PREVIEW PREVIEW French RCA EP from 1957

[email protected] Atlanta may not be held in quite the same holy reverence as Memphis and certain regions of Texas by dedicated rockabilly aficionados, but the voluminous rock and roll talent roster of Georgia’s leading metropolis could easily challenge that of any southern city during the mid-to-late 1950s and right through the ‘60s, if sheer star power is taken into consideration.

Jerry Reed, Ray Stevens, Joe South, Tommy Roe, Mac Davis, and Billy Joe Royal were all young products of the greater Atlanta area, every one going on to enjoy prolonged national prominence. The city’s burgeoning rock and roll recording scene initially revolved to a great extent around the garrulous Bill Lowery, who wore several hats in stylish fashion during that era as a popular Atlanta broadcast personality, music publisher (he corralled Gene Vincent’s 1956 smash Be-Bop-A-Lula as an early cornerstone of his Lowery Enterprises portfolio at BMI), record producer, artist manager, and owner of several record labels. The most prolific of the latter was NRC, which stood for National Recording Corporation.PREVIEW “Bill was a wonderful man,” says Norbert Putnam, who played bass with Rick Hall’s first resident rhythm section in Muscle Shoals when Lowery sent The Tams and Tommy Roe by to make hits at Hall’s FAME Studios in 1963. Bill would probably not have succeeded on such a grandiose scale without Ric Cartey’s immortal Young Love, another hallowed early prize in Lowery’s expansive BMI catalog.

When Cartey waxed the melodic ballad for Lowery’s fledgling Stars, Inc. label in 1956 in Atlanta with guitarist Charlie Broome’s Jiv-A-Tones in musical support, no one could have foretold that not one but two covers of the song Ric had written with his friend Carole Joyner would top the national hit parade in February of the following year. Young Love would prove the biggest seller of all to reside in Lowery’s bountiful publishing holdings, helping to solidify Bill’s local standing as he eventually assumed the lofty mantle of “Mr. Atlanta Music.”

Born October 21, 1924 in Leesburg, Louisiana, William James Lowery, Jr. began working as a deejay when he was 16, snagging a radio station manager post in Tennessee at the precocious age of 21 before visiting Atlanta in 1946 and deciding that he wanted to settle there. Lowery was named the manager of Atlanta’s WQXI radio, then switched over in 1948 to WGST, situated on the campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. WGST was the site of many recording sessions during the ‘50s because Atlanta had no professional studios at the time, including the historic 1954 date that produced Ray Charles’ smash I’ve Got A Woman for Atlantic.

One of Lowery’s on-air gigs was portraying the title character on ‘Uncle Ebenezer Brown,’ a Saturday morning country music program that featured live music acts (including a very young Joe South, who became a Lowery protégé and NRC artist; Bill would convince Joe to shorten his surname from Souter). Lowery survived a 1951 bout with cancer before formingPREVIEW his own Lowery Music Company with local country musician Boots Woodall. Always looking to expand his boundaries, Lowery launched his first label, Stars, Inc., in 1955, issuing a stream of country and rockabilly product by newcomers that included Cleve Warnock, Little Jimmy Dempsey, and Chuck Atha.

Whaley Thomas Cartey was another of Atlanta’s young musical hopefuls, born there on January 18, 1937. Ric and guitarist Charlie Broome formed a musical partnership early on. “Ric and I started off as a duet,” says Broome. “We went to school together. I think I was one or two grades before him and Carole Joyner both, but we all knew each other. We

YoungPREVIEW Ric Cartey (on the right), 1953 lived in the Kirkwood area. It was considered Atlanta, but the neighborhood was Kirkwood. Ric and I didn’t live that far from each other. So we just started playing. I started playing when I was about 13.”

The two had separate interests while attending Murphy High School. “I was in the band, and I played drums and sousaphone, or tuba, in the band,” says Broome, who briefly beat the skins for future country star Roy Drusky and local singer Kenny Lee before concentrating his energies on guitar. “Ric was on the golf team, and he was in ROTC. And Carole was a cheerleader. It was probably varsity, because she was a beautiful girl.

“(Ric and I) were both out of school (when we started), because we weren’t actually playing together then. We had mutual friends that we knew, and I was playing more than he was, and I’d played longer than he did because I was playing at parties and stuff like that. It was, ‘Hey, Charlie! We’re gonna have a party! Can you come?’ Of course, it flattered me, you know. And then they’d say, ‘Oh, by the way, would you mind bringing your guitar?’ And of course I did. I wound up being the entertainment. So I guess word got around, and we started, and we hit if off. This is when Elvis was kind of beginning on the scene there, a little bit before that. It was, I’d say, probably ’53, ’54.

“He was a nice-looking young man, real slight build. And I don’t know that he got in any fights in school or anything like that. And I know I didn’t. We hit it off for a long time. We were both learning from each other,” says Charlie. “He lived around the corner on Memorial Drive from where I lived, and I knew him from Murphy too. We just kind of hit it off playing,PREVIEW and up until then I always played by myself. “When Ric and I started, we actually didn’t have a name. It was just Ric and Charlie, Ric Cartey and Charlie Broome. And we went down the beach. But we actually weren’t doing really what you consider professional jobs there. I mean, we were playing down at the beach, and we’d always attract a crowd and everything. And then it just sort of grew.”

CarolePREVIEW Joyner Carole & Ric Ric Cartey, Charlie Broome, Sonny Golden

Ric and Charlie weren’t fated to remain a duo forever. Broome began to assemble a band, one of his first recruits being drummer Sonny Golden. “We were in grammar school together. Sonny and I are about the same age. There’s probably a month or so difference. I forgetPREVIEW which one of us is older,” says Broome. “I was popcorn boy at a little neighborhood