by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Gates program PBS showed a second episode of Soundbreaking — a British TV miniseries produced with the
involvement of the late Sir George Martin, which explains why he’s depicted
essentially as the touchstone of music production and its advancement to a
central creative role in record-making — and then a fascinating little show
from the PBS affiliate in Miami, WLRN (whose call letters are the consonants in
the word “learn,” reflecting PBS’s origins as National Educational Television), called Deep City: The Birth
of the Miami Sound. When I first heard the
promos for this the KPBS announcer seemed to be saying that Deep City was the
first Black-owned record label, which was hardly true — they formed in 1963,
when Motown already existed (and indeed was a role model for them) and 42 years
after W. C. Handy and his business partner Harry Pace founded Black Swan
Records, the first widely distributed label owned by people of African descent.
(The Wikipedia page on Black Swan lists an even earlier Black-owned label,
Broome Special Phonograph Records, but it had only limited distribution.) Deep
City was a product of the Black community of Overtown in Miami, though its
proprietors were two schoolteachers, Willie Clarke and Johnny Pearsall, who had
met at the all-Black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University — known
affectionately by its alumni as “Fam-You,” their pronunciation of its initials
FAMU.
Johnny Pearsall owned a record store in Overtown whose window sign
advertised “Spirituals and Jazz” — which Charles commented were about as far
removed from each other as two forms of African-American music could be —
though their merchandise also included all the top-selling soul records from
the major Black-oriented labels of the day, Motown, Atlantic and Stax. Willie
Clarke had also started writing song lyrics as a hobby, and he and Pearsall
decided to start a record label to record them — using their salaries as schoolteachers
as capital; every time they got paid they’d book a session at one of the local
recording studios, where they were charged $15 per hour for a four-hour session
and therefore needed musicians who would come in well-rehearsed and not waste
any time cutting the actual records. They also had only two tracks, one for
vocals and one for everything else (this was how the early Motown records were
made, too, though Motown founder Berry Gordy soon acquired a three-track
machine so he could have two
instrumental tracks and release stereo LP’s as well as mono singles). The man
they picked as their musical director was Clarence Reid, a talented composer,
arranger and bandleader (he supplied melodies to Clarke’s lyrics and most of
Deep City’s best-sellers were credited to both of them as songwriters) with a
fondness for the bottle — sometimes he didn’t show up at all and sometimes he
was so under the weather his musicians had to play without his guidance — but
mostly he came through and delivered tight soul grooves for Deep City’s vocal
artists, including a group called the Moovers (that’s how they spelled it),
Paul Kelly, Frank Williams and the Rocketeers and the label’s two top artists,
women singers Betty Wright (who went on to become a major star) and Helene Smith
(who didn’t).
It’s hard to tell what Deep City’s records sounded like from the
snippets we get to hear here, but it seems that they managed to achieve an
appealing blend of the smoother Motown and the raunchier Stax styles with
admixtures of the Cuban influence in Miami and also the use of FAMU’s marching
band, or members thereof, as their horn sections (over a decade before the
story told in the second episode of Soundbreaking about how Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac was
considered oh so innovative for using the USC Marching Band on Fleetwood Mac’s
song “Tusk”). Deep City ran into the usual problems facing an independent
record label in the early 1960’s, including difficulties with distribution
(their network extended only about as far as Palm Beach and they never acquired
a national distributor) and the need to pay DJ’s, sometimes in money, sometimes
in meals, sometimes in female companionship (the show never comes right out and
says that the proprietors of Deep City pimped out their woman artists to DJ’s
to get their records on radio, and indeed they might not have, but you do get that impression) to get their records played on
the air. Deep City also had another problem relative to the followings of their
two most important artists, woman soul singers Helene Smith and Betty Wright.
Both of them had distinctive voices somewhat between the two biggest woman soul
singers of the era, Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin, and Wright had that voice
from the tender age of 12 — sort of a Black soul version of Judy Garland: a
prepubescent girl who sang with the volume, character and richness of sound of
an adult woman. Betty Wright was also fiercely ambitions, whereas Helene Smith
was painfully shy and could barely be induced to get on stage and perform for a
live audience — she had to close her eyes and pretend she was somewhere else to
be able to do it. Helene Smith was also the girlfriend, and later the wife, of
Deep City co-owner Johnny Pearsall — they had met as fellow aspiring teachers
in the education department of FAMU — and not surprisingly Pearsall was
incredibly protective of her and her career.
The partnership broke up when a
white distributor, Henry Stone of TK Records, who wanted — the show is unclear
on this point — either to distribute Deep City as part of his line or buy out
the label altogether, make it an imprint of TK and let Pearsall and Clarke
continue to run it. The main reason he wanted Deep City Records was he wanted
Betty Wright — he could tell she had the makings of a nationwide star and only
needed the clout of a label who could get her music out past Florida — and
Clarke desperately wanted to do the deal with TK. Pearsall didn’t because he
feared that Helene Smith would get lost in the shuffle. As things turned out,
Deep City folded, TK picked up Betty Wright (and did indeed build her into a
nationwide star with songs like “Clean-Up Woman”), Pearsall and Smith broke up
and Smith retired from performing, going back to being a schoolteacher and only
recently returning to singing in the gospel choir of her church. Ultimately
Deep City records began resurfacing, at least partly thanks to an audience for
them in, of all places, Manchester, England, where they were a major influence
on the “Northern Soul” scene (remember this is “Northern” as in Northern England, which is looked down upon by sophisticates much the
way the South is in the U.S. — indeed, when the Beatles formed their own music
publishing company in 1963, in a spit-in-your-face gesture to the London
showbiz establishment, they called it “Northern Songs” to emphasize that they
were from Liverpool in the north of England and they had done something a
London-based act hadn’t been able to do in 50 years: become world-class
superstars). Eventually Deep City records were reissued and frequently used as
the source for “samples” by artists like Beyoncé,
Mary J. Blige, Sublime and Afrika Bambaataa — thereby finally giving
Willie Clarke, who as co-composer was entitled to sampling royalties, some
money for all his hard work way back when. But the term “Miami sound” in pop
music usually means the bands like K.C. and the Sunshine Band and the Miami
Sound Machine, both signed to TK Records after Deep City folded and both
considerably more commercial and less soulful.
