From left: Wayne Butler, Jerry Tuttle, Kenneth Buttrey, Mac Gayden and Charlie McCoy
Before he was a Nashville music legend, before he was a Grammy-winning and hitmaking country instrumental recording artist, before he was a first-call session musician who backed an array of rock, pop, country and R&B stars, harmonica virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy was a young rock singer backed by Nashville’s hottest rock band, the Escorts.
During the 1960s, Charlie McCoy & the Escorts released eight 7-inch singles of blues- and soul-influenced rock ’n’ roll — one for Cadence Records and seven for Monument. But that part of McCoy’s career has been mostly obscured, because all but two of those cuts have long been out of print and never available on CD — until now. Earlier this month, highly regarded archival label Bear Family Records released Screamin’, Shoutin’, Beggin’, Pleadin’ — The Rock ’n’ Soul Recordings from 1961-69, a 29-track retrospective of McCoy’s recordings with the Escorts.
In addition to all the aforementioned singles, the collection includes McCoy’s first rock release for Cadence — “Cherry Berry Wine” backed with the blues shuffle “My Little Woman” — which was recorded before the Escorts were formed, with accompaniment from a number of Nashville’s top session musicians. Screamin’, Shoutin’, Beggin’, Pleadin’ also includes nine tracks that originally appeared on McCoy’s first album for Monument, 1968’s The World of Charlie McCoy, which featured backing from his bandmates and others. Two instrumental tracks round out the set, credited to The Gas Lantern featuring Charlie McCoy — which McCoy says was “basically the Escorts.” The sides were released by the Rising Sons label as a one-off single in 1969, and the B-side (“Mach I”) was one of the first tracks recorded in Nashville to feature a Moog synthesizer.
As did most bands in the ’60s, McCoy and the Escorts included a number of covers in their live performances and on their recordings, and covers make up more than half the collection. The band’s 1962 cover of Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” for Cadence foreshadowed blues covers by British bands like The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds that would be released a few years later.
What is probably most revealing about the retrospective is that in addition to being a world-class musician, McCoy also is a strong, soulful vocalist. “Charlie is a master of rhythm and blues,” Escorts guitarist Wayne Moss tells the Scene.
The collection also showcases guitarist Mac Gayden’s emergence as a songwriter of note. (He’s best known for co-writing the evergreen hit “Everlasting Love” with Buzz Cason.) Of the 11 original songs included, Gayden was the writer or co-writer on seven of them, including the titular tune, which opens the album. The idea for a collection of McCoy’s rock and soul recordings came from Russ Wapensky, one of the reissue producers on the project. He first met McCoy while working on a Fats Domino box set for Bear Family.
“I knew Charlie was on Monument, so I went to Bear Family and said, ‘I don’t think anyone has touched this stuff from that time and this would be a great subject,’ ” Wapensky recalls. “They worked up a budget for it and said, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ So I contacted Charlie, and he was kind of surprised. He said that was the one part of his career that no one really looks at. Hopefully that will change with this CD.”
“It’s amazing,” says McCoy of the Bear Family collection. “This is the music I did for eight years while [Monument owner] Fred Foster patiently waited for me to do something commercial. I love this stuff because the Escorts were a great band. To have this preserved is really cool.”
To say the Escorts were great is somewhat of an understatement — the group’s level of musicianship was unmatched and remained so through a few lineup changes. In addition to McCoy, it featured a number of other players whose names are etched in the history of popular music, including guitarists Moss and Gayden, drummer Kenneth Buttrey, saxophonist Quitman Dennis and keyboardist Bill Akins. While McCoy and the Escorts didn’t score hits of their own, they provided accompaniment individually and collectively to scores of hit recordings by other artists.
Bob Dylan had a copy of the Escorts’ 1965 single “Harpoon Man,” an original backed with a cover of Willie Dixon’s “I’m Ready.” It played a significant role in his decision to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. On that single, Dylan could hear that McCoy and his band were better than the musicians he was working with in New York. He could also hear they were making the kind of music he wanted to make. As Moss explains, “Blonde on Blonde was basically Bob Dylan backed by Charlie McCoy and the Escorts.”
After the success of Blonde on Blonde, a lot of recording artists followed Dylan to Nashville to record with McCoy and his band. As their session work increased, the Escorts were able to play in person less and less often, and by the end of 1968, the group’s run as Nashville’s hottest live band had come to an end.
The material on Screamin’ puts a spotlight on an important piece of Music City history that’s been overlooked far too long. While these recordings may not be the best-known work by the members of the Escorts, they helped lay the foundation for Nashville’s rise as a multifaceted recording mecca.
