film theaters quickly got into the act by using local bands to help promote rock ’n’ roll films, and by turning their theaters into venues for amateur musicians. Budding rockers Jerry Woodard and Bobby Mizzell secured dates at the West End Theater performing there after movies such as Go, Johnny, Go and Rock around the Clock were presented. The manager of the theater said he booked them for a return appearance because “there was such a demand for the boys” by the audience. Some theaters dispensed with the traditional Saturday morning show of cowboy and adventure serials to replace it with “Teen Time” shows of rock ’n’ roll films with live music. The talent show moved from its origins in radio to film theaters and television studios as the rock ’n’ roll craze caught on.
Each movie brought more converts. Henry Lovoy experienced his initiation at the Alabama Theatre in 1957, where he saw Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock in a house packed with teenagers. Henry had been drawn to music at a very early age: “My wife had my picture in the paper on Sunday because it was my birthday. The picture … was when I was five years old and singing with the Harrison Cooper Orchestra. It was at the Pickwick Club. They used to have a lot of dance receptions, wedding receptions, and other dances. My aunt’s marriage was one of the last receptions there … It had two stages. It had a bandstand stage and a regular stage … They had Elvis movies that played at the Alabama Theatre … I remember going to the premier opening of the Elvis movie. At the end of the movie you could see this clump at the side of the stage. Bands didn’t have much equipment in those days. The band was Sammy Salvo, who was singing his song ‘[Oh] Julie.’ He had about three or four pieces with him. He was dressed up like the Elvis-type guy. He was dressed up in ’50s attire with the white buck shoes and a white coat. His hair was [combed] back … I was sitting in the mezzanine and looking over to watch him. Girls were screaming in the movie. When the movie was over, girls were screaming at him. The girls were going wild. I thought, This is the life for me!”
CHAPTER TWO
Records and Rock ’n’ Roll
The coming of rock ’n’ roll to Birmingham produced a surge of activity in the newly established commercial recording business. After World War II many new entrants to the record industry were created to take advantage of postwar innovations in sound recording, in which tape recorders replaced the expensive, sensitive machines that cut recordings onto acetate discs. As Ken Shackleford found out, all you needed was a tape recorder, a mixer, and some microphones, and you could set up a recording studio in a shop front or office. The Sun record label was the work of a businessman from Alabama called Sam Phillips. Born and raised in Florence, one of the three communities in northeastern Alabama with strong industrial ties to Birmingham, Phillips moved to the nearest city to advance his career in broadcasting. After starting with WLAY radio in Muscle Shoals, he then moved to Decatur, Alabama, and then briefly to Nashville and finally to Memphis in 1944 to take a job at WREC radio. He set up the Memphis Recording Service in a storefront on 706 Union Avenue with the intention of recording “Negro artists … who just wanted to make a record and had no place to go.”1 He loved the music of his youth, the music he had heard on his father’s farm and in black churches. He recorded B. B. King and Jackie Brentson’s historic “Rocket 88.” Sun was not big enough to market these recordings, so the masters were sold to larger companies such as Chess in Chicago (which released “Rocket 88”) and RPM on the West Coast. Sun was building a reputation as being “the expert in recording Negro talent,” but this wasn’t profitable enough to support a storefront operation with two employees, so Phillips had to make a living recording anything from wedding speeches to bar mitzvahs. “We record anything — anywhere — anytime” was the motto. For $3.98 anyone could make a recording on a fragile acetate disc. In the summer of 1953 Presley walked in to 706 Union Avenue, and there occurred the most fateful meeting in the history of American popular music.
Birmingham in the 1950s was primarily an iron and coal town, but it had also become the technological center of the region, a communication and broadcasting hub. When Rick Hall decided to set up a recording studio in Florence, he had to come down to Birmingham to get some of the equipment. Soon after the war was over the first independent record companies and studios were established in Birmingham — the work of entrepreneurs who wanted to record local country and gospel acts for limited distribution in northern Alabama. They were small, shoestring operations linked to local musicians and locally financed. The Vulcan and Bama labels were the first two. Both used acetate disc recording equipment in radio stations to record masters, until wire and tape recorders became available in the late 1940s. Charlie Colvin established his first studio in Albertville, a small community in northern Alabama, near Huntsville: “Well, I had a studio in Albertville back in ’49. We took the root direct to disc. Tape was just an invention at the time. Ampex made the first recorder, and I happened to go to Nashville one time. I had written a song, and there was a publisher up there who had run a check on it, and there was this Ampex tape machine and I thought, well, you know, it’s just like wires [wire recorders]. In my studio in Albertville I was recording mostly the gospel groups around. Then I came to Birmingham to get into the business. I left for a while and went to school and then I came back here in ’57. Ken Shackleford and all of them had started a studio called Heart and Soul Studio. It was above a blood bank on Third Avenue … Of course we had mostly black artists. We were right in the middle of Fourth Avenue [the black business district] there: so we had a lot of black artists in there.”
Charlie Colvin thinks that the first studio in Birmingham was established by Ted Bilch, a guitar player and head of the musicians’ union, probably in his home in Birmingham with Ampex or Presto equipment. Several others started recording in their homes and then progressed to building studios in rented properties. Homer Milam was the pioneer of commercial recording in Birmingham. After operating several small studios in the suburbs, he built his Birmingham studio in two rooms above a restaurant at 1917 First Avenue North in the early 1950s. Described by some musicians as a “dump,” it was old, dusty, and nasty. There was an office and a room with a direct-to-disc recorder in it — a device that inscribed the sound on a flimsy Presto acetate disc. The rest of the equipment was equally primitive — an Ampex tape recorder and “one microphone, one of those all-the-way-round things.” Yet Milam’s Reed label produced some exciting recordings and played a big part in bringing rock ’n’ roll to Birmingham.
Reed was not the only record company driving the spread of rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly in Birmingham in the late 1950s. Charlie Colvin’s label was releasing records produced at Heart Studios, while Squire Records was releasing rock and rockabilly numbers, including Slick Lawrence’s “Little Mama.” Although the rock ’n’ roll records are the best-known, much of the recording activity of the small labels was directed at the large audience for sacred music in Alabama, where gospel quartets thrived. Arlington Records produced songs of the Birmingham favorite, the Harmony Four, and many other gospel groups. Some of these small labels were formed specifically to record gospel and several were directly linked to the singing groups. Vulcan Records was set up by Peter Doraine in 1955 to record local R&B groups. Charlie Colvin worked closely with Heart Records as a producer and writer, setting up sessions for his singers to make the demos he would hawk in Nashville: “Tony Borders was the first artist that I recorded. I took him to Nashville and recorded a song that he and I wrote … Then we had the first release on Smash Records [one of his labels], which was Mercury’s [one of the larger independents set up in Chicago after the war and then established in Nashville] first ‘Indian Blues.’ I don’t know if they printed up the labels for us … I did a lot of rhythm and blues, recording mostly black musicians. I also had a little white group that was really quite good. They were just kids in high school. God, I can’t remember their names. They were a singing group. I put out a record on my label [Colvin Records] called ‘Let’s Dance.’”
Many of the records produced in Birmingham
