WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) - Lowman “Pete” Pauling softly plucked his guitar, the cue for John L. Tanner to step into the microphone at Fries Auditorium at Winston-Salem State University one day in August 1951.
Nearby, executives with Apollo Records in New York City hovered over their recording equipment, wondering whether Pauling, Tanner and their three band mates in the Royal Sons Quintet - Otto Jeffries, William Samuels and Jimmy Moore - would become their next big recording stars, joining a roster that included Mahalia Jackson, the country’s preeminent gospel singer.
The stakes must have felt high for Tanner. A dry-cleaner with a young wife and four children, he was staring down a life in segregated Winston-Salem with few career opportunities.
But Tanner possessed a special gift, an emotionally charged voice that soared with the power of the Holy Spirit and wrung the truth out of each word as if he were testifying from the pulpit.
“Oh well, this journey,” Tanner sang, his band mates joining in on harmony, “will soon be over after ’while. Yes, after ’while.”
In the spiritual realm, Tanner’s point was well-taken.
But in the material world, he couldn’t have been more off the mark.
Tanner’s journey, and that of a band that would morph into the “5’’ Royales, was just about to launch.
It would be a heady, raucous ride that would take the band to some of the country’s most hallowed stages, to the top of charts, into the company of music royalty and back to Winston-Salem where its legend would fade into the folds of history.
Nearly 65 years after that historic recording session at WSSU, the journey of the “5’’ Royales continues, straight into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where it will be celebrated as a trailblazer in the field of popular music.
On April 18, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Stevie Wonder, Patti Smith and Beck - a cross section of some of the era’s most successful and influential musicians - will be among those in the audience when the “5’’ Royales are enshrined.
As an early influence on rock ’n’ roll, the “5’’ Royales will occupy a permanent place in the Hall, next to such fabled stars as Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams and Billie Holiday.
The ceremony will be a lavish, star-studded affair with paparazzi, red carpet, tuxedos and champagne. HBO will film it for a later broadcast. The New York Times and other major media outlets will give it prominent play.
The band members who will be inducted - Pauling, Tanner, Moore, Eugene Tanner and Obadiah Carter - have long since died, but there will be a large contingent of family members representing them.
Otis Williams, the last living member of the original Temptations, repeated a common refrain among people familiar with the “5’’ Royales’ music.
“They should have been recognized a lot sooner,” said Williams in a phone interview from his home in California. “But everything has its place and time. They will always be one of the great vocal groups and harmony groups. They just had a distinct sound that was exclusive to them.”
Though best known for its vocal harmonies, the “5’’ Royales had another weapon that the Hall found praiseworthy - the pioneering guitar playing of Pauling, which earned the admiration of Jimi Hendrix.
Alvis Moore, whose father, Jimmy, sang harmony, got the opportunity to interview Hendrix while he was a student at Ohio State University.
“Jimi came in and mentioned Uncle Pete as one of his inspirations for playing the guitar,” Alvis Moore recently recalled, invoking Lowman Pauling’s nickname. After Moore told him his dad sang with the “5’’ Royales, Hendrix’s eyes brightened, and they spent the remainder of the interview talking about the band.
Beginnings in gospel
The sound that electrified Hendrix and Williams was forged in Winston-Salem, home to a vibrant gospel scene in the 1930s and ’40s that grew out of the city’s black churches.
Among the most prominent players in that scene was E.E. Tanner, John and Eugene’s father. E.E. had a gospel program in 1937 on WAIR-AM that is believed to be the first radio program in Winston-Salem to feature black artists.
E.E., and his wife, Marie, were tobacco factory workers and devout Christians who instilled a love of singing and spirituals into their five boys.
The house on Spencer Avenue in the old Boston neighborhood had a piano and lots of records from early gospel groups - the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers, and blues singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters, said Fred Tanner, the youngest of the boys.
Encouraged by their parents, the boys formed their own singing group, with John, the oldest, often orchestrating the harmonies.
A tenor, John seemed born with an innate understanding of music, said Fred Tanner, who later became the director of bands at WSSU.
“It was almost instinctive,” Tanner said. “It’s difficult to explain now, and my profession is music.”
John Tanner sang with his brothers until moving out to marry Cornelia Fuiell in 1943 and taking a job at Camel City Cleaners. The other brothers, with Fred now in the fold, formed the Tanner Four Gospel Singers, while John took his talents to another gospel group, the Royal Sons Quintet.
The Royal Sons also started as a family group, centered on the Pauling family. At one point, brothers Curtis, Lowman and Clarence were all members of the band, with their father, Lowman Pauling Sr., acting as manager.
The elder Pauling had previously worked in the coal mining camps near Bluefield, W.Va., where his sons absorbed the music from such visiting musicians as Ella Fitzgerald and Jimmie Lunceford.
Back in Winston-Salem to live with their mother in the late 1930s, the Pauling brothers formed a gospel group, the Royal Sons, that would later include friends Samuels and Jeffries, a member of the Camp Meeting Choir, a renowned gospel group from Winston-Salem that had made several recordings.
John Tanner joined the group in 1943, the start of what would be a 20-year professional relationship with Pauling and Jeffries. Meanwhile, Clarence, who changed his last name to Paul to avoid confusion with Lowman, dropped out in the late 1940s, resurfacing later in Detroit to mentor Stevie Wonder.
The Royal Sons played the church circuit, performing at Sunday afternoon programs at Macedonia Holiness Church, Kimberly Park Holiness Church and New Bethel Baptist Church, while also singing spirituals at house parties for the city’s rich white society.
The abundance of talent teeming from the city’s gospel scene was largely ignored outside the black community. Its activities were rarely covered in the mainstream press, with the Winston-Salem Journal relegating news from the community to a column called “Activities of Colored People” in its back pages. In 1951, the column was mostly a listing of gospel programs from the Russell Gospel Singers, the Starlight Gospel Singers, the Christian Gospel Singers and others.
The Royal Sons Quintet had higher aspirations.
The Royal Sons nailed it that day at WSSU in August 1951.
Two months later, Apollo executives summoned the men to New York for another recording session, with Carter taking Samuels’ place.
For nearly 10 months, they traveled to New York to record gospel tunes while maintaining their local concert schedule.
But Apollo had other plans. With such bands as the Clovers and the Ravens scoring big hits in the fledgling field of rhythm and blues, Apollo executives asked the Royal Sons to try some secular songs.
They nailed that, too.
Pauling, the band’s de facto musical leader since the early 1940s, was a skilled tunesmith, writing songs with bawdy lyrics and rhythmic punch. And Jimmy Moore provided a host of blush-worthy sounds in a comical falsetto.
To complete its makeover, the band changed its name to the “5’’ Royales (including the quote marks around the number five to differentiate from the Royals, a doo-wop group).
Seventy-two hours after recording “Baby Don’t Do It,” in August 1952, the “5’’ Royales had its first No. 1 hit on Billboard’s R&B charts.
News of the band’s triumph caused a stir in east Winston-Salem.
“I remember in grade school, that excitement I got hearing ’Baby Don’t Do It’ on the radio for the first time,” Fred Tanner said.
His parents, however, weren’t particularly happy to hear their son John singing such lyrics as, “If you leave me pretty baby, I’ll have bread without no meat,” Fred Tanner said.
But, in many ways, the band stayed true to gospel, tapping into that music’s raw emotionalism to expand the boundaries of R&B past the polish of doo-wop into more soulful, ecstatic terrain.
“They were doing something new,” said Holly George-Warren, a music historian. “They had that black gospel sound, that fervent emotion that came from gospel that powered their music.”
The band was on a roll, and by the end of 1954, it had placed five songs on Billboard’s R&B Top 10. By this time, John’s younger brother, Eugene, had taken Jeffries’ position in the band. Jeffries, who stayed with the band as manager until 1965, was about 10 years older than the other band members and lacked the physical stamina for a demanding stage show.
Mainstays on the “chitlin circuit” that weaved through the Deep South and up to Harlem, the “5’’ Royales became friends with Little Richard, Etta James and Ben E. King.
Occasionally, stars would swing by the homes of the members of the “5’’ Royales in Winston-Salem for a home-cooked meal.
Alvis Moore, Jimmy’s son, remembered the time that Ray Charles came to visit.
“I didn’t understand what blind meant, so my mother explained it to me and told me he (Charles) saw with his hands. So when he came over, I kept looking for eyes on his fingers,” said Moore, who lives near Columbus, Ohio.
Sam Cooke often stopped by the home of John Tanner to wolf down Cornelia Tanner’s famous pinto beans, fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, a sight that whipped the neighborhood kids into a frenzy, John Tanner Jr. recently recalled.
Black listeners from across the country embraced the “5’’ Royales’ unique sound. Some of them, such as James Brown, incorporated that style into their own music.
When Pauling decided in 1957 to play the band’s guitar parts rather than rely on studio musicians, the “5’’ Royales added a new dimension to its sound, one that would catch the ears of Hendrix and Steve Cropper, an architect of Memphis soul.
Had he never picked up guitar, Pauling would still be one of the greats of early rock ’n’ roll, based on his compositions and arrangements. Add guitar to his arsenal of skills, and Pauling emerges as a true pioneer whose kinetic guitar blasts foretold the instrument’s prominence in 1960s rock ’n’ roll.
Critic Peter Guralnick, who was written extensively about soul music, called Pauling a singular talent in a 2011 interview with the Journal.
“It’s fairly unusual for someone to create such a wide range of work and a personally expressive range of work that determines a unique sound,” Guralnick said “He is like Sam Cooke, Hank Williams or Merle Haggard. He’s just roping off this area for himself.”
But mainstream success, the kind that would have provided for its families and set them up for life, eluded the “5’’ Royales.
White radio was slow to embrace the more soulful style of R&B, and by the time it did in the early 1960s, the “5’’ Royales were road-weary after 10 years of barnstorming tours and well into their 30s.
John Tanner, for one, longed to be with his four children.
“He just got tired, going from place to place, as he got older,” John Tanner Jr. said. “He wanted to come home.”
By 1965, the “5’’ Royales called it a day.
Pauling was the only one of the five who tried to make a living from music, but for all his greatness he still needed to supplement his income. He found a job in maintenance at a Brooklyn synagogue.
His body was found there in 1973, the apparent victim of an epileptic seizure.
Carter, the tough guy with the teddy bear interior and Pauling’s foil on stage, drove a bus for the city of Winston-Salem. He died in 1994.
A few months later, Eugene Tanner, the free spirit who sang lead on some of the band’s most heartfelt songs, including “Dedicated to the One I Love,” found work in a tobacco factory. He also died in 1994.
John Tanner, the serious and thoughtful older brother whose tenor sent the band on its journey, returned to dry cleaning. He died in 2005.
That left Jimmy Moore, the band’s good-natured charmer, who was heartbroken to be the last of the “5’’ Royales.
After leaving the band in the early 1960s, Moore took a job in hospital administration in Ossining, N.Y. He died in 2008.
When the “5’’ Royales are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there will be no band members to bask in a glow that many say is too late in coming.
Pee Wee Burris, a Greensboro guitarist who briefly replaced Pauling, plans to be in Cleveland, as do the children of the band’s members.
Without them here, it’s hard to know what the “5’’ Royales would have said about the honor.
But Alvis Moore has an idea what his father would say.
“He would have felt that all he worked for was worth it. It was worth it. This is something he left not just for other artists,” Moore said, “but for me and my children.”
Seen in that light, the journey of the “5’’ Royales will never end.
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Information from: Winston-Salem Journal, https://www.journalnow.com
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