The Last Sultan Read online

  Later that day, Ahmet took McTell into a local studio only to have the singer tell him he would record only gospel songs. To get him to play the blues, Ahmet offered to release his material under the name “Barrelhouse Sammy.” Six months after he had recorded McTell in Atlanta, Ahmet released a single under the name Barrelhouse Sammy that did not sell. The rest of the session did not appear on Atlantic until 1992 when it was released under McTell’s real name. Still relatively unknown when he died at the age of fifty-six in 1959, Blind Willie McTell had by then become famous. The Holy Modal Rounders, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, Taj Mahal, and the Allman Brothers had all covered his “Statesboro Blues,” and Bob Dylan had immortalized the singer by writing and recording the song that bears his name.

  Leaving Atlanta, Ahmet and Herb Abramson drove to New Orleans, where they heard about “a musical magician who played in a style all his own” known as Professor Longhair. After taking a ferry across the Mississippi to the Algiers section of the city at eleven at night, the partners found a white taxi driver who would take them only as far as an open field. Stopping his cab by the side of a road, the driver pointed to the lights of a distant village and said, “I ain’t going to that nigger town.”

  By the light of the moon, Ahmet and Abramson trudged across a muddy field toward the distant lights. With each step they took, the sound of a big rocking band grew louder, “the rhythm exciting us and pushing us on.” At last, they reached a nightclub “or rather a shack” that looked to Ahmet “like an animated cartoon” that kept expanding and contracting in time to the pulsing beat.

  The joint was packed to the rafters, with people literally hanging out the windows as music blared loudly from within. Because “there had never been any white people there,” the big man guarding the door told Ahmet and Abramson they could not come inside. Ahmet was about to tell him they were from Atlantic Records when he remembered one of the reasons he had set off on this trip was because no one in the South knew the label. Making the story up on the spot, Ahmet said, “We’re from Life magazine . . . and we’ve come to hear Professor Longhair.”

  Unimpressed by Ahmet’s imaginary press credentials, the man at the door still refused to let them in. “Just put us in a corner,” Ahmet pleaded. “Hide us, we want to hear the music.” When the man finally relented and began walking Ahmet and Abramson inside, people scattered in all directions “because they figured the law had arrived.”

  From his seat in a corner of the room, Ahmet realized to his amazement that all the music he had been hearing was coming from a single musician. With an upright bass drum attached to his piano, Professor Longhair was pounding a kick plate with his right foot to keep time while playing his own idiosyncratic rhythms on piano against the beat. In Ahmet’s words, Longhair was “creating these weird, wide harmonies” while “singing in the open-throated style of the blues shouters of old.”

  Insofar as Ahmet could tell, he and Herb Abramson had just hit the mother lode. Going where no white men had ever been before, they had found an unknown artist who could play the kind of authentic gutbucket blues for which Ahmet had been searching ever since he had first begun listening to music. Sounding like a cross between Jelly Roll Morton and Jimmy Yancey, Longhair was mixing the blues with jazz, ragtime, and Cajun music. “My God!” Ahmet told his partner. “We’ve discovered a primitive genius!”

  When Longhair came over to talk to them after his set, Ahmet shook his hand and proudly informed the man born Henry Roeland Byrd, who had acquired his stage name for his long shaggy hair, that he was now going to be recording for Atlantic. “I’m terribly sorry,” Longhair replied, “but I signed with Mercury last week.” He then added, “But I signed with them as Roeland Byrd. With you, I can be Professor Longhair.”

  Polished to perfection as Ahmet told the story again and again over the years, the saga of finding Professor Longhair became one of the set pieces of his repertoire. As funny as the punch line always seemed when he delivered it, the true import of the tale was that when it came to finding undiscovered talent in the hinterlands of America in the spring of 1949, Ahmet and Herb Abramson were already late. Sixteen years after John Lomax had recorded Huddie Ledbetter in the state penitentiary in Angola, this particular musical frontier had closed. The sweeping social and economic changes brought about by the Second World War had transformed the South, and it was no longer the isolated backwater it had been during the Great Depression.

  Nonetheless, Ahmet and Abramson took Professor Longhair into the same studio in Atlanta where they had recorded Blind Willie McTell and cut three sides with him that were never issued. In October, they recorded him again at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M studio on Rampart Street in New Orleans and cut ten tracks, among them “Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” which along with “Tipitina” would become one of the artist’s signature songs.

  Longhair, who had originally recorded “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” for Star Records in Dallas, Texas, as Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Hungarians, was billed on Atlantic as Professor Longhair and His New Orleans Boys. For an artist who at various times in his career was also known as Roy Byrd and his Blues Jumpers, Roy “Bald Head” Byrd, Roland Byrd, Professor Longhair and His Blues Scholars, and Professor Longhair and the Clippers, the name on the record never mattered as much as the music.

  While none of the sides Longhair cut for Atlantic sold very well, his unique sound influenced seminal New Orleans musicians like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, and Dr. John. After suffering a heart attack and dying in his sleep in 1980 at the age of sixty-two, “Fess” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  Although Ahmet and Herb Abramson had not been able to find an artist in the South who had not yet been approached to record by someone else, they had given it their best shot. As they drove from one city to the next in the new Ford convertible they did not own, they also had one hell of a time together. For Ahmet even then, this was always a good reason for doing anything.

  3

  Having managed to avoid compulsory military service in the land of his birth, Ahmet was forced to register for the draft in America after Congress passed the Selective Service Act in June 1948 decreeing that all men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six would now be required to spend twenty-one months in the army. Busy running a record company that was not yet providing him with enough income to live as he would have liked, Ahmet had no desire to be subjected to the draft and so dealt with the problem in his usual manner.

  Blithely, he ignored a written request from Lieutenant Colonel Walter S. Welsh, chief of the Manpower Division of the Judge Advocate General Division in Washington, to appear in Welsh’s office with his passport and visa so it could be determined if he would be exempt from registering as a “male alien who has not declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States.” If Ahmet could prove he had entered the country as a student, he would also not have to register.

  Over the course of the next three months, Welsh sent Ahmet three more letters to which he also did not respond. When Ahmet finally appeared in Welsh’s office, he explained he had come to America under a diplomatic visa and remained in the United States to pursue his graduate studies at Georgetown University. Rather than solve his problems, this explanation served only to complicate them.

  On March 29, 1949, Welsh wrote Ahmet that if he was “not now entitled to remain in the United States under a diplomatic visa or because of diplomatic connections,” his status would be reported to the Bureau of Immigration. Until the bureau reached its decision, Ahmet would be subject to Selective Service procedures like any other registrant, pending further clarification of his current status, “that is, your attendance at school or your employment, if employed.”

  Although Ahmet was still writing his mother and sister in Turkey that he planned to return home at some point, the diplomatic visa on which he had entered the United States was no longer valid. Technically an illegal alien, Ahmet could not leave the country even if he had
wanted to and was now subject not only to conscription but possible deportation as well.

  Ahmet’s first problem was solved by the kind of good fortune he would enjoy throughout his life. During the same month Welsh informed Ahmet he was still subject to military service in America, the army declared an unofficial “draft holiday.” Due to the high rate of voluntary enlistments, just thirty thousand of the nine million young men who had registered had been inducted.

  Ahmet however still needed to find a way to stay in America. In a handwritten letter to Welsh, he explained that he had remained in America after his diplomatic visa had expired to “continue my studies, and did so until recently when I finished my courses and began to write a thesis. I hope to be able to finish my thesis in a few months. Meanwhile, however, I have been spending much of my time with the Atlantic Recording Corporation . . . a company I started with some associates, in which I am a stockholder. It is my plan to return to Turkey in about a year, when I hope to have fulfilled all my business.”

  Quite possibly to maintain the fiction that he was still a student in America, Ahmet did enroll two years later in a graduate course in economic theory at the New School for Social Research taught by Dr. Eduard Heimann, a well-known socialist who had emigrated from Germany to America in 1933 because of his political views. On January 30, 1951, Ahmet appended the following explanation in an examination booklet on the unlikely subject of Crops and Labor—“Dr. E. Heimann, I was unavoidably detained and arrived at the examination half an hour late so that I was unable to complete my answers. My excuses.” He still managed to receive a B on the exam.

  Ahmet was far more successful in solving his immigration problem than his brother. Facing deportation charges with an actual warrant for his arrest having been issued, Nesuhi wrote a frantic letter to his brother in November 1953 telling him he had hired a very expensive immigration lawyer to represent him at an upcoming hearing. Nesuhi implored Ahmet to persuade the Turkish consul to issue him a new passport to replace the outdated document he had been carrying since 1946. “Please explain to him,” Nesuhi wrote, “that this is a question of life and death for me. . . . I hope to God it will not be impossible for him to issue a passport.”

  Ahmet finally solved his own visa problem by hiring a lawyer who advised him to apply for permission from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to leave America so he could return as a “preference immigrant.” Following his lawyer’s instructions, Ahmet went to Montreal, where the American consul issued him the visa. On June 8, 1953, Ahmet was granted official status as a permanent resident alien.

  In time, both brothers became American citizens. Having come to the United States under privileged circumstances, they had fulfilled the first task of every immigrant, which was to stay at all costs in the land where they had chosen to make their lives.

  FIVE

  Mess Around

  “Although Ray, I’m sure, knew about boogie woogie piano playing, he had not at that time heard of Cow Cow Davenport, one of the pioneers of that style. So in explaining ‘Mess Around,’ I was trying to put across to Ray the very precise phrasing of Cow Cow Davenport, when he suddenly started to play the most incredible style of that playing I’ve ever heard. It was like witnessing Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious in action—as if this great artist had somehow plugged in and become a channel for a whole culture that just came pouring through him.”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  Long after he had become a wealthy man, Ahmet would say, “I remember when my dream was to make a hundred dollars a week. My God, if I could ever make a hundred dollars a week, I’d be a rich man.” By 1950, his third year at Atlantic, he had yet to achieve this goal, earning just $4,880, a scant $500 more than the average income for an American family. Nonetheless, it was enough to persuade him to sign away his interest in the patent company to his partners, Dr. Vahdi Sabit and Sukru Fenari, in return for “one dollar and other valuable consideration,” thereby freeing him to devote all his time and energy to the record business.

  Two years later, Ahmet and Herb Abramson signed the greatest artist who ever recorded for Atlantic. Born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930, Ray Charles would come to be known at various times throughout his long and illustrious career as “Brother Ray,” “The Genius,” “The Father of Soul,” and “The High Priest.” None of these nicknames adequately describe the astonishing talent of a man whose impassioned singing, piano playing, and unique ability to write songs in several genres would change popular music in America.

  The son of a sharecropper and a railroad repair man who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, Ray Charles began losing his sight when he was five years old and was completely blind by the age of seven. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, where he began playing piano and singing. After both of his parents died before he was sixteen years old, Charles began his career as a professional musician. Spending most of his life on the road, he was married twice, fathered twelve children by nine different women, and first began using heroin while playing in a jazz band in Seattle in 1948.

  An artist who always lived according to his own rules, Ray Charles brought the chord changes, structure, and deeply felt emotion of black gospel music to an audience who had never before experienced its power. That he did so while recording for Atlantic was due in great part to the way in which Ahmet influenced him during the early days of his career.

  Ahmet first heard Ray Charles in 1951 when Herb and Miriam Abramson played him “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” on Swing Time Records, a Los Angeles-based label owned by Jack Lauderdale, a black record business entrepreneur. Although Charles then still played piano “in a style modeled closely on Charles Brown” and sounded very much like Nat King Cole when he sang, Ahmet, who as a boy had regularly seen the King Cole Trio perform at a Chinese restaurant in Washington called the Lotus Club, said, “I want a piano player like that on our label.”

  When Billy Shaw, who was then booking Ray Charles, learned that Jack Lauderdale was looking to let Charles go, he put the word out to Chess Records in Chicago, King Records in Cincinnati, and Atlantic. Leonard Chess and Syd Nathan were both interested in signing Charles but after Shaw told Ahmet that if he made hit records with the artist, Shaw could book him as a headliner, Ahmet said, “I guarantee we’ll make great records with him—how do I get him?” When Shaw told Ahmet he could buy Charles’s contract from Lauderdale for $2,500, Ahmet said, “Done deal.”

  Billed as “Ray Charles, Blind Pianist,” Charles came to New York on February 29, 1952, to perform for the first time at the Apollo Theater on a bill headlined by the Orioles and Lowell Fulsom and his band. Charles was staying at the Braddock Hotel on 126th Street and Eighth Avenue adjoining the backstage door of the Apollo when Ahmet and Herb Abramson came to meet him for the first time. After they exchanged handshakes, the partners welcomed Charles to the label but said they were in no hurry and would wait until he returned to New York to do their first session with him.

  Ahmet would later remember first meeting Ray Charles in the Atlantic office. After Charles had sat down at the piano and played, Ahmet said, “Ray Charles! You’re home here. You are home, man. We’re gonna make some hits. We’re gonna make beautiful music, ’cause you’re the greatest!” Charles replied, “Oh man, I’m gonna try to live up to this, to what you say about me.” He then gave Ahmet a hug. In Ahmet’s words, “We became brothers right away.”

  Ahmet and Abramson first recorded Charles on September 11, 1952, but the session “produced four jazz-influenced sides which were barely noticed when they were issued.” Abramson wanted Charles to emulate what blues singer Big Joe Turner had already done at Atlantic by recording songs that rocked harder but Ahmet believed the problem was that New York musicians tended to look down on illiterate bluesmen from the South. In truth, Charles had not yet found what would become his characteristic sound.

  Unlike Ruth Brown, who did not write her own
material and let Ahmet help shape her career by recording songs that became hits, Ray Charles was, in the words of songwriter and arranger Jesse Stone, who was then working on the staff at Atlantic, “very temperamental and hard to get along with, it was hard to persuade him to do the rock type things. But finally after we’d done a few sessions the way he wanted to do them, he came into the studio and said, ‘Okay, I’m not saying anything, you guys tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ ”

  In May 1953, Charles spent a week in New York with Ahmet playing piano and exploring new musical ideas. Although Ahmet could not read music or play an instrument and his voice left a good deal to be desired, he had by then begun writing songs because Atlantic was “such a small company that publishers didn’t want to give us their good songs.”

  With Abramson, Ahmet had already formed a publishing company called Progressive Music, thereby ensuring that the partners would earn 50 percent of the net proceeds for all piano copies and 5 cents a copy for all orchestrated versions of the original material they generated at Atlantic. When Ahmet cowrote “I Know” with Rudy Toombs and Abramson in 1950, the songwriting royalties were split among the three men according to the contribution each had made to the song with Ahmet being allotted 45 percent of the royalties for the lyrics. The partners profited from the record as the owners of the label, the songwriters, and the publisher as well.

  Although many independent record company executives regularly attached their names to music they had done nothing to create, Ahmet would write out his lyrics in capital letters across music staffs on sheet music paper with Roman numerals above each verse. He would then go to one of the recording booths in the Times Square arcade where for a quarter or 50 cents he would make “a flimsy vinyl demo” of a song by singing it to the melody in his head. In the studio, where time was precious because he was paying for it by the hour, Ahmet would then present the song in the most efficient manner possible.