Excerpt from Preston Lauterbach's 'Chittlin' Circuit':
"(Rhythm 'n' Blues band leader Lucky Millinder) stood up for his people. Back in 1940 Down Beat magazine predicted that Negro orchestras were on their way out, which provoked a passionate response from Lucky in an Amsterdam News (black-American newspaper) editorial. "Can Down Beat tell us what hit swing song past or hit swing arrangement the white bands have featured that colored bandsmen or arrangers haven't had something to do with?" he wrote. "I get sick and tired of hearing would-be white critics on colored music telling us how bad colored music is, and yet praising white bands to the skies for playing the Negro's creations."
And here's something I just read when I randomly flipped open Charles Farley's University Press of Mississippi tome
'Soul Of The Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland:
"Meanwhile, (Duke Records president) Don Robey was beginning to recognize the value of integration in the record industry. In February 1957 Billboard discontinued its 'Rhythm-Blues Notes' column and replaced it with a column called 'On the Beat.' Writer Gary Kramer offered this rationale: "No abstract categories prevent the teenager today from buying records by Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins or Little Richard at one and the same time. The trade, therefore, must revise, and perhaps abandon, some of the old boundary lines."
AS WE SAY, SOME GREAT AUTUMN READING WHILST CURLED UP BY THE STOVE, FIREPLACE or A LARGE DOG.
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