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Continued from Part One.

Rodney Marsh, of Marsh Woodwinds, does recall a nightclub in the Capital Floor Care and Vacum building. “I played there in 1972, with terrible band called Gene Barbour & The Cavaliers. Gene was an early Beach Music figure who was trying to cash-in on the revival of the Beach Music thing. The club was “The Embers Club”, a Beach Music club operated by the band, The Embers. It wasn’t a black club, it was a white Beach Music club, but I think there would have been black people dancing with white people there.” The history of Beach Music is really more interesting than most of the music itself. In the Jim Crow south of the 1940’s and 1950’s, young white people in conservative cities and backwater towns could be exposed to R&B through late night radio shows, as well as live music, and jukeboxes at the beach. The drinking age was 18, and kids visiting the beach were exposed to a heady world of alcohol, dancing and R&B music, for the first time in their lives and those good times sometimes broadened people’s minds about race and culture. The Beach Music variety of R&B never ventured far from the “Swing” sound of the 40’s and early 50’s and now the phrase “Beach Music” usually means the whitest aspects of black music. Similar conditions created Rock Music but whereas Rock mutated and evolved, Beach Music became a “Golden Oldies” format. John Swain at the Record Hole, used to love answering phone calls asking him the difference between R&B and Beach Music. “Buy the record, give me the god damn money, and I’ll call it whatever the hell you want.”

Speaking of “The whitest of white”: Metro Magazine had this blurb a few years ago:

BBC producer Andy Kershaw interviewed Reeves at the legendary Mecca Restaurant in downtown Raleigh to ascertain what the city was like in 1964. Reeves discussed the musical scene of the era, remembering the many nightclub and concert appearances of the leading black musicians who, as the song says, “rolled into Raleigh.”

The Metro publisher explained that racism was not a visible problem in Raleigh due to its gentility, its lack of industry and unions, and the large population of college-age students attending area universities and colleges.

Said Reeves: “Of course I remember the black and white water fountains, the separate entrances to movie theaters, but back then we didn’t know it was wrong. But now we know it wasn’t right.”

Reeves also remembered “young, white music lovers going to black nightclubs and going to see black entertainers at the many clubs that existed in Raleigh—including the Cat’s Eye, the Embers Club, the Frog and Nightgown—and attending concerts at Memorial Auditorium and Dorton Arena, where as many as 15 acts would appear on the same bill.”

WTF? You may already think that Bernie Reeves is a facist blowhard but it’s nice to learn that segregation and racism didn’t greatly inconvenience him. God knows, labor unions might have agitated and made racism seem like a problem to old Bernie!

Marsh recalls the same shows at Memorial Auditorium but cares to mention that when someone like Solomon Burke, or James Brown performed at the Auditorium, and James Brown performed often, it was billed as a “Show and Dance”. “Show” meaning balcony seating for whites only and “Dance” for black people and a handful of white people. Marsh recalled that the floor for these shows was usually quite a party, with bottles of booze and cheap “Richards” wine,”There was a lot of dancing and swapping spit through the bottles being passed around.” An interesting aside: Marsh once took John Peden, of the Sidetrack Coffeehouse to a James Brown concert on the very same night that the Dave Brubeck Quartet was performing a concert at NC State. Peden closed the coffeehouse and they walked to Memorial Auditorium. When they returned to the coffeehouse after the show, there was a large crowd of people waiting outside and they were told that Dave Brubeck and his band had waited outside the coffeehouse in a station wagon for over an hour, hoping to have a late night jam and they had just given up and left.

Bruce Lightner, son of Mayor Clarence Lightner, recalled Club 54 and The Cave, two black-owned nightclubs in East Raleigh, that would have had all black audiences. He recalled Otis Redding, BB King and Sam Cooke performing at The Cave, on Cabarrus Street. When I asked if there were any white people at the Otis Redding show, he laughed and remarked, “No. The audiences at The Cave would have been ALL black.” Club 54 at the corner of Davie and Bloodworth, hosted Soul and Jazz shows into the early 1960’s. Much like Rodney Marsh’s description of the Ember’s Club, all the nightclubs described by Bernie Reeves as “black nightclubs” were white clubs that might have had mixed audiences, or had black entertainers. They weren’t “black clubs”.
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Cecil Johnson currently plays saxophone at Easy Street, in downtown Raleigh. In the mid-Sixties, he performed with a band called Willie T. & The Magnets, from Greensboro. They were a band of mixed race and traveling in the deep South always seemed, and often was, dangerous. “We would play black clubs with all black audiences and we would play some black clubs with white people in the audience, but we also played white clubs and beach clubs, where black people would not have been welcome in the audience. I run into some of the black guys from that band occasionally, one of them is an architect in Durham now, and we’ll swap stories about the dangerous situations we ran into getting from club to club.”

The poster above is from Globe Posters of Baltimore. We couldn’t find any Raleigh posters from this era but these posters were identical for each stop on a tour, with only the city date and name changed. Raleigh and Durham were part of the Chittlin’ Circuit for black entertainers, a regular stop between Atlanta and Washington, DC.. Collectors pay BIG money for these old Globe posters, with prices starting at $1000.

Memorial Auditorium doesn’t have records of the concerts that occurred in the 1950’s and 1960’s and most of the research for this history is little more than oral recollections by a few, very helpful, individuals. And we thank them. If you have more info to add, please comment or email wtf@rduwtf.com. We know there are many stories about Durham that we’d love to hear.