BIRMINGHAM RECORD COLLECTORS

DEDICATED TO THE COLLECTING OF MUSIC, ITS PRESERVATION AND LASTING FRIENDSHIP

THIS MONTH’S MEETING

THE SECOND SUNDAY, AUGUST 13TH 2:00 PM

HOMEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY 1721 OXMOOR RD BIRMINGHAM, AL 35209

NEXT MEETING, SEPTEMBER 10TH 2:00 PM THE SECOND SUNDAY

THE BIRMINGHAM RECORD COLLECTORS 2023 RECORD SHOW

The 38^th annual BRC Record Show will be held Friday-Sunday, August 18-20 at the Gardendale Civic Center. If you are a dealer who would like to check on table availability, please contact Joe Reddick at 205-655-3108 between 1:00 PM until 9:30 PM, Central Time. We are also going to need volunteers. Be ready to step up and help when the time comes. Thanks. 

THIS MONTH’S MEETING

Scheduled to be with us at the August club meeting will be Larry Parker. Most of you know Larry from Larry & The Loafers and their recording of ‘Panama City Blues’ and performing around the Birmingham area as well as Atlanta and Panama City. But Larry also has much knowledge about Birmingham radio and the great DJ’s that were associated with local radio. He knew most of them personally and will share with us his knowledge about not only them but places like The Sky Castle where WSGN did their radio shows. Drop by, meet and hear Larry and have a good time.

BRC MUSIC HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES

We will be inducting three new members to the BRC Music Hall of Fame this year. We missed one year of inductees due to covid (2020) and one year due to a death (2022) so we are retroactively inducting two of these to those years. Here are the bios for each inductee. Thanks to BRC club member Martin Johnson for heading up the HOF committee.

Over the weekend we will have some special guests in attendance.  Of the 3 inductees this year, 2 of them will be there and representing Big Mama Thornton we will have with us 2 of her cousins who will be driving up from Montgomery.  So be sure to meet and greet these new inductees.   With us all weekend will be Victoria Hallman.  Victoria is a member of our 2018 HOF Class and has just recently had an LP released that was recorded in 1982, produced by Buck Owens and then put aside and lost.  Then the acetate appears and now the LP is out.  Victoria along with one of the LP’s 2023 producers, Randy Poe will be there signing the LP’s and CD’s.  Randy is currently the President of Leiber & Stoller Music Publishing in Los Angeles and has served as Executive Director of The Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York.  So, stop by the BRC HOF table at the entrance into the show and talk with Victoria and Randy and get a copy of Victoria’s ‘From Birmingham To Bakersfield’ LP or CD signed. 

WILLIE ‘BIG MAMA’ THORNTON – CLASS OF 2020

World-renowned Blues singer, musician and songwriter Willie Mae Thornton garnered the name ‘Big Mama’ for her 6’0, 300-pound frame and her powerful voice. She is best known for her 1952 recording of ‘Hound Dog’ which was #1 on the R&B chart for seven weeks and later recorded by Elvis Presley and her own composition, ‘Ball & Chain’ which was a big hit for Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, demonstrating that Big Mama was not only a big influence on the Blues, but effectively shaped two generations of Rock ‘n Roll.

Willie Mae Thornton was born on December 11, 1926 in Ariton, Alabama. She was the youngest of six children born to Reverend George Thornton and his wife. Mattie. Willie Mae grew up singing in the church choir at her father’s church. She began playing the harmonica at age eight. Legend has it that she would sit in front of the Ariton bus station blowing her harmonica. Her mother died when Willie Mae was just 14 so she was taken in by Florence Jackson. Willie Mae moved to Montgomery and got a job cleaning a local bar and began her singing career performing with Wild Child Butler. She joined promoter Sammy Green’s Georgia-based Hot Harlem Revue in 1941. She was billed as the ‘New Bessie Smith’ and began gaining much needed singing and stage experience.

In 1948 she settled in Houston, Texas where she would be part of the development of the ‘Texas Blues’ style. During this time she worked with band leader Johnny Otis and entrepreneur Don Robey, who was impressed with her self-taught harmonica playing and drumming. Robey signed her to his Peacock Records label and shortly thereafter recorded the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song, ‘Hound Dog’. It was with the Johnny Otis Show that Big Mama went to New York and played The Apollo opening for Little Esther Williams and Mel Walker but later becoming a head-liner and it was here that she earned the name Big Mama.

Big Mama left Houston in the early 1960’s and moved to San Francisco. In the 60’s and 70’s she toured throughout America, Canada and Europe with blues royalty such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and others. She played Carnegie Hall, The Fillmore West, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival garnering millions of fans worldwide. In addition she released seven albums and has been featured on many compilations.

Big Mama Thornton died in Los Angeles in 1984 at the age of 57. Yet, her legacy lives on. She was a six-time nominee for a Blues Music Award and was elected into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. She was featured in the VH1 documentary ‘The 100 Greatest Women of Rock ‘n Roll’ and in the Rolling Stone magazine article ‘Women Who Changed the World’. In 2004 ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Ball And Chain’ were also listed in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame’s list of ‘500 Songs that Shaped Rock ‘n Roll’. In 2010 Big Mama was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame and her vocals on ‘Hound Dog’ are featured in the 2022 movie, Elvis in a remix song entitled ‘Vegas’ done by Doja Cat.

PATRICK CATHER – CLASS OF 2022

Growing up in the explosive midst of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement years, Patrick Cather—a young white kid from the suburb of Homewood—was an unlikely champion for local Black music and musicians. In his early teens, however, Cather emerged as a prolific blues and jazz researcher and writer, a record producer, a music magazine publisher, and a devoted chronicler of Alabama’s rich African American musical legacies.

Born in 1947, Cather was about twelve years old when he fell into record collecting. He witnessed a neighbor tossing heavy stacks of old 78s into the curbside trash and, curious, hauled them all home, loaded them onto the family record player, and discovered—in the music of Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and others—an unexpected and thrilling world of classic blues and jazz. The revelation marked him for life. Soon he was placing want ads in local Black newspapers, seeking 78s, and he spent his weekends searching Salvation Army stores for old records. His father, encouraging Cather’s developing interest, introduced him to John T. “Fess” Whatley, Birmingham’s celebrated “Maker of Musicians,” the longtime local bandleader and Parker High School teacher whose classroom had launched countless professional careers in jazz. Now in his seventies, Whatley took Cather under his wing, taking him for rides in one of his famous Cadillacs and unspooling vivid first-hand accounts of the city’s jazz history.

In 1961, at the age of fourteen, Cather began producing a mimeographed auction sheet, which he distributed to collectors across the country, buying, selling, and trading records by mail. Operating out of his family’s printing shop, he quickly expanded the project into a full-fledged, glossy magazine, Music Memories Monthly (later, Music Memories and Jazz Report), publishing his own articles on blues and jazz history alongside contributions by nationally prominent critics and historians. As the folk and blues revivals of the 1960s sent folklorists and record producers scouring the South for traces of the region’s blues history, Cather became an important point of contact for researchers in Alabama, his family’s home welcoming such visitors as Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records and, on a mission from the Folkways label, Sam and Ann Charters. Cather himself became a vital preserver of local musical legacies. The legendary Bessemer harmonica player and recording artist Jaybird Coleman is remembered today largely through the efforts of the teenaged Cather; his interviews with Coleman’s family filled in essential details from the musician’s biography and made available the only known (now widely reprinted) photo of Coleman. Cather also recorded the harmonica player, singer, and guitarist Dave Miles, last survivor of the original Birmingham Jug Band, a group whose first and only recordings—highly infectious, and highly collectible—appeared on the Okeh label in 1930. In the meantime, Cather was developing relationships with several older Black musicians he came to regard, despite the racial and generational divide, as invaluable friends and mentors.

Through Birmingham bandleader and educator Frank Adams, Cather met and befriended Robert McCoy, a remarkable blues and boogie-woogie pianist whose music preserved a once-thriving local piano tradition. (McCoy had cut his first records in the late 1920s, backing local artists Guitar Slim, Charlie Campbell, and the surreally named Peanut the Kidnapper.) In 1962, Cather and McCoy entered Homer Milam’s downtown studio to record an LP, Barrelhouse Blues and Jook Piano, which Cather released on his new Vulcan record label; a second album, Blues and Boogie Classics, followed the next year. On Vulcan’s Soul-O imprint, Cather released two additional 45 singles by McCoy, who this time was joined by a rocking R&B combo, the Five Sins: Frank Adams on saxophone; Cat Eye Summerfield, drums; Ivory “Pops” Williams, bass; and Marcus Ingram, vocals. Cather himself sat in on second piano.

Since his early years in the music business, Patrick Cather—as a collector, dealer, and passionate preservationist of rare books, sheet music, artifacts, and ephemera—has continued to document his native state’s many diverse cultural legacies. As a writer and publisher, he has produced multiple works on Alabama history, music, literature, and art. For his indispensable efforts to preserve Birmingham’s blues and jazz heritage, Cather was inducted in 1991 to the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. In 2002 the Delmark label reissued the first of his Robert McCoy LPs, along with previously unissued outtakes and personal, poignant notes by Cather himself; the original Vulcan and Soul-O records, today, are sought-after collectors’ items. Continuing his lifelong devotion to historic preservation, Cather in recent years has donated substantial collections of rare materials to the archives of Auburn University, the Birmingham-based Southern Music Research Center, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his alma mater.

BOB FRIEDMAN – CLASS OF 2023

Florence Goldstein and Morris Friedman immigrated to New York City in the 1920’s from Austria-Hungary and by 1935, they had met and married. Florence vowed to “have music in the house.” An Emerson upright was purchased and Bob’s older brother Mort was first to play. Bob began at seven. At overnight camp in 1958, Bob’s counselors borrowed 78 RPM records from the Black kitchen staff. Two of those records, “My Hearts Desire,” by the Wheels and “The Closer You Are,” by the Channels, “blew my mind,” Bob said. His love of music and singing would lead Bob and his singing friends to meet in the bathroom of the local “Y” and sing “for the echo.’ Bob shared, “I found I could organize their harmony.”

In 1960, Bob entered CCNY and also joined the DuVals, an acapella group. In 1961, Bob sang falsetto in the first performance of his DuVal career, leading “Two People in the World” (by Little Anthony and The Imperials). His voice “cracked” on the first falsetto note in front of everybody. “I finished the song but was terribly embarrassed” he added. Bob remembers, “My dad owned Deluxe Vest Company and produced vests for the group, reversibles with a black Germanic letter “D” on the chest emblazoned on bright gold. We looked good.” They sang “Tonight, Tonight,” by the Mello Kings and other oldies in white churches all over Inwood/Washington Heights. One of the Duval’s members brought Lewis Lymon to practice. He was soprano lead of Lewis Lymon and the Teen Chords (“I’m So Happy”); his brother was Frankie Lymon. We recorded on tape “I’ll Be Home” (the Flamingos) and “Sweet Was the Wine” (the Impressions) with Lewis leading

A year later, Bob joined the Chambrays. They recorded a demo of ‘Strangers in Paradise” but were turned down by both Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour and Atlantic Records. Bob regrouped with a member of the Chambrays and some new guys in 1963 and they sang at Amateur Night at Greenwich Village’s famous Café Wha?. They met producer Wellington Gray. “On day 1, he asked us to record a record; on day 2, we signed a contract; on day 3, we were in a studio recording,” Bob said. While there they met Arlene Smith, lead of the Chantels and Richard Barrett, lead of the Valentines. We were the Squires and recorded, So Many Tears Ago and Don’t Accuse Me for GEE Records. When the record came out, they found the lead singers’ voice on “Tears” had cracked and the other side “wasn’t even us! To add insult to injury, the “wrong” Don’t Accuse Me – became very popular in England”. The original Don’t Accuse Me was found 35 years later in a Roulette Records ware house and used for the GEE box set. It took 35 years to hear it. That same year, Bob and his group, now The Four Delights sang at the Apollo Theater on Amateur Night. Come show night they were ready and they won, singing the Dominoes version of “Stardust.” They returned the following week and lost to an adorable 14 year old pianist. Such is 15 minutes of fame!

In 1964, owners of The Twin Hits label asked the group to record cover records. They covered the Beatles’ From Me to You, Twist and Shout, and She Loves You; the Four Seasons’ Dawn Go Away; the Tams’ What Kind of Fool; and Bobby Goldsboro’s See The Funny Little Clown, mainly for export. “The lead earned $10 a side while the others got $5 a side. Then, they charged us 20 cents a piece to buy each record. Exhausting!”

In 1965, the group broke up. Bob continued to collect records and met the Sparrows Quartet, singing bass with them for nine years, recording three albums, and “a dozen or so” 45’s and 78’s, on Dom’s labels – Jet and Broadcast – and sang at Rock and Roll shows mainly in New York and New Jersey.

Bob moved to Gary, IN and in 1978 he was asked to join “Yesterday’s Rhythm,” an Indiana acapella quartet. For the first time Bob would not be singing bass but, instead, sang lead and tenor. The group recorded two albums and performed live throughout the Chicago-NW Indiana area. Favorite songs included Duke of Earl, Stormy Weather, Most of All, Mother’s Son and Oh What a Night. In 1978, Bob moved back to Chicago. He continued singing with Yesterday’s Rhythm and took weekly South Shore train rides to nearby Hammond for rehearsals.

Bob left Chicago in 1987 coming to Birmingham, AL working in politics and in 1988 Gary Richardson, owner of WJLD 1400 AM, hired Bob to sell air time and agreed to let Bob have a radio show, the “Doowop Shop.” He found his beloved vocal group music was more the music of the Northeast than the South, so he replaced some 50’s groups with 50’s Blues and R&B soloists such as Jimmy Reed and Slim Harpo. Bob produced 38 shows. For 22 years (1989-2011) on Saturday Morning Live (SML), Friedman hosted and interviewed local and national guests, had discussion with listeners on the issues of the day and co-hosted campaign debates. SML interviews became the foundation of the Birmingham Black Radio Museum (BBRM) oral history collection.

Bob incorporated the BBRM as a non-profit in 2004. Board of Directors included local businessman Ennis Bragg, WJLD station manager; Willamena Richardson, and local civil rights activist Minister Gwen Webb. (In 2021, the Board added Atty. Emory Anthony and local dentist Reginald Swanson.) Bob Friedman was named as founder and Director. In 2005, Bob made contact with UAB History Professor Pam Sterne King who helped begin organization of the BBRM archive.

Bob would continue to sing joining The Magictones in 1996 and then via WJLD radio, Bob met Reverend Don Solomon and N. B. Wooding, Jr. both of whom had religious shows of their own and had been gospel singers in their youth. In 2007, with Don Solomon, N. B. Wooding, Jr., Henry Burton, Hobdy Moorer, and Bob, they formed the Pillars of Birmingham, produced two albums and performed at numerous churches, as well as at UAB’s Alys Stephens Center.

In 2011, Bob left WJLD to work full time on the BBRM and moved the collection to Birmingham’s Carver Theater with the support of their Executive Director Dr. Leah Tucker. In 2013, Bob began presenting the BBRM’s civil rights research to Alabama’s colleges, universities and libraries. In 2016, the BBRM web site was created by Ms. Emily Bibb. With designers’ drawings in hand, the BBRM was able to begin raising funds in 2021 for a permanent museum exhibit at Birmingham’s Carver Theater in the downtown historic Black Business District, listed on the National Registry.

Congratulations to these three inductees. All have done so much during their life to provide music, entertainment, doing research, record collecting and being sure that the music is preserved for many generations to come.

See ya, 

Charlie