Lloyd Price, R&B star who helped lay the foundation of rock-and-roll, dies at 88
LLOYD Price, an R&B singer from New Orleans whose scorching 1950s recordings ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ and ‘Stagger Lee’ became crossover hits seminal to the development of rock music, and whose later endeavors included owning record labels and promoting boxing matches, died May 3 at care facility in New Rochelle, NY He was 88.
The death was confirmed by his manager, Tom Trapani. He had complications from diabetes.
Price gravitated to music in childhood, as he sought an escape from backbreaking work carting blocks of ice. He took up piano and later fronted a band in high school. At 19, he had an audition with Fats Domino’s arranger and music producer, Dave Bartholomew, who was floored by Price’s charisma – he was later dubbed ‘Mr Personality’ – and the upbeat, yet plaintive, blues number he brought into the studio.
‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy,’ whose title came from an advertising catchphrase of a local DJ, Okey Dokey Smith, was released as a single in 1952. The song featured the distinctive piano trills and triplet rhythm of Domino on backup as Price wailed, ‘Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawdy, Miss Clawdy. Girl, you sure look good to me.’ It topped the R&B charts for seven weeks, attracted a huge White audience (Price was Black) and over decades became a standard covered by dozens of performers, including Elvis Presley, Little Richard and – in their 1970 concert film ‘Let It Be’ – the Beatles.
In 1954, at the peak of his success with ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy,’ Price saw his career interrupted by the draft. His music, he often said, was a threat to segregated society because both Black and White kids were dancing to it.
“Truly, that’s one of the reasons why I got drafted in the service,” he told the New York Times decades later. “It was a revolution underground that nobody could stop. The lady at the draft board said Washington wanted me in the Army. Their children were dancing to ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy.’ “
He returned to civilian life nearly two years later to find himself supplanted in popularity by Little Richard, the pompadoured singer whose career Price had helped boost after spotting him in a club.
At the beginning of his career, Price had the foresight to retain ownership of the copyrights and future royalties of his music. In 1956, he bought out his old record contract and went into business for himself, moving to Washington and launching the independent KRC record label his band director, Bill Boskent. He signed with ABC-Paramount in 1958.
He bobbed along in the R&B and pop charts of the late 1950s and early 1960s with songs such as ‘Where Were You On Our Wedding Day?,’ ‘I’m Gonna Get Married,’ ‘Lady Luck’ and ‘Have You Ever Had the Blues’ – brassy hits that paired his impassioned delivery with sunny big band and choral arrangements. ‘Personality’ topped the R&B charts for weeks and was a No. 2 pop hit.
His most notable success was ‘Stagger Lee’ (1958), a punchy shuffle adapted from a Black folk song that flew to No. 1 on the R&B charts and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart in February 1959. (The original ballad, alternately called ‘StagO-Lee’ or ‘Stack-O-Lee,’ had been recorded innumerable times since the 1920s. It recounted the 1895 shooting of St. Louis gambler Billy Lyons by a pimp, Lee ‘Stack Lee’ Shelton, in a fight over a Stetson hat and a dice game.)
In Price’s version, Stagger Lee “shot that poor boy so bad till the bullet came through Billy and it broke the bartender’s glass.” Perhaps it was the manic enthusiasm – and a refrain that egged on a murderer (‘Go Stagger Lee, go Stagger Lee’) – that moved television host Dick Clark to censor the ballad’s story line for a rendition on ‘American Bandstand.’ “Take out the shooting,” Price lamented to the Colorado Springs Independent in 2015. “Can you imagine that? Suppose he was playing records today!”
In 1962, Price started a record label with business manager Harold Logan. Double-L – named for the two partners – launched the career of singer Wilson Pickett. Price had one last pop hit for the label, an up-tempo version of the Erroll Garner ballad ‘Misty’ in 1963.
Logan and Price then went into the nightclub business, with a midtown Manhattan venue they named the Turntable. The cabaret shuttered after Logan was shot to death in the business office above the club in 1969. The homicide was never solved.
Price, who had known Muhammad Ali since the early 1960s, later moved to West Africa and helped boxing promoter Don King put together ‘The Rumble in the Jungle,’ a 1974 heavyweight title bout in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), between Ali and George Foreman. Price was instrumental in staging a concurrent music festival that included James Brown and BB King, then helped King promote Ali’s ‘Thrilla in Manila’ fight in the Philippines with Joe Frazier in 1975.
From his background as a performer, Price keenly understood the importance of showmanship. During the negotiations for the Ali-Foreman bout, he pushed King to do something that would symbolize his eccentric persona.
“He needed an image, a look, like Daddy Grace or Reverend Ike, who was his hero in those days,” Price told writer Jack Newfield in the King biography ‘Only in America’ (1995). “I told him all stars have some unique gimmick that fans can recognise them by – a hat, a uniform, a way of dressing.” — The Washington Post