Pyles

Dylan Pyles

Dr. Davis

ENG 365

9 October 2013

Red Flame Records and Early Independent Rock and Roll Music

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the landscape of pop music in America was

dramatically altered by the installation of rock and roll music as the sound of a new generation.

Adolescents had more money than ever before and found themselves in a place where they could

influence the world of popular media and its associated business of commodification. As Bruce

Harrah-Conforth states: “…as the marketplace shifted its focus to the attention of youth and their

parents’ dollars, the focus of American life also shifted to youth” (307). Kids wanted to hear

something loud, with a beat they could dance to – something just for them – and situated

themselves as a commercial demographic that could demand it. Out of this demographic came a

slew of junior high and high school aged kids who wanted to make music of their own, their own

version of the music they worshipped, and soon received budget instruments to learn, copy, and

appropriate the rhythm and blues based sounds of the artists they went wild for. Soon, a

nationwide boom of underground music was taking place, with demand for live rock and roll as

instigator.

It was during this time that small towns all across America cultivated their own “scenes,”

comprised of a handful of bands sharing the local dance and bar circuit. In Kirksville, MO and

surrounding areas, a group called The Red Blazers rose to popularity by creating their own

variations of popular rock and roll songs, while writing some of their own material based on

those hits. Aspiring music mogul and Kirksville native Dick Lowrance, who had ideas for taking

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the insurgence of local groups a step further, managed the Red Blazers. As other artists – such as

the Twlighters – sprouted in the area, Lowrance took them under his wing with hopes of uniting

the scene into one core under the banner of his independent record label, Red Flame Records

(Daniels).

Between 1961 and 1967, Dick Lowrance produced and released records from artists local

to Kirksville through Red Flame. A total of ten songs were recorded and distributed on five 45

rpm singles, most of them featuring The Red Blazers with different vocalists; the first two being

from Jonny Bragg & the Red Blazers and three from Ike Haley & the Red Blazers. The Red

Blazers recorded three tracks sans vocalist, and The Twilighters released the label’s final record

in 1967. The Red Blazers were an instrumental group that took on various front men on vocal

duties, with only one record that strictly features the core instrumental group. The only record

released on Red Flame that didn’t feature Lowrance’s Red Blazers was by a group comprised of

high school and college-aged musicians from Kirksville and surrounding areas dubbed The

Twlighters.

Twilighters drummer Dave Daniels remembers the early days of the northeastern

Missouri rock and roll scene, and how Dick Lowrance sought to unify all of the groups playing

locally under one management flagship. Though Lowrance’s intentions may have been

entrepreneurial, he gave opportunity to young musicians through the connections he forged with

smaller music industry figures, and opened up options of recording his groups in St. Louis and

pressing the records through companies like Rite Records in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Red Blazers were formed in Kirksville the late 1950s, probably 1958 or ’59. After

playing many local gigs, friend and aspiring disc jockey Lowrance began to offer financial

support and managerial services to the group with hopes of expanding their popularity around the

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region (Ellis). In 1961 he enacted his idea for an independently funded record label by pairing

the group with vocalist Jonny Bragg and producing two songs, one co-written by Bragg and

Lowrance (“Flame of Love”) and the other solely penned by Bragg (“Storybook Love”.) The

songs, supposedly recorded at Technosonic Studios in St. Louis (where all of the Red Flame

songs were tracked) would become the inaugural Red Flame release. It was also around this time

that Lowrance opened the small, short-lived Red Flame storefront near the town square in

Kirksville, which only operated for a short period between 1961 and 1962 (Ellis). In addition, the

Red Blazers hosted a Dick Lowrance produced teen dance television program in Ottumwa, IA on

KTVO on Saturday evenings at five (Daniels). The program was short lived; Donny Ellis

estimates a run of only 6-8 weeks in 1961. Ellis remembers being invited by Dick to dance on

the show, and Dave Daniels remembers The Twilighters being invited to play a set in the Blazers

place. Because the shows were shot entirely live, there are no surviving tapes archiving them.

Soon, Bragg and the Blazers parted ways and Ike Haley took over vocal duties for the

group and recorded a string of songs with them over the next two years. Haley, an African

American originally from Arkansas, had roots in classic rhythm and blues and added a new flair

to The Blazers that contrasted the teen dance sound of the Jonny Bragg singles. His addition by

Lowrance to the group further cemented music as a unifying philosophical entity within the

cultural community of the Kirksville area, because Haley, quite frankly, “added color” to a scene

that was prepared to fully embrace black music and the related approach to rhythm and blues.

The three songs he recorded with the Blazers are versions of Little Richard’s “Lucille,” “A

Thousand Miles Away,” originally a hit by doo-wop group The Heartbeats and Big Jay

McNeely’s 1957 record “There’s Something on Your Mind” (Ellis).

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All of these songs had a distinct rhythm and blues sound, aided heavily by Haley’s extra

soulful interpretations of what had become instant classics and dance hall favorites. It was his

electric adoption of these well-known tunes that gave him notoriety as a performer, and by

making them his own he participated in the common practice in underground music of

appropriating mass culture into something rooted heavily in communal transmission.

The Twilighters were founded in the early 1960s by upperclassmen from high schools in

Kirksville and surrounding areas. They gigged rigorously on the local circuit, playing

everywhere from bars (where their peers couldn’t watch them perform), to school dances, to self-

organized gigs at the National Guard Armory in Kirksville. Many member changes took place

within the band, but the group eventually landed on what Daniels calls the “classic” lineup of the

group – Randy Elmore, Gary Blurton, Everett Cassady, and himself. Daniels was much younger

than the other guys, and admits he just tagged along. It was long before Lowrance recognized

their youthful talent and invited them to record under Red Flame. This was in 1967, and Daniels

remembers going to Technosonic Studios in St. Louis to cut two original songs, one written

specifically for the session “Spellbound” and the other “My Little Angel.” “Spellbound” has

gained attention in circles of 1960s garage rock scholarship, and its rollicking, simple structure

and manic upbeat tempo are considered early examples of features that would later become punk

rock.

Their sound wasn’t the only feature of the group that can be rightfully considered as a

predecessor to punk. Daniels remembers those self-organized gigs at the Armory the best,

because it was “better to do it yourself.” They would pay $50 to rent the place for an evening,

pay the janitor $50 to clean up, and pack the place with kids at 75 cents per entry, clearing the

profit margin by a landslide. This do-it-yourself ethic lends more evidence to the communal

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vitality of the early days of local, independent music scenes, which would come to full fruition in

the punk rock movement of the 1970s and 80s. This was a music made by the locals for the

locals, and organized entirely by the “kids” without outside help or influence.

Lowrance produced one other group, Friar Tuck and the Merry Men, out of Western

Illinois (Blurton). Though the group wasn’t released under the Red Flame banner, their sound is

similar to that of the groups that were, creating a fine continuity between the Midwestern local

music sound that was being perpetuated by young musicians in the 1960s. They released one

Lowrance-produced single one what could be an original Lowrance label, Sherwood Forest

records. The songs on that single were “Peanut Butter” and “Try Me” (Ellis)

The small town and urban boom of young rock and roll imitators of the late 1950s and

early 1960s forged what could be considered a new folk community. Young musicians listened

to rhythm and blues records to escape the pressures of school and parents, and the desire to learn

instruments and imitate the new sounds stemmed from the communal and in some ways anti-

academic approach to musicianship. If a young musician wanted to learn a song, they taught

themselves and taught each other. In her book The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA,

Anne Dhu McLucas talks extensively about the oral tradition involved in popular American

music as it takes on a life of its own outside of the pop world: “The changes wrought by

successive performers as they took on a piece and made it their own were seldom the result of

notational changes; instead, they resulted from the individual stylistic characteristics of the

genre…” (49).

As ways to play different rock and roll or rhythm and blues songs were passed from

musician to musician, stability and variation began to show up heavily in local interpretations of

different hits or the appropriation of those newly discovered practices into simple, original

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compositions. In other words, there was no book written on how to play the groovy new music

taking the country by storm, so it was left to those who desired to learn it to create their own

means of doing so. McLucas talks gives exact reference to the musical crevasse discussed here

when she says that “The bands generally start by covering the songs of the bands they want to

emulate, but often branch out from there to do their own material” (67). This could be seen as an

example of how something from mass culture can influence a folk group and lead to that group’s

appropriation of the culture into their own community.

An example of this is Ike Haley & The Red Blazer’s recording of the song “Lucile,”

released in 1962 (still need to verify this date). This song was made famous in its original version

recorded by Little Richard in 1957, during the beginning of the rock and roll takeover. Songs like

“Lucille” enter the folk world when they are learned and passed on outside of – or better,

underneath – the pop world and mainstream society. These musicians were creating a new mode

of folk transmission in relation to the new form of culture, by learning these songs in the under-

the-radar setting of small towns and urban areas. This form of cultural conductivity can be

paralleled to the way Appalachian folk or southern blues music is passed on by means of one-to-

one transmission in a rural community.

One major difference here is that the previously mentioned classic folk music settings

date back many, many years in practice and don’t show any signs of being derived from mass

culture. Some would say this is what makes them distinctively folk, but an argument may be

made that the evolving landscape of youth culture in America in the late 50s and early 60s

allowed for a new type of folk ideology to emerge within centralized towns, in which young

people are influenced much more by mass culture than traditional folk methods of cultural

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transmission, and therefore construct their own folklore influenced by – but not the same as –

mass media.

Harrah-Conforth talks much about the folkloric qualities of rock and roll music and its

community-binding effect. He mostly writes about the rite of passage involved in youths

attending rock and roll concerts, paraphrasing Victor Turner when he says that “…due to the

very chemical workings of our brains, human beings have no choice but to construct [folklore] to

explain their world in what often appears to be a capricious universe” (308). This alone is

prevalent in the notion of the necessity for American youth to construct their own folk

communities in relation to the mass culture shift that rock and roll brought with it, at a time when

consumerism became more focused on youth and their demands. Harrah-Conforth elaborates

more convincingly: “…rock and roll, like all human products, has the capability of being used as

a tool to both reorder and make sense out of that ‘capricious universe’” (308). It’s not as if young

people of this time period were consciously trying to sift through and decide what was

traditionally appropriate for them to base their community around, but instead actively

recognized the need for their own ritualistic processes and created them as an abstraction from

the mass media that heavily influenced their worldview and common practices.

Hannah-Conforth makes a great point that “Those critics who have failed to see rock and

roll as anything but a mass-market commodity have extracted the item from the process…”

(310). This is inherent in the manner of which young musicians were learning the songs that they

wanted to replicate, and creating their own spins on those popular hits as they adopted them from

mass culture into their grassroots sphere. Just because something is commodified and mass

produced doesn’t mean that it didn’t have roots in a folk community or couldn’t inspire one.

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At this time, the music itself was entering the smaller cultural groups of young musicians

through recordings, and the musicians were picking apart those songs and learning them, then

rebuilding them in new versions that displayed stability and variation. This is exampled in

different stages within the singles that were recorded and released on Red Flame Records, from

covers with slight variation such as Haley’s rendition of “Lucille” to original tunes obviously

based on the structures that were prominent within rock and roll trends at the time, structures

based on approaches that the composers had learned and passed along within the group.

Wherever there is music – wherever there are musicians – there will be a folk

community. There are certain traditional parameters of what can be considered folk music itself,

but it is not entirely unfair to say that any type of music can be of a folk type once it enters the

folk community and that community manipulates it and appropriates it in unique ways that are

entirely separate from the popular society which propels it or generates it. Soon, ways of playing

a rock and roll song that was originally written for a consumer audience become so variable

among independent musicians that the song takes on a folk essence of its own, due to its sacred

and ritualistic significance to the non-pop community that embraces it and passes it along. This is

evident in the story of Red Flame Records, an early independent music label that took on the job

of uniting and perpetuating a small-town music scene with inspired do-it-yourself ethic. It’s this

kind of grassroots planning and execution that proves ideas about music and art can be taken

from the greater realm of society and be used on a folk level within a specified community.

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Top Left: Red Blazers business card. (Ellis)Top Right: Twilighters business card (Daniels)Bottom Left: Twlighters Promo: Gart Blurton & Dave Daniels (Standing), Everett Cassady & Randy Elmore (Kneeling) (Daniels) Bottom right: Twilighters live, mid-1960s (Daniels)

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Top Left: Ike Haley (1935-2009) (Ellis)Top Right: The Red Blazers David Prather, Larry Smith, and Bobby Rollins (Ellis)Bottom: The Red Blazers: Front Row – Bob Rollins, Dick Mohr, David Prather

Back row: Dick Lowrance, Nels Edwards, Jerry Hagmeyer (Ellis)

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Works Cited

Blurton, Gary. Personal Interview. 8 March. 2013.

Daniels, Dave. Personal Interview. 3 Oct. 2013.

Ellis, Donald. Personal Interview. 3 Oct. 2013

Harrah-Conforth, Bruce. “Rock and Roll, Process, and Tradition.” Western Folklore 49.3 (1990):

306-13. JSTOR. Web. 11 Sep. 2013.

McLucas, Anne Dhu. The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Print.

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