Cradle of Rhythm and Blues (Record Row TV Documentary) Documentary on the birth and emergence of the soul music industry in the late 1950's, along the 12-block stretch of Chicago's South Michigan Avenue known as "Record Row."
I'M WHITE & I'VE LOVED THE BLUES, R&B , MOTOWN FOR 70 YEARS ❣️ I STILL LISTEN TO THE MUSIC EVERY DAY NOW , BEST MUSIC THERE EVER BEEN MADE 🖐🏻😇😇🤜🏾🤛🏼🤜🏼🤛🏾😎
I bought a lot of records from Chess Record Company in Chicago Illinois. Nothing like good old Rock N Roll And The Blues. Kick up the music and play it loud to me.
Im proud to say i have many ties to the blues, besides playing with leon Russell, i live right beside and play with Bob Margolin steady rolling, who played with muddy waters for years and years, and I've heard all the stories you folks would die to hear. It's crazy how far a hillbilly with a guitar can go, especially in swva
Sugar Pie DeSanto, Mitty Collier, Jackie Ross, Holly Maxwell, Koko Taylor, Jan Bradly, Fontella Bass so many soulful divas including Ruby Andrews, Josie Armstead and Etta James ❤️
Thank you so very much for this program. I was raised up on this music. Being a young musician I had the great pleasure of being on the same bill with Mr. Duke Of Earl him self Gene Chandler . His showmanship was excellent . The suits were great and colorful . As the years went by I got the opportunity to be on a show in Cleveland ,Ohio with Mr. Curtis Mayfield. What a great man for me to meet and to be on the same stage with. I have many stories about the Acts from the 1960s. I was their and worked for a number of them. Thank You again so many great memories.
I remember reading in a book about Rock and Roll history that the area in front of Chess Records was a bus stop and that Chess had a speaker outside the front of their building. Whenever they had a new record coming out , they'd play over the speaker and if the black folks were dancing to it, they knew they had a hit.
When I was growing up, in the New York metro area in the 50s, I heard this music on WADO & WAAT. Jocko and The Bruce were my favorite DJs. Now I live just a few blocks from Record Row and wish the music was still there.
@Charlie...that’s interesting I grew up in the NYC area(North Jersey) in the 70’s. I was fascinated by Chicago because Ebony/Jet. Afro Sheen/ Ultra Sheen, Soul Train and of course Curtis Mayfield, Chi-Lites Staples Singers. When I moved there as an adult I then began to understand how that city could produce so much soul. The gospel music coming out of those churches were something I had never heard even in Newark or Harlem. Amazing experience!
@@ccth22 I was born in Newark and lived in Elizabeth, West Orange and East Orange. Chicago had so much great stuff but it's largely just another corporate-chain city now. I've been here since 2002 and am now leaving to live in the desert.
That I - vi - IV - V chord progression was just done to death. "Duke of Earl" used it too. Most all those Doo-wop songs used it. I just got so sick of it, but i was 7 years old in 62, so who was I?? A future hard rocker and metal head, and then i abandoned metal (not hard rock) and got into contemporary country fan and a Southern rocker. But it's ALL based in the BLUES, including R&B, of course.
As a kid who grew up in the Chicago burbs in the 60's and 70's (Blue Island [southside] ) I'm proud to know this, some of which I already knew, as a musician and ongoing lover of Chicago blues and soul.
I agree, I’m from the NYC area(Jersey side) originally. But I loved in Chicago for two years and this documentary captured everything I felt about the city and the music. Chitown just felt “soulful”. Driving through the south side you would hear ladies voices blasting through church windows and I would be thinking this has got to be where r&b was born.
ALL ranking is irrelevant. Chance is not. Try to figure out what s in between. . . . Answer : the historical momentum as reflected thru individual choice. Some call it fate, others talent !
Wow that was good Rachel, stuff I knew and stuff I didn't. You know, I don't let anybody see me when I watch things like this, because all that history - all those people - it makes the tears flow big time.
Willie Dixon had hits of his own in addition to being a talent scout. One I like is "29 Ways to Make it to My Baby." I have a cd of his and there's a lot of good music on it. Plus he played a mean bass on a lot of other people's records, too.
Berry Gordy had people jumping up and down on boards to simulate handclaps but that was after this phone book stomping right? 21:45 Dick Clark got slapped down with his "much to do about nothing" blow off comment GOOD!
I just thought it was Michigan Avenue. I've never heard of "Record Row" until this documentary. Before the Dan Ryan expressway was opened, Dad used to travel past Chess Records on the way from the west-side to the southside to visit my grandmother.
Sad that it all fell apart when the large corporates started to show interest in the music produced by the independent companies.The music then became watered down and lost its edge.Another problem was the white middle class who did everything in their power to prohibit this music,public smashing of records by some white dj’s and naturally the horrible payola scandal that hit record promotion.Nice clip of Robert Nighthawk on Maxwell street!
You have a great channel. It's like taking a complete music class. The!!!!!Beat is so good,and you are very generous for sharing the episodes. I added an extra exclamation point because I like it so much. Go Muddy. Thank you again, have a good new year.
Hello John, Thank you for your kind comment :) I wanted to share full episodes after noting small excerpts appearing on YT mainly the artists that are more well known, however the lesser acts also deserve to be seen I think? :)
Why would there even exist a situation where an unheard album could be in any contract? That just sounds ridiculous. Also, speaking of Curtis’, Curtis King Jr., who sings in two different bands with Bruce Springsteen, has a beautiful voice too.
I enjoyed this learning about my town from this documentary a whole lot! Thanks for posting it! How about that Dick Clark bit? "It was a big stink about nothing. The original artists got their due." - The White Man
I love that music broke down the walls of discrimination!!!! Disgraceful that white people wouldn't play the original recordings at first. As a white person that saddensxme. We are one. So glad things have changed.
+Rachel Cummings Everything's gotta be alright, so it is. Do you want to hear something nice? Maybe it's a little premature, but I'm starting to get some music together, posting it here: www.soundcloud.com/don_deering Most of what I'll be posting are rhythm gittar tracks and then--hopefully--responses to them. There's one collaboration at present, the guy sounds great. Every two weeks or so, I'll add a different track, different key, different rhythm. I'm due for one this weekend.
+Don Deering you always sound great !! :) checking it out, plus I've put it on my channel here :) one of my wonderful friends I have on yt !! Have a good weekend suga.
+Rachel Cummings Thank you, Rachel! Are you on Facebook? There are a couple groups you "should" belong to if you're interested, and we should be friends there if you are.
people was changing over and they were always looking 4 a new sound the people of the 195OS were listen 👂 2 more music 🎶 than be 4 and in the bigger towns there was records stores every where and it was the young people who was buying the records and that's where the music 🎶 sales came from there recording studios every where and just as many record stores there is only 2 big music 🎶 stores I know of 2 day left 👈 😮😊😂 OMG 7 8 2O23
@@sulevisydanmaa9981 OK, but wouldn't that have been more or less a guy (Bass) or two working out of a hotel room, maybe a bar? Can't see Sid Nathan opening an actual branch... that would cost money! I imagine lots of companies, majors included, had people covering Chicago, just in case something profitable was ripe for the plundering .
PULVERIZED the Toddlin Town w just talent scouts was not the impression I got from E.B. whom I was in nearly weekly contact due to residential proximity betw 86-94 way up here in The N ...Not sure if "branch" in the corporate sense was the exact word he used. He conveyed that Ralph B was the one & only fair & decent middleman between him and "dem Lennardh people peckawoods" ... He was mentally devastated by the supremacists financial serfdom, which was the main reason for his relocation to Europe. Only in the late 80s the Scott Cameron Organization took him under their wing - along w Dixon, etc other victimized semi-simpletons... and, thru erudite legal wrangling, finally got back to E(xploited) what was justifiably due theirs in terms of royalty rights to hit songs. Talking bout "hits" & Chgo ...is another discussion. But if u can read betw the lines in Bob Pruter s book Chgo Soul, there are many not just unturned pages but ostensibly still laid down untruths resting subsurface in the murky waters of Lake Mich - above which the Hawk is, once again, soon going to blow all evidence away ...just as another Chi-kid, Lou Rawls, once delivered in a long pre-rap oratory on one of his mid-career live albums. . .Boyd s widow still lives in Helsinki, 1st name Leila, a finn. PS. the crookedest rec row cmpny, acc to Pruter, was Brunswick - the Decca subs. which did superbly arranged DEEP SOUL (Erma, Tyrone, Acklin, Jackie W, Chandler, Percy - by Sonny Sanders, Carl Davis - maybe Bass also + Barge) , but was so corrupt I'm not going to speculate in public. Ask Pruter, convey my admiration concerning his in-depth book from 1990. PPS. WHO, btw, would, finally, start digging deep by shoveling off THE Dirt from the Duke/Peacock/Backbeat ...(whatever). If they changed the name of Grant Park, why not change the myth concerning Don Robey s semi-philantropist Cadillac giveaways to his most profitable stable drivers - LJP, BBB, OVW ....just askin ? The Roy C. Ames book is a surface history !
@@sulevisydanmaa9981 Thanks for the detailed response! So cool when you can learn things rather than get into a ridiculous argument! My only comment would be, yeah, Brunswick. Well known as mobbed up profiteers, almost to the level of Roulette. I personally don't care for the Brunswick production style, but they did make some hits. But imagine if Jackie Wilson had been in, say, Sam Cooke's position, on a label that at least wasn't shady as all get out, and with management that saw more than a day or two into the future. Brunswick was not good for him, in any way, even if you like the arrangements. Anyway, you seem to know a lot more than I do on all this, and it's been a while since I've read the books, etc. Lots of newer books I need to read it sounds like! Thanks again!
Chuck Berry is the true King of R&R .. Elvis all he ever did was steal Hound Dog from Big Momma Thorton . That piece of trash didnt even throw her a Bone .. 500 bucks thats not even a crumb .
Thornton co-wrote "Hound Dog"; I'm sure that her estate is *still* collecting royalties off of "Dog", which reached far more people on the planet/ in history because Elvis chose to record it: *Think;* will you ? *Fun Fact:* Elvis was a very respectful friend of the U.S. R&B community.
49:40 The Beatles *SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ON THE VEE-JAY(V.J.) LABEL AT ALL!* EMI in Britain should've *PULLED RANK* on their insignificant little US subsidiary, Capitol, and *FORCED* Capitol to carry The Beatles, Frank Ifield and *ALL OTHER EMI-ROSTERED ARTISTS AND GROUPS!* Capitol was, after all, a *MERE SUBSIDIARY* rather than a division of EMI. And as a subsidiary, that equated to Capitol being the *INFANT TODDLER* in the EMI "family".
So mad about even though Chess etc did give Black music a Hell of a boost they also as Jerry Butler made black artists basically Musical Slaves by paying them a pittance of what they Earned which Big money mostly was taken by White record owners 🤔😵😠🤬⁉️ All that is all wrong but later Black guys like Barry Gordy did the same to their Black artists so it was and Still is all ABOUT MONEY 💯🤑⚰️👺 Great Documentary not only about the music but the hopes,dreams and the will to make Better lives for Black people in America 🤯
