Sydney Nathan never intended to become a champion of race relations in Cincinnati. He only wanted to hire the best employees for positions in his new company, King Records, when it began operating in the mid-1940s. He was desperate to create a steady job for himself and for others crazy enough to follow him down an employment road lined with shellac: these included poor Appalachians and blacks and other minorities for whom good jobs were hard to find. To them, Nathan was the Chief, the guy who signed the paychecks and made their dreams real. On the creative side, he also turned minority performers into stars in a time when white big-band musicians dominated the record business. He saw a niche and he filled it with the most suited, and in a way the most unlikely, people.
First, Nathan hired black trumpeter Henry Glover as one of King’s top producers and chief of the firm’s Artists and Repertoire (A&R) department. Nathan also hired blacks and other minorities to work in his factory and offices.
By the late 1940s, his King Records, Inc. had become a significant force in the U.S. record industry, in both sales and enlightenment. The man who helped forge the sound of a modern country music also discovered many early giants of rhythm and blues, including James Brown and Hank Ballard. Yet Nathan and his gritty old factory remained unfamiliar to most Cincinnatians; the place was a secret to all but the city’s hipsters and true music lovers.
Cincinnati was Nathan’s hometown and he loved it, despite its general lack of understanding of his musical mission. He was born there on April 27, 1904, of middle-class parents, and later in life he would refer to himself as a Dutchman, a Cincinnati German. He fit into local society by appearing, at least to acquaintances, to be a family man who enjoyed watching local television stars and lived in an early city suburb named Bond Hill. When he came home from work, he’d tinker on the piano and sometimes swim in the family pool. Personally, he preferred business-friendly Republican James Rhodes for governor in the 1960s and middle-of-the-road pop music. But he knew how to sell so-called hillbilly and race records like commodities.
Sydney Nathan, circa 1965. (Authors’ collection)
What outsiders did not see was the other Sydney Nathan, the one with unending drive and a keen business sense. He was a big turning wheel that never shut down. He couldn’t help himself, for he was born with a give-it-to-me-straight attitude that sometimes offended his performers and business associates. “Everybody had a Syd story,” recalled Rusty York, a King rockabilly singer who hurriedly covered “Peggy Sue” when Nathan decided to jump into rock and roll in 1957. “But he was always nice to me.”
Legendary recording engineer E. T. “Bucky” Herzog, whose downtown studio attracted Nathan in the late 1940s, remembered Syd as a gruff autocrat who cursed and pressured musicians when they fouled up a song. “Finally, I had to ask him to leave and not return,” Herzog once said. “So he went out and built his own studio.” A close associate, the promotion man Jim Wilson, recalled Syd’s hidden sensitivity: Nathan once ordered him to stop the car so he could rescue a turtle they saw crawling across a country road. Then there’s the Reverend Bobby Grove, who began as a struggling King country singer. Being poor in the ’50s, he didn’t have enough money to press an experimental gospel album. So the accounting department rejected his plea for credit. Then Nathan intervened and told his managers to press the record anyway. Syd told Grove he believed in his talent and his decision to move toward religious songs. That album launched a new career in Grove’s ministry, which helped countless homeless people. Another King artist, the famous Grandpa Jones, was Nathan’s earliest. Jones claimed that Syd was so cheap then, in 1944, that he paid him a royalty of only five-eighths of a cent a record side—“about a cent and a half a record,” Jones explained years ago, still pained by the experience. “I sold so many records that my check for three months was over one thousand dollars. So Syd made all the money, and I didn’t. But he didn’t cheat me out of the publicity I got.”
Today, the world is interested in Syd Nathan’s dream. Music lovers everywhere discuss records he cut in his own King Recording Studio in Cincinnati’s ragged Evanston neighborhood. They may speak different languages, but they know good American roots music. Syd turned out hundreds of hits, big and small. In the 1990s, an East Coast book publisher devoted two large hardbound books to the entire King discography. Nathan’s world—an old office, factory, and studio at 1540 Brewster Avenue—is not just rooms of brick and metal, but a historic place, designated as such by a marker from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which has enshrined Nathan for his pioneering work. He is also a member of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame.
Yet in his day, the local music people who mattered loved the symphony and the opera. They could not see the importance of an upstart label owned by a brash, loud, and boisterous Jewish businessman who recorded mainly Appalachians and black people singing and playing all types of roots music—bluegrass, country, polka, jazz, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, the blues, and anything else Nathan could find. Consequently, what was going on inside the brick factory received little attention, even when the national charts rang with hit after hit from his studio. Even less attention was paid to the young men and women whose dreams Nathan captured on old ribbon microphones and issued on shellac 78-rpm records with attractive maroon and blue paper labels.
In time, however, the whole wonder vanished as though it had been just a dream. King, the dream machine, is gone too from the Queen City. Today, 1540 Brewster is the home of several small businesses, and less recently it was a dairy company warehouse. The building is painted an ugly brown and looks old—very old. No music is made there anymore except for the constant humming of tires on Interstate 71 nearby, or the clanging of metal crates on the concrete floor of the plant.
The King is dead in the Queen City, but its spirit lives on in its songs.
By 1971, when King Records moved to Nashville to merge with Starday Records, Cincinnati had already been eclipsed by the Music City as an important regional music center, and Sydney Nathan was dead. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cincinnati turned out more hit records than Nashville and country musicians flocked to the Ohio River city to perform and record, mostly because of King and Syd Nathan. Nathan was not exactly born to lead a record company, but once he got the chance, he led indeed.
At an early age, Nathan wanted to perform. For a time he played drums in a dance band, but poor eyesight—cataracts would later rob him of much of his vision—and asthma forced him to leave school in the ninth grade and to surrender his dream. He tried all kinds of jobs—he worked in a pawn shop, started a shooting gallery, promoted wrestling matches, and ran amusement-park concessions. None of them led to anything permanent. He ended up working in a radio store, where he met people who worked in the record business.
They knew him as a fierce bargainer. “He’d go into a pawn shop and pretend interest in some item,” dance-band leader Forest Bradford once recalled to a reporter. “He had no intention of buying it. He just wanted to pit his skill against that of the pawnbroker to see how good a price he could get.” Nathan would need this skill in King’s early, lean years.
He still dreamed of some sort of career in music. Eventually he decided that if he couldn’t play music, he’d sell it in his own record store. By the late 1930s, he had Syd’s Record Shop on West 5th Street. Business was good. The city was finally poking its head out of the Great Depression.
Then one night Nathan stopped at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in northern Kentucky for a little entertainment, and the course of his life—and the nation’s record industry—was changed. On the dance floor he encountered a jukebox outlet owner who owed him six dollars for some new records. Nathan told a reporter in 1949,
Six bucks meant more to me in 1938 than $1,600 now. I saw the fellow with a gorgeous blonde. I figured he would be in the next day with my six bucks. He didn’t show. For three weeks in a row I saw him at Beverly with the same babe. Finally on the dance floor I grabbed his shoulder and told him, “If you can afford Beverly, you can afford to pay me.” He turned red, blue, and green. He said he didn’t have it. The next day he came into the shop and offered me 300 hillbilly, western, and “race” records from his jukeboxes at two cents a platter. He figured I could sell each of them for ten cents and get back my six bucks. I took him up [on it]. The first afternoon I made $18.
Selling records one at a time, however, did not satisfy Nathan. He sold the shop to his sister and brother-in-law and moved to Miami, to be near his brother, a physician, and to start a photo-finishing business. But a freak cold snap hit the Sunshine State in the winter of 1939, forcing Nathan to return to familiar ground in Cincinnati. He had $900 in his pocket when he arrived. A few weeks later, he woke up in the Hotel Gibson with only $3 left. “I decided it was time to go back into the [record] business,” he recalled, “or go to work for somebody. I decided for business.”
He contacted his former suppliers in the jukebox business and arranged to buy their used records. Then he opened a store at 1351 Central Avenue and stocked it with jukebox cast-offs. He had anticipated the worst—World War II. When the federal government imposed restrictions on record-pressing a few years later to save shellac and other raw materials, Nathan still had plenty of used records to sell. He stayed in business.
He still wanted to write songs and make records, however, even if they were for other artists. Friends warned that he might lose everything, but he knew what he wanted. His view was simple—the big record companies were recording only a few stars and promising singers in race, hillbilly, and western music, as the trade magazines called them. A niche could be filled, Nathan believed, if someone aggressively marketed the “music of the little people”—urban Appalachians and African Americans.
In 1943, at the height of the war, he got several friends and family members to invest and launched King Records, then he signed Grandpa Jones and some other hillbilly singers who performed on WLW Radio. In November 1944 he moved his new company into rented quarters on Brewster, where the firm remained until it was sold in 1971. Before long, he had his own recording studio and hard-to-find record-pressing equipment. Eventually, he acquired everything he needed to produce, distribute, and sell his own records. It was an unusual arrangement; as he liked to brag, a singer could walk into King in the morning and leave that night with a new record in his or her hands.
In time, Nathan built a growing business with his main label and subsidiary ones—King, Queen, Federal, DeLuxe. “Syd always had regal ideas,” said his sister, Dorothy Halper, one of the company’s original investors.
By 1945, King was turning out two hundred shellac 78-rpm discs a day. Nathan told friends he and the partners earned only $12.50 a week that first year, and $25 a week the next year. But King’s sales increased as Nathan astutely signed long-term contracts with hillbilly stars and potential ones: Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Wayne Raney, Moon Mullican, Hank Penny, the Stanley Brothers, and many more.
Nathan put the company’s slogan, “The King of Them All,” above the crown logo on the early maroon labels. After all, he was the king of his personal musical kingdom, and his word was the law. He deserved to call it King. He became the consummate record-maker. When the little 45-rpm vinyl disc was introduced in 1948, Nathan was one of the first to see its potential and was one of the first to recycle surplus vinyl. By 1949, King was selling 6 million records a year, including the number-one Billboard hit “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” by Wayne Raney. Nathan was a success. He joked, “The ‘y’ in Sydney is because my parents knew I was going to make money.” His largest profits, though, came not from King Records but his music publishing companies, including Lois, Arnel, Blue Ridge, Blue Ribbon, and others. He owned the rights to such hits as “The Twist,” which Hank Ballard originally recorded in Cincinnati, and “Fever,” done by Little Willie John. Through the years, Nathan earned a lot of money on the cover versions. Using the pen name Lois Mann, he collaborated on numerous hit songs, including the hillbilly classics “As Advertised” and “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered” by Cowboy Copas. No one knows how much he actually collaborated, if he did so at all, but performers recall Syd telling them about ideas for songs and hook lines that he made up while driving to work. Whatever the fine print said on any individual record label, insiders knew Sydney Nathan was the king of King and its jack of all jobs.
In 1957, Nathan hired a young Ray Pennington as a stock clerk. One day, Pennington was walking down a hall when someone called him into the recording studio to help with a technical problem. “I don’t know what’s wrong with this console,” the engineer moaned. Pennington studied the mass of electrical cords and inputs leading to the unit. He knew something about the equipment because he was a performer at night, using all manner of guitar amplifiers and things electric for his country and rockabilly band, the Western Rhythm Boys.
Like many King country artists, he had come to Cincinnati from Kentucky with his family so his father could get a job in a factory. Pennington naturally gravitated to King, the hit-maker. He wanted to be a star like everyone else, and a record producer, too. So Nathan recorded him—as Ray Starr for rockabilly and Ray Pennington for country—and gave him a day job in the stockroom.
On his knees, Pennington patched some wires together and pronounced the engineer’s problem solved. The session resumed. Syd Nathan, watching all of this from the back of the room, was uncharacteristically silent. Suddenly, he appeared at Pennington’s side and said, matter-of-factly, “Your desk is gonna be moved tomorrow—into the A&R department.”
The king had spoken.
One day in 1956, King talent scout Ralph Bass had a visitor, a young black man named James Brown from Georgia who had just rolled into town with a vocal group called the Famous Flames. Brown had been making a name for himself as a loud and unearthly howler of rhythm and blues. King’s reputation in that field had drawn Brown and the Flames to Brewster Avenue, but the operation itself looked unremarkable: the old icehouse next door was still banging out its cold crystals, and the halls at King were filled with throngs of odd characters, white and black, coming and going. This musical integration was by design. When the hillbilly sound temporarily plummeted in popularity in the early ’50s, Nathan was not about to sit around and hope it would return to good health. He had already started signing many R&B singers, including Hank Ballard and the Midnighters (Ballard’s song “The Twist” would first appear on King), organist Bill Doggett, Little Willie John, Otis Williams and the Charms, Wynonie Harris, Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and Nina Simone.
Hillbillies and black people, it was a strange combination, and as Ralph Bass showed Brown and his group around that day, it looked stranger. The bewildering maze of corridors and cubbyholes that passed for offices were lined with copies of King’s growing list of hit records and albums. There were framed pictures of the label’s stars—Earl Bostic, the black saxophonist; Copas, the hillbilly crooner; and long rows of famous, half-famous, and unknown faces, black faces out of the Deep South or the northern ghettos, white faces out of the hardscrabble mountains—a potpourri of race, talent, and unlikely ambitions.
In one studio, someone was wailing a wild R&B number, while a hillbilly singer wearing a wide cowboy hat smoked a cigarette and strummed a guitar in the corridor as he waited to go in next. Everything was a crazy juxtaposition—the music, the songs, the performers—and all of it held together by the loud voice of Sydney Nathan.
According to most accounts, Nathan was a terror in the studio. The black singers seemed to have the most difficulty making him understand their music. This was not hillbilly fare; no, this was rhythm, man. Over the years, Brown had to defend his projects against Nathan’s tirades and on occasion even pay for the recordings himself to prove their worth. Nathan had unwavering opinions on what was good and not good in music. He was old style—hook line, strong melody. If he didn’t like what was being recorded, he’d start yelling. He hated Brown’s first hit, “Please, Please, Please” and threatened to fire Bass for making it with Brown and the Famous Flames. Then suddenly the record sold—and sold and sold. Bass was a hero.
At the same time, Nathan supported his artists. He was not a folklorist, saving ethnic music for posterity. He was in show business, and he urged his new stars to cultivate a commercial sound to lengthen their careers. “Syd had a special insight, a way of seeing talent in people,” said Ray Pennington, now retired from jobs as a Nashville record company president and staff producer at RCA. “I loved him. If he were still alive today, I’d probably still be working for him. He was one of the pioneers of the modern record industry. Funny, he couldn’t play [well]; he couldn’t sing. He could barely talk. But he had insight. It’s sad to see a dynasty like King die, but I don’t think anybody else was capable of keeping it going.”
“Colonel” Jim Wilson, another Nashville record executive, began as a sales manager at King in 1949 and in one job or another lasted at the firm until 1965. “Mr. Nathan—I always called him that—used to say, ‘All you need to get into the record business is a desk, a telephone, and an attorney.’ Then he’d laugh. But he built a solid record company because he could do everything in-house. He didn’t have to answer to a lot of other companies or people. King could do everything but make the shipping cartons.”
Nathan knew the business from top to bottom. Wilson said the boss sold records through nontraditional outlets, such as general stores in rural areas and his own nationwide system of distributors, so often the nation’s music charts didn’t fully reflect King’s sales. While on the road promoting hillbilly records in the 1940s, Nathan decided he should also start offering so-called race records—black music—on the same sales calls. So he returned to the office and started King signing black acts to contracts. He also opened his thirty-two sales branches in various cities, shunning the slow-paying independent distributors.
Nathan’s offbeat operating procedures extended to the studio as well. Henry Glover, his chief producer, was a black man who wrote and recorded songs for all kinds of acts, from white pop singers to bluegrass pickers to black R&B vocalists. To Glover, a good song was a good song, regardless of what musical genre recorded it. Before the civil rights movement changed America, Glover was using black and white musicians on all kinds of sessions. “There was no color line at King,” Jim Wilson said.
“Henry Glover was one of the first major African American executives in the record business,” noted playwright KJ Sanchez, who interviewed dozens of former King employees in 2013. She said Nathan and Glover used to
travel down South, scouting for talent and setting up accounts. Because they were going to the places where black people weren’t allowed to go legitimately, except if they were working on a job or something, Henry Glover would go as Syd Nathan’s driver, as his chauffeur. That’s the only way he could get in. This is a man who today, [if] you go to BMI’s [Broadcast Music Inc.] catalogue, [you will find] that Henry Glover owns over 400 songs in that catalogue alone. I mean, this is the man who is listed as the composer of “Drown in My Own Tears,” a song that’s been covered by Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, scores of others—and in those days Glover had to pretend to be Syd’s driver.
Obviously this couldn’t have been healthy for Glover’s self-esteem, but then he was used to the way things were in the South. No one knows exactly what Nathan thought of this arrangement, but he used to say he was familiar with discrimination’s sting because he was a Jew. From the beginning he hired blacks and whites for all types of jobs and made sure they worked together. He believed that if people worked together, they would understand one another better, and tolerance would follow. So he mixed things up in every department and gave approval to hire more minorities if they could do the jobs. As a result, Sanchez said, King’s A&R department was an incredible showcase of talented people of different races, “many of whom went on to run their own labels, many of whom were smart enough to get the rights to the songs they wrote.”
Sanchez was impressed that he stood up and hired minorities at a time when most companies didn’t. It wasn’t that Nathan was committed to social justice in any obvious way, she said, “it just made good business sense to him—why shouldn’t he have white and black musicians playing on the same records, if they were the best—and, of course, most affordable—musicians there were? … He was also promoting music of ‘the folk’—what at the time was called ‘race records’ and the music of Appalachian immigrants of the area. He was promoting folk before folk was cool.”
Nathan signed many doo-wop groups in the ’50s, including the Platters and the Swallows. Some had been successful in the past, and he tried to resurrect their careers. Others, like eighteen-year-old Otis Williams of Cincinnati, were just starting out. Sometimes the black vocalists clashed with Nathan over royalty payments and song selection. Nathan was old school; he wanted songs that sounded familiar. Their battles sometimes lasted years, but the artists couldn’t leave—they were under contract.
Williams, like James Brown, stood up to Nathan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Williams maintained that he helped write songs but didn’t receive credit. Yet he admitted, “He was one of the innovators. King had the best artists collectively. But he was shrewd… . It was one of those things. You either accepted it and went on with your work or …” Williams’s group, the Charms, had several big R&B hits, including “Ivory Tower.” Williams later went to court against Nathan to retain ownership of the name “Otis Williams and His Charms.” “We started a [musical] revolution,” he said of his generation’s performers, “and didn’t know it at the time. We were just there at the right time.”
By 1967, Nathan’s label was slowing down. Friends and family gathered at his home that July to honor him for his twenty-fifth year in the record business. Heart attacks had hit him hard over the last few years, and with them Nathan seemed to lose his way in the recording jungle. The King empire was already beginning to shrink. Nathan had closed his sales branches and had been forced to make do with the often unreliable independent distributors. The major labels had finally awakened to the country-western music market and descended on the hillbilly stars, fountain pens in hand. Race records had broken out of the ghetto and into mainstream America, and the big companies were now courting the singers.
So Nathan concentrated mainly on rhythm and blues. Although King continued to release many kinds of music, comedy, and other types of recordings, by the mid-1960s the label could be described in two words—James Brown. The self-proclaimed “Soul Brother Number One” was selling millions of records to both blacks and whites, just as he had predicted to Nathan in their studio shouting matches years before. “Cold Sweat,” “It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (Part One),” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and dozens of other records poured out of the King pressing plant every day, from the same building where Brown recorded many of his hits.
Nathan had little time to savor his later successes, however. On March 5, 1968, he died of a heart attack in Miami, Florida, where he had been living six months of the year to take advantage of the warmer climate and local heart specialists. His death put the company’s partners in a quandary. In the long term, they realized the kingdom could not exist without the king. So they decided to sell it. Over the next few years, the King companies were sold to other owners, a New York record label bought James Brown’s contract, and other pieces of Nathan’s kingdom were dispersed.
In Evanston, his dark factory sat empty. So did his recording studio. Employees scattered to New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and other places. King Records—the heart of it anyway—was dead. There would be a new King, but nothing like the old one, for Nathan was King Records.
Today in Cincinnati, the name Sydney Nathan is rarely spoken, except by record collectors and historians. James Brown is dead, after a tumultuous end-of-life chapter that included prison and a crazy binge that led him there. The international record companies control the business now, and they have turned Nathan’s “music of the little people” into a major industry. The name of their one-time king, the Pied Piper of Appalachia and of rhythm and blues, is a piece of music business trivia.
KJ Sanchez doesn’t mourn its passing, but she knows what was lost in the company’s demise. “King Records played a significant role in American music, and then, just as suddenly as it came, it went,” she said. “The tragedy of the story is that the label was not able to live beyond Syd’s lifetime, which makes the whole story rather Shakespearean in scope.”
The king of King Records is dead, but not forgotten.
