News — R&B

 In Memphis, there was a period when country and rockabilly prevailed at Hi records, before the label became synonymous with Willie Mitchell, and all things soulful and funky. Producers Quinton Claunch and Bill Cantrell had just left Sam Phillips’ Sun in 1957. They joined forces with country singer Ray Harris and some financial backers to set up Hi. Within a couple years, just before Claunch had left to set up Goldwax and prior to Willie Mitchell joining Hi (initially as a recording artist and then president), a young country / rockabilly singer called Tommy Ray Tucker appeared at the studio...

  “Looking back, I’m really proud of what we achieved in the 1960s” reflected the late Nelson Lemmond of The Tempests. “We made some great R&B. And played with some great talent too. We never performed with Otis or Wilson. But pretty much everybody else in between. At the end of the day though, things started to change. Otis had died, Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Civil unrest was everywhere and there was a militant atmosphere, even in the more progressive areas of the south. People ended up taking sides.” This feeling echoes previous comments made by various session...

The passing of Edwin James Balbier a couple of years ago went virtually unnoticed in UK northern scene circles: indeed few outside of the industry will recall his name. Yet, this individual would be the unwitting driving force behind one of the most popular soul re-issue (if brief) label imprints of the 1970s, even if it was the company’s younger soul music enthusiast employees who shaped the nature of the label arm of the operation. Balbier’s initial interests did not lie in soul music, but more generally in the oldies market. Born in 1930, the Philadelphian had an early career...

The DJs, producers and label owners WLAC DJs Gene Nobles and Herman Grizzard are often cited as the first who braved plugging black music in Nashville in the 1940s, largely through playing jazz records. Individual DJs pivotal to the story of the development of R&B and soul included Morgan Babb and Ted Jarrett at WSOK through the 1950s, then Bill “Hoss” Allen and John “R” Richbourg at WLAC in the 1960s and early 1970s. These DJs extended their role to other related industry activities, including record promotion, label ownership and production, cementing the R&B sound in Nashville’s music history.  ...

For Roger Branch, original founder of The Tempests, New Orleans had an attractive pull for studio engineering and production work. Like any musician, he had a deep appreciation for the vibrancy of the city’s musical culture. In addition, he had already forged professional links with key industry figures there like Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn, from his early days at Reflection Sound back in Charlotte. Toussaint and Sehorn had already been working closely together some ten years before Roger had first connected with them in the early 1970s. Toussaint’s musicianship helped define the Nola R&B sound of the late 1950s...