King Curtis - The Soul Of King Curtis
Rock music has long revolved around the guitar.
During the genre’s mid-1950s primordial days, however, when “and roll” was attached to the term’s back end and volume levels weren’t ratcheted up to the boiling point, tenor saxophone ruled the roost. It’s impossible to imagine the torrid output of Little Richard and Fats Domino without scorching sax solos midway through their smashes. Ditto virtually any upbeat doo-wop hit. Those mighty horn players, wailing chorus after chorus of rafter-rattling riffs that sailed to the very heavens, provided the grit and power behind many of rock and roll’s pioneering voices just as they had during the jump blues era immediately preceding them, providing an indelible instrumental blueprint for rock and roll’s breakthrough to mainstream glory.
In addition to sax stars Sil Austin, Red Prysock, Big Jay McNeely, Rusty Bryant, Willis Jackson, and Joe Houston, whose respective instrumental platters were enough to tear the roof off any respectable record hop, most key R&B recording centers had their resident first-call tenor titans. In New Orleans, it was the mighty Lee Allen, whose muscular solos propelled the classic rock hits of Little Richard, Smiley Lewis, and Shirley & Lee a notch or two higher, with Herb Hardesty and Robert Parker standing next in line. Plas Johnson was the top R&B saxist in Los Angeles, Jackie Kelso running a close second.
New York was absolutely loaded with leather-lunged saxophone blasters. Sam “The Man” Taylor lived up to his nickname there for the first half of the ‘50s; his endlessly imaginative screaming sax rides enlivened more vocal hits than seems humanly possible. If Sam The Man wasn’t available, New York producers could turn to Jimmy Wright, Big Al Sears, Jesse Powell, Buddy Lucas, Freddie Mitchell, and several others to honk up a storm at their sessions.
A strange thing happened at a December 14, 1955 date for RCA Victor’s Groove subsidiary. It was unusual to book two tenor specialists for a vocal date, but that’s what A&R man Bob Rolontz did for gravel-voiced blues shouter Teddy “The Bear” McRae. On McRae’s hurtling rocker “Mr. Bear Comes To Town,” Taylor jumped in at the halfway point with a typically spectacular 12-bar ride before handing the spotlight off to a newcomer from Fort Worth, Texas whose equally compact solo was every bit as flammable as Sam’s.
It was like the torch was passing at that very instant from Sam to Curtis Ousley, who had the confidence to regally crown himself King Curtis. Once Curtis assumed the mantle of New York’s top R&B session saxist, he wouldn’t relinquish the honor for the remainder of rock and roll’s glory years and well into the ‘60s. His versatility was so infinite that he was capable of inventing an entirely different sound whenever he needed it.
Case in point: the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak.” King’s uproarious sax break on that ’58 across-the-board blockbuster was so unique and attractive that it threatened to eternally typecast him as he provided sparkling variations on the same basic theme for many of the Coasters’ subsequent hits, most notably “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones,” and “That Is Rock & Roll.” Down in Nashville, Boots Randolph found the concept so satisfying that he wrote his signature instrumental theme “Yakety Sax” around it that same year, cementing his rise as a Music City session ace and performing star in his own right.
“It was just a pattern that I played on this record,” said the late Randolph. “And I got home, and I got to thinking about that thing. I thought,= >I don=t know where that came from or how I played it or why, but I=m gonna work on that a little bit!= And I sat down and got me a pen and pencil and started writing some notes down, and formulated it.”
It’s doubtful that Curtis minded Boots borrowing his innovation. It’s been reported that King was none too fond of his invention anyway, worrying that it would typecast him. In order to stay on top, Curtis’ yakety period proved relatively brief because he had too much else to achieve. At the same time that he reigned as a session ace in the studios of New York, Curtis was blowing full-length jazz sessions as a leader for Prestige Records. And King scored an R&B chart-topping smash of his own in 1962 that leads this collection. There was seemingly nothing King couldn’t do with a horn, and it all started down in Texas, home state to an inordinate number of R&B and jazz saxophone lions.
Born in Fort Worth on February 7, 1934, Curtis hailed from a musically inclined family. His dad played guitar in church, and Curtis would eventually exhibit talent on the instrument as well. The ebullient Louis Jordan caught young Ousley’s ear, and he followed the jump blues pioneer’s glorious example by picking up an alto sax when he was 11, though he switched to tenor in high school. Louis wasn’t his only prime influence by any means; Lester Young, Gene Ammons, Illinois Jacquet, and Arnett Cobb all made their respective marks on the young horn man’s musical maturation.
Before he was done with high school, Curtis was walking the bar at various local gin joints, blasting out Jimmy Forrest’s “Night Train” like a seasoned pro. Fort Worth couldn’t contain him. Ousley went to visit his uncle in New York in 1952 for a few months, reportedly finding time to win the Apollo Theatre’s prestigious amateur contest while he was in town. Curtis also made his first appearance on wax during that visit, backing blues singer Bob Kent on the timely “Korea, Korea” for short-lived Par Records (you’ll find it on disc two of this collection). It was Kent’s only release, but King was just getting started.
Returning to Fort Worth to attend college, Curtis squeezed in a wild session with singer Melvin Daniels for the Bihari brothers’ RPM label, receiving bandleading credit on the 78. King also waxed his own debut single, the jaunty honking instrumental “Tenor In The Sky,” for the obscure Gem logo, with Daniels returning to sing the opposite side.
The scholastic endeavors of Curtis Ousley came to an official close when exalted orchestra leader Lionel Hampton rolled through town one tenor saxist short during the summer of 1954. King hired on with Hamp’s organization and hit the road for a couple of months. When the tour finished in New York, King was back where he needed to be and settled in for the long haul. Union regulations were strict; a newcomer had to wait several months for his cabaret card, but King honed his craft during his downtime, studying with Joe Napoleon and Garvin Bushell.
As soon as he acquired his union card, King began making inroads into the competitive New York scene, making it into the studio for Lexy “Flap” Hanford’s After Hours logo to back Doc Pomus on his boisterous ’55 outing “Work, Little Carrie, Work.” Born Jerome Felder in Brooklyn, Pomus had overcome a crippling bout with polio to undertake a performing career as a white jump blues singer, but his main role in the history of rock and roll was as a composer. During the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, he and his Brill Building writing partner Mort Shuman came up with mammoth hits for the Drifters, Elvis Presley, Dion and the Belmonts, Jimmy Clanton, Fabian, and plenty more.
Word was traveling fast about the new young hornslinger with the huge sound. Jesse Stone, the veteran bandleader then working at Atlantic Records, put in a good word for King with Bob Rolontz, A&R man for RCA Victor’s Groove subsidiary, and Curtis started to rack up session invitations. Groove pressed up a 1956 instrumental two-sider of King’s own coupling “Movin’ On” and “Rockabye Baby” and employed him as a frequent sideman, placing Curtis behind Mickey & Sylvia, the Nitecaps, Varetta Dillard, Big Connie, and guitar prodigy Roy Gaines.
“King Curtis played with me on my records,” said Gaines. “He was from Texas. That’s what we had in common. I knew him as a studio musician, and he played on two of my records. He was from Texas, and I’m from Texas.”
Groove was by no means King’s only employer during his early years in New York. He wailed on the Englewood, New Jersey-based Avons’ debut outing “Our Love Will Never End” on Hull and the Tony Middleton-fronted Willows’ “Don’t Push, Don’t Pull, Don’t Shove” on Club. Close to the end of ‘56, Apollo Records issued a one-off instrumental pairing by King, “King’s Rock” b/w “Dynamite At Midnight.”
With all the doo-woppers haunting New York, there was plenty of demand for Curtis’ services the following year as well—he was on the Pearls’ delicious “Ice Cream Baby” for Onyx—but they weren’t his only session assignments. Curtis wailed on jump blues shouter/guitarist Rudy Greene’s scorching ‘57 Ember offering “Juicy Fruit” (Rudy’s discography stretched back a decade to a Nashville session for Bullet and included three 1953-54 singles for Chicago’s Chance label and two for Nashville’s Excello logo in ‘56). He even backed Nat King Cole on one of his more R&B-oriented hits that year and made two 45s of his own for DeLuxe.
Veteran trumpeter/arranger Sammy Lowe, a Birmingham, Alabama-born alumnus of Erskine Hawkins’ mighty orchestra, brought King in to blow on Lowe’s self-penned ‘57 release “Wail Man Wail” on the Candlelight label, even name-checking him via a vocal group prior to King’s solo. And speaking of big bands, top-rated deejay Alan Freed added Curtis to the front line of his orchestra that year, both for personal appearances (beginning with Freed’s all-star extravaganza at the Brooklyn Paramount that September) and on wax. Freed’s big band cut two dozen sides for Coral and Brunswick in 1957-58, including an LP credited to the King’s Henchmen; Curtis’ sax cohorts on both projects were Sam “The Man” Taylor and Lowell “Count” Hastings (King and Count also made an EP for RCA in October of ‘57).
The honchos at Atlantic Records kept King hopping in 1958. In addition to his work with the Coasters, Curtis backed Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, LaVern Baker, Bobby Darin, the Bobbettes, and Chuck Willis, taking over studio saxist chores from Gene “Daddy G” Barge in the latter case. “King listened to my style and developed a style of his that would be similar to mine,” claimed Barge. The two crossed paths in person during the early ‘60s, after Barge had made his own name playing with Gary (U.S.) Bonds.
“When I first met King Curtis, I was in New York. I was in Small’s Paradise. At the time, Wilt Chamberlain had taken over the ownership, and King Curtis was the house band. Well, I didn’t know King was in the place. I heard he might be in there. But when I walked in, nobody was playing, and I just went through and went to the bathroom. I looked upon the bandstand and I didn’t see nobody.
“So I went to the bathroom, and into the bathroom comes this guy. He’s in the stall next to me, and it looks like, from the pictures I’ve seen, it looks like it could be King Curtis. So I said, ‘Hey, man, what’s your name?’ He said, ‘King.’ I said, ‘Yeah, my name is Gene Barge.’ So he said, ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Ruth Brown told me that you were stealing my style!’ He looks at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re the--Ruth Brown says what? Man, go get your horn! I ain’t stealing your style, man!’ We got into it in the bathroom. It was a friendly thing, you know, really friendly. It was quite funny.”
In addition to his many Atlantic dates in 1958, King recorded with the Diamonds, Brook Benton, and even journeyed down to Clovis, New Mexico to wax a few sides with Buddy Holly and newcomer Waylon Jennings at Norman Petty’s studio. Bobby Robinson operated his Fury Records out of his record store just up 125th Street from the Apollo Theatre, and he invited King to blow a crazy ride on Curtis Carrington’s “I’m Gonna Catch You (Cutting Out On Me).”
Future soul luminary Don Covay was still doing business under the moniker of Pretty Boy in 1958, just as the Washington, D.C.-based singer’s debut single for Atlantic had been the year before, when he waxed the rocking “Switchen’ In the Kitchen” for the Big label with Lee Simms’ band and King on sax. Little Richard’s influence was obvious. “I saw Little Richard and that was the end. I came back and I put curls in my hair. They said, ‘What’s wrong with him? Has he went mad?’ I said, ‘No, man. I just saw what I want to do. Little Richard turned me around!’” said the late Covay. “Little Richard got on TV and said, ‘Look, I’m getting ready to retire. And you know who’s gonna take my place? Pretty Boy!’ He said that. Atlantic ran with the Pretty Boy name. I used to open the show for Richard and drive for him.”
Meanwhile, Atlantic had bigger plans for King than the anonymity of being a sideman; he was signed to its Atco sister label and waxed a pair of ‘58 singles and then his debut album as a leader in 1959, Have Tenor Sax, Will Blow. Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler also kept him busy as an accompanist in ‘59 via memorable dates with the Coasters, Drifters, and Clyde McPhatter. Archie Bleyer’s Cadence Records did them one better, granting him a left-field cameo on a cheaply produced promo film of the Chordettes’ “No Wheels” after he guested on their waxing of the cute number. Other artists you wouldn’t expect—Lonnie Donegan, Andy Williams, Neil Sedaka—benefitted from Curtis’ diamond-bright solos on record, as did rockers Bobby Hendricks, Roy Hamilton, Little Anthony & the Imperials, the Shirelles, and the Isley Brothers.
“Air-Raid” was officially credited to ex-Lionel Hampton drummer Curley Hamner when it snuck out on tiny Fling Records in 1960, but King made his presence felt with a rampaging solo early on. Hiram Johnson, the brother of famed bandleader Buddy Johnson, ran his own little Johnson Records and was another of King’s customers, hiring him to back the Arcades on their “Fine Little Girl” in ‘60 and the Shells’ “Better Forget Him” the next year. Even though tiny Sky-Rocket Records didn’t quite know how to spell his surname, adding an “s” to its end, they were hip enough to sub-bill him on the Strolls’ two-part “Madisonville” in 1960 (it sounds as though King duets with himself through the magic of overdubbing). ABC-Paramount, Seg-Way (the source of 1961’s churning “Hot Rod”), and Everest pressed up one-off Curtis 45s.
While Atlantic kept Curtis on a steady diet of R&B and rock and roll, he aspired to more. Prestige Records was happy to oblige the saxman’s jazz leanings, producing a pair of classy 1960 albums that found him backed by pianist Wynton Kelly and cornetist Nat Adderley and another that teamed him with fellow reedmen Jimmy “Night Train” Forrest and Oliver Nelson. Prestige also featured King as a sideman on LPs for its Bluesville subsidiary by Sunnyland Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, Al Smith, and Arbee Stidham. Shifting Curtis over to its Tru-Sound subsidiary, Prestige put together four more King LPs over the course of 1961-62 in a more customary R&B bag; Trouble in Mind spotlighted King’s previously unrecognized talent as a blues singer (he doubled on alto sax and guitar), while It’s Party Time with King Curtis teamed him anew with Sam the Man.
King made more than one New York session on Wilbert Harrison, the quirky multi-instrumentalist from Charlotte, North Carolina who set the R&B and pop hit parades ablaze in 1959 with his slashing remake of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Kansas City.” That was Wilbert’s first release on Bobby Robinson’s Fury imprint, and he found it difficult to find another hit—but not for lack of trying. Wilbert brought King in for a dynamic solo when he recut the ancient blues “C.C. Rider” Chuck Willis-style for Fury in 1960 (Gene Barge did the honors on Chuck’s ‘57 smash). A year later, Curtis supplied the slicing fills on Wilbert’s charming ditty “Off To Work Again”—a Harrison original--for Ben Fowers’ Neptune imprint.
The Twist was a full-fledged national craze during the early ‘60s and Curtis embraced the dance wholeheartedly with albums for RCA Victor (Arthur Murray’s Music For Doing the Twist!) and Doing the Dixie Twist for Tru-Sound. Those two LPs didn’t contain any hits, but “Soul Twist,” waxed for Bobby Robinson and his brother Danny’s Enjoy label, was a different story altogether. Bobby later claimed in various interviews that he gave King strict instructions not to blow at the very top of the song, cut in the latter stages of 1961, but aural evidence refutes that (perhaps he was thinking of its flip side, “Twisting Time,” where King makes himself scarce for the first 24 bars). He was out front all the way on “Soul Twist,” though ex-Bill Doggett guitarist Billy Butler supplied twangy licks that wound around Curtis’ down-in-the-alley wails like a vine. Along with Butler, King’s Noble Knights consisted of pianist George Stubbs, organist Ernie Hayes, bassist Jimmy Lewis, and drummer Ray Lucas.
Butler had distinguished himself time and again with organist Doggett’s combo, most memorably on part one of Doggett’s classic 1956 R&B chart-topper “Honky Tonk” for King Records. “Billy Butler was from Philadelphia, and also my drummer (Shep Shepherd) was from Philadelphia,” explained the late Doggett. “And I had a saxophonist out of New York, Percy France. So we played Philadelphia quite a bit. And that’s how we got together in Philadelphia.”
Out in February of ’62, “Soul Twist” blasted up to the top of the R&B charts during the spring of ‘62 and crashed the pop Top 20, inaugurating Enjoy in style. Its major sales meant that Bobby brought King back to Bell Sound in midtown Manhattan in early 1962 to make a full-length LP (Paul Griffin may have been brought in as a Noble Knights keyboardist this time). There was a nice variety to the proceedings; Curtis rendered Cannonball Adderley’s “Sack O’Woe” eminently Twistable, while “Camp Meetin’” incorporated some lonesome harmonica over a tough groove. There’s a bit of a churchy feel to “Big Dipper,” while pianist/vocalist Bobby Peterson’s hard-driving “Irresistible You” made an exceptionally solid cover choice even without its devotional lyrics.
There were two treatments of Ray Charles’ ‘59 blockbuster “What’d I Say,” and surprisingly, neither of them featured King’s horn. He did a fine job singing on one of them; the other spotlighted a gutsy guitarist that sounds like veteran Texas bluesman Frankie Lee Sims (he claimed participation on “Soul Twist” in an interview but could have been confused about which of King’s tracks he played on). New Orleans chanteuse Barbara George’s “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More),” an R&B chart-topper in early ’62, was expertly transformed into a tasty sax instrumental, and “Midnight Blue,” the lone downbeat entry on the album, brings goose bumps in its elegance, Butler matching King (on alto this time) on their pristine solos.
Robinson chose another pair of Curtis originals, the infectious “Wobble Twist” and “Twisting With The King” (a raucous cousin to “Soul Twist”), as King’s Enjoy followup single, but lightning didn’t strike twice. King likely didn’t mind too much; by the time the 45 hit the streets in the summer of ’62, Curtis had already signed to the major Capitol label and put out his first single, “Beach Party,” which made a mild pop chart impression. Like most of his other label employers, Robinson also enticed King to engage in a little session work from time to time, including cooking up brief solos on both sides of pubescent singer Tyron Rowe’s only Fury single in ‘62 pairing “I’m A Go’fer (I’m A Go’Fer)” and “Mama Don’t Allow.”
The funky “Hot Potato” was the last Enjoy single boasting King’s participation when it came out in the spring of ’63, but the precise nature of his involvement remains a tad unclear unless he played guitar on it—there’s no sign of his sax anywhere on the two-parter, issued under the moniker of the Rinkydinks. The instrumental certainly had staying power—it later served as the theme song on Don Cornelius’ weekly TV program Soul Train for several years and was reissued in 1972 on the Rampage logo as “Soultrain” under the name of the Ramrods.
“The Monkey Shout,” a virtual clone of “Soul Twist,” came out on Danny Robinson’s Vest logo in early ‘64 under the name of pianist Bobby Davis & the Rhythm Rockers, although it sounds like Curtis wailing (he shared authorship with promo man Wally Roker, an ex-member of the Heartbeats).
Capitol pressed up three fine albums on Curtis, but he only scored one real hit for the firm in 1964: the spectacular “Soul Serenade,” on which King brought out his saxello, a relative to the soprano saxophone, to achieve a unique sound on the lovely theme (Maxine Brown and Aretha Franklin would later turn in delightful vocal renditions).
Atco regained Curtis in 1965 (the same year he opened for the Beatles at New York’s Shea Stadium), and his career catapulted to a whole new level. He began producing for the firm, his early gems including Texas guitarist Ray Sharpe’s two-part ‘66 Atco single “Help Me (Get The Feeling).” “When it was released, it was so R&B-flavored because of him, because of what King did and the way he did it,” said Sharpe. “He was just very much influenced by guitars, guitar music, and guitar players who could really play.
“You haven’t heard a saxophone player play or blow, man, until you’ve heard this guy. That=s for sure!”
Near decade’s close, King produced two albums by another Texas-bred blues guitar great, Freddie King, for Atlantic’s Cotillion imprint. But it was his golden saxophone that really continued to set him apart. Curtis provided the immortal solo on Aretha Franklin’s ‘67 mega-smash “Respect” as well as turning in equally sterling work behind Wilson Pickett. And he was high on the R&B charts under his own name once again, cutting the savory funkfest “Memphis Soul Stew” in 1967 at Chips Moman’s American Studio.
“Now that was really a good record,” said the late Reggie Young, Moman’s brilliant house guitarist. “Next to the studio, there was a restaurant, the Ranch House. We were recording King, and we all went over there, took a break and went over there to eat lunch. And we were sitting around the table, and King picked up a menu. And as a joke, he was just reading.
“He said, ‘Hmmm---today’s special is Memphis Soul Stew!’ He said, ‘We make so much of this stuff, we’re gonna tell you what we put in it. We got fatback drums, a pound-and-a-half of organ.’ He was just making it up. When he got to me, then we sort of looked at each other. All of us did. We just got up, we didn’t even order lunch. We just got up and went in the studio and cut ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ that quick!
“He’s the best one I’ve ever worked with. He was really, really good. He’s from Texas. He knew all those—he could play sax in a lot of hillbilly chords, like in the key of E and the key of A, instead of all the hard flat chords and stuff. So he knew all that. Even then, he said, ‘What key do you want to do this in?’ We said, ‘Well, it’s your record!’ And he said, ‘What’s easy for y’all to play in?’ So whatever we came up with, I don’t know--whatever key that’s in, it was our idea. But he played in all keys.”
Before 1967 was through, Curtis had racked up another Top Ten R&B seller with his instrumental rendering of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe.” A treatment of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made To Love Her” charted for King in ’68; his own “Instant Groove” followed suit the next year (he also won a ’69 Grammy for a rendition of Joe South’s “Games People Play”), and his versions of the Temptations’ “Get Ready” (cut in Muscle Shoals) and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” made chart noise in 1970 and ’71 respectively. A historic booking as Aretha’s bandleader at Fillmore West in early 1971 resulted in classic LPs for both of them. That June, Curtis traveled to the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform with veteran New Orleans blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree (Atlantic released their collaborative set as an album).
Tragically, King wouldn’t live to see its release. An argument with a drug addict on the steps of his New York apartment building escalated into senseless violence on August 13, 1971, the junkie fatally stabbing the 37-year-old Curtis. If there’s any consolation, King recorded more extensively than seemingly humanly possible.
When it comes to R&B saxists, he was the king of ‘em all!
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Alan Freed official website: http://www.alanfreed.com/wp/archives/archives-rocknroll-1951-1959/brooklyn-paramount/
45cat website: http://www.45cat.com/artist/king-curtis
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1988)
King Curtis—A Discography, by Roy Simonds (Edgware, 1984)
Liner notes, Blow Man, Blow!, by Peter Grendysa (Bear Family BCD 15670, 1992)
Red Saunders Research Foundation website: http://campber.people.clemson.edu/chance.html
Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Curtis