By Daniel Cooper
Along Came Ruth
“Did you see my punk rock boots?” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Ruth Brown, a.k.a. Motormouth Maybelle of the John Waters movie Hairspray, was wondering if I had taken proper note of her stagewear at a recent show at Tramps in New York. Performing to help celebrate the release of the book Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone History of Women in Rock (Random House/Rolling Stone Press), Brown had appeared at Tramps on a knockout bill that also included Wanda Jackson, Ronnie Spector, and Lucinda Williams, among others.
Two days later, I met with Brown, hoping to talk to her about a pair of albums she recorded in Nashville in the early 1960s—although Brown, about to turn 70, probably has a more diverse and active career right now than she did back then. Her lively current album, R+B=Ruth Brown, has been well-received, and her 1996 autobiography, Miss Rhythm (Donald I. Fine), took first prize in the annual Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards. It’s also to be made into a feature film.
Sadly, Brown had scarcely had time to savor these triumphs when her cowriter on Miss Rhythm, Andrew Yule, died recently, adding one more name to a lengthening list of close friends whom Brown has outlived. Passionately dedicated to seeing that those friends’ contributions are not forgotten, she helped establish the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, and onstage she enunciates the names of those who are gone like a battle-toughened general conferring medals on the honored fallen: Brook Benton. Clyde McPhatter. LaVern Baker. Dinah Washington. Sam Cooke.
In that same spirit, Brown met me at the door of her hotel suite and immediately launched into tales of WLAC, Randy’s Record Shop, and, especially, one of Nashville’s own departed greats: deejay John “John R” Richbourg. Like so many of her generation, Brown is quick to credit the ’LAC jocks for the incalculable support they gave the early R&B industry, and she so respected John R that when a tribute was held for him at the Grand Ole Opry House in 1986, Brown showed up and sang.
“You could hear that station all the way up to the East Coast,” she says. “And at that time, that was the only outlet that we really had. And I think [John R] was very responsible for the South as well as the Eastern states hearing the very early R&B records.... Before I went in the Atlantic studios to do my first record, I heard John R. I heard him, you know? So when he started playing my stuff, I knew I had made it.”
Brown recorded for the R&B independent Atlantic from 1949 to 1961, during which time her succession of hits (including “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” which could have been the hippest cover the Judds ever did if they’d thought of it) helped turn Atlantic into the preeminent R&B label of the postwar era and made Brown perhaps the top female R&B singer of the 1950s. During those years, her career took her to clubs and warehouses and auditoriums all over the country, including a 1953 stop at the Ryman Auditorium, where she appeared on a bill with Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, and George Shearing. In her book, she tells how the Ryman audience initially booed when Shearing, who is white and blind, appeared onstage with two black musicians, only to have Shearing politely lecture the crowd into shame for their over-attention to visual detail.
Of course, Miss Rhythm more often performed in the North Nashville ballrooms and nightclubs—especially the New Era, where her stage vibes nearly caused a disaster one time. “The balcony almost came down,” she says. “People were dancing and having such a good time.”
In 1962, her disgruntlement with Atlantic and a friendly push from singer Brook Benton led Brown to switch labels to Philips, a Mercury affiliate. Mercury A&R chief Shelby Singleton (nowadays the maverick potentate of the Sun Entertainment complex on Belmont Boulevard) brought her to Nashville to record two albums with a crew of Music City players. After the more regimented hit-factory methods she experienced in the Atlantic studios in New York, she found the atmosphere on 16th Avenue almost shockingly congenial.
“I remember how very kind these people were to me,” Brown says. “I get tearful when I think about it, ’cause that was a whole lot of years ago. I remember that they were exceptionally kind to me, and warm.... They said, ‘If you don’t feel comfortable with something, let’s talk about it.’ ”
Brown’s first Philips album, Along Comes Ruth, featured covers of such straight-up R&B hits as Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Cry, Cry, Cry” and LaVern Baker’s “Jim Dandy,” as well as a rambunctious remake of “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” enlivened by a young Jerry Kennedy’s raunchy guitar work. Kennedy, who would go on to produce Roger Miller, Jerry Lee Lewis, and even Reba McEntire, among others, was session leader on Along Comes Ruth, as revealed in the cheerfully overstated vernacular of the 1960s label copy: “Orchestra Conducted by Jerry Kennedy.” Though long out of print, Along Comes Ruth remains one of Brown’s favorites among her own works. “Going down there and working with these great musicians.... If you hear that, there’s a different feeling. Just a whole, wonderful feeling.... I think it’s one of the best things that I have ever done,” she says.
Her second Nashville album (likewise out of print) is the only gospel album Brown has ever recorded. “I expressed this desire to do a gospel album. And [Singleton] took me down there, and we did this Gospel Time. Which is the only time I’ve ever sung gospel. But it was done then like more mainstream, ’cause Ray—what’s his name, that does ‘Ahab, the Arab’—Ray Stevens was playing keyboard. He was on the organ. We had a great time.”
Brown was especially thrilled when John R, who had taken a personal interest in the project, visited during one of the Gospel Time sessions. “John R came into the studio while we were recording,” she recalls, “and he suggested that I do a song called ‘Walk With Me Lord.’ And that’s in that album. And when I came down to do the tribute to him, that’s the song that I sang.”
Otherwise, Brown mostly hand-selected the material she sang on Gospel Time, drawing on her long memory of music heard in the churches and on country radio during her childhood. “Because living in Virginia in the war years, the early war years, I heard...all of the good country & western. I fell in love with it,” she says.
Indeed, like many black singers of her generation, Brown emphasizes the thematic similarities between R&B and country (“it was the one other form of music that really was like life set to music”) and laments the fact that so few black singers have had successful, long-term careers in country music. She speaks of her early love for singers like Hank Williams and Red Foley, and she says she often closes her show with the Willie Nelson hit “Always on My Mind.” “I am a great fan of Willie Nelson.... Every time he does the Farm Aid things and all, I keep up with him,” she says. “He’s a very giving individual. And he is so pure and from the heart. And I watched him in films—I don’t miss anything.”
On the other hand, given her background, her perspective on contemporary country remains a bit skewed. For instance, a few years back she was flabbergasted to learn from singer Cleve Francis (whom she knew then as her heart doctor) that the former teen rocker Jimmy Bowen had become a prominent producer in Nashville. Brown knew Garth Brooks’ nemesis from a slightly different setting. “I worked with Jimmy Bowen,” she says. “Years ago, in a Alan Freed Show.”
Still, for Ruth Brown, Nashville remains a city marked less by the power plays of men like Bowen than by the fainter imprint left by the likes of Joe Henderson, a Nashville soul singer whose 1962 smash “Snap Your Fingers” is part of Brown’s current repertoire. Looking back, she speaks fondly of her many overnight stays at Brown’s Hotel on Jefferson Street, and she recalls with robust humor even nightmare gigs like one at a long-forgotten North Nashville venue—was it the Ballerina Ballroom?—where the PA failed, killing the show. With the enraged crowd rioting behind them, Brown, Jackie Wilson, Wilbert Harrison, and organist Doc Bagby fled through the back door as rain cut loose overhead.
“I was drenched wet,” she says. “Jackie Wilson was drenched wet. And we got up on that bus and had to lay on the floor, on our stomachs, ’cause the people were beatin’ on the bus. Nashville. I have great memories.”
“I was drenched wet,” she says. “Jackie Wilson was drenched wet. And we got up on that bus and had to lay on the floor, on our stomachs, ’cause the people were beatin’ on the bus. Nashville. I have great memories.”
