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A Conversation with Tex Stephens: Black Radio Pioneer |
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Sunday, 05 February 2006 05:06 |
Turn On Your Volume, Baby
A Conversation with Tex Stephens
By John Sinclair
New Orleans radio in the late 1940s and early 1950s helped create the template for Black-oriented radio stations all across the country. The Black-oriented programming pioneered by WDIA in Memphis in 1948 eventually moved the white management of New Orleans stations WMRY and WBOK to hire colorful African-American radio personalities like Ernie the Whip, Dr. Daddy-O and Tex Stephens to play blues and jazz recordings over the airwaves and advertise products aimed at a new market of Black consumers.
These ground-breaking disc jockeys provided an essential outlet for the new music called Rhythm & Blues produced by small independent record companies from the West Coast and the cities of the North. They introduced their listeners to the music of T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Wynonie Harris, Ray Charles and countless other artists, including New Orleans performers like Roy Brown, Paul Gayten & Annie Laurie, Professor Longhair, Larry Darnell, Jewel King, Tommy Ridgley, Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis.
I met Tex Stephens, one of the first African-American air personalities to emerge in New Orleans and now a very active 78 years old, in Armstrong Park on a beautiful February afternoon. We sat on a bench next to the lagoon behind the WWOZ studios and talked about the days when the disc jockeys were kings in the Crescent City and the music they played made an impact like never before.
Indie: How did you happen to get on WMRY? What was your background before that?
Tex Stephens: I used to broadcast from up at the old Gladstone Hotel on Dryades Street. My program was on WJBW. And then later on, when the place got too small, I moved my program over to a restaurant called Hayes' Chicken Shack. See, I couldn't go into the station. I had to sell my own time, and I had to do a remote broadcast, because WJBW was an all-white radio station.
When I started, you could play anything you wanted. When I first started, whenever a white disc jockey would pick up a record by Count Basie or Duke Ellington, they would call it "race music," you know. I think I had to change a lot of that because I started, really, in 1948. I started before Dr. Daddy-O, but I was working part-time.
Daddy-O was the first full-time [Black] disc jockey; I was the first part-time [Black] disc jockey. And then came Ernie the Whip, and then came everybody else after that. Ernie the Whip, Tex Stephens, Dr. Daddy-O, when we went on, we took over, and we laid the groundwork for things to come. It was a real radio genesis when we came on.
Tell you what happened: Ernie the Whip, he and I had gone to high school together, and we grew up together as young men, so Ernie took it upon himself to go down to the French Quarter to WMRY and talk to the people down there. And they hired Ernie right away.
Then, later on, Care Associates, which was an advertising and marketing firm, they picked me up from WJBW because they could probably see the handwriting on the wall, that a new day was coming in radio and that Blacks were beginning to create inroads.
After a few months, I think in 1950--'49 to '50--they moved WMRY from the French Quarter to the old Louisiana Life Insurance Company building up on Dryades Street, and that's when the Black people started coming out. Man, the people used to stand in the street, trying to come into the studio. They had to expand the studios so the people could watch us work. We started out making $35-$40 a week, and eventually got $50, then eventually we started making a few hundred dollars. And that was the good old days.
Quiet as it's kept, the late George Israel Augustine was also a disc jockey on that radio station, and Nolan Marshall. In 1953, my good friend and neighbor, Larry McKinley, came on the station. Larry came in from Chicago and created a new type of character on the radio. We started getting other people in: Bob Parker, who was an announcer at the Dew Drop, he joined the station.
Tell me about Dr. Daddy-O.
Dr. Daddy-O [Vernon Winslow] was a professor at Dillard University. Daddy-O was a very aggressive young man. He had finished Morehouse College and he had a degree in law, and he came to Dillard to work. Somehow or another, Daddy-O was writing continuity or scripts for a white guy named Duke Thiele, who was the number one white disc jockey in the city of New Orleans.
This was in 1948, and [one day] Duke Thiele was late coming on the show, so Daddy-O opened the program, and about five or ten minutes later, Duke Thiele came on. But the management had heard Dr. Daddy-O on the air and fired him.
How he officially got into radio was, he challenged the system. A fellow who was working for the Fitzgerald advertising agency picked Daddy-O out and went to the Jackson Brewing Company and got Daddy-O on WWEZ for a half hour every day.
Later on, in 1950, I think it was in December, at WBOK, they hired a guy by the name of James W. Smith, who took the name of "Okey-Dokey" on the radio station in the latter part of 1950, early 1951. Then there was another young man by the name of Honeyboy Harley, who was very smooth, good-looking, tall handsome young man, he played the jazz and stuff.
WBOK was born here in New Orleans, and eventually WBOK got so powerful that they sent another guy that was a disc jockey at the Dew Drop, Sporty Johnson was his name, to Houston, Texas to open up a chain for WBOK. And, really and truly, that was the first time that Blacks in Houston had heard a Black man on a radio station with a program, and, man, Sporty Johnson was something else.
It's all contemporaneous, isn't it? Roy Brown made "Good Rocking Tonight" in July of 1947, Paul Gayten's cutting for DeLuxe with Annie Laurie in 1947-48, Fats Domino cut The Fat Man" on December 10, 1949, Professor Longhair started recording in 1949, Larry Darnell had those huge records....
Those were the good old days when we could play those records. I'll never forget when I put Roy Brown on the air, "Good Rockin Tonight," boy, this city jumped like something else. And Dave Bartholomew, I think, touched and opened more doors for musicians and entertainers on a local level than anybody that I know other than Louis Armstrong.
The popularity of your programs also moved these white station owners to make their whole programming Black-oriented?
No doubt about it. Then, see, Billboard carried our names, carried Okey Dokey, myself, Ernie the Whip and a few other Black guys, and then WDIA and a few of the other Black radio stations in the South, and then that's when they started selling advertising, and then we started making money.
See, we could do 15-minute programs and the station would pay us X numbers of dollars for these programs. Sometimes you did a half-hour radio program. I can't think of anybody who did a full hour program. I had a 15-minute program for Pabst Beer on old WMRY.
You'd do a 15-minute shift at a time?
Yeah.
But you'd do several of these over the course of a day?
During the course of a day, yeah. It all depended on who was the sponsor. See, I started playing jazz and blues. I didn't only play Count Basie and Duke, I played any jazz musician at that particular time. My man at the time was Woody Herman. And I got my own records--see, I was playing the old 78s, because the 45s and the 33s wasn't even on the market at that time.
What I have done with some of the old 78s that I played on the radio, I gave most of them to the Tulane Jazz Archives, where I still do a few historical lectures and I work up there sometimes with Dr. Bruce Raeburn.
So how'd they call you Tex?
Well, I had relatives and friends in Houston, Texas. As a young boy, I used to go to Texas, in and out of summer school, and I used to come back with a big cowboy hat. I think I've been six feet tall ever since I was 14, 15 years of age, and having that high, big hat on, they started calling me Tex.
My real name is George Joseph Herman Stephens, but who's gonna remember that? You gonna forget that, but you won't forget Tex Stephens.
--New Orleans
February 24, 1999
(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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