The Atlas Records Story

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been listening to a Boogieology Records CD compilation called The Atlas Records Story – Atlas Records having been a short-lived independent label based in Los Angeles in the mid-1940’s. It’ was founded by a songwriter named Robert Scherman and is most notable for being Nat “King” Cole’s last label before he started his long and prosperous career on Capitol in 1943 – in fact Capitol actually bought Cole’s contract from Atlas and also got some masters Cole had recorded for Atlas that became his first Capitol releases (much the way Sam Phillips’ sale of Elvis Presley’s Sun Records contract to RCA Victor included five previously unissued songs he’d recorded for Sun). The result was that Cole had only four songs actually released on Atlas, the ballads “My Lips Remember Your Kisses” (written by Robert Scherman) and “Let’s Pretend” and the jazz tunes “Got a Penny, Benny” (vocals by Cole and the other members of the trio) and “F.S.T. (Fine, Sweet and Tasty),” a jazz instrumental and yet another record that shows how much the jazz world lost when Cole departed the piano and became a superstar singer instead. Atlas helped launch the careers of several important artists, including Cole, Charles Brown and the white performers Frankie Laine and Merle Travis.

The Laine and Brown recordings came about as a result of guitarist Johnny Moore, whose brother Oscar Moore, also a guitarist, was making tons of money with the Nat “King” Cole Trio. Johnny wanted to get some of that dough for himself and he decided the way to do it was to form his own equivalent of the Nat “King” Cole Trio. To do this he needed a Black man who could play piano and sing, and for some reason the first one he hired was Frankie Laine, who only met one of the qualifications: he could sing, but he wasn’t a piano player and he was white. Later Johnny Moore stumbled on Charles Brown, who was Black, played piano and sang in a soft but still bluesy ballad voice similar to Cole’s. The Boogieology CD The Atlas Records Story contains “Got a Penny, Benny” and “F.S.T.” by the Cole Trio, “Melancholy Madeline” and “Maureen” by Frankie Laine with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers (whom Scherman agreed to record if Johnny could get his brother Oscar to play on the date too, so he could bill the better-known Moore brother on the label) and one quite lovely ballad track, “That’s the Way You Love Me,” by the Three Blazers with Charles Brown. In 1948 Johnny Moore and Charles Brown had a big fight that resulted in Brown leaving the group and starting a solo career. Moore pointed out to Brown that his name had been on the Three Blazers’ records and no one know who Charles Brown was; Brown responded, “The moment they hear my voice on those records, they’ll know it’s me and they’ll buy them.” They did, and despite the ups and downs typical of the careers of musicians in general and Black R&B musicians in particular, Brown maintained his distinctive vocal style and stayed active until his death in 1999 (I saw him perform at the San Francisco Blues Festival in 1976 and he was magnificent, though he seemed like a retro figure less because of his music than his hair: he was still “processing” and trying to straighten his hair while younger Black people were letting theirs grow and sometimes elaborately coiffing it into the highly unnatural “natural” or “Afro” style). He was helped to a comeback by singer Bonnie Raitt, who used him as one of the veteran blues musicians she hired to open for her on her tours.

Aside from people like Cole, Laine and Brown who became stars later (and on other labels) Atlas’s house band was a group called Joe Alexander’s Highlanders, and singer Luke Jones recorded a lot of the label’s releases with this band. The Highlanders’ trumpet star was Red Mack, who also sang – one of the most fascinating tracks here is “If You Love Me, Baby,” featuring Red Mack on trumpet and vocal and possibly the first instance of a singer overdubbing his own voice and double-tracking on a record. (The only previous example I can think of in which a singer used double recording to perform a duet with himself was not on a record but in a film: Lawrence Tibbett in MGM’s Cuban Love Song from 1930.) I remember this song because it was on the only Atlas 78 I ever owned, and the original flip side, “Black Man’s Blues,” is also here; it’s a vocal by Helen Andrews that reflects the bizarre internal racism within the African-American community in which lighter-skinned “yellow” people were considered the elite, darier “brown” people a sort of mid-range and the darkest “black” people the lowest on the racial hierarchy. Andrews’ song actually flips that dynamic, pointing out how abusive her “yellow” and “brown” lovers were while her “black” one treated her well and was great in bed until she did something (unspecified) that cost her the relationship. (Blind Willie McTell did a similar song from the male perspective called “Three Women Blues” – “I’ve got three women, yellow, brown and black.”) There’s also an engaging novelty by Luke Jones and HIs Orchestra called “Take the ‘U’ Car” – a pretty obvious answer record to Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” for Duke Ellington, and also an answer from an L.A. band to the New Yorkcentricity of the Ellington theme. And there are two records by white artists in Atlas’s brief attempt to crack the country market, an instrumental called “Steel Guitar Rag” by Red Murray (who didn’t become a major country star) and “That’s All” – a joking cover of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s song of the same name, including a snarky verse attacking evolution – by Merle Travis, who did become a major country “name.”