Back in 2003 I read this amazing story from Washington Post article about British collectors' fascination on long forgotten Washington DC record artists whose record was released under 'Shrine Records', a Thomas Circle based studio which tried to bring fame & fortune to Washington DC music scene as Motown did to Detroit. What attracted my interest was not only the story how these British connoiseurs & collectors helped the resurrection of these musicians and their works which even the locals, let alone people in the U.S. hardly recall such groups existed. But also the fact that the article talks about the past of an area that I frequent or am familar with and that it carried photo of a person that I know as member of one of the bands of the time.
Well, Thomas circle was not far from I used to live and I had Ethiopian friends renting in the area. Since the Real Estate boom in Washington, DC & revitalization some of its neighborhoods, Thomas Circle has become prime location for hotel chains, buildings converted to high-price condos and reconstructed office buildings.
Just before the boom and the gentrification process that followed it, significant number of Ethiopians used to live in Thomas Circle, Logan Circle (two blocks up) as well as neighboring areas along the 14th & 16th street corridor.
Actually, the lives of Ethiopians & other immigrants living in the area served as the background for "The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears" the best selling novel by the young & rising Ethiopian born author Dinaw Mengistu.
As I said in the beginning, I used to know one of the recording artists whose photo is included and his band was mentioned in the article. This was the late Melvin Butler of the Eddie Daye & Four Bars, the band he founded with Eddie Daye. Melvin as we used to call him fondly was an affable Concierge at the apartment building I used to live in. He was smooth & charming gentleman in his 70s who had a way saying things that make your day bright if you happen to meet him on the hall way of the apartment building.. He used to say to me that I remind him of those Ethiopians he met during the Korean war while he was in the Army and adds "You Ethiopians have something noble in you. Like your Emperor Haile Selassie is his name right?". He was telling that he used to perform in musical band in Washington DC local musical scene of the 1950s & 60s so I attributed his charming personality to his time in show business. I remember listening to this song back in his apartment which he said his grand kids converted from vinyl record to CD, if i remember correctly. I remember him saying he & his band mates opened for the likes of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Wison Picket, the Platters among others.
Even though Melvin was suffering from poor health due to kidney failure, he was often cheerful as well as class. So was his good looking wife who used to work for one of the local government offices. I believe for one of the suburban counties. I used to wonder, with his being in the show business and full of charm nature, he must have charmed the best one to be his wife. However, appearance can be deceiving. It was his best looking wife who seemed to be in good shape who suddenly died first. The affable Melvin's physical health deteriorated more after his wife's passing, he also died not long after. Years after, when the Washington Post article came out, I clipped the article and gave it to his daughter. His family seem to do not know about the article.
Recently years after the article was written and I have lost contact with Melvin's daughter (both of us have moved out of the apartment), I saw exchanges between collectors at this website that album cover for 'Eddie Daye & the Four Band' records sell for more than 200pounds by itself in the UK. I also learned that the leader of the band Eddie Daye died in 2009. I am glad Melvin & his band mates received in the end even though belated the success & recognition they deserve in the end. I just wish he had died knowing that people discovered to love their music and scavenge to get hold of whatever can be found. May God bless the souls of Melvin Butler & Eddie Day with their wives.
Washington's Lost Soul
D.C.'s Answer to Motown Failed Nearly 40 Years Ago, But Today Shrine Records Is a British Treasure.
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page N01
The band is drunk. Not falling-down drunk, but more than tipsy, and it's only midnight, which means the band will soon be loaded. Edgewood Studios on K Street is packed with musicians and well-wishers, including Bo Diddley, who lives nearby. And over in a corner stand the Cavaliers, a five-man vocal group and the stars of this session, here to record a rowdy, 2 1/2-minute R&B track called "Do What I Want."
It's the autumn of 1966, and this is the Cavaliers' last chance. Every member of the Washington group is about 30 years old, which is borderline past-it in the pop business. The group knows that if "Do" doesn't chart, the dream of singing and touring full time is doomed. But it's hard to worry tonight. There's a party mood at Edgewood: The musicians, more soused by the hour, keep fumbling the tempo, and to give the song some roadhouse ambiance, the crowd is whooping and shouting through each take.
A couple of weeks later, a local label called Shrine Records releases "Do What I Want." It flops. Bass vocalist Theotrice Gamble will hear his group once or twice on the radio, but that's it.
"We were kind of disappointed," recalls Gamble, now 68, sitting at the dining room table of his house in Silver Spring. "We didn't give up right away, but then I drifted away and I haven't been in touch with anyone in the group since."
Gamble reaches under a stack of papers and pulls out a copy of the 45 recorded with his friends decades ago. "In all my years of singing, this is the only remnant I have," he says quietly. "And this is my only copy."
There it is. Groove-worn from years of spins. Sheathed in a rumpled white cover sleeve. Rightthere on the table.
What Gamble doesn't know is that this seven-inch slice of vinyl is a coveted treasure in England, where American soul is fervidly collected. It's a craze that started in the early '70s, when a handful of British clubs began to host marathon, pill-fueled all-nighters of soul singles by artists who'd been long forgotten in the United States. For deejays, the trick was unearthing great tunes that nobody else owned, that couldn't be heard on any other dance floor. The scarcer the record, the better.
No soul records, then or now, are scarcer than Shrine's. Founded in 1964, the label hummed to life in a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle NW, hoping to do for Washington what Motown had done for Detroit: turn local talent into national stars. It was the dream of a producer and songwriter named Eddie Singleton and his wife, Raynoma Gordy Singleton, a businesswoman with perfect pitch, loads of pluck and a singular credit to her name. She and her then-husband, Berry Gordy, had founded Motown.
But after releasing nearly two dozen singles, Shrine ran out of money and, having failed to send even one song up the charts, the label folded in 1967. Then its luck got even worse. Most of Shrine's overstock was stashed in a warehouse owned by a company called Waxie Maxies on 14th Street, and during the Martin Luther King riots of 1968, the warehouse burned to the ground. What little Shrine vinyl had been given to performers or sold was all that remained.
For British soul connoisseurs, the story of Shrine's life and fiery demise held an irresistible allure. The fans revered the music, too, which is less polished and noisier than Motown's. For years, hard-core Shrine-o-philes have been flying to Washington to scour the bins of local record stores and comb through area estate sales. Some have posted signs ("Shrine records wanted!") on D.C. streets. All are searching for acts whose names are rarely uttered even in their hometown: the Counts, Tippie and the Wisemen, Les Chansonettes, the D.C. Blossoms, Leroy Taylor and the Four Kays, the Enjoyables, the Epsilons.
"It's still incredibly popular," Dan Collins, a British soul collector, says in a phone interview from England. "For 30 years, we've been coming to America to buy Shrine singles, to the point where we've got more of the stuff than you do."
As it happens, the Cavaliers' "Do What I Want" is one of the holiest of the grails hunted by overseas collectors. Until this afternoon in Theotrice Gamble's house, there were just two known copies. He owns the third. Sitting at his dining room table, he learns for the first time that this single is worth far more than its weight in gold. Conservative estimates put the auction price of the single at about $4,000.
Gamble absorbs this news with stoical awe.
"My, my," he says after a pause, looking at the record and slowly shaking his head. "Unbelievable. . . . Unbelievable." He pauses again. "I thought we'd been forgotten long ago."
When Shrine began, there was nothing like it in Washington. Everyone here assumed that the city boasted as much talent as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Memphis and other towns with homegrown labels built on homegrown artists; Marvin Gaye hailed from here, after all, as did R&B great Billy Stewart. Dozens of doo-wop and soul groups were singing on street corners and vying for stage time at area clubs.
Eddie Singleton had seen these singers up close. As the manager of comedian Flip Wilson and as a songwriter and producer based in New York, he'd traveled often to Washington, and he smelled opportunity.
"I knew there was a void," Singleton says on the phone from South Africa, where he has lived for four years. He is 66 now, and the tale of Shrine still smarts a little, but he tells it patiently. "Washington was a major pulse. I felt it was fertile."
He was ready for a fresh start. Big-time success on Tin Pan Alley, the epicenter of Manhattan's music scene, had eluded him, and he had a girlfriend who needed a change of scene, too. Miss Ray, as she was known, was already semifamous in the pop music world. She and an ex-boxer named Berry Gordy had opened a Detroit studio where locals could record songs cheaply. The operation flourished, and when the pair moved into a townhouse on that city's West Grand Boulevard, Raynoma had a sign made for the front of the building that read "Hitsville, U.S.A."
She did more than just decorate. With her formal musical training, Raynoma wrote arrangements, played keyboards -- for the Temptations, among others -- and oversaw day-to-day operations. But as Motown prospered, Berry Gordy had a series of adulterous affairs and became physically abusive, according to Raynoma's autobiography, "Berry, Me and Motown: The Untold Story." After a mail-order Mexican divorce, Miss Ray headed to New York, where she and Berry commenced a love-hate relationship odd enough to keep Oprah busy for weeks. She continued to work for Motown, opening an East Coast office of the label's song-publishing arm, Jobete, looking for new acts for Motown.
She didn't find many. And when word of her relationship with Singleton reached Gordy, he was enraged. As Raynoma struggled financially, Gordy refused to sink more cash into a venture that wasn't making money. Strapped, Raynoma did something she'd regret: She ordered a manufacturer to press 5,000 copies of Mary Wells's "My Guy," a national hit at the time, then drove to local record stores and unloaded them for 50 cents apiece.
A week later, the FBI arrested Raynoma, accusing her of bootlegging. As an executive vice president of Motown, Raynoma thought she was doing something a bit sneaky but legal. The feds disagreed, and Gordy soon presented his former wife with a terrible choice: Either sign away her co-founder's stake in Motown or he'd press charges. She signed, collecting a $10,000 one-time payment and monthly child support for the son she'd had with Berry. Her share of Motown would have eventually been worth millions.
Singleton's plans for a soul label in D.C. sounded to Miss Ray like an ideal new beginning, and the pair moved here and set up shop on Thomas Circle. Like Motown, the house had rehearsal space as well as offices. Three stories, 19 rooms and a basement. Singleton chose "Shrine" to pay homage to the recently assassinated JFK, whom both he and Raynoma had idolized. For a logo, he picked an image that baffled British collectors until well into the '80s, when they finally tracked Singleton down. It was, he told them, a sketch of the eternal flame beside Kennedy's grave.
Word about Shrine spread fast. Raynoma brought in her nephew Dale Warren, who would later write string arrangements for artists like Isaac Hayes at Stax Records. Producer Maxx Kidd, later the business force behind go-go music, joined, too. Songwriter and former singer Harry Bass moved from New York to lead the hunt for talent, scouring venues like the Lion's Den, the Colt Lounge, Ed Murphy's Supper Club, the Flamingo Room, Turner's Arena and the Howard Theater.
Contracts were signed, house musicians were hired. The house at 3 Thomas Circle bustled.
"It was incredibly exciting," says Richard Collins, formerly of the Counts, whose members were all so young, their parents had to cosign their contracts. "They had wonderful musicians, and for us to be part of it was amazing."
A bunch of area performers in their teens and early twenties found themselves opening local gigs for stars like Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Mary Wells. None was getting rich, but even the youngest discovered they had some very ardent fans.
"They were after me," James Faison, who sang with the Counts, says with a chuckle. "Somebody would send a drink onstage, and if you accepted, that was their in. I was still living at home with Mama, and these women, they were older and they had jobs and cars. The next morning, they'd drop me off at my house. My friends were a little jealous."
Through 1966, Shrine's roster grew. It included groups like the Cairos, featuring a young singer named Keni St. Lewis, who later wrote songs for Michael Jackson and Peaches & Herb; and Little Bobby Parker, who had once written a guitar riff cribbed by John Lennon for "Day Tripper"; and Eddie Daye and 4 Bars, already veterans on the local music scene, who had answered an open-audition ad for Shrine they'd spotted in a newspaper.
"I was impressed," says Daye, who still sings in Washington. "They were spending money. And early on they were getting airplay. . . . That's the most important thing for a label, getting your records played."
Local sales were decent at first, peaking with the Epsilons, who had a regional hit with a multi-harmony tear-jerker called "Mad at the World." But soon after, Shrine stalled. Few of the singles gained traction. Airplay dropped off dramatically. Eddie and Raynoma were mystified and then frantic. Within a few months, Shrine was foundering, and by 1967 it was out of money.
How good was the music? Very good and often great, judging from the two-volume "Shrine: The Rarest Soul Label," released by a British label called Ace Records in the late '90s. Ace spent years tracking down whatever master tapes still existed, and vinyl copies of the rest of the songs. Then it negotiated a licensing deal with Eddie Singleton, turning a small fortune's worth of vinyl into a retrospective available to anyone with $34. (Amazon sells each disc for $16.98.) Listening to "Rarest" you realize how carefully Shrine relied on the template designed by Motown, famously described by Berry Gordy as music by black artists that white people would buy. But Singleton and his colleagues didn't write melodies as sweet as those produced by the Motown team, which is part of their slightly gritty charm. There aren't overlooked platinum records to be found here. Just emotion-drenched vocals, lush orchestration and songs so accomplished they force a question: "How come I've never heard this stuff before?"
Among the standouts: "I Wouldn't Mind Crying," by Tippie and the Wisemen, a ballad that savors the agony of love in cymbal crashes that echo like sobs of joy. And "I Won't Be Coming Back," which sets J.D. Bryant's blazing voice against deep and thumping heartbeat drums. Shirley Edwards's performance on "Dream of My Heart" makes you wish she'd accepted the invitation, later offered, to sing the title song of the James Bond movie "Goldfinger." (The tune launched the career of another Shirley, last name Bassey.) Nearly all of the songs come with elaborate horn and string arrangements, and all have that compressed, AM radio sound that is somehow both dated and timeless.
"There was unbelievable talent there," says Sydney Hall, who recorded as a solo vocalist and now lives in Connecticut. "Unbelievable. There were a lot of great acts. At first, it was a thing that none of us comprehended. Then we got old, and we saw where we could have been."
Today, among many Shrine performers and former higher-ups, bitterness about the label's death lingers. Reached at home in D.C. one recent morning, Shirley Edwards refused to discuss the subject, saying she didn't want to salt old wounds. Raynoma, who now lives in California and has been divorced from Eddie Singleton since 1971, politely declined to discuss the topic.
Others, like Harry Bass, talk about Shrine with a sense of bewilderment and surprising emotion.
"When I look back on it, if nothing else, it was a school for talent development," says Bass, sipping coffee in Union Station one afternoon. At 60, he has twinkly eyes and a tranquil air that's ruffled only when he discusses the label. Bass spent much of his life as a D.C. tour guide, work he enjoyed but not the career he had in mind in his twenties.
"I defied my family to have a life in music," he says. "My grandmother proclaimed I'd be a teacher or a preacher, and everyone expected me to go that way."
The resentment, in part, is about money. Neither Bass nor any other performers got much of it from Shrine, not from its original days in business, or from the secondary British market in Shrine vinyl, or from the Ace CDs.
What stings most, though, are the what-might-have-beens and the sense that many members of this professional family have vanished. I asked Bass about some Shrine artists who hadn't been heard from in decades, some of whom are apparently unaware of their remarkable second act in England. In particular, I was curious about the Cautions, an object of special fascination for Shrine fans because it was the only act to release two singles with the label. Little is remembered about the group except the names of a couple of members, one of them known only as AB Jones.
"These were street guys," Bass recalls. "Some of them may be in jail. Some may be dead." He mulls that for a moment, and looks toward the ceiling. He was like a big brother to the Cautions. Suddenly, there are tears rolling down his face. He dries them with a napkin, apologizes and then laughs.
"Sorry," he whispers with a smile. "I didn't know that was in me."
The mass appeal of obscure American soul in England isn't as bizarre as it might initially sound. Brits have a history of embracing artists who've been overlooked stateside. In the '60s, American bluesmen who struggled in their hometowns were greeted as celebrities in London. In the decade that followed, soul singers who had never charted in the United States found, to their amazement, that they had thousands of fans in cities whose names they'd never heard. To Brits, the songs were intensely moving and profoundly exotic.
"You've got to understand, there weren't any ghettos in this country in the '60s, no race riots and no place to get suffering music," says John Manship, owner of one of England's largest retail outlets of American soul. "You get a white guy with his hair all slicked back singing about a girl who'd run off with his best mate, and then you get someone like Otis Redding singing about the same thing -- it's a whole different ballgame. We'd never heard anything like it."
Bands like the Beatles and the Who covered Motown tunes early in their careers, and through the '60s, soul flourished in England. As the sound faded in the States, towns like Wigan and Blackpool became the beating heart of the "Northern soul" movement in the early '70s. The name came from a journalist who noticed a strange phenomenon: kids packed into clubs in towns north of London, dancing for hours to long-forgotten soul singles. These were the prototypes for raves, and attendees were usually stoked by uppers like Dexedrine. For these crowds, spinning a hit like the Supremes' "Back in My Arms Again" wouldn't do; they'd heard that one before.
By 1980, the club scene had crested, but the collector's market it created flourishes to this day. Type the words "Northern soul" into eBay's search window and you'll find about 1,500 singles for sale -- nearly all the product of labels that died fast, featuring artists only soul scholars would recognize.
One of those scholars is Andy Rix. A registered nurse by day and a well-known DJ by night, Rix was captivated by Shrine's music and in the late '80s began a transatlantic campaign to contact the label's artists and back-office types. He wanted to find some vinyl, but more than that he wanted to tell the label's story and bring it some overdue respect. After years of calling and visits to Washington, Rix had located many of Shrine's key players.
"They're fairly stunned to hear from me, actually," says Rix, on the phone from England. "Years later, for someone to come along and explain that there are people who recognize your artistry and respect what you did -- that means something."
"When my wife told me he'd called, I thought it was a hoax," said Sydney Hall from Connecticut. "Then he called back and I heard this thick British accent and I could tell right away he wasn't kidding."
But a handful of artists have yet to be found, among them solo vocalist J.D. Bryant, who is believed to have returned to his native South Carolina, and Bill Dennis, reportedly a deejay at WHUR at some point. Nobody even knows the names of three Baltimore high school girls who were Les Chansonettes. And, of course, there's the mystery of the Cautions. As Rix put it, AB Jones and his group mates "have eluded me for 12 years."
You might assume that AB Jones has been keeping an intentionally low profile. Not so, he says.
"I'm in Laurel," he explained when I called his cell phone recently. "But I'm moving back to the city tomorrow."
I found Jones after a few weeks of networking through Theotrice Gamble, who knew a guy who had a friend who'd run into AB not long ago. After chatting on the phone, we met at the apartment that was his new home in Southeast Washington. There were plenty of unopened boxes on the floor, as well as keyboards and a four-track tape recorder for home studio demos.
"I'm still writing songs, doing some producing," he said as he cleared some space for a chair. "I've been working with some rappers who are really terrific."
Jones is 6 feet 7, soft-spoken, and slowed by rheumatoid arthritis that recently ended his long career as a truck driver. He had moved to Laurel to raise a family with his wife, now deceased, but with his kids grown, he was glad to return to the city. Shrine's overseas renaissance was news to him.
"I had seen signs, people offering money for Shrine stuff, one on Central Avenue," he said. "It tickled me at the time. But I don't own a copy of either of our singles. I gave them to friends a long time ago. So I didn't bother calling the number. I just moved on."
The history of the Cautions seemed fresh in his mind. He met the other members -- Joe Clyburn, Albert Nicks, Billy Blanchard and Julius Hayes -- when he was 14 and hanging around the playground of Stuart Junior High School. "We were just a bunch of dropouts," he said, laughing. But they could sing and dance like the Temptations, and through a local promoter, the quintet performed in hospitals, other schools and, soon enough, in local clubs.
Once they heard about Shrine, they paid an impromptu visit to 3 Thomas Circle, walking through the front door and straight into Eddie Singleton's office. Singleton auditioned the group that day and loved what he heard.
"We sort of became his pet project," Jones remembered. They recorded six songs for Shrine, four of which were released, and the group was soon opening for some big stars, including Wilson Pickett. But "Watch Your Step," the first release, didn't get much attention, nor did a follow-up. A year after Shrine closed, the Cautions split.
Told about England's passion for "Northern soul" and the small manhunt he'd inspired, Jones seemed amazed. I'd brought along the Ace reissue of Shrine's catalogue, which contains five Cautions tracks, and we put a disc in a boombox in his bedroom. Staring at the floor, he listened, for the first time in more than 30 years, to the sounds he had recorded as a teenager.
"It's all right," he said, as "Watch Your Step" plays. He said it as if he meant, "It's only so-so."
"We didn't have a lot of funding, and it was like rush-rush. On this song, I can tell that Joe is hoarse." After taking in the other songs, he stood up slowly and smiled. Mostly, it was reliving the camaraderie of the band, something that he can do only in memory now. All but one of the Cautions are dead.
"I feel good," he said as he escorted me out the door. "I'm glad this happened."
Why did Shrine fail? According to British collectors, there were about 7,000 soul labels in the United States in the '60s, and most of them never turned a profit. A handful made a killing. Shrine was in a long-shot business.
But the label's singers and management contend that some blame lies with Berry Gordy. In the '60s, Motown was the strongest force in soul, and the theory is that Gordy -- loath to compete against his ex-wife and her new husband -- muscled DJs and distributors to ignore Shrine singles. The record industry was then a street fighter's game, and Motown certainly had all the right weapons for a brawl. In the mid-'60s, it made history with a torrent of top-sellers by the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations and young Stevie Wonder. The label had money to spread around and sought-after tunes that every station wanted to play.
Singleton says he has no doubts that Gordy worked to undermine Shrine. He says a local DJ, the late Paul "Fat Daddy" Johnson, visited him one night to tell him so.
"He told me what others didn't tell me: that people had been to see him and that a lot of DJs caved," Singleton says. "Everyone was trying to protect their market share. Motown seemed a little more motivated."
"All we knew," Raynoma later wrote in her autobiography, "was the best distributors, who didn't want to lose Motown affiliations, wouldn't help Shrine."
Berry Gordy didn't return calls for this article. But the head of his sales force at the time, Barney Ales, later Motown's president, said he didn't remember Shrine and didn't think Motown could have caused its demise.
"It's an impossibility to stop a song of any value," says Ales, now retired and living in California. "If you're not successful, you blame somebody else."
Shrine had been bankrolled largely by a group of young Wall Street investors who, according to Singleton, pushed hard for quick results. The man who introduced those investors to Singleton says they groused about it for years.
"Nobody is happy to lose money," says Dimitri Villard, who moved to Washington after graduating from Harvard and who later became a Hollywood movie producer. "But there was always the feeling the money wasn't spent well."
By 1967, the pressure of keeping the label solvent had taken a physical and mental toll on Eddie and Raynoma. They were married by then, and commuting every week to New York and working for other labels to keep cash flowing in. Singleton's doctor warned him that if he kept up the pace, he'd die.
The Singletons departed Washington dispirited and broke, leaving boxes of vinyl in the basement of 3 Thomas Circle, boxes that were eventually shuffled to that doomed warehouse on 14th Street. "It cost me everything I had, everything I could muster," Singleton says of his struggle to get Shrine aloft. Today there are no townhouses at Thomas Circle, just office buildings, chain hotels and a church.
Singleton would remain in the music business for years, working as Nina Simone's manager for a time, then move to South Africa in 1998, where he is now trying to start yet another label, called Mother City Entertainment Group. Looking back, he vividly recalls his impulse to leave Washington without any of the vinyl he'd labored so hard to produce.
"I didn't want to carry any memories with me at that time," he said. "It was too painful."
Shrine's incorporated life -- bookended by two of the most notorious assassinations of the last century -- didn't last long. But the label has never really gone away, and not just because it's been so avidly mythologized and scavenger-hunted on the other side of the ocean. In the city from which it sprang, Shrine has lingered, ghostlike, in places like Theotrice Gamble's home.
Sitting at his dining room table, I asked if it was all right to give his phone number to British collectors, some of whom will be thrilled to learn there's a third copy of "Do What I Want." It'd be a pretty quick way to make $4,000. He thought about it a moment and shook his head.
"No," he said. "Don't give them my address, either. There's no way I'm selling this."