[INTRO]
- [DATES & PERSONNEL] - [SOLO RECORDINGS] -
[BACKING TRACKS] - [FAKES]
Dates
& personnel
Information given
on the various lp & cd releases of these tracks is very inaccurate & confusing,
but I'll try to make some sense of it here…
Dates
The recording details
given on album liner notes for the Youngblood tracks are often variations of the
following:
Produced
by Johnny Brantley & Lee Moses
Engineer: Abe Steinberg
Recorded at Abtone
recording studios, New York 10 June 1966
This has been considered false information because the Youngblood "Go go shoes" single has a release date of 1963 on the label. But this seems not to be the actual release date of the single:
According to a Fairmount discography page at freespace.virgin.net/rachel.wilson/fairmount.html the label released their first title in march 1963, and closed shop in january 1965. I've found two labels with higher catalog number than the undated "Soul food" single (1022), namely 1023 & 1024, and both have 1963 as the date on the label. So thus both of the Youngblood singles appear to have been released in 1963.
There are
several things that suggest that the two singles were actually
released much
later than 1963.
1. Kees De Lange wrote in the book "Plug Your Ears" that on the single "Sweet Thang" is a reference to Miniskirts and on the single "Go Go Shoes / Go Go Place" Boogaloo is mentioned, both of which became popular in New York around 1965. "Go Go Shoes" also mentions "the Jerk", another dance that became popular circa 1965 (read more about it in the Rosa Lee Brooks -section)
2. A third Youngblood single exists, which doesn't feature Hendrix, "The grass (will always sing for you) / Wooly Bully" was released as Fairmount 1016 (no date on label), which falls between the catalog numbers of the other two singles. The B-side was originally released by Sam The Sham And The Pharaohs in march 1965 on the single "Wooly Bully / Ain't Gonna Move" (MGM K13322), so how is it possible that a Youngblood cover would have been released on Fairmount before the original release came out?
3. There is a version of the "Soul food (that's a what I like)" single on a black & blue fairmount label, with a 1963 date on the label. As this single has a higher catalog number than the single with Youngblood's version of "Woolly bully" this date clearly can't be correct.
4. A test pressing for an Evie Sands 45 "Picture Me Gone / It Makes Me Laugh" (Cameo 413) was sold on eBay in 2003. According to the seller "The label is blank although you can make out a faint impression of a Lonnie Youngblood Fairmont release", thus this disc was being pressed around the same time as one of the Youngblood 45s (Fairmount was a subsidiary of Cameo Parkway). The test pressing was in a plain sleeve with "5-31-66" written on it, thus suggesting it dates from 31st of May 1966.
5. The 1963-dates on the labels have been printed separately from the credits. These move around on the various labels, sometimes well apart from the credits, sometimes overlapping them. Also, the date has been pressed using a different ink (look closely at the pic below), all of this suggests that the labels were pre-printed with a 1963 date and the credits on the various single labels were added apart. Could be that Fairmount had seriously over-estimated the demand for their product and were stuck with a big surplus of labels, printing new ones with a correct date would have meant loss of money.
So it seems that the dates on the Fairmount labels aren't correct, nor the info that Fairmount would have been closed down by January 1965. A US record guide also gives the dates for these singles as follows:
"Go
go shoes / Go go place" Fairmount F-1002 - 1966
"The grass (will always sing for you) / Wooly Bully" Fairmount F-1016 - 1966
"Soul
food (That's a What I Like) / Goodbye, Bessie Mae" Fairmount F-1022
- 1967
Exactly when these tracks were recorded is unknown, but they are probably from around the same time as the other existing Brantley sessions tracks ie from sometime early 1966.
The label of the Billy LaMont "Sweet thang" -single gives J.Brantley as the Producer, so that is correct.It doesn't mention Lee Moses. I suspect he participated in the "post-production" of these tracks, that is the wiping and overdubbing part when they were prepared for release in the 70s on lps such as "Moods".
It's also been thought that the tracks were recorded in Philadelphia, the Fairmount label being based in that city. Lonnie Youngblood said in an interview published in Univibes issue #24, asked about whether these tracks were recorded in Philadelphia, that they were recorded in New York on 8-track at Abtone recording studios, Broadway between 55th and 56th [street] on the second floor.
It is likely that the songs weren't recorded with a contract for release already in hand, but instead completed first and then circulated around record companies to find someone interested in releasing them. The fact that Brantley produced songs appear at least on such labels as Maple, 20th Century Fox, Samar, Bran-T and Trip supports this theory, plus the fact that "Sweet thang" was only released some 2 years after it was recorded.
The engineers name seems correct too, as Abtone probably is a play on the engineers name "Abe", if this was a small studio the owner might well have been working as an engineer without much or any other staff employed.
But t hese same recording credits are also given for "fake", Billy LaMont, The Icemen & Jimmy Norman tracks, and songs that appeared on the Fairmount singles, which makes taking them seriously a bit hard. Obviously Brantley wouldn't have been too keen on giving accurate info about these recordings as he was trying to pass them along as something which they weren't, so the accuracy of any of the information given by him remains suspect. It's definately hard to believe that all these different songs would have been recorded during one day, but since there is no other information available there is no other option but to belive that at least some ofthem were recorded on the date & location given.
personnel
Musicians appearing on the tracks are usually given as:
Jimi
Hendrix: guitar
and vocals
Lonnie Youngblood: saxophone
and vocals
Herman Hitson: guitar
Lee Moses: guitar
I find it very doubtful that Lee Moses or Herman Hitson play on any of these tracks. All confirmed information suggest that they are strongly connected to the "fake" songs instead, see that section for more information. Why they got credited on so many releases is a complete mystery. The actual musicians on these recordings that I know of consist of:
Jimi
Hendrix: guitar
and vocals
Lonnie Youngblood: saxophone
and vocals
May Thomas: background vocals
Ace
Hall: possibly bass on some tracks
Napoleon
Anderson (aka Hank anderson): possibly bass on some tracks
See the recordings -section to see details of the mixes & musicians.
