BY LARRY NAGER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
He created what some say was Cincinnati's first integrated business.
His work inspired Elvis and helped bring on the rock 'n' roll revolution.
His innovations, such as recording singers with a studio band instead of their performing groups, paved the way for the so-called "Nashville sound."
His record label spawned some of the best, most diverse music of the past 50 years, a dizzying body of work that spans hard-core funk, down-home blues, classic country and high lonesome bluegrass. He released the original versions of such rock, pop and blues standards as "The Twist," "Sixty Minute Man," "Honky Tonk," "Train Kept A-Rolling," "Fever," "Hideaway" and James Brown's epic run of hits.
He's Cincinnati's premier music man, Sydney Nathan. Tuesday, the late founder of King Records will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a long overdue honor for the short, stocky Russian-Jewish immigrant, a man whose combination of keen business sense and taboo-busting attitude about mixing country music and blues helped shape modern American popular culture.
''King was the first of the post-war independent labels that actively mixed white and black forms of music," says producer and music historian Jon Hartley Fox. "By doing that, they sort of acknowledged the potential that was there for everybody else to follow."
Mr. Fox, now based in California, is a former Ohioan who produced King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, a series of four one-hour programs broadcast by National Public Radio in 1987. He believes King only could have come from Cincinnati, an industrial center that saw a massive influx of rural white and black Southerners to work in local factories during and after World War II.
In the late '30s, Mr. Nathan, a high school dropout, made a living working in pawn shops and buying and selling radios. One night in a Northern Kentucky casino, he saw a man who owed him $6. Figuring that if the guy could afford a night on the town he could afford to pay his debts, the future record mogul confronted him.
The man, a jukebox distributor, talked Mr. Nathan into taking used blues and hillbilly records in lieu of cash. Selling the 300 78-RPM records for a dime each, he turned a $24 profit. Syd Nathan had found his mission in life.
He saw the buying power of those new, largely ignored, Cincinnatians, Mr. Fox says, and with his analytical eye, he realized that, despite their racial difference, "they essentially were the same audience. They shopped in the same kinds of stores, and they listened to the same radio stations."
Post-war independents
In 1944, as the war in Europe wound down and materials used in making records became less necessary to the military, Mr. Nathan started a record label to serve his market of African-Americans and country folks.
A few years later, similar independent labels were everywhere, but Mr. Nathan's was first. In Memphis, Sam Phillips noticed the phenomenon when he started his Sun label in 1952. But where Sun's owner would look for a white pop star who "sounded black," Mr. Nathan took a simpler route, recording R&B singers doing country and country singers doing R&B. All the songs, of course, were owned by Mr. Nathan.
''It wasn't due to any great altruism on Syd Nathan's part," Mr. Fox asserts. "He did it because he thought he could make money. But he did it."
Mr. Nathan went even further, says local King historian Darren Blase. "As far as my research goes, King was the first integrated major company in Cincinnati." In 1949, says Mr. Blase, Fashion Frocks is on record for integrating its work force. "King was integrated in 1947," he says. Henry Glover, who was responsible for setting up most of King's recording sessions, was an African-American who arranged and recorded blues, bluegrass and jazz with equal skill.
With black and white musicians recording together and swapping ideas in the studio, the stage was set for rock 'n' roll. The Delmore Brothers frequently used African-American musicians on sessions, recording a country-blues hybrid known as "hillbilly boogie." With a big dose of teen-age hormones added, the sound was pretty much what Elvis came up with a few years later.
''Syd created the professional atmosphere which resulted in what I think were the first rock 'n' roll records," says Mr. Blase.
For hard evidence of King's influence on the future King, Exhibit A is "Good Rockin' Tonight."
In 1948, the song was a No. 1 R&B hit for King artist Wynonie Harris. But it entered rock 'n' roll history when Elvis released it on Sun Records in 1955. Elvis had received much of his early musical education listening to Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, whose Red Hot & Blue radio show regularly featured R&B records from King and its various subsidiaries, among them Federal and Queen.
Along with providing a ready market for his records, Cincinnati also gave Mr. Nathan a superb pool of studio musicians.
Back in the '40s radio stations still maintained staffs of musicians. Country performers such as Merle Travis, Grandpa Jones, Homer & Jethro and the backup musicians of the Boone County Jamboree and its later incarnation, The Midwestern Hayride, all found their way onto King Records. The Northern Kentucky casinos provided such R&B stars as Amos Milburn and Charles Brown. Cincinnati's central location also made it a convenient tour stop for national performers.
Mr. Nathan recorded them all. He had Bullmoose Jackson do Wayne Raney's hillbilly anthem, "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me." Wynonie Harris sang western swinger Hank Penny's "Bloodshot Eyes."
Mr. Nathan kept that cross-pollination going into the '60s. When Hank Ballard, originator of "The Twist," hit with "Finger Popping Time," Mr. Nathan had the Stanley Brothers bluegrass band "cover" it, with Mr. Ballard doing the finger pops. It was arguably the first integrated bluegrass record.
''He wasn't bound by conventional notions of genre and appropriateness," says Mr. Fox.
But the business genius of Mr. Nathan could best be seen at a distance, viewing his entire operation. He took an old icehouse converted it into a complete record-making machine. That chocolate-brown building facing Interstate 71 in Evanston housed every step required to turn a musical performance into a product. Offices, studios, record-pressing and cover-printing machinery - it was all under one roof.
''You could do a session at 2 in the afternoon, finish by 5 or 6 and have the records on a truck to the distributors by 8 ing," the late King artist Bill Doggett (''Honky Tonk'') once said in an interview.
If Mr. Nathan kept tight reins on the business end of King, creatively, the label was all over the map. In 1950, King was the sixth largest U.S. record company. In that decade, the label's roster of country acts fueled a business that sold 6 million records a year, making King the largest country music label.
James Brown classics
In the '60s, with Nashville dominating the country music industry, King shifted focus to R&B. Mr. Nathan's bluegrass bands sold to the booming folk music audience, but King's real money was made with funk and soul pioneer James Brown.
Coming out of Georgia, Mr. Brown wedded the raw emotion of Southern soul with intensely complex, urban rhythms. The result was the new sound called funk, and the records he made for King stand today as classics - "Please Please Please," "Try Me," "Cold Sweat," "Sex Machine" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," to name a few.
One of Mr. Brown's biggest hits was 1962's groundbreaking Live at the Apollo album. Mr. Nathan had turned down the idea. Hit singles sold albums and live albums didn't produce hit singles. But Mr. Brown recorded the album with his own money, and it sold more than a million copies. The album continues to turn up on lists of the best live albums of all time.
He may not have always been right, but it was Syd Nathan's personality and energy that kept the label going. After Mr. Nathan died in 1968, King was on borrowed time. Within two years, the label closed, its rich catalog of classic American music parceled out to various companies. haven't been forgotten. The newest evidence of that will be found Tuesday in Cleveland, as Mr. Nathan is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the museum opens its King exhibit.
In Cincinnati, it's as if King and Mr. Nathan never existed. There's no museum, and even a proposed historical marker remains controversial. Many say its because Mr. Nathan's crudely direct style and the rawness of King's music don't fit Cincinnati's refined, blue-chip self-image.
Whatever the reason, the most important part of King - the music - remains very much with us. There are four-CD collections of King's top bluegrass acts, the Stanley Brothers and Reno & Smiley. Rhino Records has a series of CDs showcasing King's R&B performers, including Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Little Willie John, Freddie King, the Dominoes, the Five Royales and Hank Ballard & the Midnighters. A four-CD compilation of classic King R&B has also been released. James Brown's entire King output is available on CD.
It's an astounding legacy by any measure, but the continued vitality and relevance of so much of that music to so many different musicians and fans makes it even more remarkable.
Rappers continue to sample James Brown records. Every blues guitarist knows Freddie King's "Hideaway." The new, locally co-produced tribute to the Boone County Jamboree, Straight Outta Boone County, featured more than a dozen alt-country bands doing songs learned from old King records. Virtually every bluegrass band knows at least one song recorded for King by the Stanleys or Reno & Smiley.
Syd Nathan didn't set out to change the world. He just wanted to sell some records. He wound up doing both.
