purchase [ Chicken Skin Music ]
I only know of Charles Calhoun/Jesse Stone from digging through the Internet. Maybe if I had held on to my vinyl 33's, I could have gone back and looked at the jackets for track details, but like most everyone else, I shifted away - in fact, I gave my rather large collection of maybe 700 LPs to a local radio station. For free, in the hopes that they would make better use than myself (sitting on a shelf for 20 years)
"Chuck" Calhoun (you'll need to search for Jesse Stone as well), seems to have had a pretty long life (1901-1999). What he did with that time is even more impressive:
He is credited with writing this post song: "Smack Dab in the Middle", but is also the author of "Money Honey" - another Ry Cooder "hit".
It looks like Calhoun got around in the 30s and 40s - his songs were performed by Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman and more - no wonder Ry Cooder came across his music: he's hard to miss if you do a little research. His version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" appears to have been a chart topper that lead to "Rock Around the Clock"
Charles Calhoun (aka Jesse Stone) appears to have also been the first black musician to join Atlantic records - via Ahmet Ertegun (and that leads us back to my home city of Istanbul, Ertugun being Turkish)
Other version of possible interest:
The above claims to be the man himself in 1955, I can't verify, but it seems to fit.
and then, there's .. Ray
and the Deep River Boys:
and on and on the list goes. You want more? Do a YouTube search for the title .. Looks like there could be 50 or so there.
