News — rhythm and blues

  “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 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...

The home page of A Nickel And A Nail emphasizes that its wider purpose, beyond being a commercial entity and serving readers interested in exploring the history of soul and R&B, is to contribute to the preservation of that music history through a variety of means, including reviews, blogs, biographies and supporting self-publishing authors. Preservation is not just about holding onto what we know soul music's past. It also requires effort to obtain new insights into past events, to add context, debunk myths and get the stories straight. This is achieved admirably by a number of writers and researchers on...

(A book by E. Mark Windle. Publication date 15 July 2019. Pre-order facility available now). I doubt it was just a moment-in-time thing. Thirty years on, my memory of first hearing Someday echo across the dancefloor at an all-nighter and stopping this young teenager dead in his tracks has not faded. It wasn’t a recording which necessarily broke the mould upon ‘rediscovery’ on the early 1980s northern soul scene. The new open-minded approach and healthy appreciation for musical diversity had already seen to that, whether it be mid tempo, beat ballads, latin soul, early R&B or others  - and the...