Recently, during one of our family gatherings at my parents’ house, we watched the Hollywood All Stars’ “Shindig!” performance again. “Shindig!” would feature multiple acts nonstop for the entire half-hour. He’d planned a prime-time revue with live performances before an audience - a format without the interspersed interviews featured on “American Bandstand” or “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Then in 1964, the Hollywood All Stars were presented with a major opportunity to boost their exposure.īritish music producer Jack Good, an ardent fan of rock ‘n’ roll, had been given the go-ahead by ABC to create a new take on the music show.
He celebrated his 21st birthday in Los Angeles. Between booking local gigs, my uncles shined shoes on Central Avenue while Dad collected rent for the owner of a boardinghouse that catered to fellow performers. around 1960 and rebranded themselves as the Hollywood All Stars. “And I think it was about six weeks after that I decided we were moving out.”įueled by dreams and a need for self-preservation, my father, his brothers and his best friend made their way to California to take on the music industry. “My daddy told us, ‘Don’t you know they’ll burn my damn house down?’ ” Dad said. The crossover drew the ire of some locals, and word got back to my grandparents. And that popularity led to shows in places where the audiences were primarily white, including spots in Nashville’s Printers Alley where the group sang covers of songs recorded by big-time musicians such as Fats Domino.įor a time, the Classics continued to play shows on both sides of the tracks, until white fans followed them to the Black clubs. Reginald Cornell Atkins and my father, whom they called Sonny but nicknamed “Lead.” (Dad was the lead singer with his brother Bruce, and he was also the oldest of the three boys.) He also had other nicknames like “Brick” due to his, at times, hardheaded uncompromising nature.Īs several of my father’s friends from Nashville would attest over the years, the quartet was a draw back then. The group consisted of my uncles Bruce and Louis Meeks my dad’s best friend, Mr. For a while, “The Classics” gained traction as the four men performed at a handful of neighboring Black venues in the 1950s. The group that would become the Hollywood All Stars was known by a few other names in its early days in Nashville. “That’s great! So hey, can I ask you again about when you did shows in the ‘50s and ‘60s?”
And I came to understand that preserving these stories was an imperative I couldn’t ignore. I started to push him for details about his days before I was born.
#Old time pilot hat free#
I took any afternoon or evening I had free to visit during his recovery. I couldn’t stop thinking about the things we rarely talked about and the questions I hadn’t asked.įortunately, his surgery went well. I was rattled when I thought about how I’d taken our regular Sunday dinners together for granted, that there was still so much I didn’t know about him. For an 80-year-old man, the timing of going into the hospital and having an extended stay in another facility to recuperate raised concerns for our family.
I wanted to document what it must have been like for my father to be a Black entertainer in the ’50s and ’60s, striving to create and perform during a time when America was being called upon to reckon with civil rights.Īt the start of 2020, when we started to see a steady rise in COVID-19 cases in the U.S., my father was scheduled to have surgery to repair a nerve that severely limited his mobility.
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