Roots of The TULSA SOUND

Many different artists and bands representing widely varying musical styles influenced the beginnings of the Tulsa Sound; it began to come together in the 1950s as vocalists and musicians struggled to get a handle on the new musical phenomenon called "rock and roll." Most Tulsa musicians had heard Bob and Johnny Lee Wills and the Texas Playboys on the radio for most of their lives. The Playboys were regular performers at Cain's Ballroom, which opened in 1924 and is still going strong in 2009. Although there was a lively black music scene in Tulsa then, few musicians from the other side of town knew anything about it. The black music influence was mainly through radio. Frank Berry had a late night radio show sponsored by Moscowitz Furniture Company and many Tulsa teens used it for background music while cruising in their cars. Frank's show started out as mostly Gospel Music, but as Rock and Roll began to absorb many of the better known gospel singers, like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin, he started playing more and more of it, until eventually the show was almost all Rock, with very little Gospel content. In the mid 1950's my friends and I would all pack into somebody's car and drive to the top of Turkey Mountain, where we could "pick up on the skip" and hear Mahalia Jackson's radio show from Chicago. Mahalia would not sing non-religious songs, but the way she sang Gospel taught us what we needed to know to play good Rock music. The Live Music scene in Tulsa's black community was headlined by Flash Terry and his band, playing mostly at the Flamingo Lounge. In the late fifties, some white Tulsa musicians began to go hear Flash's band play and sometimes sit in. Lucky Clarke and Gene Crose were already singing Country Music and both easily incorporated Rock into their song lists. A Tulsan, Sanford Clark, had an international hit with his song "The Fool," which was a Rock and Roll song before anybody used the term. I'll never forget how excited I became the first time I heard Little Willy Johns' version of "Fever." In those days, music shows on the radio were rarely dedicated to just one musical genre, so it was not unusual to hear Spike Jones followed by Porter Waggoner, followed by the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra, followed by the Ink Spots. According to John "JJ" Cale, "There isn't really any Tulsa Sound; we were just trying to play the blues and didn't know how, so that's what we came up with." We played what we knew, so it was a mixture of Western Swing, Country, Blues, Gospel and Popular Music, which ranged from ballads to marching bands.

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