The Last Sultan

The false starts were now over. With his good friend Herb Abramson, Ahmet was about to found what would become the most prestigious record label in a business about which Ahmet then knew woefully little.

2

Ever since he had first caught sight of the brilliant lights of 42nd Street at night as a boy and then spent a thrilling night on his own in Harlem as a teenager, Ahmet had known that New York City was where he belonged. The record company he was about to found would reflect not only his unique personality but also that of his new partner.

Born in Brooklyn on November 16, 1916, Herbert Charles Abramson was a multitalented real-life golden boy who had also chosen to make his life in music simply because he loved it so much. His father, an amateur songwriter who at one point published a small newspaper in Oswego, New York, had died when Herb was twelve. Born in Russia, his mother had emigrated to the United States when she was two. His uncle was a state senator from Queens and his first cousin was Stanley Kramer, the noted film director and producer.

After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in 1934, Abramson attended the City College of New York. In an era when admission quotas for Jewish undergraduates were actively enforced by Ivy League colleges, CCNY was known as “the poor man’s Harvard,” or more accurately “the Jewish man’s Harvard.” Wanting to become a doctor so “he could find a cure for cancer,” Abramson transferred to New York University, where he pursued a premed program. He was not admitted to medical school because, in the words of his third wife Barbara, “he was a Jew and the quota was filled.”

Abramson was working in Washington when he became part of Ahmet and Nesuhi’s social circle. He then helped them put on their early concerts in the nation’s capital. Knowing he was about to be drafted into the army, Abramson left his job and returned to New York to live with his mother until he was called up for service. It was there he met and began keeping company with Miriam Kahan, another ardent jazz fan from Brooklyn. Seven years younger than Abramson, she had also graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and had worked as a proofreader for G. P. Putnam’s Sons and advertising agencies before being employed as a bookkeeper at Hearn’s, a large department store on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues where “a lot of very prominent people worked part-time for a while.”

Drafted into the army in 1944, Abramson, who much like Ahmet had no desire whatsoever to serve in the military, “tried desperately to get out.” After being ordered to climb an eighteen-foot-high pole to install a telephone wire one day, Abramson fell to the bottom only to be ordered to climb it again so he would not lose his nerve. Replying, “I already lost my nerve,” Abramson “ran five miles without stopping because the place where you signed up for medical education in the army was closing at five o’clock, and he put his foot in the door.”

Selected for the Army Specialized Training Program because of his premed background, Abramson was sent back to NYU, where he enrolled in an accelerated dentistry program. To avail himself of the extra $50 a week granted by the army to wedded students in the program, Abramson married Miriam in the fall of 1945. The couple went to Washington, D.C., on their honeymoon to see some of Abramson’s old friends but when Abramson called Ahmet, he was, in Miriam’s words, “very late in calling us back because his father was ill. That was the illness that became fatal.”

Discharged from the army in 1946, Abramson, who “did a lot of things part-time,” continued his dental studies while working as a talent scout for Al Green, the long-haired, hard-drinking character who ran National Records. After becoming head of A&R (artists and repertoire) at the label, Abramson recorded Billy Eckstine, Joe Turner, the Ames Brothers, the Ravens, Pete Johnson, and Charlie Ventura. Abramson’s two biggest hits on National were Dusty Fletcher’s version of “Open the Door, Richard” and “Sioux City Sue” by Dick Thomas.

In 1947, Abramson graduated from NYU with a doctor of dental science degree as an endodontist, but as Barbara Abramson would later say, “He didn’t like dentistry. I asked him why and he said, ‘Because I never saw a hip filling.’ ” In the words of his first wife, Miriam, Abramson had “a different kind of mind. He could cook. He could build. Herb could do anything. He really could.”

Before the year was out, however, Abramson decided he could no longer work for Green. “The reason Herb left National,” Barbara Abramson explained, “was because Al Green did not want to deal with female artists if he could avoid it. He said they were too much trouble. When Billy Eckstine brought in Sarah Vaughan, he said, ‘No broads. No broads.’ At that point, Herb felt he had to move on.”

Abramson then founded the Jubilee label, on which he released two gospel recordings. Because “his heart was in jazz and blues,” Abramson sold his interest in the label to his partner, Jerry Blaine, in return for his original $2,500 investment. While Ahmet never failed to praise Herb Abramson for the role he played in the creation of their new record label, his new partner also brought more than just a shared interest in black roots music and hands-on experience in actually making records to the venture.

By the middle of 1947 when the two men were actively working to start their new company, the American Federation of Musicians had already announced plans to go out on strike on January 1, 1948, and so had ceased granting any new recording licenses. “Atlantic was formed on Herb’s charter from Jubilee,” Barbara Abramson would later say. “It could not have been established without the charter because they weren’t issuing any more. Herb was the only experienced founding partner.”

By then, Abramson, in Ahmet’s words, already “knew all the aspects of the music business which I didn’t know: how to get a lawyer, how to write a contract, what the going rate of pay was, how to sell records . . . he knew where to get pressings and we didn’t press at National because Herb knew it wasn’t a very clean operation. They used to press one for you, one for me.”

While the license was essential, the new company could not have been created if Ahmet had not managed to find the money to bankroll the label. The way in which he did so has since become a cornerstone of the Atlantic Records story as well as an essential part of Ahmet’s legend. As rock critic Ellen Sander would later write, “Ahmet was such a bullshitter that his dentist couldn’t get him to shut up long enough to drill his teeth. At one point he was telling stories of his success in picking and reselling those rare old 78s and the dentist got talked into lending him some money to start Atlantic Records.”

Now perfectly willing to accept help from his father’s friends, Ahmet had approached some of them for financial backing but, “They all knew my background and refused to show any confidence whatsoever in my ever being able to run any kind of business. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my dentist, Dr. Vahdi Sabit, who actually fell for the line I was peddling at the time, which was something like, ‘If we could only sell one record to each record shop . . .’ He turned out to be a gambler and mortgaged his house in order to put up the $10,000 that we needed, became a partner with Herb and myself, and we started recording in 1947.”

Nor did Sabit come up with his entire investment before the label began operating. As Barbara Abramson recalled, “Over a two-and-a-half-year period, Dr. Sabit paid bills when they couldn’t be met like rent and light bills, electricity bills. He did not extend the money in a lump sum. The reason he invested at all was that he had been apprised of Herb’s prior track record. Like Sabit, Herb was also an educated man, a dentist. So Dr. Sabit came in as a limited partner and there was a time period during which he could be bought out.”

In a letter to his sister during the spring of 1948, Ahmet wrote, “Dr. Sabit hasn’t been able to sell his house yet, and therefore is in a bad situation financially. That is why I was unable to pay off some of our debts with the $300 you sent me but had to use it for our own expenses. We put a lot of money into this business and should be able to get returns on it soon. Originally Dr. Sabit said he would put in $12,000, but due to the house not being sold, he is in a difficult position. We will repay you the $300 as soon as possible.”

On December 31, 1947, Sabit, Abramson, and Ahmet signed a contract consisting of three typewritten pages with five line-outs and two addendums that each partner initialed six separate times. All three parties, with Sabit in first position as the major investor, agreed to form a stock corporation pursuant to the laws of the state of New York known as Horizon Records, Inc. Crossed out by hand, this name was replaced by the Atlantic Recording Corporation.

As Ahmet would later say, “The name Atlantic was probably about our eightieth choice, because every name we came up with—Horizon, Blue Moods, all kind of names like that—had already been taken. We’d call the union and the union would say, ‘We already have a record company registered by that name.’ I’d heard of a label that called themselves Pacific Jazz at that time. So in desperation, I said, ‘Look, they call themselves Pacific; let’s call ourselves Atlantic.’ That’s how that happened. It wasn’t a name we were crazy about—it was so generic. There are so many Atlantics, A&P and all of that, but finally we said, who cares what we call it?”

The contract also stipulated that fifty of the company’s one hundred shares would be given to Sabit in return for his payment of $12,500. Ten shares of stock were issued to Herb Abramson for his payment of $2,500. In return for services rendered to the corporation, Herb Abramson received an additional twenty shares. Ahmet was given nineteen shares with the remaining share going to Sabit. Because they would be “active in promotional and other endeavors on behalf of the corporation,” Abramson and Ahmet would each receive $40 a week for expenses in return for expending thirty (the word “forty” having been crossed out) hours a week in such endeavors.

At the end of each year, all parties would receive an equal bonus from one half of the company’s net profits with the other half to be distributed in accordance to the shares they owned. Abramson was named as the president of the company with Ahmet as vice president and secretary, and Dr. Sabit as treasurer as well as chairman of a board of directors, which consisted of the three men and two other members they would elect.

The first incarnation of the company’s record label was a red and black circle with the long, red, skinny legs of the “A” in Atlantic stretching down the left side as the remaining letters appeared beside it on an extended red horizontal line on a black background with the name of the title and the artist in black below on a field of red. Depending on who told the story, the “A” itself, which was the label’s most prominent graphic feature, stood either for “Ahmet” or “Abramson.”

On November 21, 1947, more than a month before the partners signed the agreement, Ahmet and Herb Abramson cut their first track on Atlantic with a group called the Harlemaires, who performed “The Rose of the Rio Grande.” Working constantly over the next five weeks in studios like WOR, Beltone, and Apex, Ahmet and Abramson cut sixty-five sides. Even for an established company, this would have been an astonishing number of tracks to record in such a short period of time. As partners in a fledgling label without a name, Abramson and Ahmet were motivated by a sense of utter panic. As Ahmet would later say, “We were grabbing at straws because of the coming strike and we recorded lots of semi-names, unknown artists. . . . We must have spent three or four thousand dollars just making recordings in 1947 without ever releasing anything.”

After the strike began, Ahmet learned to his great chagrin that although he had thought “the major companies would be doing a lot of recording in Europe and we couldn’t afford to do that, ‘Europe’ turned out to be New Jersey because you could go there and record anybody you wanted because the local wasn’t sending anybody to check up. The guys who were used to making scale would come up and say, ‘Hey, listen, we’re willing to record nonunion. . . . Don’t let anybody know and we’ll do it for $25 a session.’ Suddenly, with the strike on, the price went down. All the musicians were scuffling for work.”

Many of the sessions Ahmet and Abramson cut in 1947 were then “just thrown in the garbage because I should have known better and certainly Herb Abramson should have known better. You can’t record a lot of stuff in advance hoping to release it later because later it doesn’t sound so good.” After what proved to be but the first of many decisions by the partners that did not turn out as planned, the real miracle was that Atlantic Records itself managed to survive.

3

To house his new company, Ahmet rented a tiny two-room suite on the ground floor of the Hotel Jefferson, a derelict, broken-down old building at 208 West 56th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway that would soon be condemned. Using the living room as the Atlantic Records office, he shared the bedroom with his cousin, a Turkish poet named Sadi Koylan who had upgraded his own living situation by moving from the flophouse where he had formerly resided. The rent on Suite 102 was $60 a week but since the hotel switchboard operator answered all incoming calls, Ahmet did not need to hire a secretary. Songwriters like Doc Pomus and Rudy Toombs soon began dropping by to audition songs.

On January 22, 1948, Nesuhi congratulated his younger brother on having finally launched his own record company by writing, “The name sounds good, label nice. Some of the recordings you made strike me as terribly exciting.” Now running his own small jazz label called Crescent Records from his record shop in Los Angeles that featured New Orleans musicians like the legendary trombonist Kid Ory, Nesuhi counseled Ahmet not to bring out his records too fast so they would have “time to be properly exploited” and added, “Received press release from your publicity man. This, to me, seems to be an unnecessary luxury: I mean the hiring of a PA. I would think that between you and Herb, you could take care of that angle yourselves. Why increase your overhead?”

Far more organized than his younger brother and obsessed with detail, Nesuhi would throughout this period continue sending Ahmet long letters from Los Angeles without ever getting a timely reply or managing to persuade him to heed his advice. Even as Ahmet was sharing a bedroom with his cousin while trying to draw attention to Atlantic’s first releases by having Waxie Maxie play them on his radio show in Washington, he conducted his business exactly like someone who had grown up in incredibly privileged circumstances.

Despite how doggedly Ahmet had worked to find the money to start Atlantic, he was still caught between two worlds, a point reinforced by Nesuhi when he asked, “By the way what happened to your studies? When are you getting your degree, and are you? You are being very foolish to reject your studies; you will bitterly regret it the rest of your life.”

While in many ways Ahmet was still the pampered rich boy he had been brought up to be, he had learned to rely on the kindness of friends to survive. Before starting Atlantic, Ahmet would often come to New York and spend the night on the couch in the living room of the furnished three-room apartment Herb and Miriam Abramson rented for $45 a month at 106 West 13th Street. “Nobody believes this story,” she would later say, “but when I used to go to work in the morning, Ahmet would still be asleep because he had been going to clubs all night and when I came home in the evening, all the sheets and pillow cases were neatly folded on the couch. If you know Ahmet, he was from a privileged background and he had never done any of that. In a way, he was coddled all his life.”

In the words of his old friend Delia Gottlieb, “Ahmet was still very naive. He would say, ‘I don’t have any shirts. I don’t know what to do.’ When I got into the hotel, he had a pile of shirts in the closet he had worn. I said, ‘You know, you’re supposed to take them to the laundry and they wash them for you.’ The servants or his aunt had always taken care of them for him.”

When it came to his own appearance, however, Ahmet was never frugal. “He didn’t have a nickel,” Gottlieb recalled, “and he would say, ‘I need a pair of alligator shoes. I have to order them from Lobb’s.’ Back then, who knew what they cost? He didn’t pay his bills because the gentry don’t do that. But Ahmet was having the time of his life. He liked the music and he knew the music and he understood the people and he had this enormous gift—he could talk to musicians and he could talk to dukes.”

In Miriam Abramson’s words, “Ahmet had been cosseted at the embassy where they had taken care of everything. He didn’t know anything about the practicalities of life. He had all these personal bills and I said, ‘Why don’t you pay these?’ He said, ‘If I pay them, they’ll think I’m closing the account.’ That was what would happen at the embassy because they would keep credit going forever for those people.”

In 1948, Atlantic had some success with two jazz instrumentals, “Old Black Magic” by Tiny Grimes and “The Spider” by Joe Morris, who also recorded “Lowe Groovin’,” which then became the theme song for Washington R&B radio deejay Jack Lowe Endler, known to his listeners as Jackson Lowe. In November, Ahmet produced “Midnight Special” by Morris and the song went to number twelve on what was then known as The Billboard Juke Box chart. The money on which Ahmet was living however did not come from record sales but regular payments his mother sent him from Turkey.

Although an American dollar then cost nearly four times as much on the black market in Turkey than it was worth in the United States, Ahmet’s mother continued raising money to settle family debts in America by “selling most of the things” she had brought with her from Washington. “I only hope,” Selma wrote, “you haven’t been annoyed by angry creditors too much. It is some comfort to think that sort of thing never bothered you so much as it does me.” Ignoring the bills, Ahmet was in fact using the money to keep Atlantic going.

He was also keeping company with Mynell Allen, a black vocalist with the Sam Donahue Orchestra, who, in Miriam Abramson’s words, was “very sweet and not very pretty. A lovely woman. I think he was more interested in Ginnie Powell with the Boyd Raeburn band. What was interesting considering Ahmet’s background and education was that I don’t think he’d had much success with girls. He was beautifully educated with wonderful manners but rather shy and when he first came from Washington, he had an inferiority complex about girls. But that faded fast.”

With the Hotel Jefferson about to be knocked down so the Mutual of New York building could be built on the site, Ahmet and Herb Abramson were forced to move the Atlantic office to a tenement building at 301 West 54th Street just around the corner from Stillman’s Gym, the center of the boxing universe in the city. Located above a storefront, the office had no desks so Herb and Miriam Abramson bought a used partner’s desk, which Abramson then refinished because, in her words, “He could do everything, and that was our furniture.”

“We were very short on help,” Ahmet would later remember. “There was just Herb, Miriam, and me. Occasionally, if we had a particularly heavy box of records to send out, we would give one of the less successful heavyweight fighters a dollar to come and carry our shipment to the local post office.” In the words of Francine Wakschal, who began working at Atlantic in February 1949, “It was a funky neighborhood. When I went to work, there was a shipping clerk who used to come in early in the morning and wait for me so I could go into the lobby because there were always bums sleeping around. It was not a great building and the area was not good.”

In time, the West Side of Manhattan from 42nd to 56th Streets between Broadway and Tenth Avenue would become the home of the independent record business in Manhattan with “dozens of small independent record labels and distributors eking out an unsteady existence in the burgeoning rhythm and blues field.” Tenth Avenue, which boasted the largest concentration of independents, most of which were located in storefronts, came to be known as “the Street of Hope.”

By the time Ahmet and Herb Abramson set up shop not far from Madison Square Garden, then located at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, Ike and Bess Berman were already doing business at Apollo Records. Herman Lubinsky, who knew nothing about music, had started Savoy Records from his electrical parts store in Newark. Syd Nathan had founded King Records in Cincinnati. In Los Angeles, Art Rupe, whose real name was Arthur Goldberg, was doing business at Speciality Records. Jules, Saul, Joe, and Lester Bihari, four brothers who had grown up in a large Hungarian Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were running Modern Records. Eddie and Leo Mesner were putting out hits on Aladdin. In Chicago, another set of brothers named Leonard and Phil Chess were converting the Aristocrat label into Chess Records. In an industry that was still relatively small, Ahmet and Herb Abramson had gotten in on the ground floor.

Which did not mean Atlantic was yet doing all that well. In a fourteen-page letter on January 28, 1949, to his sister, “Dearest sweetest darling Selma,” Ahmet noted he was “working harder than I ever have. There is a lot at stake and I just have to make good. We started this record company at a time when business on the whole was on a downgrade and have done remarkably well, considering that fact. Of course, at first we were making no money at all, so I had to borrow quite a bit from Dr. Sabit in order to live in New York.”

Hedging his bets in case the record business did not work out for him, Ahmet was also running a “patent development” company called Industrial Improvements for Dr. Sabit, who in return for a $6,000 investment had acquired a half-interest in some “sixty odd inventions” by a fellow Turk named Sukru Fenari. Although Fenari and Sabit would eventually be granted a patent for an automobile carburetor on which Ahmet had been “working very hard,” none of Fenari’s inventions had yet been sold and “getting the patents is a long tedious process, and of course all one does is spend money at first and that’s all we have been doing.”

Each morning at about nine-thirty or ten, Ahmet would go to the Industrial Improvements office at 104 West 40th Street and then report to the new Atlantic office where he “usually had quite a few appointments.” Staying there until about seven at night, he would “return home, wash up and go out to dinner. After dinner, I often have to go to the opening night of one of our artists, or have to go hear some new talent. Sometimes we have recording sessions at night. Or else I have to go see some disc jockey.” After “paying for my laundry, food, and other necessities,” Ahmet didn’t “have a hell of a lot left to go out” and usually went “to bed by one o’clock so that I still get plenty of sleep.”

In Ahmet’s estimation, “The record company is now worth about $25,000 and growing every day. We had some tough luck at first but we’re doing extremely well now, that is, we’re not getting rich yet but the company is now one of the top 25, and to do this in one year when there are some 500 companies is pretty good.” Ahmet, Herb, and Miriam Abramson were all drawing salaries “and we make a profit every month, and this increases solidly every month. But we keep investing all the money in order to let Atlantic grow healthily so that we may build something worthwhile for the future.” Within a year, Ahmet believed they could all “become quite well-to-do.”

Although Atlantic had been unable to make any new records during the past year because of the musicians’ strike, it was now selling forty thousand records a month “and this figure is increasing. When we hit 75,000, then we’ll be able to take some sizeable profits out of the Atlantic Corporation, without it hurting the company.” As Ahmet noted, Atlantic already had “26 distributors in all parts of the U.S.A. and sell[s] more records in a month than a company like Nesuhi’s sells in a year. Our records are in almost all the shops.” Because his accountant and his lawyers had advised him not to declare any dividends, “This is why I don’t have any extra money now in large enough quantity to repay you the money I owe you, even though my share of Atlantic is worth quite a lot, but I would have to sell out to get it.”

By running both companies for Dr. Sabit, Ahmet was taking home “$90.00 to $100.00 a week, on which I just manage to get along, as New York is tremendously expensive” but was now settled in a large four-room furnished apartment in a building with a doorman at 150 West 55th Street. Still living with his cousin Sadi Koylan, Ahmet had a “tremendous master bedroom with two double beds and a nice living room” in an apartment he shared with the “elderly couple” from whom he was subletting his two rooms. They were “extremely nice, well-bred Southern people and they like me very much, so that I’m really very happy and so are they to have me.”

Just a week before he wrote the letter, Ahmet told his sister he and Herb Abramson had completed recording background music composed by Vernon Duke for This Is My Beloved, a collection of poems by Walter Benton. Although Miriam Abramson, who had first brought the project to Ahmet’s attention, thought the poetry itself was “absolutely schmaltz,” she believed it would “make a great record” because the book was so popular she had found it in a drugstore lending library where usually only romance novels and mysteries could be borrowed for 10 cents a day.

Although Ahmet could not persuade “either Montgomery Clift, a new Hollywood star, or Tyrone Power” to participate in the project, he proceeded with it nonetheless. As he would later recall, “We made a recording of a book of poetry called This Is My Beloved by Walter Benton which was slightly erotic and the number one book that all the soldiers in the American army took with them when they went to war. We got this second-rate movie actor John Dall to read this poetry and I got Vernon Duke, who wrote ‘April in Paris,’ ‘Autumn in New York,’ ‘I Can’t Get Started with You,’ to write this semiclassical score, and that sold fairly well.”

Released in March 1949, This Is My Beloved was the first 33¹/₃ RPM album on Atlantic. Miriam Abramson would later recall that the record “did not sell particularly well” and this would seem to be confirmed by a letter written to Ahmet from Paris by Vernon Duke, a very elegant and eccentric character who had been born Vladimir Alexandrovitch Dukelsky in Russia. Addressing Ahmet as “Dear Ahmedakis,” Duke wondered why there had been no publicity for the record “in Variety, Newsweek, Life, Time, etc. . . . I am frankly astounded at the total lack of a single detail of the propaganda campaign in your letter. Not one clipping!”

Whatever level of success Ahmet may have achieved with This Is My Beloved, he continued recording material no other independent record label would have even considered. Thinking that if Atlantic issued “a series of Shakespeare’s plays on record that hadn’t been done, every university would buy at least one copy,” Ahmet enlisted the well-known Shakespearean actors Eva Le Gallienne and Richard Waring to record Romeo and Juliet accompanied by “the music of Mendelssohn.” Ahmet’s belief that universities all across the country would snap up this release was “of course a mistake. They were not interested in buying any. We were very dismayed that this album of Shakespeare’s most famous play did not sell.”

Ahmet and Herb Abramson then released a series of children’s records that also did not sell. In order to survive, Atlantic needed a hit record. Establishing what would become the pattern of his career, Ahmet soon found one.

4

Once a week from his office, Ahmet would call his distributors to take orders for Atlantic’s records. After William B. Allen, his New Orleans distributor, had placed an order for thirty singles that retailed for 79 cents each, Ahmet plaintively asked him, “Can’t you push these a little more?” Telling Ahmet those were all he needed because no one in New Orleans was looking for anything on Atlantic, Allen said there was a record selling like crazy down there on both the Harlem and Cincinnati labels that no one could find. If he could locate some copies for him, Allen offered to take what Ahmet would later recall as either five or thirty thousand of them. Stunned by the size of the prospective order, Ahmet asked Allen to send him a copy of the record, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Stick McGhee.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 23, 1917, Granville “Stick” McGhee had acquired his nickname as a boy while pushing around his older brother, who suffered from polio as a child, in a wagon with a stick. In a photograph taken when both brothers were in their early thirties, they sit across from one another holding guitars before an ancient microphone. A handsome light-skinned man with a wispy mustache and a shiny lustrous conk, Stick peers down at his left hand as he fingers a G-seventh chord on his guitar. In an open-necked white shirt, a pair of boldly pinstriped dark suit pants held up by skinny black suspenders, white socks, and leather sandals, he looks like a gentleman who had little trouble attracting the ladies.

Drafted into the army in 1942, McGhee first heard what was then a drinking song popular with black soldiers. In the song’s original chorus, the phrase “Drinkin’ wine motherfucker” was repeated numerous times. After he was discharged in 1947, McGhee cleaned up the lyrics, added some verses, and recorded the song with his guitar and a slap bass on the Harlem label for J. Mayo Williams, a pioneering black record producer who had been an outstanding athlete at Brown University, played in the National Football League, and then spent a decade running the “race music” department at Decca Records. Although Williams attached his name to the song as cowriter, he did little to promote the record, which nonetheless became a runaway hit in New Orleans.

With no idea how to find thousands of copies of a record on a label he had never heard of, Ahmet decided to remake the song and then ship the Atlantic version to New Orleans and so began looking for someone to record it. As he would later say, “The only blues singers we knew were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, but they were doing Carnegie Hall-type blues—more like folk singers, doing hollers and that sort of thing.” When Ahmet called Brownie McGhee to say he was looking for someone to cover “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” McGhee replied, “That’s my brother’s record!” After Ahmet asked if he knew how to get hold of him, McGhee said, “He’s right here.”

When Stick McGhee came on the line, Ahmet asked him if he had ever signed anything when he had recorded the song. In an era when the independent record business was still so fly-by-night that such arrangements were common practice, Stick McGhee replied, “No man, I never signed anything. They gave me $75 and a couple of hot dogs.” Ahmet promptly offered him $500 to cut the song for Atlantic.

Ahmet and Herb Abramson then spent twelve hours in the studio trying to get Stick McGhee to do an exact copy of the original record. Unable to get it right, they sent him home. When McGhee returned the next day, they cut the song in an hour. At the session on February 14, 1949, Ahmet and Abramson added Wilbert “Big Chief” Ellis on piano and Gene Ramey on bass and had Brownie McGhee sing backup vocals. Credited to “Stick McGhee & His Buddies,” the Atlantic track was far superior to the original version.

Although the song was a twelve bar blues, Stick McGhee would, in Ahmet’s words, “sometimes sing 13 bars, sometimes eleven and a half, so it took us a long time but finally we got it right—and that was the first big hit we ever had. We sold at the time, I would say, 700,000 copies of ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,’ and the bootleggers sold a million.”

Released in April 1949, the record went to number two on the Juke Box chart and number twenty-six on the Pop chart. Entering the Best Sellers chart on April 16, it remained there for twenty-three weeks. Even though Decca Records then bought the original from Mayo Williams and released it as well, the Atlantic version outsold the Decca side by far, which “gave us confidence in our production techniques and marketing.”

A month after he had released the song on Atlantic, Ahmet went to Houston, Texas, to find a local distributor only to walk into a record store where he saw “a stack of about 300 copies of our record, ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,’ which lots of people were coming in and buying! I picked up a copy and it had the Atlantic logo and label, but it wasn’t our pressing.” In an era when “the police couldn’t have cared less,” it was also common practice for bootleggers to issue their own pressings of a hit record they would then sell for cash to anyone who would buy them.

Determined to personally confront whoever had been stealing money from him and his company, Ahmet learned the men who had pressed the bootleg record were holed up in the mountains outside Paris, Texas, where they also made their own rye whiskey and bathtub gin. After being informed they kept five or six armed men on guard twenty-four hours a day, Ahmet decided his life was worth more than the money and did nothing to stop their operation.

Despite how many illegal copies of Stick McGhee’s record may have been sold, Atlantic had its first hit. For independent record men like Ahmet and Herb Abramson, a hit was the high tide that floated all boats. Above all else, a hit allowed a record man to stay in business so he could produce more hits. The only problem was that once a record man made a hit, he had to make another, if only to get the distributors to pay what they owed for the first one. The need to generate hits would soon become Ahmet’s lifelong addiction.

Along with the money “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” brought Atlantic, the success gave Ahmet credibility. No longer just a rich boy dabbling in a business in which he had learned there were no rules, everyone stole, cheated, and lied, and making hits was all that really mattered, Ahmet had himself now become an authentic record man.