Lloyd Price was born on March 9th 1933 in Kenner, Louisiana, not far from New Orleans. He was the eighth of eleven children. Like many young kids, he was given music lessons, learning piano and trumpet. He also sang in the local church choir. Price has spoken about learning all the songs on the juke-box in his mother’s “Fish ‘n’ Fry” in Kenner, singing and dancing along to the music. His performance skills were developed early! Price and his younger brother Leo then played together in a band, along with some school-friends. They were still teenagers but they got a regular local slot playing at Morgans, a local club.
Price wrote an eight-bar blues called “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, inspired by a local DJ’s radio jingle, which he was singing one day in his mother’s shop, when in walked Dave Bartholomew. Mr Bartholomew was a well-known band-leader and A&R man, who was always on the look-out for new talent. He had discovered Fats Domino singing in a local New Orleans bar and had launched Fats’ career with Imperial Records. Now he discovered Lloyd Price in a fish bar and sent him to Specialty Records. The owner Art Rupe was suitably impressed and signed Price to his label. Bartholomew then began setting up the recording of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” as Price’s first single.
A month or two later, Price went into Cosimo Matassa’s J&M studio, to be faced with Dave Bartholomew’s band, guitarist Ernest McLean, bassist Frank Fields, drummer Earl Palmer and tenor and alto saxophonists Herbert Hardesty and Joe Harris, and Fats Domino on piano! Price must surely have been a little daunted but he gave it everything. All those years practising in the fish bar finally paid off!
The single was released in 1952, spending seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart. It was also the R&B Record of the Year in both Billboard and Cashbox magazines, and went on to sell over a million copies.
In an interview with Alice Clarke, Lloyd Price has spoken of the impact of his song (Classic Rock magazine, January 15th 2016): “Before that record, if a bunch of black kids and a bunch of white kids were walking down the same side of the road, the black kids would have to cross the road to the other side: you didn’t talk to each other, you didn’t look at one another, you lived separate lives. That’s how it was. After Lawdy Miss Clawdy, suddenly black kids and white kids were coming together through music. White kids were buying the record, dancing to the record, and that was the catalyst for the first youth movement.” Price became a pop music idol for young teenagers, probably the first Black singer to do so.
Image: Publicity Photo (Wikimedia Commons)
Sadly, Price wasn’t able to build on his success, because he was called into the army and sent to serve in the Korean War. When he came back home, he was a bit older and a lot wiser. He bought out his contract with Specialty Records for a thousand dollars and teamed up with a friend Harold Logan to set up his own record label KRC (Kent Record Company). What a brave move for a young Black musician. At the same time, he left New Orleans and moved to Washington DC, signing for ABC-Paramount Records. He was obviously a brave and ambitious young man.
Between 1957 and 1959, Price recorded a series of songs with ABC-Paramount Records, including “Personality”, “I’m Gonna Get Married” and “Stagger Lee”, which all topped the R&B Chart. “Stagger Lee” also topped the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Chart and sold over one million copies. In the UK the song reached number seven on the Pop chart. The song is not a Lloyd Price original. It was an old folk song (with a variety of names) relating the murder of Billy Lyons by ‘Stag’ Lee Shelton in St Louis, Missouri in 1895, which was recorded many times, including a well-known Country Blues version by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928. Price changed the shooting to a quarrel and hit number one. For some listeners, Price’s version became a message song relating to the struggle for freedom from oppression.
Ironically, “Stagger Lee” was originally the B side of the release, recorded in just one take. Price explained what had happened to Alice Clarke in the Classic Rock magazine article mentioned above: “I really wasted no time on the recording of Stagger Lee. I needed a B-side to a song I’d written called You Need Love, which I thought was just about the greatest thing I’d ever done, so I did the arrangement, got it down in one take and forgot about it. Two months after the record came out, it still hadn’t done anything, and a DJ from Spokane, Washington called up, said, ‘Stagger Lee’s the hit here.’ We flipped the record and by the next afternoon we had sold 2,000 copies of Stagger Lee and that was the beginning of a three-and-a-half-million run.”
When Price’s contract with ABC ended in 1963, he once more took control of his career. With his partner Harold Logan, he founded Double L Records, in order to release his own records. He also signed other acts, including a young singer called Wilson Pickett, whom he heard singing at a show in Flint, Michigan.
Price also saw an opportunity to develop live music. He bought the famous jazz club Birdland on Broadway in New York and renamed it the Lloyd Price Turntable. He had played at the club in April 1964 and could see that there were very few venues in New York where R&B stars could play. He booked James Brown, Maxine Brown, The Coasters, Chubby Checker, Patti LaBelle And The Bluebelles, King Curtis and many others.
His own songs were less successful now and, when his partner and friend Harold Logan was murdered in 1969, Price decided to take a different road. Price moved to Africa, where, working with his friend Don King, he helped to promote Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle boxing match. He also produced the Zaire 74 music festival in Kinshasa.
Price toured Europe in 1993 with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Gary U.S. Bonds, playing at Wembley Arena in front of 11,000 people. It was his first live performance in the UK. Twelve years later, Price performed with soul legends Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler and Ben E. King on the “Four Kings of Rhythm and Blues” tour in 2005. Price received the Pioneer Award at the sixth annual Rhythm and Blues Foundation ceremony in Los Angeles in 1994 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame on March 9th 2010, his 77th birthday, in New Orleans.
John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com 2018 (Wikimedia Commons)
So why is Lloyd Price such an important figure in the history of modern music? There are three main reasons.
He took the baton from Fats Domino and handed it on to Little Richard and Elvis Presley. His songs formed the template for New Orleans R&B, his performances set the style for those who followed him. Little Richard and Elvis Presley both recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1956; so did Fats Domino, Ronnie Hawkins, Carl Perkins, Eric Burdon and many others.
Then he showed how a singer could take control of his or her career and build a music-based series of businesses. From 1952 Price issued a string of classic singles, released twenty-seven albums, owned three record labels and a music venue on Broadway. The Lloyd Price Turntable Club became the template for later well-known businesses. “It was the biggest club in town. We had 378 seats with a cabaret licence and it changed the way New York worked in terms of clubs – the stage came out of the floor, we had disco lights, strobe lights, we had a recording studio and we recorded all the shows. It was a magnificent operation. It also provided the prototype for the Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood. We had young adults eating hamburgers and french fries and listening to music. That’s where the idea for that type of thing began.” (Classic Rock magazine, January 15, 2016).
Finally, he showed how folk music, jazz, blues and R&B could evolve into something that would appeal to young people everywhere: Rock & Roll. And, as a spin-off from this appeal, young Black people in the United States and elsewhere grew in confidence. Lloyd Price understood what he and his contemporaries had achieved. “The black and white kids kept dancing together” (Classic Rock magazine, January 15, 2016). For him “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” had ignited a spark, four years before Rosa Parks sat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. “This music played such an important role, not just in the US but around the world. This record caused the bell to ring for civil rights. People heard the call through the beat of the music.”
Lloyd Price died in New Rochelle, New York on March 14th 2011. In 2015, Price’s collection of essays on the African American experience was published with the interesting name of “Sumdumhonky”.
