“The Bullet Records Story”: Short-Lived Indie That [Almost] Could

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first 10 years after World War I! — 1945 to 1955 — were a bizarre period of ferment for the music industry in the United States. White mainstream pop music was dominated by solo singers — women like Rosemary Clooney (George Clooney’s aunt), Peggy Lee and Patti Page, men like Frankie Laine, Tony Bennett, Buddy Clark and Guy Mitchell — who had taken over the top of the charts after the demise of big-band swing and would in turn be dethroned by rock ‘n’ roll. White country music was going through a similar change, as the so-called “Western swing” style that fused country and jazz faded under the onslaught of the rawer, simpler “honky-tonk” style and its principal exponent, Hank Williams. Jazz was fading in popularity among Black record buyers, too; they were picking up records in the style then known as rhythm-and-blues and later the basis of rock and soul.

The years after World War II were also the time in which the dominance of the record industry by major labels suddenly and dramatically ended. Before the war the record business was almost totally controlled by four big companies: Victor, Columbia, Decca and the upstart Capitol label. The main reason was that virtually no one outside those companies actually knew how to manufacture a record. In those days records were cut directly onto wax or lacquer master discs, which then had to go through several steps of elaborate metallurgical processing to make the “stampers,” the negative molds from which records were pressed. The original patents on the technology had run out in the early 1920’s, so anyone could legally press a record if they could figure out how — but nobody could figure out how until a man named Jack Gutshall took a job in a record plant in L.A. in the early 1940’s, learned the technology and set up shop as an independent record processor, willing to press records for anyone who could pay for them.

The result was an explosion of new record companies, showing up with master discs, getting them pressed and selling the finished records anywhere they could. Virtually all the rhythm-and-blues of the late 1940’s came out on independent labels, as did a lot of the country music. Among the most important R&B labels were Atlantic and Savoy in New York, Chess in Chicago, King and Federal in Cincinnati and Modern in Los Angeles. There were also shorter-lived companies that had their day in the sun and had a handful of hits but didn’t survive longer than a few years, including Black & White in Los Angeles, Apollo in New York (one of the few Black-oriented labels actually owned by a Black person, Bess Berman) and Bullet Records in Nashville, the subject of a three-CD boxed set from the German Blue Label company in 2011.

Bullet Records only lasted six years, from 1946 to 1952. It was founded by partners Jim Bulleit and Sterling Hitchcock — though in 1949 Hitchcock bought out Bulleit and ran the label during the remaining three years of its existence. Bulleit took the name of the company from his own last name, dropping the “i” and evoking not only the sheer energy of a fired bullet but the symbol used by Billboard magazine in its hit-record chart to indicate that a record was rising rapidly. Unlike most of the minor labels that started after World War II, which concentrated on just one or two types of music, Bullet’s releases ran all over the map, including the relatively primitive country blues of Big Joe Williams and Smokey Hogg, the more sophisticated R&B of Cecil Gant and Wynonie Harris, white country music in both the Western swing and honky-tonk styles (well, they were based in Nashville, after all!) and a few forays into white pop and novelty jazz.

Bullet Records’ logo was a drawing of a bullet being fired through the name and landing in the bull’s eye of a target surmounting the legend, “Always a Smash Hit.” That wasn’t true for Bullet (or any other record company, either), but their second release was a smash hit. Bulleit and Hitchcock had signed the Francis Craig Orchestra, an ordinary dance-pop group that had been a fixture in fancy hotels in Nashville since the 1920’s. They made a record called “Near You” which began with a chorus of the ricky-tick piano that was selling a lot of records in 1947 before the full big band cut in backing a male singer doing the vocal. “Near You” went to number one on the charts, sold over a million copies, stayed on the charts 25 weeks and sold better than any other record released in 1947.

Alas, having a huge hit that filled a new record company’s coffers instantly could actually be one of the worst things that could happen to it. Flush with cash, Jim Bulleit made the same mistake Paul Reiner of Black and White Records had done when his label released the sensationally popular novelty rap number “Open the Door, Richard” in 1946. Bulleit used the income from “Near You” and Craig’s almost-as-popular follow-up, “Beg Your Pardon,” to sign a large number of acts, including Bob Crosby (Bing Crosby’s bandleader brother), Bob Chester, Bobby Breen, Russ Carlyle, Seger Ellis, Ethel Shutta and Les Elgart. These artists had been big names in the 1930’s but were decidedly “out” by 1947 (though Elgart would make a comeback in the 1950’s when he returned to the major labels and shifted his style from jazz to easy-listening). Ironically, the Blue Label compilation doesn’t include any of Craig’s records, though “Near You,” “Beg Your Pardon” and a few other sides from Craig in the period are available for free download or streaming at https://archive.org/details/FrancisCraigOrchestraCollection.

R&B Bullet: Letting the King Get Away

Instead of including their big hit, the Blue Label compilation of Bullet Records sides is subtitled “The First Americana Label” and emphasizes its contributions to R&B and country music. Independent record labels of the 1940’s were like the “B” movie studios, Republic, Monogram and PRC: as one executive with that tier of movie companies once commented, “We get ‘em on their way up and on their way down.” The biggest R&B name Bullet got on his way up was B. B. King, who made his first record, “Miss Martha King,” for Bullet in 1949 — but it went nowhere commercially and King didn’t become a star until he recorded “Three O’Clock Blues” for RPM Records, an imprint of the L.A.-based Modern label, in 1951. “Miss Martha King” and King’s second (and last) Bullet record, “Take a Swing with Me,” are included here and show him still awfully rooted in his formative days in the Mississippi Delta before he became the smooth, sophisticated R&B performer, recording with big horn sections and showcasing his unique “twanging” guitar style, which he did for Modern and, after 1961, ABC Records and the various companies it morphed into.

If you play the Blue Label Bullet compilation in sequence, the very first thing you will hear is a hot boogie-woogie piano solo by a man who was then billed as Sonny Blount, opening “Dig This Boogie” by Wynonie Harris. Harris was a strong-voiced but not very sophisticated blues singer who’d started with Bess Berman’s Apollo label (which also launched the careers of Dinah Washington and gospel giant Mahalia Jackson) and briefly stopped at Bullet before he had his biggest hits at King Records between 1947 and 1951. King’s owner, Syd Nathan, called Harris “the stupidest man I ever met” and said that when he went to Harris’s hotel room to negotiate his contract, Harris was in bed, wearing nothing but purple underwear, with two women, one on either side of him.

Blount, whose full name was Herman Poole Blount and was related on his mother’s side to Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad, would later become an important jazz bandleader under the name “Sun Ra.” He would lead a band called the Arkestra — a pun on Noah’s Ark and the word “orchestra” — and would tell audiences he was an alien from the planet Saturn. He would dress his band members in outlandish costumes to make them look like people from outer space and fill his songs’ lyrics with science-fiction themes. Sun Ra was also a pioneer in running his own record label, which he inevitably called Saturn Records, and selling his records at his live shows. Every up-and-coming band that does that owes him a debt of gratitude. Sun Ra’s playing on “Dig This Boogie” is strong, powerful and lots of fun, but like the 12-bar blues solo a young, unknown guitarist named Jimi Hendrix played on Jayne Mansfield’s early-1960’s novelty song “Suey,” it has almost nothing to do with the music he later became famous for.

Bullet Records’ most important Black star was a man in his 30’s named Cecil Gant. In 1945 he had just been discharged from the Army when he recorded a plaintive ballad called “I Wonder” in the persona of a serviceman wondering what his old girlfriend was doing back home: “I wonder, my little darling/Where can you be again tonight/While the moon is shining bright/Baby, I wonder.” Gant first recorded this for a tiny Black-owned label named Bronze and then for an only slightly larger white-owned label named Gilt-Edge, and the company went to the max in emphasizing Gant’s military connections. They billed him on the record labels as “Pvt. Cecil Gant, the G-I Sing-Sation,” and had him wear his uniform when he performed live. Gant became known as one of the so-called “Sepia Sinatras,” Black ballad singers with laid-back but emotionally wrenching styles.

The Blue Label box includes four of Gant’s Bullet recordings, including a remake of “I Wonder” in which Gant plays, not the piano he used on the original, but celesta. (He was probably inspired by Louis Armstrong’s use of a celesta in his 1945 cover of the song.) The others are “Boogie Woogie Baby,” “Nashville Jumps” and “Anna Mae,” which reveal Gant as one of the artists on the cusp between R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Gant had a less beautiful and more nasal voice than the other “Sepia Sinatras” — Charles Brown, Billy Eckstine, Herb Jeffries, Arthur Prysock, Johnny Hartman and the one who achieved the biggest crossover success, Nat “King” Cole — but when he played fast songs like the gospel-influenced “It Ain’t Gonna Be Like That” from 1951 (not a cover of the song of the same title by Charles Brown) he sounds like a proto-rocker. Gant’s records run the gamut from hot boogie-woogie instrumentals to plaintive ballads to early rock ‘n’ roll and even one weird attempt, “When I Wanted You,” to channel Fats Waller.

Gant was also a heavy-duty alcoholic who died in 1951 at age 37 from either pneumonia or heart disease, though he really basically drank himself to death — which gives a macabre quality when you hear him call out on some of his records, “Get me another drink.” Jim Bulleit gave an interview, quoted on Gant’s Wikipedia page, on how he recorded him: “He would say, ‘I want to do a session,’ when he ran out of money. We would get a bass player and a guitarist and get him a piano, and I’d go sit in the control room, and he’d tinkle around on it, and then he’d say ‘I’m ready,’ and tap that bottle; and if we didn’t get it the first time, we didn’t get it, ’cause he couldn’t remember what he did. He’d dream up and write a song while he sat there, and he’d give me the title of it. And the uniqueness of the thing is that all of them sold.”

The Bullet blues and R&B recordings on the Blue Label box range from hard-core country blues by Big Joe Williams and Smokey Hogg to engaging vocal trios and curiosities like “St. Louis” Jimmy Oden’s “Goin’ Down Slow.” It’s not clear how Oden got the nickname “St. Louis” when he had nothing to do with that city — he was born in Nashville and achieved his greatest fame in Chicago — but he’d first recorded “Goin’ Down Slow” for the Victor subsidiary Bluebird in Chicago in 1941 and redid the song for Bullet 10 years later. After that he’d found his own record company, J.O.B., and record artists like the great blues singer/guitarist J. B. Lenoir (pronounced — and spelled on his J.O.B. Records’ labels — “Lenore”), who was given a major feature in Martin Scorsese’s The Blues documentaries for PBS — only Oden mixed his own piano so loud on his records that until I saw the Scorsese documentary I had assumed Lenoir played piano instead of guitar.

Among the best tracks on disc one of the Blue Label’s Bullet compilation are two by the Big Three Trio. One is the insinuating “You Sure Look Good to Me” (a reworking of the great 1941 Joe Turner-Art Tatum “Wee Baby Blues” from Decca), and the other is an early version of “The Signifying Monkey.” Based on an old folk tale, associated with the African “trickster god” of the Yoruba people, of a monkey who outwits a lion that wants to eat him and gets a bigger creature, an elephant, on his side, “The Signifying Monkey” was later covered by Cab Calloway (as “Jungle King”) and Chuck Berry (as “Jo Jo Gunne”), though the 1955 hit version was by an otherwise little-known white Sun Records artist named Smokey Joe Baugh. The tale has become a metaphor for Black resistance to white oppression and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called his literary history of Black America The Signifying Monkey.

Country Bullet: R-A-G-G M-O-P-P!

In some ways, disc two of the Blue Label Bullet box — focusing on Bullet as a country label — is even more interesting than disc one. As the blues disc features two songs by B. B. King, the country part of the collection has sides by two other artists who became major names: Chet Atkins and Ray Price’s. Price’s contribution, “Jealous Lies,” is a rather dull ballad sung in a high and somewhat bland voice, but Atkins’ side, “Guitar Reel,” is a lot more interesting. Fred James, who curated the collection as well as writing the liner notes, spotted it right after another song called “Guitar Reel” by the Turner Brothers, which would lead you to believe that Atkins’ record is an instrumental version of the same song. It isn’t; it’s a country-jazz instrumental with Atkins’ guitar paired with a clarinet, and the final riff chorus is a knock-off of Count Basie’s famous theme “One O’Clock Jump.”

The songs Bullet put out for the country market reflect the revolution Hank Williams was wreaking on the country scene at the time, banishing the jazz instruments (particularly trumpet and clarinet) that had marked the Western swing bands and focusing on a stripped-down sound: guitar (sometimes two, an electric lead and acoustic rhythm), pedal steel guitar, violin and bass. No drums: country bands didn’t start using them until the 1950’s and the Grand Ole Opry banned drums from its stage until 1959. When Elvis Presley played the Opry in 1955 — just once: he bombed and wasn’t invited back — his drummer, D. J. Fontana, had to wait in the wings.

Among the most interesting songs here are Atkins’ instrumental, Bill Nettles’ “High-Falutin’ Mama” (which has a Western swing feel even though he doesn’t use horns), Smiley Burnette’s “Swamp Woman Blues” (punctuated by harmonica and accordion, this doesn’t sound anything like what you’d expect from the actor who was Gene Autry’s comic-relief sidekick in innumerable films and co-wrote “Back in the Saddle Again”!), Jimmy Work’s infectious “Hospitality” and his novelty “Mr. and Mrs. Cloud” (anticipating Johnnie Ray’s big hit “The Little White Cloud That Cried” but much happier and more upbeat), Ray Batts’ “Wild Man Boogie,” and “My Bucket’s Been Fixed” — an inventive sequel to the folk song “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” — by Hardrock Gunter, one of those cult artists who turns out to live up to his reputation.

The country disc features two songs by Leon Payne, “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” and a real surprise: “Lost Highway.” This is a song of sin and redemption that was a huge hit for Hank Williams — it fits so well with his world-view that just about everybody (including me) assumed he wrote it — but it was actually Payne’s original and Williams’ was the cover. It also begins with the words, “I’m a rolling stone,” which Bob Dylan has claimed were his inspiration for his classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” though the Rolling Stones got the phrase for their name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 blues record “Rollin’ Stone.” Like Williams, Payne sings this song in a matter-of-fact fashion that belies country music’s reputation as an overwrought over-the-top genre.

Bullet’s biggest country artist was Johnnie Lee Wills, brother of Western swing superstar Bob Wills and a formidable talent in his own right — though he’s represented here by only one song, and it’s not a typical one. You have to go to archive.org for a taste of Wills’ variety, from ballads like “I Never Knew How Much I Love You” to novelties like “Lazy John” and “The Thingamajig.” There’s also the bitter breakup song, “She Took!,” almost proto-punk in the buzzing anger the singer expresses towards his ex. The Wills song we do get here was an enormous hit, though not for him. It’s called “Rag Mop” and is basically a novelty number: “I say M, I say M-O, M-O-P, M-O-P-P … I say R, I say R-A, R-A-G, R-A-G-G, Rag Mop!” Bullet recorded it both by Wills and one of their Black artists, Chuck Merrill — he gave it an R&B flavor — in a commercial strategy later perfected by Syd Nathan at King: if he had a country hit he’d have a Black artist record an R&B version, and if he had an R&B hit he’d have one of his white artists remake it in country style.

In 1950 Coral Records recorded the Ames Brothers doing “Rag Mop” and it became an enormous hit. Archive.org has the Ames Brothers version (though the one I downloaded was a very poor-quality transfer of the original 78) as well as the Wills original heard on the Blue Label box and covers by The Foggy River Boys (who added some lyrics to flesh out the novelty), jazz great Lionel Hampton with his big band, and the oddest cover of all: the Banda da Lua, the samba band Carmen Miranda brought with her from Brazil. The Banda da Lua reworked it as “Rag Mop Samba,” singing most of it in Portuguese (including the Portuguese pronunciations of the names of letters) and giving it an infectious beat that shows that the bossa nova sound of the early 1960’s was not, as we were told it was, that big a departure from previous Brazilian pop music. The TV series M*A*S*H featured the Ames Brothers’ “Rag Mop” in two episodes, in one of which the prissy character of Major Philip Winchester (David Ogden Stiers) sniffs about it, “They can’t sing, and they can’t spell!”

Heidi and Other Bullet Jazz Novelties

The first disc of the Blue Label Bullet compilation is blues and R&B, the second country, and the third a smorgasbord containing more blues, a couple of gospel sides, and some of Bullet’s attempts at jazz and novelty pop. It begins with a fast version of “Hawai’ian War Chant” by Danny Cassalla, featuring drums and tenor sax along with a bit of accordion and clarinet at the end, that fits on the cusp between mainstream swing and Western swing. One suspects Cassalla learned the song from Tommy Dorsey’s version, which featured Buddy Rich on drums.

The next song is “I’m All Dressed Up with a Broken Heart” by the 5 Bars (anticipating the Jackson 5 in using a numeral in their name), an obvious attempt to copy the Ink Spots that was a jolt given that I learned this song from Chris Connor’s electrifying jazz version for Bethlehem Records in 1955. Bobby Troup (billed here as “Bob Troup”), whose best-known credit is as the composer of Nat “King” Cole’s hit “Route 66,” does voice-and-piano versions of the 1920’s standard “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” and an original called “Heidi” which turns out to be an ode to … his St. Bernard dog.

The jazz (or semi-jazz) numbers here include a ricky-tick piano instrumental version of another 1920’s standard, “Avalon,” by Madge Slutee and Her Swing Trio (if that was her real name she must have got a lot of teasing about it!) and more ricky-tick piano from John Gordy on “Raggin’ the Blues.” Gordy also contributes a heavily reworked version of “Frankie and Johnny” that keeps to the original story — a woman named Frankie shoots her boyfriend Johnny because “he done her wrong” by cheating on her — but adds the novelty element of Gordy’s piano. His lyrics claim that because he was playing so loud, no one in the bar where Frankie shot Johnny heard the sound of the gun. There’s also a rather dull number called “Everything Reminds Me of You” by Pepper Neely and two quite good songs by Vicki Zimmer. One is a remake of a 1930’s swing tune called “Take Another Guess,” and while her version doesn’t swing as easily as Benny Goodman’s with Ella Fitzgerald (at the start of her career but already displaying her musicality), her other song, “He’s a Bad Man but He Treats Me Good,” is a great bit of ribald jazz-blues.

The Bullet compilation ends with two gospel recordings that suggest Blue Label should follow up this box with one devoted to Bullet as a gospel label. One is a sped-up version of “Amazing Grace” by a Black quartette (that’s how it was spelled on the labels of records like this; it generally denoted a group singing a cappella) called the Fairfield Four. This one will jolt you because I don’t think anyone has swung this song that hard! The other is an even more searing song, “Dig a Little Deeper” by the Speer Family, yet another one of those white acts that sound Black. (In his book on Robert Johnson, Elijah Wald mentioned that there are blues records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s for which we have no idea whether the singers were Black and white because, while the records survive, photos of the performers do not.)

Though I’m not sure what Fred James meant when he subtitled his Bullet compilation “The First Americana Label,” The Bullet Records Story is a fascinating assortment of American pop from one of the quirkier periods in the U.S. music business. There’s a lot of great stuff here, and not just by the few people on it (B. B. King, Chet Atkins and Ray Price) you’re likely to have heard of. Bullet was a madly eclectic label whose owners seemed willing to record anything they thought would sell, and though that probably helped do them in as a business after a relatively short time, it also made their output unusually fascinating and this box well worth hearing.