After promoting his curiosity in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his personal firm, Juke Field Data, in 1944. “I known as it Juke Field as a result of the jukebox was the medium then for plugging information,” he advised Arnold Shaw. “If you happen to acquired a document into the bins, it was tantamount to getting it on the highest stations immediately.”
Mr. Rupe was methodical. He purchased $200 value of race information and, stopwatch in hand, started analyzing musical construction, tempo and even titles to determine the frequent traits of the best-selling releases. Because the phrase “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate variety of hit songs, Juke Field’s first document, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It offered a greater than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his method.
The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Stable Senders, gave Juke Field its first large hit: “R.M. Blues,” launched in 1945, which was stated to have offered one million copies. Mr. Milton went on to document almost 20 High 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he based the following 12 months after breaking along with his Juke Field companions.
In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which turned the top-selling R&B document of the 12 months. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging fashion who would later contribute “Hit the Highway, Jack” and different songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a 12 months later with “Please Ship Me Somebody to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label one more No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Issues That I Used to Do,” one of many earliest information to place the electrical guitar entrance and middle.
“Specialty was a bit just like the Blue Word label in jazz,” stated the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s finest sides launched in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Data Story,” printed in 2019. “Artwork was greenback acutely aware, however he didn’t let that cease him from going into the higher studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took nice delight and care to make high quality information with high quality musicians.”
