Francis Craig had a bit of a disreputable air in his days on the Vanderbilt campus in the early 1920s, according to music historian Martin Hawkins.
“He started a jazz band at Vanderbilt in 1921, which then was a slightly outrageous activity,” Hawkins said. “They were a bit of a punk band for their time. He was not a great student, and was definitely not held up as a shining example at Vanderbilt.”
Craig went on to lead a dance band at Nashville‘s Hermitage Hotel for 22 years, and in 1947 scored the hit “Near You,” the record many credit with putting Nashville on the map as a recording center.
Craig is one of several musicians and businessmen with Vanderbilt ties cited in A Shot in the Dark, released on Nov. 30 by Vanderbilt University Press in conjunction with the Country Music Foundation. The coffee table-style book is packed with photos from the early days of the music business in Nashville, and comes with a CD of gospel, country and R&B recorded in the city. The book covers the decade starting in 1945 that established “The Athens of the South” as a music industry town.
“It could have easily been Houston or Atlanta that became the Southern base for record companies,” Hawkins said. “It didn‘t have to be Nashville.”
Hawkins is an Englishman whose passion for record collecting has led him to research and write books on Sun Records and the birth of rock ‘n‘ roll, and liner notes for two massive box sets of early Nashville music released by Bear Family Records of Germany.
Hawkins‘ research into the early days of the Nashville recording industry turned up familiar names such as Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, but also maverick businessmen and musicians whom history was in danger of forgetting. He also found a much more diverse musical stew in Nashville before it became known worldwide for country music – “Nashville isn‘t all about country music, and it never was,” he‘s quick to point out.
Some of the early players in Nashville‘s music business had Vanderbilt ties, though many of them – including Craig – attended but never graduated.
“There was a strong part played by Vanderbilt alumni who helped set up the infrastructure of the music industry,” Hawkins said. “Many of them were with the 1920s and ‘30s jazz and dance bands, playing jazz for dinner dances and the like.”
Beasley Smith, for a time Craig‘s roommate at Vanderbilt, also became a Nashville bandleader and led the WSM Orchestra and his own Beasley Smith Orchestra before becoming music director at WSM and writing or co-writing hits for Roy Acuff (“Night Train to Memphis” and “Tennessee Central Number Nine”) and pop standards including “That Lucky Old Sun.”
Singer Dinah Shore sang with Smith‘s band before moving on to a national singing, television and movie career. The Winchester, Tenn.-native attended Hume-Fogg High School in downtown Nashville before enrolling at Vanderbilt. Early in her career, she was known as the “Nashville Nightingale.”
Vanderbilt graduate Jimmy Gallagher led a dance band at shows at the Andrew Jackson Hotel which were broadcast over WLAC Radio. Industry legend Owen Bradley got his start writing arrangements for Gallagher‘s band for $3.50 per song.
James Michelinie studied data processing at Vanderbilt in the 1930s, way before the computer age. A decade later, he helped launch the recording studio business in Nashville with the Nashville Recording Studio, with his partner Harold Walker. They went on location to record weddings and parties for clients, but mostly worked in their studio on Union Street recording anything paying customers wanted for posterity. The also got business from some up-and-coming Grand Ole Opry performers.
Frank Clement, a Vanderbilt Law School graduate and governor of Tennessee from 1953 to 1959 and 1963 to 1967, played a role in the saga of the Prisonaires, a vocal group formed at the Tennessee State Penitentiary who scored an R&B hit with “Just Walking in the Rain.” Clement, a music fan with ambitions for reforming the state‘s prison system, encouraged entertainment by and for inmates and allowed the Prisonaires to make personal appearances. “Just Walking in the Rain” became an even bigger hit for singer Johnnie Ray in 1956.
Other industry figures who briefly attended Vanderbilt include prominent deejay Hoss Allen of WLAC and Jack DeWitt, who went on to become a pioneering recording engineer and then president of WSM Radio.
Perhaps the most influential and unfairly neglected Vanderbilt graduate in the early Nashville music industry was Jordon Stokes III. A scion of a prominent family of attorneys, Stokes was active in social justice issues including the treatment of workers in a meatpacking firm and the opening of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., which evolved into a key center of the civil rights movement. He fought the political machine of “Boss” Ed Crump in Memphis and wrote the bill that brought power from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Nashville.
In the music business, Stokes fought as the lawyer representing the Nashville musicians union to open its ranks to country and folk musicians, and then blacks. When the national musicians union ordered a musicians strike in 1948, Stokes set up a non-union record label named World Records. In A Shot in the Dark, Hawkins reports that Stokes felt that the growth and prosperity of the music business in Nashville would ultimately benefit local musicians more than the national strike.
In the early days, gospel and R&B music were just as prominent in Nashville as country music. The emphasis on country music evolved in large part because of the growing prominence of the Grand Ole Opry radio show, which led listeners to associate Nashville with country.
“The national recording companies needed to have a base somewhere in the South where the musicians were, and the Opry was in Nashville,” Hawkins explained. “There was also Fred Rose and Roy Acuff publishing songs at Acuff-Rose.
“In the end, the big companies had to have a presence in Nashville to stop the local independent record companies from signing up all the top talent.”
For more information about A Shot in the Dark, go to the Vanderbilt University Press website at http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-2706
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu