Q&A: Ruth Brown

You made a verbal agreement with Abramson to record for Atlantic and were on your way to New York City to sign the contract and perform at the Apollo Theater when you were in a serious car accident.
Yes, in Chester, Pennsylvania. Atlantic Records actually signed me to a contract in the hospital bed.

Had you met Ahmet Ertegun before this?
No.

And you hadn’t even recorded a demo?
Never.

And Atlantic paid for your hospitalization?
Yes. I was in the hospital for a year. I’ll never forget that: On my twenty-first birthday, Ahmet came down to Chester to see me in that hospital. And he brought me a book on how to sightread, a pitch pipe and a big tablet to write on, because I had a knack for writing lyrics.

So you hadn’t even recorded a note for them, and here they were treating you pretty nicely.
I loved them. I didn’t know anything different to do except to love them. I felt like I was part of the family. After I got out of the hospital, Ahmet, Herb Abramson and Miriam Bienstock [Bienstock was Abramson’s former wife, as well as a partner in and the comptroller for Atlantic], when they would go somewhere to eat, they would come and take me. We were like family. They took care of me.

Who else was on the label?
Stick McGhee, Tiny Grimes and Ivory Joe Hunter. Ivory Joe used to sit at the piano –— in the same room where Miriam had her desk, and cartons were stacked on one wall –— and play his material.

The kind of material you were singing in Washington was not exactly the kind of material you became known for on Atlantic.
They really didn’t know what I was going to do, what kind of singer I was going to become. They knew I was a good singer, but they didn’t know what to do with me. I was recording with the Delta Rhythm Boys, I was recording ballads, they even had me singing some Yiddish songs in English. They really didn’t know what to do with me, and my problem was I could sing any of it.

But eventually Rudy Toombs came in with “Teardrops From My Eyes.” That was the first one that really turned Ruth Brown in the direction of being an R&B singer.

In 1950, when you recorded it, did you have any idea that this was a change in direction?
I had no idea which way it was going to go, it was just one of the songs. I had come to New York, and I had been playing theaters and working with the big bands. I was working with Count Basie, Charlie Ventura –— they didn’t know where the hell to put me. I opened for Oscar Peterson, I worked with Charlie Parker, I was down at the Earle Theater with Frankie Laine on his show.

“Teardrops” turned it all around.
“Teardrops” went to the top of the charts and stayed some twenty weeks up there. That song moved Atlantic up as a record company. And with that song, I started to be boxed over there, in R&B. You had Roy Brown, Charles Brown, Larry Darnell, the Dominoes, the Drifters – all of these people were sort of in that.

Rhythm & blues was becoming popular.
Rhythm & blues was a hot item, and that’s when I started headlining a lot of package shows. We worked in barns and warehouses in the South.

You had three huge R&B hits in the early Fifties: “Teardrops,” “5-10-15 Hours” and “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean.” But I gather that it was still black radio playing them for a predominantly black audience.
Well, it couldn’t basically be an all-black audience, because by that time the concerts were integrated, but separately. You had white spectators who had to be listening to the black radio stations. That’s why eventually you had to get rock & roll.

Did each tour seem to attract more whites?
Yeah, yeah. And there would be promoters who had sense enough to work together; one would be white and one would be black. And the concerts would be – downstairs where the dancers were – jampacked black. Upstairs balcony, all the way around, white spectators. Then a lot of times when the building didn’t allow for that —– if you had a warehouse or something like that, where there wasn’t two layers – they had a dividing line on the floor. That was the rope; sometimes it was just a clothesline with a sign hung on one side to separate them. Or there would be some big, burly white cops standing on one side to make sure that the rope stayed in position, which a lot of times it didn’t, because people got to go dancing, and they didn’t give a damn about the rope.