JESSE STONE AMONG FOUNDERS OF ROCK 'N' ROLL
* 04/08/99
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(Copyright 1999)
Jesse Stone, a major influence on 20th-century music who wrote
"Shake, Rattle and Roll" and helped develop many of Atlantic Records'
biggest hits, has died. He was 97.
Mr. Stone died Thursday after a long illness.
As a writer, producer and arranger at Atlantic, Mr. Stone worked
with artists such as Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, the Drifters and
the Clovers. Among his other famous songs were "Idaho" and "Money
Honey."
In 1974, Atlantic Records President Ahmet Ertegun said: "Jesse
Stone did more to develop the basic rock 'n' roll sound than anybody
else."
Mr. Stone's widow, singer Evelyn McGee Stone, said that on March
27, the day her husband went into a hospital for the last time, he
began writing a new song while she was playing with their dog.
"I had been saying to the dog, ` That's it, that's it,' and he
wrote a song and that's the title," she said.
The grandson of Tennessee slaves, Mr. Stone had a career that
spanned the spectrum: minstrels, folk songs, dance orchestras, rhythm
and blues, rock 'n' roll and jazz.
Mr. Stone always was on the cutting edge, never quite achieving
fame but highly respected within the core of the profession.
He helped build Atlantic Records into a top rhythm-and-blues label
in the late ' 40s and early ' 50s, signing such stars as Ruth Brown.
"Her first record came out. Bang! It was a hit. We got a group
called the Clovers. Their record came out. Bang! It was a hit,"
Mr. Stone said in a 1991 Associated Press interview. "Everything we
touched after that went over big. Sometimes we had four or five
records on the chart at the same time."
It was Mr. Stone and Bill Haley, who had a Top 10 hit in 1954 with
Stone's "Shake, Rattle and Roll," that paved the way for the
acceptance among whites of what had been considered "Negro music."
"A white man recording black music. That's when white people
began to buy this stuff - they could hear it on the air," Stone
said.
Elvis Presley's nationwide success the following year cemented the
R&B-rock foundation laid by black singers and Haley - many with Mr.
Stone's tunes and arrangements.
Earlier, his jazz tune "Idaho" helped make Guy Lombardo rich and
famous, selling 3 million copies in the mid-1940s. Benny Goodman and
Jimmy Dorsey also had a hit with it.
Born in Atchison, Kan., on Nov. 16, 1901, Mr. Stone - who also
wrote under the name Charles Calhoun - started performing at age 5,
touring with his family's minstrel show. In the 1920s, he led a jazz
group that included future saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins.
In 1936, Duke Ellington helped him get a booking at the Cotton
Club in New York. He also worked at the Apollo Theater, composing
and arranging songs as well as writing jokes and sketches.
He was inducted into the Rhythm 'n' Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.
At Mr. Stone's 95th birthday party, Ertegun read a letter from
famed producer Jerry Wexler, noted: "From your vast experience with
jazz, blues, country - in fact, every facet of American root music -
you became one of the architects of the new urban music of black
* folk, the music that came to be known as rhythm and blues.
"You wrote the tunes and the arrangements; you assembled the
players; you ran the rehearsals; you conducted in the studio. And it
was your own continuing evolution that helped pave the way for the
next great cultural tidal wave - rock 'n' roll."
