Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Soul beneficiary

I opened the glass door and headed out of the high-rise elevator lobby to an outdoor walkway when a dog with a wagging tail, floppy ears and curly fur came trotting down the path. It sniffed my ankle, darted between and around my legs for a while and finally led me to its luxury doghouse.

His master was standing in the doorway, commanding that he get his happy little butt back inside where it belonged (at least I think she was talking to him).

"I'm Ruth," said the woman, extending a hand. "That's B.J."

These were the first words in an afternoon of many -- most of them from the mouth of the woman in the apartment's doorway, Ruth Brown.

Ruth Brown is a singer by profession and a talker, by gosh. She filled all but one of the 60 pages in my notebook. She laughed when, two hours later, I informed her that I was out of pages and my pen was nearly out of ink.

"I can talk," acknowledged the R&B legend known as "Miss Rhythm."

She was sitting on a couch in the living room of her Las Vegas pad, with B.J., half shi tzu, half cockapoo, nestled between her and Brandon, Brown's 10-year-old grandson from Los Angeles.

She dotes on him and talked up his fledgling commercial career, but there's a limit to her grandmotherliness. Her patience wore thin at his sudden hearing loss when she asked him (for the third time) to set down the "Star Wars" X-Wing fighter he was putting through impossible G-force maneuvers, and she grabbed it from his hand.

It isn't the child play she objected to, but the toy's incessant beeping, which was interrupting her ability to think and, by extension, to speak -- and, as we've already established, a talking Ruth Brown is a happy Ruth Brown.

Ruth Brown, who for many was the R and the B in rhythm and blues. Me, I'd never heard of her until she turned up on a '70s reissue of a Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big-band album recorded in the '60s.

"Oh, my God. My favorite album," said Brown, disappearing into another part of the apartment. She returned clutching said disc, an album with a worn blue cover and a photo of the band leaders sandwiching the singer.

She was about to launch a story about the session, but before she could, I asked about the book on the coffee table in front of me. It's her autobiography, "Miss Rhythm." How'd she acquire the nickname? I ask.

"It was given to me by Frankie Laine," answered Brown, putting the date at 1952 and the location as a black theater in Philadelphia. "Frankie Laine was known as 'Mr. Rhythm.' At that time I had 'Teardrops in My Eyes' (on the charts), and I was on in front of him."

Those were the days of midnight rambles, where large gatherings of people would fill the black theaters of the day and listen to the acts from midnight till the wee hours. That's what this was, Brown said.

"That particular night, I had one of those nights where I could not do anything wrong. They kept saying, 'More, more more,' and here's Frankie Laine waiting to go on."

When they finally let him, Laine bestowed the name on the woman who had upstaged him.

"He went out and said, 'I just had a bright idea. I think Ruth Brown should be called "Miss Rhythm."'"

That out of the way, Brown returned to the Thad and Mel story.

"I had known Thad for years, when I traveled with (Count) Basie (during the mid-'50s) and he was in the brass section. He said he'd like to write some charts."

They ran into each other in New York City some years later, and Jones broached the subject again. He was with a Phillips label record executive, who arranged the session and promised a recording contract.

"Unfortunately," Brown said, "it's one of the albums I've never been paid (royalties) for. It's been re-released by Sony under a different name. I think I may have got $500 (for the original session), if that. And it's a very, very popular album."

I present this seemingly innocuous information about a relatively minor recording session not only because of the musical sparks it created, but because it illustrates a pattern in her career. That is, getting stiffed.

The royalty treatment

Brown is one of many R&B artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s who made money for their record companies, yet saw little of it themselves. That's because the contracts were stacked against the performers.

Record companies would charge 100 percent against an artist's royalty rate (often as little as 1 1/2 percent) for expenses incurred in the making of a record. Record companies would bill artists for promotional and recording costs, packaging, distribution "and endless sorts of things," said Howell Begle, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represented Brown in her fight against Atlantic Records, for which she recorded until the '60s.

Most of them not only didn't make a dime, but ended up owing the record company, he said.

When Begle (pronounced "beagle") took Brown's case in 1983, Atlantic Records claimed that Brown had earned $754 in royalties between 1960-80 but wasn't entitled to them because she was in debt to the company for $25,000.

"It's the only business I know of in which the entire cost of marketing and promotion is charged against the artist's share," he said.

Blues singer Joe Turner, for instance, was receiving royalty payments until his record company released a 40th anniversary package of his music.

"When they put out the product," Begle said, "boy, he went right back in the hole again. The entire cost in the creation of the package was charged back to the account of the artist."

Begle was skeptical about Atlantic's calculation of Brown's royalties, which amounted to little more than $35 a year in sales for 20 years. He doubted her records would have remained in the catalog if that was all they were making.

"I don't know if it's that important to describe these people as crooks or dishonest as much as trying to point out that something was wrong," he said. Some of the artists in question -- Brown, Turner, Laverne Baker, the Drifters, the Coasters -- were essentially forgotten by their record companies, he said.

"Many of the people who were responsible for the situation were not accessible or long since dead, or the company was bought by other people."

Gaining ground

Fortunately for Brown, Atlantic Records was still intact, which gave Begle a starting point despite the fact that his client no longer possessed copies of recording contracts or royalty statements.

"Basically, it was getting people at the record companies to realize they had a potential problem, because these people were not on the radar screen. They didn't exist as far as the people in accounting were concerned.

"Sales of these records (many of them repackaged and reissued) were not being tracked by the record companies, and a lot of this had to do with the fact that on the books there were large, unrecouped balances by Ruth and others. By their accounting, these were artists that the company had spent far more on than the artists would ever earn."

Brown's royalty rate was 4 1/2 percent, which scarcely mattered.

"It still comes out the same way," Begle said.

The fact that Atlantic couldn't provide documentation to back up its claim regarding Brown's and other artists' debt was also an advantage in getting the company, in 1988, to recalculate its royalty rate (now 10 percent), eliminate the unrecouped balances and pay royalties to its former artists retroactive to 1970.

Brown, who for years cooked and cleaned houses to tide her over when singing jobs were scarce, received a check for $30,000 -- which she gleefully spent paying off creditors almost as quickly as she got it.

"For once I didn't have to change my voice (on the telephone) and tell (the creditors), 'Ms. Brown's in Europe.'"

She now receives statements three times a year tracking worldwide sales of her records -- usually with an accompanying royalty check.

"It's to their credit," Begle said of Atlantic, "that (the artists') sales are tracked. Someone like Ruth Brown now gets paid a decent amount of royalties."

Said Brown of her attorney: "I feel that if there's anybody in the world who has been a friend to me, it's him. For whatever reason, God involved him in my life."

Fight for reform

An R&B fan from way back, Begle showed up backstage after a Washington performance of the musical "Amen Corner" in 1983 with a batch of Ruth Brown albums under his arm and a mission on his mind: have her sign them.

Albums Brown never knew she had, let alone been paid for. It was a sobering moment for both the singer and the attorney alike, who agreed to meet with Brown in New York City when the show went to Broadway.

"I found it very difficult to believe that she wasn't entitled to receive something," he said. "I knew that those records were still being sold."

Brown's royalty-reform fight didn't begin when she met Begle, however. She was spurred to action 19 years earlier, in 1964, while working as a domestic in a house on Long Island, New York.

She describes these intermittent bouts with brush and broom as "points of survival."

"Even though my whole life is about music, I couldn't be too proud to get a 9 to 5."

Anyway, Brown was working one day and listening to the radio, when the station began playing her music and the disc jockey began touting her stature as an artist.

"At that time I was down on my knees, scrubbing floors," she said.

Attorney after attorney told her the situation was hopeless, and she had all but given up when Begle -- who as a young teen in Phoenix attended an Alan Freed rock 'n' roll show with Brown on the bill -- entered her life.

"I call him 'Begle the Legal Eagle,'" Brown says.

Hello, Ruth

Miss Rhythm moved to Las Vegas in 1994, when the Southern California earthquake destroyed her home and just about everything in it. Her Grammy is in pieces in the bottom drawer of a home entertainment system in her office.

This is her second residency here, the first spanning the years 1976-78. She came here when singer Herb Jeffries, feigning illness, backed out of an engagement at the Tender Trap, then a jazz club, because he felt the money wasn't worth him leaving Los Angeles.

Brown, who was sitting in Jeffries' office when he canceled, was broke and thought the money was too good to pass up -- even if it did end up being only "a lousy" $150 for five shows that night -- and quickly offered her services in his stead.

That led to an extended run in the Circus Circus lounge. Later, she auditioned for and won a part in the musical "Living Fat," which ran at the Aladdin and met a premature end due to "inner turmoil." Nevertheless, it led to a role in the television series "Hello Larry" when producer Norman Lear caught her in the play and liked what he saw.

He said he'd send for her, Brown said, "and he did."

In the meantime, she continued to live in a boarding house on the Strip and earn extra money working as a drug counselor at a local rehab center.

She departed for L.A. when Lear called, filmed 16 episodes and was let go. The reason?

"Again, inner turmoil. There was a problem with me getting too many laughs," she said, making an oblique reference to star Maclean Stevenson's ego.

Another influential patron played a role in Brown auditioning for a part in the 1988 John Waters movie "Hairspray." A casting director for Waters happened to see Brown in an off-Broadway play ("Stagger Lee") and asked her read for a part in the film.

"I was excited," said Brown. She went to Baltimore (the director's home base), read one line for Waters and was cast as "Motormouth Mabel, the crazy woman with the white hair."

Once in a lifetime

But Brown is first and foremost a singer, and always will be.

"She's the greatest soul singer there is," said Norma Miller, the former Savoy Ballroom Lindy hopper and a close friend of Brown's. "If you ever get an opportunity to hear Ruth sing in the church, if you don't have religion you'll get religion.

"She's also one of the most compassionate human beings you'd ever want to meet. She took care of (the late R&B singer) Laverne Baker. She practically took care of her when she lost her legs."

"She's probably the one person who you can be sure that when she performs, she's going to move an audience," singer Joe Williams said. "People that sing like she does come along once in a lifetime."

Williams describes her voice as "strident" and "wonderful," and her personality as "bubbling."

"She's what I call a character singer," he said. "I think saloons (when he hears her voice), and yet you hear that same sound in church."

Brown calls herself a "stylist," which means she can move easily between idioms, then settles for simplicity. "I'm a singer."

She recently completed a tour with Bonnie Raitt and finished work on a new CD (her first in several years) featuring Raitt. She also has a 41-song boxed set coming soon from Rounder Records. This summer she'll travel to New York and perform in a pair of tribute concerts, to Lena Horne on June 23 and Nat King Cole on July 9.

"And," Brown said, "I'm working nice clubs under the guise of a jazz singer."

She doesn't work as often as she'd like, but enough to keep the creditors at bay.

In the meantime, she'll wait for the arrival of another large royalty check.

"That 10 percent, if I'm lucky, might be enough to pay my rent for a couple months and allow me to keep this lovely view I've got of the mountains."

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