by Randy Reynolds
My brother, when he was in his young teens in the mid-1960s,
said he got mugged after mistakenly walking into the black side of town but I’m
not entirely sure it was a textbook mugging.
African-Americans were so rare in our Covington (and Lee Road ) world that my brother might
have seen the other youngster coming and preemptively pulled out his empty wallet and
told him to take it.
Overall, it seemed to me that whites and blacks got along
very well together in the Covington ,
Louisiana Covington
except for Louis Prima’s wife Keely Smith.
There were rumors that she was part black, but she got a pass, them
being rich and famous and owning their own country club and golf course and all,
out on Highway 190 near the radio station.
I started working at WARB in early 1965. The Billboard Top 100 that year had numerous
black artists on it, but we didn’t play their music. We did
play popular black holdovers from the 1950s including Louis Armstrong, Ray
Charles and Nat King Cole, but none of the new stuff that white program
directors called “race” music. (We
couldn’t play white “race” music either, as I discovered when I aired my own
copy of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” on my Saturday show. Mr. Rick, the boss, said
that was “an integration song” and forbade me to play it on his station again.)
Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Pt. 1, by James Brown and the Famous
Flames was #33 on the end-of-year Billboard Top 100 chart of 1965. If we had played a song like that, we might
have gotten some negative feedback from sponsors, certainly from our wannabe
Congressman John Rarick, who sometimes bought blocks of airtime to rant against Civil Rights. Playing Hold What You’ve
Got by Joe Tex (#85 that year)? Out of
the question. Other Top 100 songs of 1965 by black artists that we didn’t
play: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie,
Honey Bunch,) by The Four Tops; My Girl by The Temptations; Shotgun by Jr.
Walker & The All Stars; Nowhere to Run by Martha and The Vandellas; How
Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You) by Marvin Gaye. Radical stuff, huh?
The Billboard Hot 100 songs we did play for our Covington audience in 1965 were: Jolly Green Giant/The Kingsmen; A Walk In The Black Forest/Horst Jankowski;
Red Roses For A Blue Lady/Bobby Vinton; Red Roses For A Blue Lady/Bert
Kaempfert and his Orchestra; Cast Your
Fate To The Wind/Sounds Orchestral; Goldfinger/Shirley Bassey; The Race Is On/Jack
Jones; Crying In The Chapel/Elvis Presley; King of the Road/Roger Miller.
Those white songs don’t seem as cool now as they did then. When I think of 1965, I don’t start humming
something from Horst Jankowski, Bert Kaempfert or Jack Jones. I think of Marvin
Gaye, The Four Tops, The Temptations, James Brown—all those artists I couldn’t
play at the time but who became the soundtrack of my memory.
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http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html
