Love Is Strange

Sonny & Fran

Love Is Strange

(E. Smith & M. Baker)
Jonware Music Corp. - BMI
Producer Sonny Throckmorton
Chalet Records Record No. 1060
Chalet Record Co., Inc. 812 16th Ave. S. Nashville, Tenn 37203
1969

Jerry Shook, Sonny Throckmorton, Pete Drake

Sonny is certainly Sonny Trockmorton, but it's not known who is Fran.

James Fron "Sonny" Throckmorton was born April 2, 1941) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. He moved to San Francisco, California after graduating from college, and first played rock & roll before switching his focus to country music at record producer Pete Drake's suggestion. By 1964, he played bass guitar for Carl Butler and Pearl Known primarily for his songwriting, 

Throckmorton has had more than 1,000 of his songs recorded by various country singers. He has also had minor success as a recording artist, having released two major-label albums: The Last Cheater's Waltz in 1978 on Mercury Records and Southern Train in 1986 on Warner Bros. Records. Throckmorton is a member of the Nashville Songwriters' Hall of Fame, and has been awarded Songwriter of the Year by both Broadcast Music Incorporated and the Nashville Songwriters Association International.   [Wikipedia]

This is probably his very first recording as a singer, prior to the pair of singles issued by Pickwick's subsidiary Hilltop Records in 1970 and 1971.

Chalet Records was headed by Bobby Bobo assisted by Chuck Howard.

Christene

 

 Little Hank
& The Rhythm Kings

Rhythm & Range 45-101
(Nashville, Tennessee - 1956)

Little Hank - Christene 

Little Hank - The House of Pink Lights

This is jazz star Bennie Ross "Hank" Crawford's first record which he made for a little-known label in Nashville while studying music at Tennessee State University in the mid-fities. The Memphis-bred saxophonist directed the Tenessessee State Collegians jazz band and fronted his own combo during college. Little Hank & The Rhythm Kings played jumping dance music six nights a week at the Subway Lounge in Nashville's Printers Alley. According to Crawford, "Christene" was written, produced and bankrolled by Roy Hall, the hillbilly boogie pianist who wrote "Whole Lot Of Shakin' Going On". Crawford supplies sax and vocal. He left Nashville in early 1958 to join Ray Charles's group, soon becoming Charles's bandleader and eventually signing his own deal with Atlantic Records.

Bio (Wikipedia)

Baby Love

Baby Love

This is a track from the budget album Modern Sound "Straight From Detroit Via Nashville" comprising ten Motown covers by uncredited artists. 

Alpha Zoe Hall

Six are unmistakably by Alpha Zoe (two of these six songs were also issued on the parent Hit label. 
☞ ☞ ☞ ☞  ☞ Six by Alpha Zoe

For more info about Alpha Zoe see  Alpha Zoe Hall and Hit Records, Nashville by E. Mark Windle.

Extract :

“When we recorded at the Columbia studios, you wouldn’t believe the talent that played in there. Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph and others. All union players. It was like music heaven. The musicians were very particular about getting the right sound. On one occasion the drummer went around the studio hitting the trash can and other objects so that he could get the sound needed for the record. We had some fun at those sessions. I never got to meet any of the white singers as we always recorded on different days. We didn’t even use the same doors; I came through the back along with the ladies that did back-up for me.”

Alpha Zoe discography (probably incomplete)

    Hit #31 Alpha Zoe - You beat me to the punch
    Hit #36 Alpha Zoe as "Gleams" - He's a rebel
    Hit #38 Alpha Zoe as "Dacrons" - Don't hang up
    Hit #41 Alpha Zoe - Keep your hands off my baby
    Hit #44 Alpha Zoe - Everybody loves a lover
    Hit #54 Alpha Zoe - Let's turkey trot
    Hit #55 Alpha Zoe as "Clara & Cleftones" - Our day will come
    Hit #57 Alpha Zoe as "Dacrons" - He's so fine
    Hit #61 Alpha Zoe as "Connie & Clara" - I will follow him
    Hit #65 Alpha Zoe - Da doo ron ron
    Hit #65 Alpha Zoe as "Clara Wilson" - Foolish little girl
    Hit #70 Alpha Zoe - Hello stranger
    Hit #80 Alpha Zoe as "Dot Hester" - My boyfriend's back
    Hit #81 Alpha Zoe as "Dacrons" - Then he kissed me
    Hit #121 Alpha Zoe as "Mary Jones" - Walk on by
    Hit #124 Alpha Zoe as "Peggy Gaines" - Every little bit hurts
    Hit #229 Alpha Zoe - Lover's concerto

Sonya and the Avons sing for Riceland Rice

Sonya and the Avons
sing for
Riceland Rice

Pressed by Southern ¨Plastics in Nashville in 1964. A promotional record for Riceland, a company founded in 1921 with headquarters in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

Produced by Noble-Dury, a nationally known advertising and public relations firm. Noble-Dury reigned supreme for a 30-year period that spanned from the 1940s to the mid-1970s. The agency is widely regarded as the most successful ad firm in Nashville’s business history, and for a time, it even ranked as the largest agency in the Southeast. Noble-Dury represented leading national and regional consumer brands, as well as banks and insurance companies, but the firm’s reputation and fortunes largely hinged on relationships with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut.

Les Beasley (of The Florida Boys gospel group) and Jan Doughten (or Jane Dowden?), vice president of Noble Dury, developed and co-produced the television show Gospel Singing Jubilee, an hour-long television program hosted by the Florida Boys that featured a number of other Southern gospel groups as guests.  The Gospel Singing Jubilee, which became the most watched gospel program on television, began in 1964 on a Sunday morning . The show ran for twenty-five years.

Backing Sonya, the lead singer, are certainly The Avons, whose first taste of the studio was an initial one-off hire for budget label Hit, providing uncredited backing vocals to Peggy Gaines’ cover of The Marvelettes’ “Playboy” (Hit 17).  Much more info on The Avons by E. Mark Windle here

I'm fairly confident that this is the same Sonya of Sonya & the Capris on Scarlet (1959) and Sonya (alone) on Dot (two singles in 1961 and 1962 and also (why not?) Sonya And The Sensations (Dont Feel Like The Lone Ranger) On Gend (1963)

 

May the new year bring me some info about the mysterious Sonya and (am I asking too much?) a picture of her...

Riceland Rice ad from 1965

Another Cup of Your Sugar

Another Cup of Your Sugar

Barry Tiffin is probably best known for "Candy Bars for Elvis", a recitation number; here he is on hiw own Sugar Records, out of Nashville, produced by Troy Shondell in 1970.

Thanks to Doug Firebaugh, who had an album produced by Barry Tiffin, I can bring to light some details about the man : 

The underbelly of Music City harbors countless hustlers and hucksters parlaying real or imagined music industry connections into “services” offered for a price to dreamers with a few bucks to squander. Often a grey area between sincere and scam, Barry Tiffin had just such a racket, but his father’s illness brought him home to Roanoke. A classified ad placed in a 1975 High Point, North Carolina newspaper reveals the angle: “For an appointment and additional information concerning the Professional Music Services of Tiffin Music Enterprises International, of Nashville, Tenn., please contact our office suite at the Ramada Inn in Roanoke, VA.”

Twenty-year-old Doug Firebaugh was referred through a mutual friend to Tiffin, but he entered the arrangement with eyes open. “We had an attorney involved in this,” recalled Firebaugh. Money was paid to have Tiffin to produce an album and contact record labels on the artist’s behalf. Three solid days in Roanoke’s K.A. studio resulted in an unadorned document of Firebaugh’s autodidactic style of songwriting. Firebaugh plays both piano and guitar throughout, with the only addition being an unnamed Nashville pedal steel player who drove six hours for the session before turning around going home. The clip-art cover of the resultant LP positions Tiffin’s Sugar Records imprint far more prominently than the artist’s name.

Also, an article from The Bee from Danville, Virginia (July 3, 1975) related:

Supervisors in Botetourt County may have succeeded in silencing a bigger-than-Woodstock rock concert planned for this historic Western Virginia community in September. the promoter had claimed the Sept. 19-21 weekend concert would draw 800,000 spectators and gross $20 million. Promoter Barry Tiffin said Wednesday he has all but given up on going through with promoting the three-day rock performance which he believes would have outdrawn the now famous Woodstock concert. Tiffin made the statement in the wake of an emergency ordinance quietly adopted by the board of supervisors May 21. He said the ordinance makes Refugees Get Senior the concert an impossibility. Tiffin, who promoted a concert at the Roanoke Civic Center last week, said he worked on plans for the Botetourt County rock festival for 18 months.

But Board Chairman Harold Wilhelm said Tiffin never approached him about the concert, and that he has never seen the promoter. He said the emergency ordinance was not directed at Tiffin's proposed concert; that the supervisors had been working on an ordinance regulatning outdoor musicals for some time

Not surprisingly, Barry Tiffin is one the Candidates For Immortality listed by Irwin Chusid in his book "Songs In The Key Of Z"

I Cried

Baker Knight
& The Knightmares


I Cried

Kit Records, Inc. SO 901

Al Bubis Productions
1956

Thomas Baker Knight, Jr.
(1933-2005)

Baker Knight's songwriting has overshadowed his long career as a singer of rock 'n' roll, pop and country. Born of Scots ancestry in 1933, Knight grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where he attended high school, spent one year at the University of Alabama (after serving in the US Air Force for three years) and became a technical illustrator after a course at a local art school. He had learned to play guitar in the school orchestra, B.B. King being his first idol. In 1955 Knight formed a rock 'n' roll band, Baker Knight and the Knightmares. Soon they recorded their first single, "Bop Boogie To the Blues"/"Little Heart", for the Nashville-based Kit label, owned by Alan Bubis. A second Kit single, "Bring My Cadillac Back" (1956), sold well enough to be picked up by a major label, Decca, and might even have become a national hit, had it not been banned by many radio stations that saw the disc as a free commercial for Cadillac.
...more reading...

Call Off The Wedding

Nancy Oxley



Call Off The Wedding

Nancy Oxley, her husband Ralph, sons Jimmy, David and Joey Oxley, daughter Donya and her husband Clay Claxton formed Country Touch who has performed country music favorites and original songs around Tennessee for a number of years.  All seven in the group grew up in Lavergne, Tennessee and later moved to Lebanon. But they still considered Lavergne their home.

Nancy Oxley passed away in May 2002

Custom recording from 1974, mastered by Nashville Record Productions. NRP became the first independent mastering studio in Nashville (competing with Columbia and RCA), and was a huge success with independent labels.

Sonya And The Capris

Sonya And The Capris
Scarlet Records Inc.
45-999
(1959)


Extra Extra



Private Party

Label owned by Noel Ball, Nashville's first and most flamboyant rock n roll disk jockey. Noel Ball produced the two following singles in 1961 on Sonya at the FAME Studios in Muscle Schoals and issued on the Dot label (Noel also was the head of the Southern Division of Dot Records) :

16235 - Sonya - Little Red Rooster / We Kiss In A Shadow - 1961
16356 - Sonya - For Your Love / Seventeen Years One Dark Night - 1962

Sonya who? Her last name remains unknown and no info has be found.  Unknown as well are the  Capris apparently unrelated to the many other recorded Capris.

Note the early Buzz Cason song composition ("Extra Extra") published by Conmay Music, probably a printing error for Conmar (a Bill Connor-Kenny Marlowe joint venture)

Matchbox

Hit Records was a Nashville-based label founded in 1962 by producer William Beasley which specialized in releasing cover versions on 45 RPM singles usually sold for a list price of 39 cents (less than half the price of the major label originals) in five-and-dime stores and supermarkets.

Here on lead vocal is probably Bobby Russell fronting The Jalopy Five

Follow this link and be ready for a really nice surprise, courtesy of the tireless Drunken Hobo (a/k/a Apes Ville)

Matchbox

Elvira

June LaSalvia

June LaSalvia, then June Dussia, was already a nationally recognized authority in age group gymnastics when she came from Florida to Nashville, Tennessee in the mid-seventies.  She is noted as one of the first yogis in the Nashville area.

She wrote some songs in the seventies recorded by country artists such as Charley Pride, Sammi Smith or Dolly Parton's younger sister, Stella. 

Aerobics music was the trend in 1982, as noted by Richard Harrington in an article published by The Washington Post (May 22, 1982) In Tone With the Music :

The fastest selling discs in any record store these days are not likely to be by Pat Benatar or Rod Stewart or John Denver; it's Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons, Joannie Creggains and Carol Hensel who are hot now.

What they're pitching are not Rocky Mountain highs, but sleek and sexy thighs. And, with the exception of Simmons, these newest recording stars aren't even singing, they're barking out instructions as direct as any marine drill sergeant: SHAPE UP! ...

And indeed, in 1982, June La Salvia recorded her own exercice program, backed by The Lean Jeans Band.  Her "Country Aerobics" album, "How The Waist Was Won", was produced by Sidney Singleton at The Singleton Sound Studios and issued on Plantation Records.

  Elvira

Lunar Flip

Joann Thomas



Lunar Flip (vocal)

Lunar Flip (instrumental)

American Voices Records 1
1970

Recorded in Nashville and

produced by Ray Pennington

Joann Thomas and Gus, her husband

 

Singing duet Gus and Joann Thomas have been for many years, direct from the WWVA Original Jamboree in Wheeling. before coming to WWSM (Lebanon, Pennsylvania) where Joann has a show twice a week.

Johnny B. Goode

Stacy Lynn Ries

(10 yrs. old)

Johnny B. Goode

Nu-Sound Records 81N-447

1981

Born in 1970, Stacy Lynn Ries is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bob Ries of Fort Wavne, Indiana.  The youngster began appearing on television at age 3 and recording records at age 4. when she also began appearing with her own band.   She has appeared twice at the Indiana State Fair, and in 1976 she performed before President Gerald R. Ford at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Indiana.   She also sang on her own weekly radio program. Stacy has appeared with such well-known singers as Ernest Tubbs. Faron Young. Justin Tubb. Loretta Lynn and Rex Allen Jr.   Her records include. "The Kindergarten Class Convoy." Be My Valentine" and "The Easter Bunny Hops Along." and several others.

What About Me

Lorry Peters

What About Me

Don Gibson, Acuff-Rose, BMI

A Statue In A Window
Boudleaux Bryant, Felice Bryant

Hickory 45-1228
1963

Hickory Records signed Lorry Peters to a recording contract in a move taking the traditonally country label further into the pop field.  Lorry Peters recorded just one 4-songs session for Hickory in Nashville in late January of 1963. This is her second single.

Brown-eyed and brown-haired, Lorry (or Lorrie) Peters was born in Middletown, Conn., May 30, 1932. She was graduated from Syracuse University where she majored in radio.  Singing was her earliest ambition. She took coaching lessons when she was three and appeared on kiddie talent shows for several years afterwards.

Miss Peters, while working as a secretary in New York, recorded a jingle for the Ansco Company. Ray McKinley, director of the New Glenn Miller Orchestra, heard the commercial and asked who had recorded it.  Later, when he was looking for a female vocalist, he remembered the girl and the voice and he signed Miss Peters immediately.  She can be heard on several tracks from a couple of Glenn Miller Orchestra albums released by RCA Records at the end of the fifties.  

 

Note : I've added "Lady Is A Tramp" from her big band period to the Hickory single in the following archived file :

Lorry Peters.zip

Baby, Baby, Baby (You're Too Young For Me)

Floyd Wilson

Baby, Baby, Baby

(You're Too Young For Me)

RCA Victor 47-6188

1955

From his second recording session at RCA Victor Studio in Nashville, in March 1955.

Floyd Fisher Wilson was born in 1925.  Tennessee songwriter and performer whose name is mentioned in print between 1953 and 1956, and then nothing...

Floyd Wilson penned one of Darrell Glenn's best recordings,"I Think I'm Falling In Love With You" (Valley Publishers) and Carl Smith had a hit with his song "Go, Boy, Go".  Other well known artists such as Martha Carson, Cowboy Copas, Homer and Jethro recorded his songs.

I wonder if he also the same Floyd Wilson who later produced records in Nashville for Omar Records in the late sixties (recording artists : Bobby Parrish, Carroll Dyer, Linda Cassady)

A Floyd Wilson discography can be found here    Not listed by Praguefrank is a record issued as by Babs (Barbara Cross?) And Floyd on RCA in 1956. (Do You Love Me?)

Am I Blue

Lois Lee & The Rockets

Am I Blue

Clarke & Akst, Remick Music Corporation (ASCAP)
Cool Records no #

1964

Lois Lee / The Rockets discography

Cool 711 — The Rockets Featuring Lois Lewsader : Special Delivery  / The Rockets : Why Oh Why
Cool 712 — The Rockets : Always Alone    /  Lois Lee & The Rockets : Year 'Round Love
Cool No # — Lois Lee & The Rockets : Am I Blue /  The Rockets : Moovin’’N’ Groovin’

Despite the fact that this Cool label has a Nashville address and may have been linked to the Globe Studios in the same town, I'm pretty sure that the band was from the Chicago area, at least Lois Lee was.

Lois June (Lewsader) Troglia

Lois June Lewsader was born in 1934 in Danville Township, Illinois.  In 1965, she married James W. Troglia on June 12, 1965  . They celebrated 45 years of marriage in June 2010,

Other than that, not much information.   There was several singers of the same name. And there is one who recorded for Okeh Records in 1959 who has a voice strikingly similar, a such point that I think she is possibly the same singer.  Any thoughts ?

 "I've Got It Bad For You Baby"  (Okeh 7119)

I'm So Grateful

The Lollipops

I'm So Grateful 

(Robert Riley, Tree Pub. Co. BMI)  

Mixed-Up 2 Production

Miki 1017
Nashville, Tennessee
1964

Songwriter Robert Riley was a member of The Prisonaires on Sun Records. ( 'Just Walking In The Rain').  The song was written in 1952 with Johnny Bragg.  Both were then hosts of the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville.  Released in 1957, Robert Riley wrote songs for Excello Records in Nashville and for the King and Todd labels who held sessions in Nashville, his hometown.

He would work on musical arrangements for Ernie Young at Excello, and he had an income-generation role too: blues singer Jerry McCain told interviewer David Nelson how Young, ''had this black dude there. His name was Robert Riley... What he would do is sit there and listen at the songs and everything, then he'd pick out a verse that he says is not strong enough. But in turn he writes him a verse that he want to insert in there so he can get writer's royalties. So Mr. Young says 'Jerry, Robert said it was a good song but the second verse ain't strong enough'. I said 'I ain't changing nothing', and Mr. Young said, 'well Jerry, see, there you go again. You supposed to go along with me'''.

Then he was signed by Tree Publishing (Jack Stapp and Buddy Killen) as writer and, later, employee..

Buddy Killen had mixed feelings about whether he did right to hire Robert Riley for Tree Records and for his Dial label. On the credit side Riley did write some good songs and, crucially, he introduced singer Joe Tex to Killen at the start of the singer's career. But then, on the debit side, Killen remembered: ''When Riley was released from prison he started coming around to Tree hoping to get some of his songs recorded. I signed him to Tree as a writer and ultimately hired him to work for the company. One day I asked him to take a check to Jack Stapp over at the radio station. The check for $1000 was for royalties from a Roger Miller song. Later that day... both the check and Riley were nowhere to be found. He had forged a signature, cashed the check, and gone to a convention in Chicago... I was furious. I'm going to have you arrested', I said. Riley began to cry and said that I was only going to prosecute him because he was black. That was utter nonsense and he knew it... I later found out that he had sold some of his songs for pocket change while under contract to write for Tree''

 ★ 

Other artists on the Miki label includes Lynn Britt, The Downbeat Seven and Hal & Jean Gilbert.The label was possibly owned by Riley or by Tree Music.

Across The Street From The Chapel

The Charms

 

Across The Street From The Chapel

D. Barnett, Candle Glo Music, BMI

Candle Glo S-5012

Candle Glo Records 

Bennie Dillon Bldg, Nashville, Tenn.

1964

The Charms, three girls from Caryville, Tennessee were graduates of Hacksboro High School.   The Charms have been singing together since they were small children, and have appeared many places over East Tennessee.  In 1963, they won first place at the state-wide Beta Club Convention talent show in Nashville.  They had their own rock' n roll band.   Margie Bullock played the electric guitar, Ann Harness piano and Susie Harness the drums.  

Among the members of the band accompanying the Charms on this record were Boots Randolph, Bobby Moore, Pig Robbins and The Jordanaires.

Rhythm Un-Huh

Maurice White

Rhythm Un-Huh

Mila Pride, Cedarwood BMI

Pride 1003

1908 Lebanon Road, Pho. AL-6-0019 Nashville, Tenn.

1960

Mila (Shoemaker) Pride was born circa 1903 in Nashville, Tennessee and was an operator-clerk for the service of the Railway Company, Tennessee.  She also wrote songs in her spare time.  And she managed to recruit singer Maurice White for her vanity Gold and Pride labels.  "Rhythm Un-Huh" was previously issued on Gold in 1958.

Maurice White sounds here more like a Globe Studios song poem artist.  He also recorded, as Marty Wyte, a more energetic "Queen of The Mardi Gras" (issued three times, on Shammy, Revue and Brosh Records).  

A Maurice White/Marty Wyte discography can be found here (Rockin' Country Style)

Big Butter And Egg Man

Butter Ball Paige

Big Butter And Egg Man

B. Paige, J. Jacobs, J.P. Copsey

Charayjim Music BMI

Rose 109

produced in Nashville by Ray Petersen

Late sixties

Hubert McBride Paige 

1921-1988

Hubert McBride Paige is the birth name of Tommy "Butterball" Paige who was a Nashville steel guitar musician, song writer and lead guitar player in the Ernest Tubb Band, until he was fired by the band leader in 1949.  He recorded for Bullet Records in the early fifties and was doing some platter talk  in various towns (Miami, WBAL, Baltimore, WNAO. Raleigh, N. C, where he opened up the  "Tobacco Barn Drive-In Grill," named after his DJ program.

In 1968, he was named A&R director for the tiny Rose Records and manager of the affiliated publishing company, CharayJim Music. located at 801 17th Avenue South, Nashville, which also was the address of Sims Records. 

One Ray Petersen produced these Rose releases.and might have been the label owner.

Granny in a Mini Skirt

Corny Critters

Granny in a Mini Skirt

Jesse M. Dyas, Sound Corp. Musc, ASCAP

Produced by Don Lewis

Relco 2096

One of the Caprice Records subsidiaries located at 907 Main Street, Nashville, as were Checkmate and Soundmate.  In a early stage, Caprice Records was closely related to Buzz Cason's Creative Workshop Studios founded in 1970.   Buzz Cason sold his interest in the firm to Charles Pohlman, a Nashville businessman.  Don Lewis presided.

In 1982, Don Lewis was sentenced to six months in prison for wire fraud, and to perform 200 hours of community service in return for his guilty plea of the charge.

 

The wire fraud stemmed from allegations that Caprice, a custom-contract label, bilked some 450 unknown singers around the country out of approximately $3,000 each in return for record "deals."  Lewis falsely promised in the contracts that the singers would get free auditions, have demos sent to Nashville producers and be provided trips to Nashville for recording (Billboard, 25 September 1982)

Two interesting pages about the song-sharking business, which was I believe quite flourishing in Nashville in the seventies  :

•  Beware of the song shark!
• http://www.songpoemmusic.com/shark.htm