Fontella
Bass
Music
has always been a part of Fontella's life. Her mother, Martha
Bass, was a member of the Clara Ward Singers, a gospel group which
toured with the Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father.
Her grandmother, Nevada Carter, raised her when her mother was
on the road singing. Fontella got her start at an early age:
"Beginning at age
5, Fontella would perform at funeral services, providing the piano
accompaniment for her grandmother's singing. And by the time she
was 9, Fontella was accompanying her mother on tours throughout
the South and Southwest. Fontella continued touring with her mother
until the age of 16. . ."
During her teens, her uncles would sneak her out to Blues clubs
where she would often get up and play with them. She was destined
for a career in music and the moment finally came:
"When I was 17, I started my career working at the Showboat
Club near Chain of Rocks overlooking the Mississippi. The following
year I accepted a friend's dare and auditioned for the Leon Claxton
carnival show. I made $175 a week during the two weeks they were
here. It was fantastic. I wanted to tour with them but my mother
wouldn't let me go on the road -- she literally dragged me off
the train. Oliver Sain and Little Milton heard my playing at the
carnival, and as a result I got a job backing Little Milton on
the piano."
This was Fontella's big break and she was excited. Milton and
Sain weren't just any old musicians, they were making a name for
themselves:
"In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the St. Louis area
was a thriving center of rhythm and blues. The patriarch of the
scene was a bandleader-guitarist Ike Turner, who, like many St.
Louis musicians before and after, had come up from rural Mississippi
by way of Memphis. Turner had been here for a couple of years,
leading a band called the Kings of Rhythm, when blues singer Little
Milton Campbell arrived in 1955. Soon, an old friend from the
Deep South, saxophonist Oliver Sain, joined Milton and became
his bandleader. They began recording on the locally owned Bobbin
label, offering Ike Turner some stiff competition . . . With Sain
sharing the song writing and adding the fluid drive of his saxophone,
Milton (like Chuck Berry) became well known enough to be picked
up by the pre-eminent blues label of the time, Chess, in Chicago."
Fontella Bass started off playing piano with the band but eventually
she began singing as well, "One night, Milton didn't show
up on time, and finally Oliver asked me to sing something. I was
scared, but I went ahead anyway, and everybody liked it. So after
that, I had a little featured spot in the show for my vocals."
Milton and Sain eventually split up, however, and Fontella left
with Sain; they became known as the Oliver Sain Soul Revue featuring
Fontella and Bobby McClure, which is when Bobby McClure entered
her life.
Fontella's music career began to grow. Recording opportunities
came her way as she and members of the band recorded songs on
the Bobbin label and at Technosonic Studio's, which Ike Turner
produced. Fontella wanted to perform with other bands, though
she and Oliver began to have their differences. In January of
1965, they had an argument over a New Year's Eve gig and Fontella
decided to go her separate way: "Bass and her husband, trumpet
player Lester Bowie, moved to Chicago . . . and she signed with
Checker, Chess' R&B subsidiary label." It was through
Milton that Fontella met Leonard Chess, of Chess Records. Fontella
and McClure recorded their Top 10 R&B hit "Don't Mess
Up a Good Thing" early in 1965 under Chess and by August
Fontella would take the music world by storm with a No. 1 R&B
and Top 10 pop hit, "Rescue Me." Fontella vividly recalls
the day "Rescue Me" was created:
"I went upstairs and Raynard was in one of the rehearsal
rooms and he was playing. So he say, come on, come on in, I got
this great idea. I said well good, let me hear it and I said well,
why don't you do this or why don't you do that, you know, I put
my input in and he said, "Oh ya, well that's great."
So we just worked on like a rhythm but the actual melody was not
there. In those days that's the way records were recorded. They
would come in and somebody would give you some paper with some
lyrics and they would play the rhythm and you could put any melody
you wanted over those rhythms . . . So that's writing and a lot
of artists, not only I, but a lot of artists wrote songs that
way. . ."
The song was released in October 1965. It hit the R&B charts
and stayed in the top 40 for 19 months and went gold in two months.
"Rescue Me" was not only popular but had a style all
its own with some talented people behind it who helped make it
a success:
"The song featured a crack horn section led by soul tenor
Gene Barge. It boasted heated call-and-response vocals, with Minnie
Riperton among background singers. And it was driven by a crack
rhythm section including drummer Maurice White (pre-Earth, Wind
and Fire) and bassist Louis Satterfield, whose monster riffs are
frequently credited with the song's success."
Bass was thrilled with her success but the music business was
quite different back then and success came with its share of disappointments,
"I had the first million seller for Chess since Chuck Berry
about 10 years before," recalls Bass. "Things were riding
high for them, but when it came time to collect my first royalty
check, I looked at it, saw how little it was, tore it up and threw
it back across the desk." Her royalties never amounted to
what she deserved, particularly because she had co-written the
song. Fontella demanded a better royalty rate and artistic control.
"At the time, these were things women singers rarely asked
for but I really thought I could change that as part of a new
breed. What happened really snatched my heart out." Fontella
tried to take care of the business side of things. She approached
her manager, Billy Davis, about signing the papers for "Rescue
Me" only to be told not to worry about it. Even after the
record came out and her name was still not on it she was told
it would be on the legal documents. This, of course, never happened
either.
Fontella knew the role she played in "Rescue Me" and
she also knew what it meant to have her name in the credits. She
made a fuss for a couple years but admits, "It actually side-stepped
me in the business because I got a reputation of being a trouble
maker." Fontella's follow-up to "Rescue Me" was
"Recovery." The two songs sounded very similar. Chess
wanted to "keep the same groove." Fontella couldn't
explore her musical creativity and her husband, who was then experimenting
in avant-garde jazz, sympathized, "Lester was getting as
disgusted as I was with the music scene, so in 1969 we moved to
Paris with the [Art Ensemble of Chicago]." They were welcomed
warmly with their musical performances in Europe but returned
to the States three years later. Fontella was ready to try again:
"She had received an offer to record for the Paula/Jewel
label, a small, independent operation in Shreveport, La., run
by Stan Lewis . . . but the record never was able to get good
distribution. In 1973, Bass signed with Epic Records, a major
division of CBS. Things finally seemed to be falling into place,
but the erratic world of the music business soon ended those hopes."
Unfortunately, there was a turnover in management and "no
dollar signs were by [Fontella's] name" so the deal fell
through. Although her music career was seemingly over, Fontella
rediscovered her roots and began to start again.
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