“I assumed that big-name performers must have been common at high-school dances,” David Owen writes. Bo Diddley, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, and more influential musicians performed at his small private school in Kansas City. Why?
Pem-Day, as my school was usually known, didn’t enroll its first Black students, two eighth graders, until 1964, ten years after the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education . Yet most of the musicians who performed at my school’s big dances in those years were Black. Musicians of that era, especially Black musicians, were routinely underpaid for performances and cheated out of record royalties, but the ones who played at Pem-Day weren’t hired because they were cheap.
In most places in the United States, white teen-agers in the fifties and early sixties learned about R. & B. by listening to the radio. As Jerry Wexler—a music producer, who coined the term “rhythm and blues”—wrote, in 1956, “You could segregate schoolrooms and buses, but not the airwaves. Radio could not resist the music’s universality—its intrinsic charm, its empathy for human foibles, its direct application to the teenage condition.
In 1964, Pem-Day’s senior class held a spring dance in the school’s new field house, where my phys-ed classes met. Schultz’s sister had a friend, Allan Bell, who had recently opened a talent agency. Schultz leafed through a binder filled with band flyers, and chose the Drifters, who were available, in a package with a group called the Georgia Soul Twisters, for eleven hundred dollars.
“Kansas City was special,” Booker T. Jones told me, not long ago. “It was better than New York.” Jones recorded his first hit song, “Green Onions,” in 1962, when he was seventeen—the same age as some of the seniors at the Pem-Day prom he would perform at, three years later. Booker T. & the M.G.s were a rarity among R. & B. groups at that time because they were interracial: Jones, Jackson, and Steinberg were Black, and Cropper and Donald Dunn, who replaced Steinberg on bass later in 1965, were white. “A lot of white people thought the band was white, and a lot of Black people were surprised to see the white guys,” Jones said.
For Pem-Day’s class of 1968, the choice for the prom came down to Chuck Berry, the psychedelic-rock band Strawberry Alarm Clock , or Ike & Tina Turner. The class president told me that he had never heard of Ike & Tina but that several classmates argued hard for them and carried the class vote. Tina Turner said that, before they made it big in the United States, they were willing to play “pretty much anywhere that paid well.
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