Wer war/ist Lin & Kliff Record ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD und mehr

Lin & Kliff Record

"This is the kind of stuff that you need to be doing. Forget the hillbilly and country and western."
Alta Hayes, counter person at Dallas’ Big State record distributors, playing an early Elvis Presley Sun release to Joe Leonard, 1954.

Producer and label owner Joe Leonard of Gainesville, Texas, has recorded a wide variety of music over the years, from his first session in late 1953 to the present day, not only that he waxed for his own Lin Record label from '53 to '68, but also the material he leased to other labels like MGM and Imperial through his Leonard Productions. His output ran the gamut from honkytonk & western swing to pop, rhythm and blues, rockabilly and rock 'n' roll, with an occasional spoken word, children’s record or gospel release thrown in, too.

There were hits and misses, though more hits in a musical sense than a commercial one. Lin Records enjoyed only one real chart hit, Ken Copeland’s Pledge Of Love in 1957. There are memorable sides from Lin’s early country sessions and some strong pop releases, but unquestionably Leonard's lasting significance, as a producer and as a label owner, stems from his early grasp of the commercial possibilities of rockabilly and rock 'n' roll and his subsequent exploration of those styles, initially long before most sensed their viability.

Bear Family has explored Leonard’s legacy previously in single CDs devoted to Lin’s most important artists Buck Griffin (BCD 15811) and Andy Starr (BCD 15845) and in a 4-CD box set (BCD 15950) that follows the winding trail of Lin Records and Leonard Productions from 1953-1968. This collection focuses, however, on the best of Lin’s rockabilly and rock 'n' roll sides (with a few sides from sister label Kliff) from 1956-60, with representative sides from the gutsy, earthy, early work of Griffin and Starr, and the assured, tight college sextet the Strikes (also featured on Bear Family’s Imperial Rockabilly set, That'll Flat Git It, Volume 12, BCD 16102), to the smoother, pop-tinged sounds of Jerry Fuller and the Tu-Tones and the hot instrumental blues of the Atmospheres, as well as the late period rockabilly of David Ray -- to name only a few.

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Joe Leonard, Jr. eased into the record business cautiously, as a sideline to broadcasting. Born into a newspaper family in Gainesville, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border in Cooke County, in 1919, he took an interest in his father’s paper, the Gainesville 'Daily Register', from an early age. After attending the University of Texas in Austin and war service in Europe for which he won the Bronze Star and other citations, he returned to Gainesville and became advertising manager for the 'Daily Register'. In 1947, with his father's help, he and friend Louis Pitchford, who had previous radio experience, started radio station KGAF in Gainesville.

Although KGAF featured local live music from the start, it was not until the fall of 1953 that any of the station's on-air talent caught Leonard’s attention enough to pique his interest in recording. A record label did not initially enter into his thinking. He hoped to secure a recording contract with a major label for a local teenaged country singer and songwriter named Wayne Jetton, but started Lin Records and recorded Jetton himself when his efforts failed. Over the next few months, with no real focus and no real success, he recorded several other local artists, Woody Mitchell and Bill Switzer, as well as Gene Armstrong's Texas Nite Hawks from El Paso.

In the spring of 1954, Leonard came across a bluesy country singer and songwriter from Oklahoma whose talent inspired a much stronger commitment of time and money: Buck Griffin. He signed Griffin at a time when the country music scene was in a rather awkward transition; the market was sluggish and rhythm and blues was increasingly impacting the music. The early Griffin sessions reflected this uncertainty, from R&B-cum-western swing with horns to fairly mainstream country, although always informed by Griffin's blues/gospel tinge and intelligent writing. Griffin's first session was a split one with Merle Shelton, brother of the more famous Bob & Joe Shelton, but thereafter Leonard focused on Griffin until he discovered another, younger singer working the Texas-Oklahoma border area whose style also reflected the changes in the country dance hall scene at the time, Frank Starr (Frank Gulledge), a Korean War vet from Arkansas.

Leonard came across Starr around the time that Alta Hayes, counter person at Dallas' Big State record distributors and a tireless early booster of Elvis Presley, steered him toward Presley and his fusion of hillbilly and R&B as the coming thing. "She really beat the drum," he recalls. "This was something new. It wasn't country, it wasn't R&B. It sold both ways." At the tail end of 1954, Leonard recorded Starr's first session as a response, an odd session that was as much pumped-up novelty country as it was rockabilly but was nevertheless clearly impacted by Presley's early Sun sides.

Neither Starr's nor Griffin's early releases made much impression in the few markets that Lin covered at the time, nor did Leonard's steady flow of other releases, like the country duets of Louisiana father and son Larry and Louis Crabb, Dallas session stalwart Paul Buskirk's sides with vocalist Freddy Powers, drummer-crooner Bill Peck's inaugural Lin pop series release, or obscure black singer Bill Simpson's one-off Rhythm and Blues Series release. Country singer-songwriter Mitch Torok and his wife, songwriter Ramona Redd, who would develop a short-lived but fruitful songwriting and publishing relationship with Leonard, brought Leonard the rocking East Texas white vocal group the Four Mints in the fall of 1955, but it was not until Presley hit big nationally with RCA, and other major labels began looking for similar sounds and artists, that Leonard's earlier forays into rockabilly and rock 'n' roll began to pay off.

In March 1956, Leonard began an arrangement with MGM Records that called for Leonard to produce sessions by Starr (now Andy Starr to avoid confusion with another Frank Starr), Griffin and Fort Worth pop singer Margee Robinson, which MGM would release, distribute and promote. Although the partnership fizzled in a matter of months and proved disappointing from a business standpoint, it produced some fantastic music. Sessions were held at Fort Worth's Clifford Herring Studio and the first of these, on March 26, yielded four swaggering, broody rockabilly sides by Starr, two of which, Rockin' Rollin' Stone and She's A Going Jessie, were penned by Oklahoma songwriter W.D. Patty (with Starr co-credited on the former). Starr was ably backed by guitarist Larry Adair, bassist Lyman Macklin and ubiquitous Dallas-Fort Worth session drummer Bill Peck. Griffin's inaugural MGM session six weeks later was equally satisfying, a spare, bluesy, mature session featuring ace western swing guitar veteran Lefty Perkins (who really was left-handed and played that way). Griffin's first MGM coupling, the classic Stutterin' Papa b/w Watchin' The 7:10 Go By, is included here.

Further sessions followed in the summer. Griffin's thoroughly bluesy Jessie Lee and Bow My Back come from a July session featuring an unidentified backing band (possibly Perkins on guitar again), while Starr's absolutely searing September '56 session found him backed, both vocally and instrumentally, by a sextet from nearby North Texas State College in Denton, the Strikes, who had just come to Leonard's attention. He would record the group on its own in a matter of weeks. The Strikes' bassist and sometime singer Don Alexander wrote both Round And Round and One More Time, which boasted fine Carl Perkins-influenced guitar work of Albert Cornelius behind Starr's almost Little Richard-esque vocals.

The Strikes had begun life as a honky-tonk trio, but evolved into a rock 'n' roll band with the advent of Elvis. The band featured an effective and distinctive vocal trio, led by Willie Jacobs, with rhythm guitarist Ken Scott on tenor vocal and Paul Kunz on bass vocal; lead guitarist Cornelius, bassist Alexander and drummer Paschal Parsons rounded out the group. The Strikes would prove sadly short-lived, breaking up by the fall of 1957, after Willie Jacobs was drafted following graduation from North Texas State and other members went their separate ways, but they cut a few classic, enduring tracks in the meantime. The band's first release, Lin 5006, from the winter of 1956-57, was Lin's first in a number of months, the flow of releases interrupted by the MGM leasing deal. Those first two sides, among four of the bands eight surviving sides which became part of a leasing agreement with Lew Chudd of Imperial Records, which Joe Leonard forged after the MGM deal went south, appear on 'That'll Flat Git It, Volume 12' (BCD 16102). Three others, not issued at the time, appear here. From the first session at Herring's, November 18, 1956 came an alternate version of If You Can't Rock Me that featured its author Willie Jacobs on solo vocal throughout, unlike the originally issued version, which featured the trio (unfortunately dubbed 'The Three Pelves' by Leonard), and Don Alexander's Come Back To Me, the only of the Strikes sides to feature Alexander on vocal. From a session the following February came the far less interesting, far more poppish My Poor Heart, written by Alexander and Ken Scott.

It was clean-cut Fort Worth youth Ken Copeland's version of Ramona Redd's pop song Pledge Of Love, issued on Lin 5007 in early 1957, that led to Leonard's deal with Imperial. Lew Chudd contacted Leonard as the song began to get regional attention and, after Chudd picked the song up and issued it on Imperial, it rose to #17 on the pop charts, inspiring several cover versions. Ultimately, Leonard's relationship with Imperial proved no more satisfying than that with MGM had, but Leonard was undeterred. In the coming months, he leased material to both Kapp and Dot, and the music he was recording became increasingly pop. He cut lush sessions by Ramona Redd and Fort Worth singer Dixon Holman, among others, at Dallas' Commercial Recording Corp. and even Andy Starr's followup at Herring's to the hot Strikes-backed session was somewhat watered-down and pop-ish. The success with Copeland, whose contract he had sold to Chudd, led him to sign similarly clean-cut, Pat Boone-mold singers like Holman and Jerry Fuller.

Jerry Fuller, who was going to school at Arlington College (now the University Of Texas at Arlington) when he came to Leonard's attention, was not just clean-cut, but multi-talented, a strong songwriter as well as singer who would later prove a talented producer, too, writing and producing late sixties hits for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. His Lin recordings mixed promising rock 'n' roll sides like I Found A New Love, included here, with pure pop and soft-shell rock. The loping, hard-hitting I Found A New Love featured some wicked, hot guitar from J.B. Brinkley, like Lefty Perkins a longtime western swing veteran who had worked and recorded with the Lightcrust Doughboys, among others. Brinkley would record for Leonard as a solo artist himself, inaugurating Kliff, Lin's subsidiary during 1958, and was a standout on many of the label's sessions during 1957-58. Mother Goose At The Bandstand, from early 1959, one side of Fuller's last Lin release, was seemingly cut in either Fort Worth or Dallas (and not in Houston, as has been reported), with Brinkley again on guitar. Fuller's Lin tenure ultimately ended on a slightly sour note when Fuller began writing and recording for the West Coast-based Challenge Records while still under contract to Lin. Litigation followed and, after several of Fuller's Challenge sides made the pop charts, Leonard issued Fuller's ten Lin sides on Lin's only LP release.

Ken Copeland's stay with Imperial was brief. After he was unceremoniously dropped from the label by the fall of 1957, he and Leonard renewed ties. Leonard leased two sides to Dot in early 1958, including a surprisingly effective cover of Jimmy Logsdon's Where The Rio De Rosa Flows. Seemingly cut at Herring's with J.B. Brinkley and company, the song found Copeland affecting a black-inflected style that walked a fine line between being thoroughly convincing or sounding like the singer had just walked off the set of 'Amos And Andy'. Dot's interest in Copeland quickly waned, but Leonard issued two further singles on Lin during 1958. Fanny Brown trod similar stylistic ground to Where The Rio De Rosa Flows -- again teetering awkwardly along a line between sounding black-influenced and sounding like some medicine show minstrel routine -- and again featured J.B. Brinkley on electric guitar. Copeland, of course, has gone on to success as a televangelist that has eclipsed his early foray into secular pop and rock 'n' roll.

In late March 1958, just a few days after the comedy/vocal trio the Chuck-A-Lucks cut a bizarre nite club, quasi-rock 'n' roller Disc Jockey Fever at Herring's with hot guitar from J.B. Brinkley and baritone sax from North Texas State jazzer Jodie Lyons, Leonard brought Brinkley (recording simply as Jay Brinkley), Lyons and others back into the studio to record two sides that would christen Lin's new (and short-lived, as it turned out) sister label Kliff. One side, a catchy, pop novelty, featured the Pitty Pats, the singing sisters of future country star John Wesley Ryles, but the flip was the aptly named instrumental Guitar Smoke, with Brinkley's wicked electric guitar underpinned by Lyons' bari and Tom Gwin's drums.

Brinkley's Kliff release was followed by the first of two by a Duncan, Oklahoma based singer named Ray Smith, who recorded for Leonard as David Ray. Ray sent Leonard a demo tape recorded in Duncan in late '57 that was something of a throwback to early rockabilly, with a strong hillbilly bent. Duly impressed, Leonard brought Ray and his band to Herring's in January to record Ramona Redd's ballad I Am A Fool and his own uptempo blues Lonesome Baby Blues. Included here, the excellent latter track, featured Joe Dean Evans' lead guitar. Ray, one of the most exciting artists Leonard ever signed, was the right man at the wrong time, however, even though his second release was even better than the first. The fantastic Kliff double-sider Jitterbugging Baby b/w Lonesome Feeling, from early 1959, included here, was cut at Nesman's Studio in Wichita Falls with Duncan fiddler Charles Dewbre providing some incisive lead guitar and future bluegrass stalwart Buck White on piano. Ray died in 1997.

Former Strikes bassist Don Alexander had gone into broadcasting after the group's breakup, but he maintained a songwriting relationship with Leonard (who had astutely sensed early on that publishing was a far more lucrative and lasting enterprise than recording). Leonard especially liked his Knee Shakin' and also wanted to record Ramona Redd's Big Bopper knock-off She Giggles. Hoping to replicate the Bopper's sound on the latter, he sent Alexander to Bill Quinn's Gold Star Studio in Houston to record it and Knee Shakin' with the house band that backed J. P. Richardson on his Big Bopper recordings, including legendary saxist Link Davis, guitarist Hal Harris and pianist Doc Lewis. She Giggles was a forgettable novelty, but Knee Shakin' was great Texas rock 'n' roll with the Gold Star band in top form. Lin 5018 was released under the name Don Terry and Alexander afterward opted to remain in broadcasting rather than pursue music.

The Strikes' unfortunately brief lifespan could potentially have caused Leonard to shy away from signing any other college bands, since the chances were high that any such band wouldn't last beyond its members' graduation. However, during 1959-60, he signed a number of student bands: the Atmospheres, a Dallas area high school group; the Tu-Tones and Steve Wright & the Lin-Airs, both Tyler Junior College bands, and the Jokers, a quintet from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He also signed a youngster named Butch McClarey, who was, Leonard recalls, from Arkansas and his older brother was then a Gainesville school teacher. McClarey recorded two singles for Kliff, the second of which was inexplicably issued under the name Don Curtis (although the vocalist on the swaggering Rough Tough Man, from that second release, sounds somewhat like a different vocalist than the one featured on the other three sides and two different vocalists may in fact have been involved).

The Tu-Tones, from Tyler, were a teenage group spearheaded by vocalists-guitarists Larry Mackey and Joe Whitfield and managed by Mackey's brother John. They also included bassist-guitarist Ronnie Goodrich and drummer Mike Post and their sole Lin single, lightweight but catchy, showed the influence of both Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Saccharin Sally, written by John Mackey and Dallas songwriter Jerry McCollum, found them in the latter bag. Not surprisingly, the Tu-Tones were short-lived and members drifted out of music; Larry Mackey, who suffered from a congenital liver condition, died a few short years later.

Also from Tyler were students Steve Wright and his musical partner Mike Danbom. Danbom's father Dan owned Tyler's KTBB radio; he and Leonard were friends and socialized, and Wright and the younger Danbom came to Leonard's attention through this friendship. Wright, a rhythm guitarist and vocalist under whose name singles were issued, and Danbom, a lead guitarist and songwriter, with bass player Dave Ward and either Danbom's brother Steve or Duane Anderson on drums (and occasional ringers like pianist Robin Hood Brians), were able to hone the instrumental tracks on the equipment at KTBB, then layered vocal tracks on at Dallas' Commercial Recording Corp., which Leonard had used extensively since Ken Copeland's Pledge Of Love in late 1956 -- and used almost exclusively during 1959-60. Most of Wright's output was fairly pop-ish, but Wild Wild Woman is a notable exception, a fine rockabilly track written by Wright and Danbom with a backing vocal riff lifted from Gene Vincent's I Got A Baby. Like the Tu-Tones, Wright and Danbom disbanded not long after these recordings were made. The Danbom brothers and Dave Ward left music, but at last word Steve Wright was still leading bands in North Texas.

The Atmospheres were even younger than Wright, Danbom and the Tu-Tones when Leonard signed them just short of graduation from high school in the affluent Dallas suburb of Highland Park in the spring of 1959. Young as they were, they were a talented, tight group and this set features two of the four instumentals they cut for Lin at CRC in June of '59. The Fickle Chicken was uptempo, guitar-driven Texas blues, probably featuring Clarke Brown, Jr. (the band's other guitarist, who shared lead duties with Brown, was Bill Kramer), while drummer Jack Allday wrote Telegraph, which featured fine keyboard work from Ken Waldrop. Waldrop also doubled on bass whenever bassist Ben Hill switched to vibraphone and Steve Voekel, the band's vocalist, occasionally played bongos. The Atmospheres -- their other Lin recordings, Kabalo and Caravan more fully justify the band's name -- broke up before the summer of '59 was out as bandmembers left for various colleges. Although most members left professional music for good, drummer Jack Allday went from the Atmospheres to the legendary white Texas blues band the Nite Caps and continues to lead his own R&B-cum-jazz combo in Dallas at this writing. The Atmospheres' sides were among several Lin recordings that Joe Leonard leased to London Records for issue in the UK (and, in some cases, Canada), including others by Steve Wright, Andy Starr, etc.

The latest recording in this set comes from another Dallas combo, the Jokers, a group fronted by bassist Dave Spencer and boasting a fine alto saxist in Bob Welz. The instrumental Dogfight, credited to Spencer, also featured an unidentified electric guitarist (other Jokers included Ray Cochran, Joe Cook, Don Hosek), though both sides are essentially features for Welz. The Jokers, too, don't seem to have lasted much beyond leader Dave Spencer's early sixties' graduation from SMU.

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Although Joe Leonard's recording activities slowed down after 1960, he continued to produce occasional sessions, and to release on Lin material that he was unable to place elsewhere. In particular, he continued to push his early and most enduring discoveries, Buck Griffin and Andy Starr, whom he cut sessions with through 1962 and '63, respectively. He also released three singles in 1964 by the elusive Buddy Holly disciple from Amarillo, Ray Ruff. The last Lin sessions occurred during 1967-68 and yielded releases by Trella Hart, a Dallas nite club and jingle singer, and Honee Welch, an R&B influenced singer from St. Jo, twenty miles west of Gainesville. Hart's session, as well as Welch's first date and some earlier Andy Starr sides, were cut in Nashville with the cream of Nashville session men, though Welch's second session, which produced the last Lin single, took place more appropriately at Robin Hood Brians' studio in Tyler.

Joe Leonard sold KGAF around the same time he issued the last Lin sides and began a second, fruitful career as a brokering consultant. Semi-retired since 1984, he has kept a hand in the recording business through his publishing properties and occasional recording projects, like the 1993 David Ray session. In 1997, he issued a CD by Dallas singer Dave Tanner on his new Big L label. Many of the best Lin sides have remained in print, too, thanks to leasing agreements with Bear Family reissues. The recordings heard here, vital and exciting four decades after they were waxed, stand as a fascinating legacy, a testament to Joe Leonard's cautious tenacity and his eye and ear for talent.

KEVIN COFFEY
Fort Worth, Texas
May 1998

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