Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [29]
Years later Lightnin’ complained that Aladdin had cheated him, but he claimed that the label had also paid him one thousand dollars for his first session. We have no way of knowing how much or how little Lightnin’ actually got paid for these records, but generally Mesner was held in fairly high esteem by other musicians who recorded for him. About Mesner, Houston blues singer Peppermint Harris (a.k.a. Harrison D. Nelson) said, “It’s hard to describe my feelings for him. He was like a father or a brother. He was the most important man in my life as far as my career was concerned. He did more for me than anyone I’ve ever been associated with. He was beautiful to me. It’s like Ella Fitzgerald felt about Chick Webb. Eddie Mesner showed me the way. He paved the way for me. He was straight about everything. Including royalties. I had no problems. If I wanted a new car, Eddie Mesner got it for me. He did things for me, like the only reason I’m a BMI writer now is because of him…. The only regret I have about Eddie Mesner is that the man died.”33
Lightnin’s interactions with Mesner and Aladdin were much more limited than Harris’s, but Hopkins was apparently looking for a better deal and a way to record closer to home, since he didn’t like traveling. He’d heard about Bill Quinn, possibly from Dowling Street record store owner Eddie Henry, who distributed Quinn’s early releases.
With a background in radio and electronics, Bill Quinn moved to Houston in 1939 and started a repair shop called Quinn’s Radio Service. By the early 1940s he expanded his small business to establish the Quinn Recording Company, located at 3104 Telephone Road on Houston’s east side. He began producing radio commercials and jingles, but saw the potential for producing records, though the materials needed were scarce. “The war had made materials short,” Mack McCormick observed, “and the four major companies had a practical monopoly on the manufacturing process. The independent labels of that period came into existence because of people like Bill Quinn. He invented his own method of making records. Somehow, he bought or confiscated an old pressing machine. He’d been experimenting and thinking about the process for years before he actually did it. The precise material—that is, the biscuit that goes into the pressing machine—was an industry secret. They called it ‘shellac,’ which is a mixture of insect matter and other resins and fillers…. One of the solutions he tried was to melt down other people’s records. Eventually, he found an independent way to go from the studio to the warehouse—recording, mastering, electroplating, and pressing his own records, and so was free to put regional talent in record stores.”34
Quinn soon joined forces with another radio repairman, Frank Sanborn, and a Houston-based hillbilly singer, Bennie Hess, and together, they founded the Gulf Record Company on July 14, 1944. But after a handful of releases, beginning around August 1945, including blues singers Jesse Lockett and Inez Newell (nothing by her was actually released, as far as we know), Quinn started his own label, which he called Gold Star, in the summer of 1946.35 His first release on Gold Star had the catalog number 1313, which was his address on Dumble Street in Houston, and featured Harry Choates, whose song “Jole Blon” exceeded all expectations. “Jole Blon” was a traditional Cajun waltz that had been recorded before, but Choates’s version accelerated the tempo and added prominent piano. It became a giant hit because it was done in the contemporary Western swing style of Bob Wills and was sung in such a charismatic way that it was immediately accessible. Quinn was not prepared by the response he got from that record, and it went to #4 on the Billboard folk charts twice in 1947. That same year, Quinn, who imprinted his label with the slogan “King of the Hillbillies” under the name Gold Star, decided to branch out.
The discs that Quinn produced were uneven and ranged from unlistenable to passable, but he was not