'Shake, Rattle and Roll' songwriter dead at 97
Web posted on:
Friday, April 02, 1999 5:06:15 PM EST
ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Florida (AP) -- 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.
Stone died Thursday after a long illness.
As a writer, producer and arranger at Atlantic, 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."
Stone's widow, singer Evelyn McGee Stone, said that on
April 25, the day
her husband went into the 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, Stone had a career
that spanned the
spectrum: minstrels, folk songs, dance orchestras,
rhythm and blues, rock 'n'
roll and jazz.
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,"
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 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 Stone's
tunes and arrangements.
Earlier, Stone's 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, Kansas on November 16, 1901, 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 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."
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
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