band that was on CBS, and I made them in 1953 … Back then I sang everywhere … I played here at Mike’s South Pacific, and also played at Carmichael’s [nightclub] … And Carmichael was a real hip kind of guy, dressed in real fancy clothes, and he introduced me … and I came roaring out from the sidelines and the band’s playing the introduction to my song and I grab the microphone off the stand, and I’m going to put on a show, then I knock my tooth out and it falls on the floor.” The life of a musician in the 1950s was “with whiskey and people having a good time … But some of the things I could tell you, you couldn’t put in a book. Because back then, performers just got women. I don’t know why … and I don’t mean it with anything illicit necessarily, just women like to meet performers. And the sexual revolution hadn’t taken place yet, so it was not a big deal.”
In the 1950s the record companies and radio stations served the adult audience. Dan Brennan: “We really wanted to get, for our clients, more of the adults than we did the young children. We reached them with rock ’n’ roll too. I think as many adults liked Elvis as did the youngsters. I don’t think our goal was ever to try and just reach teenagers or anything like that … So while the first listeners might have skewed toward the younger age groups, the final result was a family audience … So for commercial reasons it was more profitable to us to sell our sponsors’ products to adults than it was to sell them to youngsters.”
Birmingham had many dance bands and venues for them to play. Vocalist Cousin Cliff: “I want you to write down Harrison Cooper first … He is a pianist and is just wonderful … Dewitt Shaw, he had one of the best bands in Birmingham. He really played most of the dances around here, he and Harrison Cooper. They used to play the old Pickwick [Club] … Buddy Harris had a real nice dance band that was real sophisticated, but they were not real big though … Another person would be Tant, Buddy Wallace Tant … Eddie Stephens had a band also … He had a big band, about fifteen or twenty pieces. He used to play at the Cascade Plunge and the Cloud Room. Do you remember Cascade Plunge? They used to have those big dances out there called convocations of social clubs … Just a lot of big bands out there … Ted Brooks is another person, boy, he was really good … in fact, he played shows with me at the old Shades Mountain Country Club … Lou Mazzeret was a band director, and he used to play down at the Blue Note Club. That used to be downtown. Henry Kimbrell is another one. He used to play at all those society functions … Back when I was going to school, Woodlawn [High School] and all, we used to have sorority and fraternity parties. We used to have lead-outs, where all the boys bring out the girls through this pretty arch and all, and they have this big theme and usually have big bands.”
The scores of bands that played the big hotels downtown, the dinner and dance clubs like the Pickwick and Blue Note, the country clubs and private supper clubs, all depended on providing music for dancing. Harrison Cooper: “Bill Nappi had a dance band that was pretty big. It was a dance band mainly. These were all mostly dance bands that were around here. There was Paul Smith. There were a lot of little old bands like that around Birmingham at that time. They were very popular. There were as many dance bands around at that time as there are rock bands that are around now. Everything is rock now; back then everything was dance.”
Tommy Stewart, one of the great trumpet players of the swing era, hit the road early: “The snake oil and medicine shows used to come from Atlanta, and a lot of them left with musicians who could read [music]. Plenty of tent shows came through. Over by Parker High School, there was a big old field over there. These guys came through and sell you some Hadecol, snake medicine or something — some of that stuff was colored water. They had live bands and I played with some of them. I made some money when I was about sixteen traveling with a circus … Birmingham was a hotbed for music ever since I was a little boy. You had bands like the Fred Avery Band, John L. Bell, a piano player had a band, John Hands had a band in the 1940s. Fess [Whatley] had a heck of a band. When Sun Ra left [around 1946] his band was still playing here.”
Birmingham’s segregated African American community had its own entertainment. Clarinetist and saxophonist Frank Adams “saw Cab Calloway at the Masonic Temple. I remember seeing him perform on stage. It was a black-only concert. There was no integration at that time. I remember seeing Duke Ellington for the first time at the Masonic Temple … I used to wonder how luxurious it was to see someone at an auditorium. They had a balcony, where we would sit and look out. I was really impressed with Duke’s band.” Tommy Stewart: “The Madison Night Spot on Bessemer Highway was the place; it had a big hall to dance: $2.50 to see B. B. King or Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Ray Charles, Howlin’ Wolf. There were a lot of clubs, five or six clubs along Auburn Avenue, some holes in the wall and some very good. Fess was playing at country clubs. Birmingham was real dirty, but there was a lot going on, the music scene was going strong and a sports scene was really something. Willy Mays — I saw him play at Rickwood Field. Birmingham had a lot of race problems. Fourth Avenue and Seventeenth Street was a black business district full of black businesses, a lot more thriving than you do now. I’d rather be in segregation any day because the music was better — you had four or five big bands, five or six combos making money, with guys working six days a week. On weekends you would go along Fourth Avenue, it was like a brand-new city in the middle of the city. It blew my mind when I first went down there … You could go down Fourth Avenue on Friday night and see the [tour] buses, they got stranded, or stopped to get a motel in the district or stayed in homes. It’s tough now when you read about it [segregation], but then they did not pay any attention — they liked to play, they were making music, they worked regular and they were doing all kind of stuff.” Frank Adams: “Live music was big. Tuxedo Junction was a park where they played. I can think of so many places where musicians played. I can think of so many, like the old Congo Club, which was out on Bessemer Highway. Monroe’s Steakhouse was another one. A lot of people got names for clubs in Birmingham after places that had opened in New York. We had a Cotton Club here … There were sometimes musicians who would sit out on Fourth Avenue and play. It was comparable to the French Quarter … Fourth Avenue was thriving at that point. It was downtown, and it was all that we had. It was the heart of entertainment. You worked all week so you could come into town on the weekend. You spent your money on Fourth Avenue.”
Things were changing for big band players in the postwar entertainment scene. Tommy Stewart: “Jazz musicians from the swing era, when work got slim at the end of the 1940s, a lot of them went into small bands. Louis Jordan was jump jive. His band was the Tympany Five, those smaller bands, he got it from Chick Webb. At this time the small bands were coming up, because there was less costs … Well, there were two factions of small bands: followers of Louis Jordan and [followers of] Charlie Parker. Jazz used to be dance music, popular music entertainment, then Louis Jordan went toward R&B, and jazz became intellectual listening music. R&B would still employ music from big bands. For example, the Clovers and Drifters — their first arrangers were old jazz musicians.” Tommy got hired to play trumpet in R&B singer Jimmy Reed’s band: “I had gone back to Gadsden [about sixty miles from Birmingham] and had formed a jazz band, three or four students, and we went with Jimmy Reed, we were just teenagers. We had sharp stage suits, you know, the Ivy League pants and big-brimmed hats. There I was playing in New York City at fifteen. Here comes my mama … That killed me right there! We played mostly black joints … Jimmy Reed had a big white following. I think the last club my mama pulled me out of was the Birmingham Country Club — she came over there and got me!” Frank Adams landed a spot in the great Duke Ellington band, which kept swing alive in the 1950s, albeit in a more modern form. Erskine Hawkins became an arranger and bandleader for James Brown, who was making a big impression with the African American audience for his soulful stage show. Sonny Blount (aka Sun Ra) worked with Wynonie Harris, a wild R&B singer who inspired Elvis Presley with not only his music but also his outrageous stage act. In 1948 Harris cut a record for the independent King label; “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was a hit and a portent of some important changes to come in the business of popular music.
“Good Rocking Tonight”
Written by Roy Brown in 1947, this influential song started off as a jump jive number: swinging tempo, heavy on the beat, and
