Read Here Comes the Night for Free Online

switchboard answered the phone and took messages, so they didn’t need to hire a secretary.
    When their New Orleans distributor called looking for an obscure record he couldn’t find by Stick McGhee, Ahmet decided to record a version of his own and found the only McGhee he knew—bluesman Brownie McGhee—at home in Brooklyn. As it happened, the Stick McGee in question was Brownie’s brother, who was visiting him at the time. A session was arranged (brother Brownie played guitar and shouted along on the choruses), and the resulting record, “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” was the label’s first hit record when it was released in February 1949. It sold seven hundred thousand copies.
    Ertegun and Abramson went south that year to search out more real blues talent. New York musicians looked down on the earthy music and it was always a problem getting the New York cats to cut the kind of sides Ahmet wanted. He usually had to compromise and let them do two or three jazz numbers for every blues. They recognized Blind Willie McTell playing on the streets of Atlanta from his old 78s. They found the epochal New Orleans pianist called Professor Longhair playing at some dump in New Orleans white people never ventured into, only to learn he had been signed just days before by Mercury Records. They recorded him anyway.
    The next time they went south, they brought with them arranger Jesse Stone, who had been working on Atlantic sessions since the first one. Grandson of a slave, raised in a show business family, Stone started performing at age four in a vaudeville dog act in the Midwest. He made his first record, “Starvation Blues,” in 1927 for Okeh Records. He knocked around Kansas City and came to New York in 1936, when Duke Ellington ran across the all-girl vocal group called the Rhythm Debs that Stone was leading in Detroit. Ellington landed the girls a job at the Cotton Club and laid his Harlem apartment on Stone rent-free.
    Stone worked at the Apollo Theater, did arrangements for Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and others. He helped start Louis Jordan. He took songwriting lessons from Cole Porter. His song “Idaho” was a Top Five pop hit for Benny Goodman in 1942, and Jimmy Dorsey made a big record out of his “Sorghum Switch.” He worked with Herb Abramson at National Records and was the only one of the Atlantic team who knew his way around sheet music.
    Stone took notes on what he heard on that Southern trip and immediately applied what he learned to their New York recordings. When saxophonist Frank Culley showed up at Atlantic with a tune he called “Sergeant” that he claimed to have written, Stone immediately recognized it as his “Sorghum Switch” and gave it a spiffy new arrangementand title, “Cole Slaw.” Culley’s record didn’t become a hit, but Louis Jordan took the tune Top Ten R&B in the summer of 1949.
    Ertegun and Abramson signed a young singer named Ruth Brown, who was managed by Cab Calloway’s sister, after catching her act in a Washington, DC, club. Ahmet was particularly impressed by the way she handled the old Little Miss Cornshucks number “So Long.” On her way to New York City to make her debut at the Apollo and record for Atlantic, Brown was in a car crash that crushed both her legs. She spent months laid up in a Chester, Pennsylvania, hospital. Ahmet visited her on her twenty-first birthday to sign the contracts in her hospital bed. Atlantic paid her medical bills before she ever stepped into the studio. She was still on crutches and wearing leg braces when she finally did. Ahmet had her sing two songs on a four-song date with the Eddie Condon band. He held little commercial hope for Condon’s traditional jazz, but he also saw the session as an opportunity to expose a new singer. Of course, they did the Little Miss Cornshucks number, and the damn thing made the Billboard R&B Top Ten in 1949, the label’s second hit.
    But it was the Jesse Stone arrangement for Ruth Brown’s