It reached No 3 on the R&B chart and 29 on the mainstream pop chart. “I got 10% when Nat King Cole was only getting 5%,” he said. However, this did not become a hit until 1957, when it was bought up by ABC-Paramount, though Price made sure he kept the publishing. Some army lawyers advised him about the desirability of controlling his own music publishing.ĭischarged from the military in 1956, he created his own label, KRC Records, on which he launched a new single, Just Because (inspired by a melody from Verdi’s Rigoletto). He was shipped out to South Korea via Japan, and performed at military bases. He recalled that the draft board told him in 1953 that he “had to go in the service because of what my music was doing, this Lawdy Miss Clawdy thing was causing integration”. However, in segregated 50s America, Price’s popularity with both black and white listeners became a political issue. Price followed it up with a quartet of Top 10 R&B hits, Oooh Oooh Oooh, Restless Heart, Ain’t It a Shame and Tell Me Pretty Baby. The disc topped Billboard’s rhythm & blues chart and made history by crossing over on to white radio stations. With assistance from the New Orleans bandleader Dave Bartholomew, who introduced Price to Art Rupe of the Los Angeles-based Specialty Records, Price recorded Lawdy Miss Clawdy with a band including Fats Domino on piano and drummer Earl Palmer. View image in fullscreen Lloyd Price performing with Elton John, left, in 2011. ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ took that rhythm worldwide.” And that rhythm, that slow rockin’ thing? … My brother Leo would bang on a pot and get his own rhythm going. Price recalled: “I took that and made a song out of it. They were given a slot on the WBOK radio station, where Price was struck by the catchphrase used by the deejay, Okey Dokey, to promote the station’s sponsor: “Lawdy Miss Clawdy, Mother’s homemade pies and Maxwell House Coffee!” He liked to play along on the piano to songs he heard on the restaurant jukebox, not least Louis Jordan’s Saturday Night Fish Fry.Īfter dropping out of high school he started a band with his brother Leo. The young Lloyd helped out in the family business, and developed his musical skills through singing with the gospel choir in the local church and learning to play the piano and trumpet. Lloyd Price performing Personality, his 1959 hitīorn in Kenner, Louisiana, Lloyd was one of 11 children (three girls and eight boys) of Beatrice and Louis Price, who ran a restaurant, Fish’n’Fry. But he also enjoyed a parallel career as a music business trailblazer, setting up one of the first black-owned music publishing companies, Lloyd & Logan Music, and a pioneering black-owned record label, KRC. His other major hits included I’m Gonna Get Married, Lady Luck, Question and Misty. On demob, he enjoyed his biggest hit in 1959 with Stagger Lee, which topped the US pop chart. “Before Lawdy Miss Clawdy white kids were not really interested in this music.”Īfter a streak of hits in the early 1950s, many of them reaching the top end of the US R&B chart, Price was drafted into the US army. “I revolutionised the South!” Price enthused. His 1952 hit Lawdy Miss Clawdy, which was covered by a huge array of artists, from Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney to The Hollies, Solomon Burke and Joe Cocker, was a trailblazer for rock’n’roll and one of the first records to break down barriers between black and white audiences. This was a reference to his 1959 hit Personality, which reached No 2 on the US pop charts. A man of huge energy and varied talents, Lloyd Price, who has died aged 88 from complications with diabetes, fully deserved his nickname of “Mr Personality”.
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