Thats me, Howard Carroll, on the left in the background playing my cherry solid body Gibson. This was our second song of the concert. There were a dozen other gospel groups that summer day in 1966 in Newport. I suggested to my guys that we play Got so Much to Shout About. We rocked the house with that song. There were thousands of young people, almost entirely white kids, probably never heard gospel before. They ate us up. We brought the house down, there was a long standing ovation. We took them to church that day and filled them with the Holy Spirit even if they didnt know that, . . Everywhere we played for white audiences, in Europe too, we were received with amazing enthusiasm and love. Even when the main bill were white singers, we owned the house. . . Still the record distributors which were all white would not make our records available in white record stores. Don Robey was our record producer of the Peacock label for twenty five years, a great man, a Black man who allowed the Dixie Hummingbirds complete artistic freedom, unlike previous white record producers. Still, even with Don Robey as our producer, his distributors who were all white wouldnt make our records available to our many white fans. They had to come to our concerts to hear us. Don Robey was an amazing man in the record business who needs more recognition. The Dixie Hummingbirds loved him and Don Robey loved the Dixie Hummingbirds. The white record companies ran him out of business eventually and that broke his heart and he died of a broken heart soon after that in 1975.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 14:36:24 +0000