Saturday, October 26, 2024
In 1964, a year I spent largely with Frank and his friend Herbie Oakes, Frank produced a .45 record of an all-black dance band. Seemingly alone, he arranged for a Nashville studio to make the recording, then drove himself and the band to Nashville for the date. The record did not chart, due to no fault of Frank’s. In the backseat of his white Catalina convertible he carried corrugated boxes of the pressings to every place that might sell records. The records lived in the backseat for a month or two. I know, because I was in the backseat on excursions around Chattanooga, which included visits to the band’s base, a bar deep within Alton Park. The owner told us we were the first white boys to come there. For me, probably for Herbie too, the experience was much more profound than we knew at the time. Frank thought nothing of it. The guy was all over town and not even eighteen. He became an important outlier, a statistical aberration in the first year of the Civil Rights Act. All Frank could see was the beauty of the band—especially hot when live—and the business deal at hand. He was acting according to his own DNA scripts. Certainly such scripts were not handed to us. It’s good to remember how sociable and kind Frank was. And how much fun. My, what fun we all had.
He was also courageous.
