The Last Sultan Page 9

  Founded in 1926 in a drugstore basement, the Club Caverns, also known as the Crystal Caverns and later as the Bohemian Caverns, was where “Washington’s elite would come in droves dressed in the most formal attire, to be entertained by the likes of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.” A curving replica of a black and white piano keyboard ran along the building’s facade above the club’s front door. Inside, elegantly dressed guests sat at tables beneath a low ceiling made of swirling concrete designed to look like the roof of a cave replete with stalactites.

  In 1948, the Club Crystal Caverns, which still billed itself as the “Rendezvous of the Socially Elite,” was owned by Blanche Calloway. The older sister of Cab Calloway, whom Ahmet had first seen perform at the Palladium in London in 1934, she was “a gorgeous lady, tall, graceful, and statuesque” who as a singer shared her famous brother’s “high energy performance style.” Calloway let Brown audition for her and then offered the singer a one-week engagement for $30 so she could earn enough money to go back home.

  Brown was performing at the club one night when Duke Ellington walked in with Sonny Til, the lead singer of the Orioles, and Willis Conover, the bespectacled, professorial-looking white jazz disc jockey whose nightly broadcasts on the Voice of America radio network would make him a cult figure throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After dedicating the song to Sonny Til, Brown began singing “It’s Too Soon to Know,” a hit the Orioles had just recorded for Jerry Blaine on Jubilee that was rising on both the R&B and pop charts.

  Getting up from his seat as Brown was singing, Conover went to a pay phone in the coat check room, called Western Union, and sent a telegram to Atlantic Records in New York telling the partners, in Miriam Abramson’s words, “There is a girl in Washington who is a cross between Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. You must come and hear her.”

  According to Brown, a promotion man and talent scout named Blacky Sales who worked for Atlantic went to see her perform, followed by Abramson and finally Ahmet himself. As Abramson would later say of Brown, “She was, at that time, as good as she ever was. I mean, she was a finished performer, one of the best we had ever seen. . . . Ahmet and I not only wanted to sign her up, which we did, but also have control of her career and try to build her. We had great faith in her because she was great.”

  Nearly sixty years later, after Ruth Brown had gone toe-to-toe with Ahmet in a very public controversy over royalties owed her by Atlantic, he would say, “Ruth Brown was kind of a shitty singer but she had good rhythm and she thought of herself as a pop singer. The reason I signed her up was that she sang this song ‘So Long’ imitating the way Little Miss Cornshucks used to sing it. I couldn’t find Miss Cornshucks, who had sort of disappeared, but Ruth Brown must have heard her singing that song and she would imitate her.”

  Although the partners clearly had differing views of her talent right from the start, Brown was then a pop singer whose repertoire included hits by mainstream white artists like Vaughn Monroe, Bing Crosby, and the Andrews Sisters. Her biggest number at the time was “A-You’re Adorable,” a song that had been a hit for both Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters. In Ahmet’s words, “Ruth Brown wanted to sing like Doris Day and I wanted her to sing like Little Miss Cornshucks.” Believing no other label was interested in signing her, Brown made a verbal agreement with Abramson to record for Atlantic.

  In Miss Rhythm, the autobiography she wrote with Andrew Yule that was published in 1996, Ruth Brown said Blanche Calloway had never told her Capitol Records, a major label for whom Nat “King” Cole was then a star, also wanted to sign her to a recording contract. In 1973, Ahmet told rock writer Charlie Gillett, “Capitol also wanted her. Blanche was her manager and they had to choose—Capitol had Nat King Cole—but all our friends were there to persuade her to take a chance with us and she did.” Ahmet would also later say Calloway had gone to Waxie Maxie Silverman for advice and he persuaded her it would be better for Brown to be on Atlantic.

  In her autobiography, Brown insisted she had learned for the first time in the spring of 1994 that “The well-established Capitol Records . . . had come talent-scouting at the Crystal Caverns at the same time as Atlantic. They had offered a contract and been turned down, completely without my knowledge, in favor of Atlantic, a company with no track record to speak of. Why would Blanche have come to that decision? You tell me. All I can say is that I was nineteen years old, trusting and just glad to be getting signed by anyone at all.”

  Calloway, who in Abramson’s words was now Brown’s “ ‘manager’—in quotes,” extended the singer’s one-week engagement at the club into a four-month run. On the strength of the Atlantic contract Brown had not yet signed, Calloway persuaded Frank Schiffman, the owner of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, to book Brown on a show with Billie Holiday. Because Lady Day did not want another female singer on the bill, Schiffman delayed Brown’s debut a week and she was scheduled to appear there on October 29, 1948, with Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra as the headliners.

  After Brown’s husband showed up in Washington and announced his intention to accompany his wife to New York, Calloway changed her plan to make the trip by bus and decided instead to go “in her powder-blue convertible” with her barman and his girlfriend sharing the driving as she navigated in the front seat with Brown and her husband sitting in back. After Brown’s last show at the club, they set off at three in the morning only to run into a tree outside Chester, Pennsylvania. Suffering two broken legs and a back injury that put her in traction, Brown spent the next eleven months recuperating.

  On January 12, 1949, Brown’s twenty-first birthday, Ahmet and Abramson came to visit her in the hospital. With them, they brought an Atlantic Records contract, which she signed. Because Brown had told them she wanted to learn how to read music, they also gave her a book on how to sight-read, a pitch pipe, and a large tablet “on which to scribble lyrics.” Less the $1,000 provided by an insurance company to cover her extensive medical costs, the partners also paid Brown’s hospital bill. Although her “love of Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson began right there in that hospital,” Brown would later say that by the time she joined the label, she was “already in their debt.”

  In an era when nearly all independent record company owners treated their artists like hired help who could be easily replaced, only Herb Abramson and Ahmet (as well as John Hammond and Goddard Lieberson, both of whom were then working at major labels) would have extended themselves in such a manner for a singer they had not yet recorded. In Brown’s words, neither partner then even knew “what I would sound like in the studio.”

  Still on crutches, Ruth Brown cut her first side for Atlantic on April 6 at the end of a John “Texas Johnny” Brown session. “Ruth Brown wanted to sing like Sarah Vaughan,” Ahmet would later say, “but did not have the range and so we recorded her doing bluesier things. . . . I said, ‘Let’s sing some blues.’ And she told me she didn’t like the blues. So I had artists like her sing one blues song for me as a favor.”

  On May 25, Brown returned to the studio for her first real session. The way in which she came to be there demonstrates just how clever Ahmet had already become in drawing attention to his new label. Eddie Condon, a white Dixieland guitar player and band leader who had his own jazz club in Manhattan, had just hired Ernie Anderson as his publicist. Formerly Louis Armstrong’s promoter, Anderson had persuaded Time magazine, which was then producing a documentary newsreel series known as The March of Time that was shown in movie theaters all over America, to do a segment during which the theme song for the series would be recorded by Atlantic.

  “For us,” Ahmet said, “this was a huge thing.” After Ahmet had expressed surprise his label had been selected for this great opportunity, Anderson hit him with the catch. “He said, ‘Yeah. But you’ve got to record Eddie Condon’s band. We want him on the thing.’ So I got Eddie Condon’s band to back up Ruth Brown on her first single. They were totally unrelated.” Killing more than two birds with a single s
tone, Ahmet came out of the session with Brown’s version of “So Long,” a moody ballad he had first heard Little Miss Cornshucks sing that had been composed by band leader Russ Morgan, who used it as his closing theme. Backed with “It’s Raining,” the record became Atlantic’s second hit of the year, going to number four in the R&B charts and remaining there for nine weeks. Brown’s next four releases, in her words, “went nowhere.”

  For Brown, the initial period of excitement that characterized an artist’s early days with a label lasted for quite a while. Ahmet and Herb and Miriam Abramson took her with them to all the leading clubs in Harlem as well as to a new restaurant each week to eat foreign food until she felt as though “I had tasted the world.” Whenever she liked, Brown could pick up the phone and call Ahmet and be put straight through to him. To teach her about the blues, he played her records by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

  Although Brown “loved and respected” Ahmet, whom she considered “the more forceful” of the partners, she felt closer to Herb Abramson. During this period, he was in the studio producing her while Ahmet and Jessie Stone, who later wrote “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “made many of the decisions regarding” the material she was given to record.

  Brown would later remember songwriter Rudy Toombs coming into Atlantic one day with “Teardrops from My Eyes,” a song he had composed “especially” for her. Recorded in September 1950, it went to the top of the charts and stayed there for eleven weeks. The side also became the first Atlantic record released on seven-inch 45 RPM vinyl as well as the standard ten-inch 78 shellac.

  Two years later, Brown would have her second number one record on Atlantic with “5–10–15 Hours.” Also written by Rudy Toombs, the song featured sax player Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, with whom Brown was then keeping company and would later marry. In 1953, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a song Brown did not like until it became a hit, became her third number one record on the R&B charts.

  Paid about $70 to record a side, the highest fee Ruth Brown ever received for a session at Atlantic was $250. As she would also later say concerning what was then standard practice in the industry, “They were charging you for everything. The studio, the musicians, the charts, all records given out for PR purposes, you paid for everything. If you needed something, you could always go to the record company and get a couple of hundred bucks.”

  Like all musicians during this era, Brown made her real money by performing, earning as much as $750 a night on the road, which even she conceded was a lot of money at the time. But what Ruth Brown did not know was that Ahmet and Herb Abramson were also her managers.

  Nearly forty years later, rock critic and writer Dave Marsh, who became one of the founding members of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, came across a one-paragraph article in the July 30, 1949, issue of The Billboard, as the weekly bible of the record business was then known. Beneath the headline “Calloway Assoc. Formed,” the article, dated July 23, read, “Herb Abramson, president, and Ahmed [sic] Ertegun, vice-president of Atlantic Records, have joined with Blanche Calloway in forming Blanche Calloway Associates, an artists management organization. The first artist pacted is Ruth Brown, vocalist, currently appearing at Cafe Society. Miss Brown records for Atlantic.” In Marsh’s words, “I actually called Ruth and told her about it myself and she didn’t know about it until then. Absolutely not. Because for Ruth at that moment, a lot of things fell into place. She talks about it in her book.”

  “What did it mean?” Brown wrote in her autobiography. “Only that every time I had sung my heart out on the back of a tobacco truck, suffering slings and arrows while making far from outrageous fortune, the boss men in New York, not content with giving handouts instead of proper royalty accounting on my records, had systematically been collecting their pound of flesh from the road as well. Who do I blame? Blanche, for surrendering two-thirds to Herb and Ahmet of the ten per cent I paid her? Certainly she could and should have told me, for the association raises all sorts of questions of conflict of interest. I tell myself she had to play along, for who would voluntarily accept one-third of her due? Let me put it this way: I think we can be fairly sure the suggestion of the ‘Associates’ did not come from Blanche. As for Ahmet and Herb, well, at least with the likes of Morris Levy [the owner of Roulette Records] you knew going in to expect statutory rape. With Atlantic it was a case of date rape.”

  That Blanche Calloway might have welcomed an infusion of cash from the record label to which she had signed her only client seems never to have occurred to Brown. Nor did the fact that neither Ahmet nor Herb Abramson would have allowed the announcement to appear in Billboard if they had intended to make money under the table by paying themselves from both ends of the deal.

  Before Brown’s autobiography was published, Abramson, who by then had long since ended his association with Atlantic, told Chip Deffaa, the author of Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues, “Blanche Calloway diplomatically agreed to become co-manager—we were the co-managers. So Ahmet and I were managers of Ruth Brown for a period of time. However, before the hits started to come in, I would say that our function as managers really consisted of laying out money for gowns, arrangements, and transportation—everything to try to build her. But we never took a cent in commission.”

  “I was Ruth’s manager for a while,” Miriam Abramson would later say, “and I used to get these calls from her in the middle of the night. ‘You know, it’s five hundred miles to the next gig,’ and that kind of stuff. Ruth Brown’s manager was Blanche Calloway and I don’t remember why it was I got involved in it but it was not for long. Ruth Brown got a lot of attention from us. She really did and I don’t think she was ever grateful at all. I can’t tell you how many people thought they built Atlantic Records. Everybody built Atlantic Records.”

  In truth, the house that Ruth Brown built at Atlantic had a foundation so shaky that sixty years after it had been laid, the principal architects still could not agree about how it had been put together. As Miriam Abramson would later put it, “The whole thing is Rashomon.”

  2

  If you really loved the music in those days, you had to go out on the road to find it being played in its original form in crowded, smoke-filled juke joints and roadside honky-tonks in the Deep South where the smell of spilled whiskey and beer and the overwhelming funk of sweating bodies on the dance floor made it hard even to breathe. For any record man worth his salt, this was the pilgrimage. It was the haj—the holy journey first undertaken in July 1933 by John Lomax, who after installing a 315-pound acetate phonograph disc recorder in the trunk of his Ford sedan went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he recorded Huddie Ledbetter playing twelve-string guitar.

  As the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, Lomax spent much of the next nine years on the road with his son Alan, recording hundreds of singers, some of whom no one but friends and immediate family had ever before heard perform. As music scholars, Ahmet and Herb Abramson knew Lomax’s work very well. As record men, they had yet to make the journey themselves.

  In May 1949, the partners decided to set out on their first field trip down South. They went because they could not find, in Ahmet’s words, “any real funky blues singers or players in New York because that was not where they were.” Ahmet, who was also looking for distributors in the South to improve Atlantic’s sales, intended to end the journey by visiting his brother for the first time in Los Angeles.

  “Unfortunately,” as Ahmet would later say, “neither of us owned a car back then. As luck would have it, a girl I used to date was given a Ford convertible by her parents for her graduation from Sarah Lawrence. She had no idea how to get the car back to Texas where she lived. So I volunteered to drive it to Fort Worth for her and she thought this was very kind of me and she invited us to stay with her and her parents on their ranch. Herb and I did eventually make it to Texas, but only after criss-crossing the south in that convertible, covering some ten thou
sand miles—looking for new music and making business contacts. To this day, I’m not sure she knows how important that car was to the beginning of Atlantic Records.”

  In what Ahmet considered “the most incredible story of my whole career,” he was walking down a main street in the black section of Atlanta when he came upon a blind man sitting on a street corner with his back against a building singing gospel songs and “playing incredible slide guitar” as passers-by dropped coins into a hat. After handing the blind singer some money so he “could tell it was bills, not coins,” Ahmet asked, “Have you ever heard of Blind Willie McTell?” To Ahmet’s astonishment, the singer replied, “Man, I am Blind Willie McTell.”

  Unable to believe he had actually stumbled on to the blues man with whom John Lomax had recorded more than two dozen songs in an Atlanta hotel room in November 1940, Ahmet asked McTell if he would cut some sides for his company in New York. When McTell asked how everyone at RCA-Victor was doing, Ahmet told him he was from another record company. “No man,” McTell replied, “if you’re from the New York record company, that’s Victor-RCA-you.”

  Although Ahmet was convinced he had found a completely authentic backwoods bluesman, historian Sean Wilentz would later write that by then Blind Willie McTell had already “made himself into a successful, consummately professional entertainer, and something of an urban sophisticate” whose “everyday wardrobe” consisted of “a suit and tie and a fashionable billed cap.”