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2 days ago

Wow! We share the same birthday. Although we worked with Emmylou, I did not know this until recently. #MusicIcons #MusicHistory #omegaliveproductions
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When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.

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4 days ago

Leon Helm performing “Highway 61 Revisited,” from his PBS series, Great Drives: Highway 61, 1996. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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6 days ago

Here’s one we post from time to time. Townes Van Zandt, who set the standard for Texas singer/songwriters is inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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1 week ago

What’s behind a song? From Rising Son Records and Arlo Guthrie. It was 55 years ago that Steve Goodman sang Arlo "City of New Orleans" for a beer. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
bit.ly/4bB87y9It was 55 years ago that Steve Goodman sang me "City of New Orleans" for a beer.

I was doing a couple of nights at Richard Harding's Quiet Knight - A club in Chicago - January 1971. Steve came over to me as I was packing up my gear after the close of the night, and almost everyone had left. He asked if he could sing me a song he'd written. I said "Sure, if you buy me a beer. As long as it lasts, I'll listen." Best beer I ever had. We became friends.

Steve didn't expect me to record the song myself, he'd known that I was friends with Johnny Cash, and Steve hoped I would get Johnny to record the song. So I took the cassette tape and lead sheet to Nashville, and played it for Cash, who liked it, but because he'd already recorded a lot of train songs, he didn't want to do it.

I took the song home where it sat on my piano until I began tinkering with it. I changed a few minor things around, and began recording the song in Pat Boone's "Sunwest" recording studio in LA January 1972. I'd tried it a few different ways - a bluegrass style, rock & roll style and a few others, but nothing seemed to work right. Eventually, I finished it at another location. My friends, John Pilla and Lenny Waronker over saw the final recorded version. They kept it simple.

The song made it on an album and was released. A radio station in Atlanta began playing the album cut, and soon got picked up by other radio stations throughout the South. By the time Warner Records released a single, the public had moved on to other things. Still - It did well.

Years later, Steve Goodman called me up and said "Congratulations! We've got a hit!" I asked"What are you taking about?" He said "Willie Nelson recorded City". I laughed. "It's your song, so why are you calling me?" Steve said, "Well, he didn't do it my way either!" We laughed, as I'd only changed a few little details from his original song. Steve Goodman was a good guy.

Here a shot of me and Steve - 1975 Worthington, MA ... See MoreSee Less

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“Some kid begged to get backstage. He had a guitar. He said it was his grandmother’s, and that she'd kept it under the bed…” Sheryl Crow was devastated when her favorite guitar was stolen – a year later, a fan gave her a life-changing gift

1 week ago

Sheryl Crow was devastated when her favorite guitar was stolen – a year later, a fan gave her a life-changing gift. #MusicIcons #MusicHistory #omegaliveproductions
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Its arrival coincided with Crow's breakout success and has remained at her side ever since

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Here’s some history on Stax Records, one of the most iconic labels of our generation, and Carla Thomas. Be prepared to spend some time. Fascinating. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
bit.ly/41oh8VdEvery Otis Redding record. Every Isaac Hayes record. Every Sam and Dave record. All of it came from a building that only existed as a soul studio because a 17-year-old girl named Carla Thomas walked in first. She was Stax before Stax had a name

The floor still sloped. When Jim Stewart ripped the seats out of the old Capitol Theatre at 926 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis and hauled in recording equipment, nobody thought to level the concrete.

The building had been a movie theater in a Black neighborhood in South Memphis, a place where people sat in the dark and watched someone else's stories projected onto a screen. Stewart rented it for $150 a month.

He was a white country fiddler who worked as a bank teller during the day. His sister, Estelle Axton, had mortgaged her house to buy him an Ampex monaural tape recorder, and she set up a record shop in the old concession stand to try to recoup some of the money.

They called the label Satellite Records. Stewart wanted to record country music and rockabilly, the kind of thing white Memphis already had plenty of.

Then Rufus Thomas walked in. Rufus was a disc jockey at WDIA, the first radio station in America programmed entirely for Black listeners, and he was still working shifts at a textile plant during the day to pay his bills.

He brought his daughter with him. Her name was Carla, and she was 17 years old, still attending Hamilton High School, still finishing her senior year.

They recorded a duet called "Cause I Love You" in the summer of 1960, with Carla's brother Marvell on keyboards and a 16-year-old kid named Booker T. Jones on baritone saxophone. It was the first record cut in that building. The sloped floor of the old movie theater caught the sound in a way nobody expected, bouncing it off the ceiling and back at the musicians with a fraction of a second's delay.

That delay, that accident of architecture, would become the Stax sound. Soul music historians would later say they could identify a Stax recording within the first few notes just by listening for what that room did to the rhythm.

But all of that came later. In the summer of 1960, "Cause I Love You" was just a regional single, something Memphis radio played for a few weeks.

It sold more than 30,000 copies. Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records heard it and flew to Memphis to sign a distribution deal with Stewart and Axton, giving their tiny label the financial backbone it needed to survive.

More than that, the song changed Stewart's mind. He had been trying to make country records in a Black neighborhood, and a 17-year-old girl and her father had just shown him what that room was actually for.

Stewart pivoted to rhythm and blues, Satellite Records became Stax Records, and the sloped floor of a $150-a-month movie theater became the foundation of one of the most important record labels in American history.

Carla Thomas had started it. But she had started even before that building existed.

At 10 years old, she had joined the WDIA Teen Town Singers, a chorus of Black high school students who rehearsed on Wednesdays and Fridays after school and performed live on the radio every Saturday morning. The program was run by A.C. "Moohah" Williams, a former biology teacher at Manassas High who believed that God and good music could save Black folks from despair, and that education was the elevator to everything else.

Carla was supposed to be of high school age to join. Her father's influence got her in early.

She sang on WDIA's airwaves for eight years, all the way through her senior year at Hamilton High. Another kid who came through the same Teen Town Singers was Isaac Hayes.

So the Queen of Memphis Soul and the man who would write "Theme from Shaft" both learned to perform in the same after-school program, on the same radio station, in the same segregated city. That's what WDIA was, a place that made things before the world was ready to see them.

After "Cause I Love You" gave Stax its first hit, Carla went back to something she'd written two years earlier, when she was 15 and just playing around at a piano. She'd composed a melody and some lyrics about a boy, a teenager's love song, and nobody had taken it seriously.

Vee-Jay Records in Chicago had passed on it. But Rufus believed in it, so in the fall of 1960, back in the sloped room on McLemore Avenue, Carla recorded "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)."

The song came out in October 1960 to almost no attention. Then Atlantic's distribution deal kicked in, and by February 1961, it was being played nationally.

It climbed to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 5 on the R&B chart. A teenage girl from Memphis, in her first year of college, was suddenly one of the most talked-about voices in American music.

She appeared on American Bandstand. They started calling her the Queen of Memphis Soul.

Here is where the story bends in a direction most people don't expect. A.C. "Moohah" Williams, the man who had run the Teen Town Singers, had told Carla something years earlier that she never forgot.

He told her she needed to go to college. And Carla, who had no dire ambition to be a star, who just liked being around music, thought, "Well, yeah."

So while Stax was catching fire, while her single was charting nationally, while American Bandstand was calling, Carla Thomas enrolled at Tennessee A&I University in Nashville. She chose to study English and Renaissance literature.

Not as a backup plan. Because she loved it.

She scheduled her recording sessions around her coursework. Stax produced her albums in Nashville to accommodate her class schedule.

She toured, she recorded, she charted, and she went to class. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in English in 1964.

Then she went to Howard University for her master's degree. Her classmates at Howard included Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, and Harold Wheeler.

Think about that for a second. The Queen of Memphis Soul, at the height of her recording career, was sitting in graduate seminars studying Renaissance literature alongside two people who would become giants in their own right.

Meanwhile, the room she had christened was changing the world. Otis Redding walked through the door at 926 McLemore and started recording.

Sam and Dave followed. Booker T. and the M.G.'s, the kid who had played baritone sax on Carla's first session, became the house band. Isaac Hayes, her fellow Teen Town Singer, became a songwriter and then a star.

In 1966, Isaac Hayes and David Porter wrote "B-A-B-Y" for Carla, and it became a Top 20 pop hit. She received two Grammy nominations in 1967, one for Best R&B Solo Vocal Performance and one for Best R&B Group Performance.

That same year, she recorded the album King and Queen with Otis Redding. Their duet "Tramp" hit No. 2 on the R&B chart.

She toured Europe with the Stax/Volt Revue in 1967, performing alongside Redding, William Bell, and Booker T. and the M.G.'s before massive audiences who had fallen in love with the Memphis sound from an ocean away. Until Mavis Staples and her family joined Stax in 1969, Carla was the only female artist on the label to release full-length albums under her own name.

Her songs hit the national charts more than twenty times. And she stayed with Stax until it closed in 1975, the person who had been there before anyone else, still there after almost everyone was gone.

In 1972, she performed at Wattstax, the concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that drew more than 100,000 people and was called the Black Woodstock. She sang "Pick Up the Pieces," "Gee Whiz," and the soul-stirring "I Have a God Who Loves."

But there is one more detail that almost nobody tells, and it is the one that tells you who Carla Thomas really was. In 1967, at the absolute peak of her fame as the Queen of Memphis Soul, she booked herself a set at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C.

The Bohemian Caverns was a jazz club, not a soul venue. Carla stood on that stage and sang standards made famous by Irving Berlin, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra.

She wanted to prove that her voice could not be confined to one genre, that the girl from McLemore Avenue could go anywhere the music took her. The recording sat unreleased for forty years, finally coming out in 2007.

Forty years. The Queen of Memphis Soul sang Billie Holiday in a jazz club in 1967, and the world didn't hear it until 2007.

After Stax closed, Carla stepped away from performing. In the 1980s, she became involved with the Artists in the Schools program, a series of workshops that brought working musicians into Memphis classrooms to talk to teenagers about music, performing arts, and drug abuse.

She never moved away from Memphis. She invested in the city that made her, the same city where she had rehearsed on Wednesdays and Fridays after school and sang on the radio every Saturday morning as a 10-year-old girl.

In 1993, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation gave her the Pioneer Award alongside James Brown and Solomon Burke. In 2021, at 79 years old, she was featured on Valerie June's "Call Me a Fool," which received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Song.

As of her 80th birthday in December 2022, Carla Thomas was still living in Memphis. She was still being recognized, still being heard.

The floor at 926 McLemore Avenue is gone now. The original building was demolished in 1989, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music stands on the same site today.

But the sound that sloped floor made is still in the air. Every recording Stax ever produced carries the acoustic fingerprint of a room that used to be a movie theater, a room where Black people once sat in the dark watching someone else's stories.

Carla Thomas walked into that room at 17 and gave it a different purpose. The first voice that room ever recorded was hers, and everything else followed.

A sloped floor in a $150-a-month building, a 17-year-old girl, a duet with her father, and a sound that the room itself helped invent. That's how Memphis soul started.

Not with a plan, not with ambition. Just a girl who liked being around music, standing on a floor that tilted toward a microphone instead of a screen, singing a song that 30,000 people decided they needed to hear.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
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We’ve all been impressed with Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing and Mark Knopfler’s guitar work. But what if we could create a metal version? #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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Dr. John, “Sweet Home New Orleans” Live At Rockpalast 1999. Great memories recording this NOLA Icon. CD/DVD of the concert due March 27th. See YT details. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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It was truly an honor to have recorded Guy Clark, who many consider one of this generation’s greatest songwriters. Here’s the new Doc, “Old No. 1 Rides Again.” See the You Tube details for more. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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“When I was seven years old, my dad put a guitar in my arms – it became everything to me”: Miles Caton, Buddy Guy and Brittany Howard lead all-star Sinners performance at the Oscars – as composer Ludwig Göransson pays tribute to the guitar

3 weeks ago

More news from an artist we recorded. Buddy Guy, Miles Caton, and Brittany Howard lead an all-star “Sinners”performance at the Oscars. #musicicons #musichistory #omegaliveproductions
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Göransson picked up the award for best score as the blues was thrust into the spotlight with a performance that also featured Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram and Eric Gales