The first thing that changed was my deal with King. Mr. Nathan didn’t have any contract with me anymore, and when I had a number 1 record, he wanted to join up again. The deal I had had with him before was terrible; I think I received half a cent a side for writer’s royalties and maybe another half a cent for performance, partly because in the original contract everything was split evenly among all the Flames and Mr. Brantly. The record companies were always under-reporting sales, exaggerating breakage, and charging for everything, so you never really knew what you were making.
My new deal was made with Hal Neely, the vice-president of King, who had come to Cincinnati in 1958 to help Mr. Nathan run things when he was sick a lot with heart trouble. Mr. Neely had been a bandleader and a trumpet player and knew something about music. On the new contract he jumped me to a 5 percent royalty, although 3 percent was standard in those days, and he made me a better publishing deal. The new contract didn’t help me with “Try Me,” though. They already had that. I think I made about $3,600 in royalties from “Try Me,” even though it was number 1. I believe I got that $3,600 all at once and thought I was rich. I went to see Fats Domino one night in County Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, thinking how wealthy I was. That’s when I realized I needed hit records because every time Fats Domino opened his mouth he had a hit record coming out of it. While watching the show, some of the people wanted me to go up and do a number, so I went on stage and ran Fats Domino off his own gig with my own record. Paid to see him, then run him off the stage. That started me thinking what I might do with a lot of hit records.
Universal signed me again, too. Mr. Bart flew down to Macon to do it. See, they want you to prove yourself and then they want to jump back on the bandwagon.
Meantime, I recruited a new band because I knew I was going to need a permanent backup group to do my music justice on the road. I met J. C. Davis in Burlington, North Carolina, and put a band together behind him: Bernard Odum played bass, Nat Kendrick played drums, Roscoe Patrick played trumpet—you can hear him real good on “You’ve Got the Power,” and Les Buie played guitar after Bobby Roach left. Les was a great guitarist. When we cut “I Don’t Mind,” he made a mistake, but it sounded so good I told him to play it again for the final recording. Albert Corley, the alto sax player, was the greatest who ever lived; he beat Cannonball and everybody. He used to roll out of his bed, pull on his clothes, and tune up his horn coming down the stairs. He’d walk in still putting on his tie and blow everybody out of their seats. Fats Gonder and I still played keyboards. It was a good band. Later, though, J. C. started to think it was his band and jumped ship and went with Etta James.
As soon as I re-signed with Universal, they set up a schedule of sixty one-nighters in a row. I think I had one day off in that time, a Sunday. During this tour I went into Masters Studio in Los Angeles and recorded “I Want You So Bad.” The new set of Flames was on the record and so was Johnny Terry, who came in and out of the group for the next several years. In January 1959, King released the Please Please Please album and at the end of the month I recorded “Bewildered” and an instrumental called “Doodle Bug” at Beltone. I didn’t tell Mr. Nathan about the tape of “Bewildered” I’d already done; we just recut it from scratch.
It’s funny, the past was starting to come back on me, even in those tunes. “Bewildered” was a song I used to sing when I had the Cremona Trio as a kid, and “Doodle Bug” took me back to my days in the woods, sitting under the house, playing with the doodle bugs. I was thinking about my mother a lot, too; figuring she must have heard about me from some of my aunts. I thought she might try to get in touch with me now that I was getting well known. She didn’t, and for a long time I felt bad, but that wore off. I understood that she had been going through quite a strain, and I thought it was more important to see her than to wait for her to come to me.
From Uncle Perry, the man who helped my father steal my mother away, I got an address in Brooklyn: 312 Monroe Street. It was all he knew about where she was. On a cold winter day I went out there to a kind of old, funny looking two-story building, the kind that gives you a weird feeling. I walked up the steps and rang the buzzer. Nobody answered. Somehow I couldn’t leave. I stood on the stoop and waited for the longest time. I hadn’t dressed warm enough, and by the time it started getting dark I was shivering. It didn’t really look like anybody was living there, but I waited anyway. Finally, I gave up. The next day I was back on the road. I told Uncle Perry to keep sending the word out through the family that I wanted to find my mother.
I thrived on the one-nighters, but I was having a lot of problems with the Flames—some drinking problems and a drug problem. J. W. Archer was the really difficult one. He was difficult and I tried to keep him from drinking, and every time I tried he wanted to jump on me and fight. One night we were in Charleston, South Carolina, and I’d had enough. I said, “Let’s have it out right now. We’re gonna fight barefisted.” He was a big fella, weighed about 195, while I weighed about 135. We started duking it out. When he saw it wasn’t going to be so easy to take me, he ripped a coatrack off the wall, an iron strip with four or five coat hooks in a line on it. He gripped it in his fist so that the hooks stuck out between his fingers. Every time I hit him with my fist, he hit me with that rack. I was bobbing and weaving, but he still busted me above the eye with that iron. That was the only way he could fight me. I still beat him to the floor.
I’m not a violent man, but I know how to be violent. I can beat a big man like J. W. real fast. I take a big man, pick him up, and run with him. Run him into the wall and near break his back.
Sometimes you have no choice. After a show in Kansas City, during this time, some of the cats who were in the gangs around there jumped on my bass player, Bernard Odum, outside the Streets Hotel and beat him up pretty bad. When he managed to run away, they turned on me. They were mad because their girlfriends were crazy about us on stage, and they wanted to show us up in front of them.
“You better leave me alone, fellas,” I said. Usually, in situations like that, when they looked at me funny I’d put the eye on ’em and they’d leave me alone, but this one fella who had jumped on Bernard wouldn’t back off. He was cursing me and threatening me, so I said, “You hobo your way over here, I’m going to pay it back.” “Hobo” means when somebody jumps on you they get a free ride, like a hobo jumping a train. He came at me, and I hit him thirty licks just like lightning. As a boxer I was always real fast with my hands and my feet. I finished him off with the old bolo, Kid Gavilan’s punch, the one where you wind up like a whirlwind and throw it like an uppercut. Anywhere it lands, it hurts. After that, none of the other cats wanted to continue the discussion.
Lots of entertainers face problems with cats who want to fight ’em in front of their girlfriends. You just have to live with it and go on. Problems within the group are another thing; you’ve either got to solve the problems or break up, or solve them by breaking up. The problems with the Flames came to a head one night in Oakland, California. I had a big argument with ’em about discipline in the group. They didn’t like it, so I left and they stayed. You can say they quit or they were fired, either way, but it was the end of the second set of Flames. It was unfortunate because they were all very good singers.
When I got back to Macon, I found out from Mr. Brantly that Universal had me booked into the Apollo for a week beginning April 24. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been booked in there—I had a number 1 record—but the date couldn’t have come at a worse time: no Flames and only a couple of weeks to get ready. People were advising me to put it off, to wait until I had a new group and had toured with them for a while. I said no, I was going to put on a good show no matter what. I figured the more people who could see me on stage and see what I could do, the more it would help me. A hit record gave me the opportunity to be in front of more of them, and in better places. You take your opportunities when they come.
I went on to New York with the band and started putting things together. Johnny Terry was still with me, and I had a young man named Baby Lloyd Stallworth who used to work around the Palms in Hallandale. He shined our shoes or went out for food, whatever needed doing. He must have been twelve years old at the time. When we left the Palms I asked his mother if he could go on the road with us and work for us. I promised her I’d look after him like a son, and she let him go. I sent him back to Hallandale when the first set of Flames broke up, but after I started touring he came to live in my house in Macon to help Dessie while I was gone. In New York I started showing him the routines, too. He had seen them so often on the road that he picked them up real fast. Then, while we were rehearsing one day, I noticed J. C. Davis’s valet, Bobby Bennett, hanging around. I stopped the band.
“Can you dance?” I asked him.
“Not as good as you, but I can dance some,” he said.
“Show me.”
I gave the band a downbeat, and they played a little vamp while he did some mashed potatoes. He was pretty good, and he was a nice-looking cat besides.
“Okay,” I said, “you open at the Apollo Theater next week. It took me five years to get there, it took you five minutes. Congratulations.”
I told Johnny to take him back to the Hotel Theresa, where we were staying, and to rehearse him around the clock in the routines. I was starting to think we might actually get the thing together in time. Then Byrd showed up.
After the breakup of the original Flames, Bobby and I stayed in touch. I had told him about a job in the King stockroom, and he had been doing that. I asked him to let me know about any good new tunes that came in in case I wanted to cut them. Pretty soon Mr. Nathan had him doctoring songs. If they received a tape they thought was promising, Gene Redd and Bobby might rework the melody a little bit or change the lyrics and cut one of the King artists on it. One time they received a tape from a couple of unknown songwriters named Sam Moore and David Prater, who later became Sam and Dave. The song was called “The Sweetest Letter.” At that time Bobby didn’t know how people felt about having their music messed with; he worked on it, and it eventually became a hit for Little Willie John as the flip side of “Sleep.”
Mr. Brantly had called Bobby and told him about the Apollo gig. When he showed up, I wasn’t surprised to see him. I knew he still had performing in his blood. All I said to him was “Byrd, we open in two days.” He said: “Let’s get to rehearsing.”
I was a seasoned performer, but under the circumstances I was a nervous wreck. The Apollo was a special place: It was the venue for black entertainers; it made a lot of people, but it broke a lot, too. For one thing, the schedule was grueling. You got there at ten o’clock in the morning because the first show was at eleven, and you might do as many as six or seven shows in one day. You ate there, slept there, and kept rehearsing when you were not on stage. The audience was very tough, too, and if they didn’t like you, they let you know. Immediately. They made you work. The other performers made you work, too. Everybody was always trying to outdo everybody else. When you went on, you tried to make it impossible for anybody to follow you. I think that’s why its standard of entertainment was so consistently high. We thought about all this as we rehearsed. And then we rehearsed harder.
Little Willie John was headlining the bill that week, and he was hot. He had a string of hits: “All Around the World,” “Let Them Talk,” “Talk to Me,” and “Fever.” He was on King Records, too, and they were lucky to have him because Mr. Nathan had once turned him down. He was recommended to King at the same time as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. When Mr. Nathan signed them, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Little Willie John. But Little Willie John was a determined cat. He walked into King Records one day and said: “I want to sing.” Mr. Nathan said, “What can you sing?” He said, “I can sing anything.” And he started singing right there in the office.
They signed him up right then and there, and he was their pet for a long time. With all his hits, he frequently headlined at the Apollo.
The Upsetters, fronted by Lee Diamond now, were on the show, too, and I knew they could play. The rest of the bill had the comedy team Butterbeans and Susie, Verna White, the Senators, Vi Kemp, and me. To set the record straight: the first time I played the Apollo was on that Little Willie John bill the week of April 24, 1959. When Sandman Sims, who was the Apollo’s stage manager for a lot of years, says he gave me a shirt and shoes to use on amateur night, he’s telling stories. I never competed on amateur night there.
By the time we got ready to hit the stage for the first time that week, I had whipped the group into shape, but we were way down on the bill. Little Willie John didn’t want us to come on anywhere near him—he knew what we could do—so they had us opening the show.
When they got through playing the Apollo theme music and the curtain went up, I came out smoking. The audience went wild. I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast. I put them on Little Willie John’s case right away. During that time I closed my set with “Please” and came out with a red suitcase that said, “Please Please Please” on one side and “Baby, Take My Hand” on the other. I fell to my knees and one of the Flames patted me on the back, threw a coat over my shoulders, and helped me off the stage. Little Willie John couldn’t hardly handle it. When we came off he said I was using tricks to get over.
We kept rehearsing between shows, getting sharper and sharper. We were getting over so good that Frank Schiffman, the owner of the Apollo, promised to move us up to the co-starring spot before the week was up. We really thought we had it going then. Here I’d started out the week with almost no show and was fixing to move up to the co-star slot. But something went wrong. On the fourth or fifth day we were still opening the show, and it didn’t seem right. The audience had let us know how it felt, and when the Apollo audience lets you know, it lets you know in no uncertain terms.
I decided to make a move. After one of our sets, while the audience was still stomping and cheering, I turned to the fellas.
“Pack up the stuff,” I said. “Everybody grab a piece. We’re leaving.”
Bobby grabbed a cymbal and the snare stand, Nat Kendrick took more of the drum kit and Fats took some stuff. The Flames each took a piece of equipment, and we walked off the stage and straight up the aisles, heading for the door. Mr. Schiffman saw right away what we were doing. He stopped us at the back of the theater.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he said.
“One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, Mr. Schiffman,” I said.
“You hear what those people are doing? We can’t even get the other act on the stage with all the noise they’re making.”
“That’s why we ought to be co-starring, sir,” I said.
He took a piece of drum out of one fella’s hands and started back down the aisle with it. “As of now, you are co-starring,” he said.
The next day we went on in the slot just before Willie John. He couldn’t hardly stand it. He was a balladeer, and I ate him alive. He could sing, though. Later on I got where I could outsing him, too, but back then I didn’t stop just to sing—I danced and sang and played keyboards and drums and did everything. He was mad because I beat him out. I can understand a fella getting mad; nobody wants to be beaten out.
By the time the week was up I felt like the Apollo was my natural home. We’d done so well that we were already booked to make the rounds of the other big theaters on the circuit—the Howard in Washington, the Royal in Baltimore, and the Uptown in Philly—and I figured that the Regal in Chicago would fall into line pretty soon. The day after we finished at the Apollo I was in my room at the Theresa, fixing to leave for Washington, when somebody knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
I was gathering up my belongings, not really watching the door. I heard it open, real slow, but that was all. After a minute, when I realized how quiet it was, I turned around. There was a small woman standing there, not young, not old. I hadn’t seen her since I was four years old, but when I looked at her I knew right away it was my mother. I had no idea she was coming to see me that day or any day.
“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”
She started to smile, and when she did I could see she’d lost all her teeth. All I could think to say was, “I’m going to get your mouth fixed for you.”
She didn’t say anything. She just walked toward me. We hugged, and then I kissed my mother for the first time in more than twenty years.