Search 
| Dec.08 Cover - The Tragar/Note Story |
|
|
|
| Written by Gretchen LaBudde | |
|
Page 4 of 4 When time came to locate the Tragar and Note artists for the reissue, turned out Cooper was also the hardest to track down, with nothing but a phone number in a 20-year-old address book. They found her, alright. She recently performed her first ever show in New York City at the Five Spot Soul Food Supper Club, presented by Dig Deeper. “What she’s making Saturday night in New York,” Jones laughs, “is more money than she made in our whole years of recording in Atlanta!”  Poust also credits the longtime radio DJ Hal Lamar with helping him discover Sonia Ross and her plaintive ballad “Let Me Be Free.” “I don't know if [Lamar] has a sense for my appreciation for the role he played in this. Without him, we wouldn’t have turned up Sonia Ross.” Her copy of the 45 was the only one known to exist.They have yet to find some of the musicians from the Tragar and Note rosters – Frankie and Robert, Sandy Gaye, Francine Thomas. That last gap is a real loss. Thomas’s beachy deep soul track “Too Beautiful To Be Good” is one of the strongest tracks on the comp. As esoteric as Tragar and Note appear, nothing else in Atlanta even approached their 40 releases. Hunter and Huntom, which shared owners, put out nine singles in 1961-62, one of which the first 45 by Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart.” Quadran – started by a grant from the Butler St. YMCA to encourage entrepreneurship among high school students – only racked up two releases in 1970. Other labels coughed up one release before they were never heard from again. Although the liner notes are chock full of details, they are curiously devoid of analysis. Perhaps it’s another case of that common gaff to mistake information for insight, but considering that these liners were cobbled from primary sources like conversations after tedious searches sifting through high school yearbooks, volumes of the Atlanta Daily World, and other such ephemera, perhaps this collection functions best as a jumping off point for more research into why Atlanta’s black community shelled out to feed a hopping nightclub scene but didn’t spend their dollars on the local record label. “It’s a bit of a mystery to me. There was no shortage of African-American entrepreneurs,” Poust says, referring to possible investors. “Seems to me like the civil rights movement could’ve fed the music industry, and the music industry could’ve fed them at the same time.”  As proud as Poust is of pulling together this collection of these two largely unknown soul labels, he admits, “There’s a piece of me upset because people in Atlanta, by and large, don’t seem to care. I’d expected it to pique the interest of more people locally than it has.“But at the same time, it’s been a really exciting project to work on. To finally have the CD in my hands... That still brings out a lot of really good feelings.” For Jones, the reissue is a signal of better things to come. He only dabbled in the record business after his return to L.A., earning a living making ceramics with his wife. Nowadays he records himself on sax, although he has spoken about another shot at recording Cooper. The optimism bred by the comp is contagious among the old players. As Hal Lamar wrote to Jones, “Maybe now you’re going to get the recognition you should’ve gotten 30 years ago.” Says an emotional Jones, “Maybe so. I hope so. I paid a big price... a – a big price!” |
| < Previous | Next > |
|---|