“Teardrops from My Eyes” that smoothly blended the robust raunch of the New Orleans r&b with the svelte sound of the New York big bands. The baritone sax belches and shimmering brass slide in behind the beat. Stone plants a throbbing bass figure in the foreground to encourage dancers. Brown gives the song a fierce, bold delivery, and saxophonist Frank “Cole Slaw” Culley honks his guts out on the bridge. “Teardrops from My Eyes” hit number one on the r&b charts and was one of the best-selling r&b records of 1950. Ruth Brown—and Atlantic Records—had arrived.
Ahmet was not a fan of the vocal group sound and Atlantic had recorded little of it, but after the massive success of the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know” in 1950, vocal groups were too popular for Atlantic to ignore. Through a fellow they knew who worked at an independentdistributor in Washington, DC, the company signed the Clovers, a five-man group they auditioned in Waxie Maxie’s store. Ahmet wrote “Don’t You Know I Love You”—using the pen name Nugetre, or Ertegun spelled backward, to avoid possible embarrassment in the event he wound up pursuing a diplomatic career anytime in the future—and used Frank Culley’s band to back the group on the record date. Saxophones were a new touch for vocal group records. Ertegun thought the performance was more white, more Ink Spots, than he intended when he wrote the piece but realized the group turned the record into something special. “Don’t You Know I Love You” was another number one r&b hit for the label in 1951, followed immediately by another number one with “Fool, Fool, Fool,” a song Ertegun insisted the Clovers record against their wishes. It sounded better to them as it went up the charts.
In 1950 and 1951, Atlantic recorded Mary Lou Williams, the Billy Taylor Quartet, Leadbelly, Al Hibbler, Lil Green, Sidney Bechet, Meade Lux Lewis, and Mabel Mercer, among others. In July 1951, Ahmet and Abramson went to Chicago and recorded ailing pianist Jimmy Yancey, whose left arm was partly paralyzed, and some other notable local talent. While in Chicago, Ahmet was knocked out walking down Maxwell Street to see black people dancing to his Clovers song on portable record players.
Ahmet knew Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner from concerts at the embassy. Abramson had recorded him at National Records, and Jesse Stone first met him as a teenager in Kansas City. When Ahmet heard Big Joe was subbing for an ailing Jimmy Rushing with the Count Basie Orchestra at the Apollo, he went to the show. Big Joe Turner was a force of nature, not a jazz singer. Turner didn’t know the material and kept coming in late and the band ended choruses before Big Joe did. The set was a train wreck. When Ahmet finally found the singer after the show, he was up the street already nursing a drink at Braddock’s Bar, miserable and dejected. Ahmet talked Turner into going with Atlantic and wrote him a song, “Chains of Love,” a rewrite of the old AlbertAmmons number, “Mecca Flat Blues” (Nugetre strikes again), that landed the roly-poly baritone at number two on the r&b charts in 1951. *
Ruth Brown had the biggest rhythm and blues record of the year in 1953 for Atlantic with “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a song that took considerable cajoling on Ahmet’s part to get her to record. They ran the session at a stage studio on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Seventh Street, and along with arranger Jesse Stone, they brought in engineer Tom Dowd, a recording engineer they had come increasingly to rely on since the boyish Dowd first showed up as the unexpected substitute at an early Atlantic session at Apex Sound.
Dowd was a remarkable young man, a classically trained pianist who as a teen worked during the war on the secret Manhattan Project that developed the A-bomb. When he went back to college and found that the nuclear physics he learned making the bomb was still classified top secret and the professors