Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Read Free Book Online Page B

Gibbs that came out two weeks later outsold Baker’s smoking record. Baker couldn’t help holding a certain resentment toward Gibbs. She also couldn’t resist her little joke. Always a nervous flyer and headed out on tour, Baker took out flight insurance at the airport, named Georgia Gibbs the beneficiary, and sent her the insurance papers.
    Ray Charles summoned the Atlantic chiefs to Atlanta in November 1954. He had been tooling around the South building his own band, learning to play them like an instrument, finding his sound. They say the crowds dancing to his band in tobacco barns raised so much dust from between the floorboards, partners couldn’t see one another. The Atlantic guys sent him material from time to time, but he liked little of it. Instead he was working on his own songs. The trumpet player in the band brought him a half-done piece based on an old gospel song and Charles put some finishing touches on the number and started playing it onstage, as he and his band continued a string of endless one-nighters with T-Bone Walker and Lowell Fulson. Since he didn’t have any dates in the New York area, but he had four songs rehearsed and ready, he told Ahmet and Jerry to meet him in Atlanta, when he came into the Peacock Room for two weeks.
    Ertegun and Wexler went straight to the club from the airport. Even though it was afternoon, Ray and the band were set up on the bandstand. When Ahmet and Jerry stepped foot in the club, Charles knew they were there and sent the band straight into “I Got a Woman.” In a moment, they realized that Charles had coalesced all the elements they saw in him, pulled together the disparate forces within him, and found his voice. They booked time where they could find it—a local radiostation where they had to stop recording at the top of the hour while an announcer came in and read the news—but they left town with four tracks in the can, including “I Got a Woman.”
    The single went number one R&B after it came out in January 1955, connecting Ray Charles for the first time across the country with black disc jockeys and audiences. They followed their best instincts with Ray Charles and left him alone. It was a novel a&r strategy, not widely practiced in the industry, and Atlantic was going to be rewarded, not with just another hit record, but also with an artist whose voice would reach multitudes. The records they were making were defining rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues was spreading out on the nationwide record scene underneath them. With Ray Charles, they had the good sense to just let it happen.

    * Ahmet liked to record his songwriting demos in the Make-a-Record booth at the Times Square subway station.

Frankie Lymon, George Goldner

 
     
    III.
    New York City [1955]
    T HE FIVE TEENAGERS who called themselves the Coupe de Villes were accustomed to moving their impromptu rehearsals. They would sing in the hallways, the same songs over and over, until the neighbors complained. They often retreated to the hallway in bass vocalist Sherman Garnes’s building across the street from Edward W. Stitt Junior High School at the corner of 165th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, the heart of Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.
    One of Sherman’s neighbors, who used to stop and listen to the boys practice, brought them a stack of letters, love poems his girlfriend had written him. He suggested they work up some material of their own. The group roughed out a melody and the harmonies together. Herman Santiago and Jimmy Merchant punched the lyrics in shape, working around a line from one of the girl’s poems: “Why do birds sing so gay.”
    Richie Barrett, who lived on 161st Street, was something of a neighborhood hero. He was not only the handsome lead vocalist of the Valentines whose record “Lily Maebelle” lit up New York radio that spring of 1955 (and was paying the bills at Rama Records), but he was also doing some artists and repertoire work downtown for George Goldner,