Concord unearths the Specialty catalog
By WAYNE MARSHALL | January 2, 2007
CHARISMA Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” defined Specialty’s niche between roots and mainstream. |
In 1939 Arthur Goldberg went to Hollywood and crowned himself Art Rupe, a suitably slick moniker for an entrepreneur in the booming post-war culture industry. Not finding much room for newcomers in the movie biz, Rupe turned to music, where he could more easily locate a niche. The apt appellation he eventually gave his label, Specialty Records, described the “special” market he sought: a space for the sounds of diverse but related racial signatures, the so-called “race records” that, over the course of Specialty’s run, crossed over into the mainstream, recast as rock and roll.Rupe’s great skill was in finding charismatic performers with catchy, crafty tunes and producing compact singles for the jukebox and home markets. Best known for Little Richard’s earth-shaking novelty, “Tutti Frutti,” Specialty found itself pushing the edges into the center from the late-’40s through the late-’50s, interweaving the resonant strains of gospel, blues, jump blues, R&B, boogie-woogie, and dance-circuit jazz just in time to reach a baby boomer, teenybopper audience thirsty for a little transgressive pop. Now, some 50 years after Specialty ruled the airwaves and dancehalls, Concord Music Group has issued a series of compilations to showcase the catalog. The label’s Specialty Profiles series offers up familiar favorites as well as delightful oddities, presenting in the process a detailed picture of a formative moment in American popular music.
The reissues run the gamut from stark to lush as they span the various genres that worked their way into what became known as rock and roll. In the label’s early years, Rupe focused on West Coast boogie and the sort of souled-up gospel — the Lord’s words animated by the Devil’s music — that would later be further secularized by the likes of Ray Charles (who himself hired Specialty’s Percy Mayfield as a chief songwriter in the ’60s). Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers were a flagship group for Rupe, despite his failure to grasp Cooke’s pop potential, afraid that embracing the singer’s secular leanings would alienate the label’s faithful. (Ironically, Rupe lost Little Richard to the church around the same time he lost Cooke to the charts.) Cooke’s and the Stirrers’ profile reveals a well-supported lead singer already mining his distinctive vocal swoops — all in the name of Jesus, of course, even as they give chills of a more down-to-earth tinge.
Stretching further into the secular market in the early ’50s, Rupe went hunting for hits in New Orleans, recording sides with Guitar Slim (including the future blues standard, “The Things That I Used To Do”) as well as Little Richard. The compilations that reach beyond these well-worn singles, including discs by Louisianans Lloyd Price, Larry Williams, and Percy Mayfield, brim with down-home style and snappy songs — if a few too many instances of grown men singing about high school girls. Accompanied by local producer-arranger Dave Bartholomew’s band (including Fats Domino on piano), Price delivers such crossover anthems as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” and invests novelty titles and romantic clichés with more pathos than seems possible.
Related:
Catfish Haven, Solo, trio, orchestra, Laughter from space, More 
- Catfish Haven
Ever wonder what it would sound like if the hypothetical lovechild of Sam Cooke and Janis Joplin wrote and sang a souped-up 21st-century version of his daddy’s “Bring It On Home to Me”?
- Solo, trio, orchestra
Charlap made the evening a primer on the American Songbook.
- Laughter from space
A History of Violence was a tense mob movie, but that title could also serve a documentary about Buddy Guy’s guitar attack.
- Close readings
The JCA has been at it since 1985, a collective of musicians who are primarily composers rather than players, in need of an outlet to hear their pieces.
- Hearts of glass
In the photo it is night, and two women in cocktail dresses sit — perhaps chatting while jazz plays in the background — in a spare modern living room.
- The long view
Bob Blumenthal’s first book is out, and the wonder is that we didn’t get it sooner.
- Heart of the matter
Even among the oddballs of the music business, Doc Pomus was unusual.
- Broadcast dues
Saturday night at Good Life, veteran hip-hop scenester Ricky Powell blessed a roomful of wide-eyes with his world-famous slide show, in which he flashed and joked about his pics of celebs ranging from Jam Master Jay to John Lee Hooker.
- Mad scientists
Successful hip hop is all about braggadocio.
- Pocket rockets
The Whatnot open their sophomore full-length, One More for Pocket , with “Apathy,” a song that appears to be about writer’s block.
- What good can the blues do?
You can’t ask too much of the blues. Like the raw emotion they’ve become synonymous with, the blues are not cerebral. They are not progressive or revelatory.
- Less
Topics:
Music Features
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, More
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, Ornette Coleman, Jazz and Blues, Blues Music, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Big Band and Swing, Less
