Notes & Queries, 18th December, 2013: Whatever happened to R&B?

 

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The upper echelons of jazz and blues have traditionally coalesced into a loosely-knit royal family: The Empress of the Blues; The Queen of Soul; innumerable Dukes, Counts, Lords and Ladies: These honorary titles convey both delusions of grandeur and reverence from peers and dedicated fans; however, any actual monarchical influence these individuals project is indirect and nebulous at best.

Dogie Ginn – the self-appointed “Pope of R&B” was a more serious proposition: A man who could walk the talk, he steered an entire genre of popular music through the middle part of the 20th century before abruptly changing the direction of the sound during the 1980s.

“Why did I choose to call myself the pope of R&B?” he pondered during an interview with Nicholas Hart, in 1994. [printed in MOJO magazine #9] Why did I chose to call myself Pope? Hmmm, hhmmmmmmmm. Because the Pope in Italy looks out for the spiritual well-being of all of the Catholic people. I am not a Catholic, by the way. For me music is food for the soul and my congregation is all over the planet, and I have a responsibility to see that they are well nourished. It goes way back, see, ‘fore the war...”

In the early 1940s, R&B - a lively blend of jazz and blues that would become the template for rock and roll was gaining in popularity. Douglas Ginn, then a 22 year old Chicago rail-road worker, saw its potential early:

“I went to a bar one evening after my shift and I watched a man there fall asleep on stage playing standard mid-tempo, backwoods blues. The worst thing was nobody in the room noticed. Back then music needed a kick up the pants. Shortly after R&B came along and happily obliged.”

From the outset Ginn had big ambitions. With the assistance of his twin cousins, who were both accomplished lawyers, he was successful in patenting the R&B sound. After this he was able to extract a royalty from artists playing “my music” - a task that his cousin's legal firm carried out with tenacity and meticulous efficiency:

“I think... I never really got involved in that area of the business... but I think what was said was: 'If you don't pay up, then ain't nobody ever gonna to hear your music.' Legally we were shaky. Soon though we got too big for anyone to challenge us and it just became the established way of doin’ things. I got away with what I did by not being too greedy. If someone was using my sound, all I asked for in royalties was a cent on the dollar. And then if you want, for an additional negotiable fee, I can press your record at my own plant up at Nettleship; I can distribute your record nationwide; I can damn well make sure that it gets played. Plus if you give me two cents royalty payment, I'll give the second to a worthy cause and you'll be in my good books and in the good Lord's good books.”

'A penny for the pocket and a penny for the pot' became the official motto of the Soot Stoop Recording Company (later rechristened Stoop Records) – the label founded by Ginn in 1943. It was scratched into the run out groove of all their recordings right up until 1979.

Early recordings on Soot Stoop were pressed onto pine resin:

“It gave a better sound than vinyl and, from where I was coming, it was cheaper too. The mixture was a secret recipe. We put in all these herbs and spices and flavours. You could melt those records down and use them as a stock, or in a sauce if you wanted. They sounded good and they tasted good.”

In his memoirs, Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, recalls an evening in 1964 when, under the encouragement of Brian Jones, the group ceremonially melted-down an album by Lincoln Spencer and served it with pork chops.

Ginn's entrepreneurial streak and appetite for expansion extended to the sponsorship of revue shows and performances at juke joints across the United States:

“We went into places that were struggling financially and we turned them into franchises for our music. We had the Spooner Jukebox factory in Georgia. Those jukeboxes weren’t pretty but they stood up to a lot of wear and tear so the bar owners liked them. The unbreakable rule was that 60% of the records in one of our players had to be endorsed by Stoop. The rest of the space you could fill up with whatever you liked.

“The jukeboxes kept a track of how many times a song got played. You could even tell if they were playing the A or the B side. They were a more accurate indicator of what was popular than any music chart. I used to keep an eye on the figures. You could watch the popularity of a record growing and spreading from town to town week upon week. I could actually predict when a song was going to hit big in a major city – in Detroit or somewhere. We'd ship product down there in advance and be ready.”

From the mid 1960s onwards R&B gradually fell from favour and was replaced by new trends and tastes in music.

“The music had its day,” says Dogie. “Around the late 1970s times were hard. The old people who were into rhythm and blues back in the day were dying out, or maybe they just weren't buying records no more. By that time the young people were all into rock and disco.

“I was running Stoop Records then with my cousin and two of my sons from my first marriage. I sat them down and I told them: 'We are dying. If we don't change the meaning of R&B and make it so the music appeals to young people, five years from now we'll be gone.'”

Nicholas Hart: “It was a good thing they listened to you.”

“Well I was only telling them as a courtesy. I was gonna do  it anyway. After that meeting we began signing funk, disco and contemporary soul acts. Really what we were doing was blending it all together. We sunk a lot of money into Champion Studios in L.A. I had the people who were running our inner city charity projects keeping both eyes open for any fresh talent. This business is all about momentum which is why, if you look at R&B today, we are always trying to align it with what is popular and what we think is going to be popular.”

Talking on The Culture Show last year New Statesman music critic, Mudada Chamboko said:

“Dogie Ginn often gets lumped in with the pop svengalis - the Colonel Tom Parkers of the business, or the devious aspiring machiavellians – the crooked managerial archetype of the 1960s and 1970s. And that's not fair because he was nothing like any of those people. He was a leader who understood and appreciated the creative process, but who also knew how to wrap it up in a profitable business model.”