Style 1
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
************************************
Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
****************************************************
Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
Style 2
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
************************************
Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
****************************************************
Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
Style 3
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
************************************
Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
****************************************************
Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
Style 4
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
************************************
Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
****************************************************
Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
Style 5
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
************************************
Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
****************************************************
Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
Style 6
On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”
April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”
Here’s a quick excerpt:
April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?
Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.
“A gem of a book”
Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”
You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!
And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.
For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.
What’s the deal with the arts, and specifically music? A person gets interested in the music others are making, learns chords and scales, seeks out training, and with practice and performance, may reach a point where their abilities are recognized as having value, contributing to a community of music makers and music lovers. A few musicians come up with a personal way of playing that sounds different from what’s been played before … Whether that helps or hinders the artist is hard to tell in advance, but with perseverance, some succeed beyond expectations.
During his life, guitarist Al Allen (1927–2020) demonstrated unbridled curiosity combined with grit — although the man often played it cool, in person — and indeed, developed a unique style of touch and tone that his contemporaries regarded with open and friendly admiration. According to Al, it all came together for him when he began playing his “Black Beauty” 1955 Les Paul custom Gibson guitar.
According to Keith Cady’s research, Al’s work in Detroit included playing in clubs, radio, TV, and Detroit-based recording studios with the likes of Chief Redbird, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Boots Gilbert and Chuck Hatfield, Bobby Sykes, Tommy Cantrell, the Davis Sisters (whose hair was often done before performances by Al’s wife Kathy at her salon), May Hawks, Casey Clark (briefly), Danny Richards, Lonnie Barron … You get the idea how popular he was!
Perhaps the earliest recorded example of Al’s picking with his Black Beauty available on a commercial record was Pete DeBree and his Wanderers’ “Hey, Mr. Presley” sung by Jimmy Franklin on Fortune (200). In this rocker, you hear Al’s blend of percussive swing and his guitar’s tremolo. He also recorded during the mid-1950s for Fox Records with the Lucky Lee band, and also with vocal groups the Larados (“Bad, Bad Guitar Man”), and the Romeos (“Fine, Fine Baby”).
Al combined his picking technique, influenced by Les Paul, Tony Mottola, Chet Atkins, as well as Detroit jazz guitarist Bob Mitchell, with the dials on his guitar and amp, as well as a vibrato bar he and Detroit machinist Jack Matthew (1916–1999) created, and eventually patented in 1958. Gibson Guitars ended up licensing and manufacturing the accessory for their guitars.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation Keith Cady and I had with Al in 2005:
Craig Maki: I wanted to ask you about the [guitar] vibrato [arm]. Were you always a tinkerer? How did you come up with that?
Al Allen: Probably the only guys I seen back then – in the late ’40s and early ’50s – that had one was Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Now, Chet Atkins had one that worked like the one that we made … But what was different about it [Al and Jack’s invention] was, if you pulled the arm up, the strings went up. And you had to push the arm down to make the strings go down. I’m trying to get this right in my head now … Well anyway, it was the opposite of how I thought a vibrato should work. Rickenbacker had a small vibrato – It was either for a banjo, or a four-string guitar, because … you hook up only four strings. Me and Jack started on that one, and we modified that one. And that’s the one I have on my guitar, yet.
CM: That’s the prototype?
Keith Cady: You took it off your [Les Paul] gold top and put it on the black?
AA: After we modified it. I’ve got a picture of it on the gold guitar – a little bitty thing with a handle up there. … I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack L. Matthew? He was my partner on the vibrato. I met him when I first came to town. He was absolutely the best repairman there was (on instruments), in the city of Detroit.
KC: Did you meet him at a show, or did you take something to him for a repair?
AA: I probably took something for him to work on. We got to be very good friends. We had parties and would go out to dinner almost every week. … He was a genius at that stuff. He was in charge of four plants that his brother owned. Honing stuff. … So help me, I’ll swear to you: He could have been a Leo Fender on guitar stuff. He made some guitars and sold them in Detroit. He put pedals on Don Tannison’s steel [guitar], and a whole lot more.
CM: What led you guys to get a patent and go into business [together]?
AA: He did most of the work, and I did most of the paying for the patent papers and everything. … I would try it out, and if there was something I thought was wrong, he’d be able to fix it.
CM: So you were the guy who tested it, and he would make adjustments to it.
AA: More or less, yeah. After we licensed that vibrato to Gibson, we came up with one even better than that one. Much, much better! But there was a span of about five or six years, I think … and we took that one up to Gibson. But they didn’t want to change, because they spent a lot of money on building the one they had going. … Well, they sold them from ’59 until about ’63.
In 1958 Al began a collaboration with local singer and songwriter Jack Scott, for Carlton Records. Al’s guitar featured prominently on the recordings, and Jack’s first single, “Leroy” backed with “My True Love” became a hit gold record. Al and Jack both had unique approaches to making music, and when one heard a Jack Scott record come on the radio, the vocal and guitar parts made it identifiable almost immediately. Between 1958 and 1960, Jack had fifteen tunes in the Billboard Hot 100, including four in the Top Ten, and a total of nine in the Top 40 charts. Al played his Black Beauty on all of these sessions.
In 1959, Al cut an instrumental single for Carlton (511) featuring his compositions “Egghead” backed with “I’m Beat.” In the age when instrumental guitar pop dominated teen-ager playlists (think Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and so on), Al’s “proto-surf” music received great reviews and earned him and his band “The Sounds” radio and TV appearances around Detroit.
After he left Jack’s band in favor of settling back into his domestic life, Al continued playing this guitar with Detroit-based country acts. He remained much in demand, and had the luxury of choosing the gigs he played … all the way into the early 2000s.
Al Allen’s legendary 1955 Les Paul custom with his patented vibrato is currently listed at Lansing’s famous Elderly Instruments. Check it out here.
For a more complete story about Al Allen’s music career, look up the chapter about him in “Detroit Country Music – Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies.”
The following piece is presented at the request of Mr. Faulkner’s family. Our condolences to all Mr. Faulkner’s relatives and friends.
Lee Nolan Faulkner, 89, of Fancy Farm, KY (formerly of the Detroit area) passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He was born June 18, 1932 in Wolfe County, KY to John and Grace (Napier) Faulkner. Lee loved to tell jokes, watch U-K Wildcats Basketball, and talk with his friends. He was a proud Mason, and had a lifelong passion for playing the mandolin, and bluegrass music.
Lee was internationally respected in the bluegrass music world for his artistry on the mandolin, and for his songwriting ability. He initially played with groups such as the Powell County Boys, and the Kentucky Troubadours in his home state, before moving to Brighton, Michigan, in the 1950s. There, he played and recorded with Red Ellis, who was a radio host on WHRV Ann Arbor, for the Pathway and Starday record labels. He served as a mentor to many musically-inclined University of Michigan students who played in his band, the Big Sandy Boys, including Doug Green (“Riders in the Sky”), and Andy Stein (“Commander Cody”). In the early 1970s, Lee began to play with Kentucky transplants Earl, James, and Charlie Miller – the Miller Brothers – in the Detroit area, and he maintained an especially close personal and musical friendship with James Miller throughout the rest of their lives. The band recorded for Jessup Records of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead Records of Brighton.
Lee’s mandolin style, strongly influenced by Bill Monroe and the blues, was highlighted on the 1976 album “The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner,” which consisted almost entirely of original songs and arrangements. He was in great demand locally for studio recording, and he appeared on albums by Lee Allen, Wade Mainer, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore, John Hunley, and others. He continued to play locally throughout the 1980s and 1990s with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base of Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and he traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders, Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys, and James Miller. His musical career was featured in an article published in the September 2021 edition of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine.
Lee was preceded in death by five children: Shawn, Timmy, and Jimmy Faulkner, Penny Faulkner Rose, and Gail (Carl) Faulkner Rogers. He is survived by three children: Wanda Faulkner Underwood, Brent (Robin) Faulkner, and Tony (Laura) Faulkner; 9 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren.
Per Lee’s wishes, no services were held.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to “KCTCS Foundation,” at 300 North Main Street, Versailles, KY 40383, directed to the “Hazard Community and Technical College – Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music” in Lee’s honor.
It was supposed to be a blog post. It grew into a book.
It’s been nine years since Detroit Country Music was published. Its first few chapters make it clear that country music in Detroit goes back almost a hundred years, arriving in 1939 with the release of a 78 rpm record titled “Hamtramck Mama” via the Detroit-based Universal label.
Since 2013, I’ve gathered more stories about the men and women involved with the label, as well as the Hot Wax, and Mellow labels. Combined, they represent an impressive body of work for the time (World War II) and the place (Detroit, Michigan). I churned what began as a series of blog posts (unpublished) into a new 130-page pocketbook.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit’s east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit’s first home-grown record company Here’s the untold story of an unlikely pair of tattooed hustlers: an ex-con, and a shell-shocked World War I vet, plus: juke boxes, the mafia, Hamtramck mamas, Wayne County grifters, the first all-female western swing act on records, the first rockabilly trio — all playing roles in sensational music originally pressed on 78 rpm discs that document the dawn of Detroit’s recording industry.
The contents include:
- stories,
- quotes from interviews,
- illustrations,
- photos,
- record label scans, and
- discographies.
Purchase online at lulu.com, The Book Beat, and Barnes & Noble.
After a lifetime of playing music in Detroit, Johnny Clem’s recollections form a winding trail through Detroit nightclubs, bars and lounges whose past existence is now only evidenced by photos and stories, such as the time he worked with bandleader Danny Richards at a barn dance staged in the legendary Graystone Ballroom during the 1950s, or when he recorded for Joe Von Battle in the back of Joe’s Record Shop on Hastings Street.
From Alabama to Detroit
Tiny Elkmont, Alabama, near the southern border of Tennessee, sits almost the same distance from Nashville to the north, and Birmingham to the south. The Delmore Brothers, renowned for making hillbilly blues and boogie woogie popular during the 1930s, were born there, as was Johnny Clem on September 7, 1929, the year that the Delmores started their act. A few years later, during the Great Depression, Clem’s father took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and moved the family to east Tennessee.
Clem’s friendly personality and ability to learn multiple musical instruments led him to sit in with many groups at a moment’s notice. In 1946, Clem picked electric guitar for the Golden West Cowgirls (Gladys and Ann) during early morning radio broadcasts at WROL Knoxville. He joined the U.S. Navy the following year, and after completing two years of service, moved to Detroit to work in Chrysler’s facilities on the east side of town. (Clem remained active in the navy for another six years.)
While living in a dense area of the city populated by thousands of people who had arrived from the South for work, Clem found loads of opportunities to play music in local bars. Jeff Durham, a guitarist, singer, and comedian, led a band at a nightclub on Jefferson Avenue and St. Jean, where Clem played his first Detroit gig, strumming a Hawaiian steel guitar in the group. “Jeff would do comedy, and put makeup on his face,” remembered Clem. “Then he shined a black light on himself, to make his face glow.” [1] Durham also had a reputation for finger style (or Travis) picking, as he had grown up in Muhlenburg, Kentucky, and had been acquainted with guitarists Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis. (Watch for an upcoming story about Jeff Durham and his brother Bob.)
An eager participant in country-western jamborees held at bars such as Ted’s Ten-Hi [you can see him in the group photo at the front of the chapter on Eddie Jackson in the “Detroit Country Music” book], Clem also taught himself how to play piano. “I never learned to read music, but I still got pretty good,” he said. “[Piano] became my main instrument for many years.”
According to Clem, his early gigs in Detroit included:
ca. 1950 — Al Dorman’s Bar, with Pioneer Playboys: Johnny, Chuck, Bill, and George Upton (14800 Mack, near Alter)
1950 — Caravan Gardens, with Eddie Jackson (Woodrow Wilson and Davison)
1951 — Torch Bar, with trio (East Jefferson Avenue, across from Hudson Motor Car facilities)
1951 — [Unknown club], with Waldo Walker (East Jefferson Avenue and Kitchener)
1952-53 — Torch Bar, with Swannee Caldwell (bass) and Red Peterson (guitar) [2]
A tattle on Von Battle
In 1953, Clem worked briefly with African American record shop owner Joe Von Battle. In the back of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings, Von Battle built a recording studio. Clem said he often visited a restaurant across the street from the shop, and he got to know Von Battle by running into him there. “After our gigs, after the clubs closed, the boys and I’d go to the Checker Bar-B-Q near Hastings Street,” said Clem. “I don’t remember how we met, but [Von Battle] wanted me to cut a country version of a song called, ‘Another Soldier Gone.’ Eventually, we visited the studio he had in the back of his shop and cut it. I sang and played piano on it. I don’t think it was released, but Joe gave me a dub of it on a record.”
From around 1948, Von Battle had been recording local blues, jazz, and gospel performers. He had just cut “Another Soldier Gone” by a vocal group called the Violinaires, issued on the Drummond label of Detroit, and he wanted to explore the idea of making a “crossover” record of it with Clem. At the time, record companies often directed their pop and country-western artists to remake popular rhythm and blues songs, and vice versa. While the artists and instrumental style of these records differed, the songs themselves often appeared on multiple charts.
Clem’s version of “Another Soldier Gone” wasn’t released commercially. But the memory of this small episode in Clem’s career provides us with one of the earliest accounts of black and white musicians collaborating in Detroit.
Astronaut of Detroit rock
When it came to music, Clem approached it with an open heart and mind, and his reputation kept him working. More bookings included the following with local bandleaders:
mid-1950s — Yale Bar with Luke Kelley (Warren at the John C. Lodge Freeway)
1955 — Dixie Belle, with Jack Luker (Vernor and McKinstry)
1956 — 3-JJJs, with Les York (Vernor and Clark)
Not surprisingly, Clem was an early adopter of rock’n’roll, which was popular in the city from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. One of his first rocking gigs was at the Shamrock Bar on Third Street and Selden, a rough area in 1957-59, but each musician (Sonny Croft – drums, vocals; Leon Chessire – lead guitar) earned $20 a night, which amounted to big bucks in those days.
After Casey Clark ceased production of the Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance in the union hall at 12101 Mack Avenue in 1957, Clem, vocalist Randy Sea and six other musicians worked dances there on weekends.
Clem’s next move was to play piano with vocalist Carl Parker. They had a steady gig at the Scenic Inn (Fort and Miami) with a man named Ted on saxophone around 1960, reportedly earning $300 per week. Then he joined Randy Sea, with Norm Sands on drums, and Leon Chessire on guitar at the Rose Bar (Vernor and Morell). Clem’s own band, Johnny and the Astronauts, worked Joe’s Bar at Jefferson and Chene, from around 1960-64, and for a while included guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Johnson, who later worked in Nashville with the Louvin Brothers, Leroy VanDyke, Jimmy Dickens and others, and spent four years on the “Grand Ole Opry” (Johnson died in 2014).
Clem also worked at Joe’s Bar with guitarist Bill Merritt, who played in town for many years. From there, Clem gigged at Ted’s 10-Hi on Jefferson and Fairview with Deano DelRay, and then to the O’Mack Bar (Mack and St. Jean) with Waldo Walker and Whitey Franklin. From about 1964-68, Clem worked the 509 Club downtown with Franklin and his brother Jimmy.
With Clem on piano, Carl Parker cut some recordings for which they didn’t find a commercial outlet. The recording presented with this story was made during a gig by guitarist Al Allen and the Sounds at Jerry’s Show Bar in 1960, and features Parker, with Clem on piano, sitting in with the band.
Listen to: Carl Parker with Johnny Clem (piano) and Al Allen (guitar)
Some country recordings were put on tape with Jay Preston for the Clix label, based in Troy, Michigan, which seem to be lost, as well as a session at Fortune Records in Detroit. Although Johnny Clem didn’t release records of his own, he made a contribution to the Detroit scene, like many others who shared space on local bandstands (for another example, see Happy Moore’s story). Through the decades, Clem worked with vocalist Danny Richards at the Red Robin on Jefferson Avenue and at the Hazel Park Eagles with Richards and guitarist Chuck Oakes. In 1978 Clem had a steady gig at Rose Lounge on West Vernor with bandleader Jimmy Kelley (Luke Kelley’s son). He played at the Clinton Gables Hotel on the Clinton River near downtown Mount Clemens, with Tony Gee and the Continentals during the 1970s, as well as Castaways near 23 Mile and VanDyke with Jay Preston and guitarist Dave Morgan.
During the 1990s, Clem moved just north of Palm Beach, Florida, and entertained crowds of retirees “as much as I could stand it,” he said with a chuckle. As of this writing, Clem is back in Michigan to be near family, and retired from entertaining.
Update: Johnny Clem passed away June 3, 2018.
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Notes
- John Clem interviewed by Craig Maki in January 2016.
- Many nightclub owners booked extended contracts with bands for weeks of steady entertainment.
In 1939 and 1940, Detroit residents witnessed a spectacular rise in popularity of a hillbilly novelty record. Les York reportedly wrote his song “Hamtramck Mama,” based on an old blues, while working the assembly line in a local automobile plant. He and his older brother George (born in 1910) performed as the York Brothers in local cafes and taverns that booked entertainment for crowds of fellow Appalachians who had come north looking for jobs. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on August 23, 1917, Leslie York took up lead guitar, Hawaiian lap steel, and mandolin, and teamed up with George at WPAY radio in Portsmouth, Ohio, before they both headed to the Motor City.
The success of “Hamtramck Mama” also shook up the local music and entertainment industry. Never mind that it was country-western, a genre that typically achieved marginal success compared to big band jazz at the time — the 78 rpm disks sold like hotcakes at a church breakfast, eventually reaching juke boxes across the Midwest and Deep South. It represented the first time a piece of music written, recorded and manufactured in Detroit by an independent label, by people living in Detroit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Listen to: York Brothers – Hamtramck Mama
Les and George quit their automotive jobs and played nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. They mixed comedy routines in their programs, with Les sometimes playing a slapstick routine as a backwards country hick he named Charles Muggleduck. The record’s notoriety drove local politicians to denounce it and threaten legal action, and the Detroit Free Press didn’t hesitate to reproduce samples of the song’s “hot” lyrics in its pages. [1]
After completing a short-lived deal with major label Decca, the York Brothers signed to one of the first — if not the first — independently-owned record companies in Detroit: Mellow Records. Within a couple of years, Les wrote and recorded dozens of songs that covered popular country-western styles, such as cowboy songs, heart songs, and blues. The addition of a bassist who could slap the strings provided many of the York Brothers’ early 1940s sides with a raucous rockabilly sound that other musicians capitalized on during the rock’n’roll craze of the mid-1950s.
Les and George left Detroit to join the U.S. Navy in 1944. After the end of World War II, they joined WSM radio’s “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee, and signed contracts with the Bullet and later, King, record companies. In 1949, their fans in Detroit welcomed them back fulltime. Besides records, George and Les continued making music on stage, radio, and television in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana until 1953, when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.
For several more years, through the mid-1960s, Les returned to Detroit each summer to entertain with local musicians Danny Richards and his Gold Star Cowboys. “Hamtramck Mama” remained a longtime favorite of Detroit audiences. In the end, Les, a prolific writer and imaginative musician, recorded several dozen original songs during his career — with and without George, who died in 1974. Les York passed away in 1984.
Click here to view a Detroit discography of the York Brothers’ earliest records. For a more detailed overview of Les and George York’s career, see the book “Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies” by Craig Maki with Keith Cady.
Listen to: York Brothers (feat. Les York) – River of Tears (live)
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Notes
- “‘Hamtramck Mama’ Getting the Deaf Ear in Hamtramck” Detroit Free Press (Saturday, April 10, 1940. Vol. 109, No. 352) 1.
