it was the first teenage sound, came right after the Big Bopper [J. P. Richardson], and Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly. It was that kind of music, but it had more of a teenage feel to it. Birmingham did have its own sound, and most of it was black influence … You had a cross between Memphis and Nashville. That was what the Birmingham sound was back then … I used to go all through the black community and get musicians, and I got pretty good at it at one time. The most fun was looking for musicians and black players. I would go out there and say: ‘Do you know so and so?’ ‘No. No, I don’t know them, they don’t live around here.’ I would say, ‘Well, I heard he did, and I have some money I need to give him.’ ‘Oh, you mean that so and so!’ That was how I would have to find them. It was really fun back then … In Fairfield there was Freddy’s Lounge over there and then the Blue Gardenia. Actually, there was more happening in the black community than there was in the white community … I was the only white guy in the place usually, because I was booking black talent, you know … There was one place that was the Choral, and it was country, and we used to always go down there. I could see all the guys from different bands. There was a lot of country, a lot of good country singers came from here, but I still think that you ought to do a little thing on the gospel that was going on here. It was big here! All-night singings and back then they were on the radio on Sunday mornings … R&B definitely had an influence on most everything that happened in Birmingham. They just had the feel! They called it ‘soul,’ the soul feeling, you know? Excitement! That’s what it was. It was excitement!”
Ken Shackleford was joined by Gary Sizemore at Heart Studios: “Just out of college — this was before Elvis — I answered an advertisement in the paper for a salesman for RCA Records … I wasn’t making any money, so I quit and went to work for Jake Friedman for Southland distributors … I was selling records: Rumore’s Record Rack, Newberry’s, Loveman’s [department store] was the big album outlet, E. E. Forbes [piano and musical instruments] was big … It’s 1956. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out. I am selling records like crazy … People were making lots of commissions on Elvis. I was selling independent records, like Mercury’s ‘Little Darlin’ [by the Diamonds], ‘Searchin” [by the Coasters], I promoted the B side —‘Young Blood.’ We were selling them in batches of a hundred in Birmingham. I took it to all the deejays — Duke Rumore was the first to play it. And then it went national.” Sizemore worked for several independent labels: “There was a lot of payola in those days. I am supposed to offer him [Buddy Dean, a Baltimore deejay] half the publishing, or half the record [sales], and I don’t know what … I went through the same thing with all the deejays, I didn’t know a thing. Time to get back to Birmingham. Then I met up with Ken — that was 1958 or 1959.”
With Gary Sizemore traveling the country promoting Heart’s records, Ed Boutwell and Glenn Lane joined the organization and learned how to be recording engineers on the job. Ken Shackleford: “I was a loan office [at a bank] and I was working every day. I was the absentee owner. Glenn Lane and Ed Boutwell did the engineering.” Ed Boutwell started recording music in 1956: “I was working for Channel 13 TV and WAPI radio doing production and people would ask us to do a jingle. So we did not know what we were doing, but we did it. We had a lot of fun. I did a lot of jingle recording up there and just commercials … the only recording instruments were at the radio stations.” Shackleford: “The studio was busy all day. We had a little tape duplicating thing. Loop tape thing, we were dubbing some of those and staying pretty busy doing sessions. Basically it was people coming in and asking to do some sessions.” To get into Heart Studios you had to go through the blood bank, full of “riffraff” waiting to sell plasma, and walk upstairs. When you entered the studios you found yourself in a big room with worn carpeting, and glass dividers to isolate the sound as it was recorded. Gary Sizemore and Ken Shackleford would be lounging in the office with cigarettes and coffee, telling stories, while Ed Boutwell would be setting up the microphone and checking the levels on the mixer consol. They often used a single microphone, and only one or two tracks to record on. Re-recording was unknown. Henry Lovoy recalled, “You had to do everything in one take … We just did the whole thing. I don’t know how many cuts we made, I remember that we had to unplug the air conditioner, because it would pick up on the microphones … I remember that the studio was dark and shabby looking. They had some baffles. I was literally squished behind a baffle, singing on this microphone … We were in and out of the studio in two hours. They gave me an acetate copy.” They learned quickly; each recording session was a learning experience. Charlie Colvin: “There were very few professionals here … I can go to Nashville, and I can cut four decent sides in three hours [the industry standard]. It would take me two days to cut four sides here.”
Birmingham’s Rock ’n’ Roll Recordings
Strolling into these primitive recording studios came the young men who were the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll in Birmingham: Baker Knight, Sammy Salvo, Dinky Harris, Bobby Mizzell, and Jerry Woodard. Thomas Baker Knight was the first of them. A few trial recordings (called demonstration records or “demos”) made in Reed Studios brought him to the attention of Alan Bubis of the independent Kit label: “He came to see us play and he took us to Nashville to Owen Bradley’s studio, and we cut five or six sides. It was all done awfully fast!” Making “Poor Little Heart” and the upbeat “Bop Boogie to the Blues” “was a good experience but nothing came of that. We came back to Birmingham and he came down again with a microphone that Bradley’s studio had leant him and we went to another studio and recorded ‘Bring My Cadillac Back.’” This was sold to Decca Records, and “it sold forty thousand copies in two weeks.” This was the hit record that all rock musicians dreamed of: “It was my very first professional song and it didn’t take long / before the record was playing on every jukebox in town,” Baker Knight wrote later in a song. “We had a big page ad. In Billboard, but the stations stopped [playing] it because they said it was a commercial for Cadillac!” The next recording sessions were carried out in Decca’s studios in New York City, and the Nightmares released three singles on Decca in 1957. This showed how fast the system could work when it smelled talent.
Sammy Anselmo had begun singing as a child: “I could do imitations. The whole family would have me do it at parties. They would say, ‘All right, Sammy, go out there and sing.’ Then I would do [Enrico] Caruso. They tried to teach me Italian. I couldn’t understand it. I made up the words as I went along. My father was an opera singer. He used to have an Italian [radio] hour every Sunday in Birmingham. He would broadcast from the back of the hotel … When I was in the army [in the early 1950s], I used to go to the library and listen to opera.” His brother George picked up the story: “Sammy went into the service in Fort Nix, New Jersey. New Jersey was a Yankee town where they were singing country & western. Country & western has a kind of soul sound. Maybe that is what it was with those service boys. I went to visit him while he was on active duty. He was singing at a local club with a boy [Horace Wheat] from Georgia. There had to be three to four hundred people in there. They were standing on a circular stage in the middle of the club singing country & western music. I didn’t know that my brother could sing country & western because he had never sung it before.” Sammy: “I would do Webb Pierce and Jimmy Reed stuff. I would do the harmony and Horace would sing the lead. The club invited us to come in on that Sunday. They wanted us to do a radio show … I got up and I had a smooth voice back then. About two hours later the whole parking lot was full. That was my first professional experience. It was professional, but not professional. We drank all that we wanted and had a good time. We didn’t make any money.”
When Sammy came back to Birmingham after his stint in the service, he took up singing professionally. His experience shows how important the radio deejays were in the music business: “We were introduced to Joe Rumore. He was a country & western disc jockey. I also met Dan Brennan. I was on Dan’s show first. Horace and I got up and did some country stuff. The next thing you know, Joe told me that he needed a singer with Curly Fagan [Joe’s right-hand man]. I said yeah, I’ll be glad to. So I started singing with Curly. We got more involved with Joe after that.” George: “Joe was a very powerful man in music. If he thought you were good, he gave you a push.” Sammy: “Yeah, he sure did.” George: “Joe
