Ed Wiley, Jr. - Birth of Rock

Birth of Rock

In 1952, the Continental booking agency paired Wiley with singer Jackie Brenston, who had released the hit "Rocket 88" for Chess one year earlier. Brenston had been one of pianist Ike Turner's Delta Cats, from Clarksdale, Miss. "Rocket 88," widely considered the first “rock-and-roll” record, had sizzled for a spell, but the fervor over the R&B hit soon died, about the same time that Wiley's stock was rising. Continental also suggested that Wiley include two other Clarksdale musicians, blues crooner "Screamin'" Johnny O'Neal and guitarist Earl Hooker, one of the most versatile and gifted guitarists of the early 1950s. In the Encyclopedia of the Blues, Gérard Herzhaft describes Hooker as a guitar “virtuoso.” Scott Stanton, in The Tombstone Tourist, effuses that Hooker had “a fretboard touch so smooth and clean, one would be hard-pressed to find a more brilliant and more underrated slide guitarist residing in Chicago during the ’50s and ’60s… .” And blues master B.B. King said that "to me he is the best of modern guitarists. Period. With the slide he was the best. It was nobody else like him he was just one of a kind".

It is important to mention this influential musician, because Hooker’s collaboration with Wiley marked his introduction to the recording world. “The Hooker/O’Neal/Wiley combination was a potentially promising one, and it drew the attention of the talent scout for the Cincinnati-based King Recording Company who attended one of their tear-it-up performances at a Bradenton club,” writes French blues historian Sebastian Danchin in his biography Earl Hooker, Blues Master.

While the combo, which also included Wardell on piano, recorded several sides for King, only two, "Johnny Sings the Blues” (featuring an “alert bebop tenor sax solo contributed by Ed Wiley”) b/w "I've Seen So Many Hard Times" (a slow, soulful moaning blues showcasing O’Neal’s serious blues chops) were ever released.

While performing an extended tour date at the Top Hat in Louisville, Ky., in 1952, Wiley allowed a local singer named Harvey Fuqua to sit in. By the time Wiley’s group departed a few weeks later, Fuqua and his singing partner, Bobby Lester, were members of the band. Fuqua – who went on to form the legendary doo-wop group The Moonglows and to produce numerous hits for Motown records – would always credit Wiley with giving him his first break in music and for teaching him how to sing blues and jump blues, precursors to rock and roll and modern soul music. Prior to joining Wiley, Fuqua and Lester specialized in vocalese, a style of singing where improvised solos are replaced with words. “They joined tenor sax man Ed Wiley's band for a tour of the South,” writes Fuqua biographer Steve Walker. “Wiley featured a variety of jump and blues tunes, and the young singers developed a wider repertoire from this experience.”

When popular disc jockey Alan Freed – importantly, the man credited with coining the term “rock and roll” – heard the remodeled songsters, he began managing and promoting the duo, and prompted them to change their name to “The Moonglows.” Writes Washington Post reporter Terence McArdle, “They also performed on Freed's touring rock-and-roll revues and in the movies "Rock, Rock, Rock" (1956) and "Mister Rock and Roll" (1957).”

Some blues aficionados contend that Texas blues pioneers can justifiably lay claim to the creation of rock and roll. Thomas Kreason, executive director of the Texas Musicians Museum in Hillsboro, for one, is among those who argue that Wiley studio mate Goree Carter’s seminal “Rock Awhile” was actually the first rock and roll recording. He notes a distinctive guitar rift as the song modulates, a technique later adopted by Chuck Berry and other early rock-and-roll stars, and he reminds that Carter’s 1949 Freedom recording was released a full two years ahead of Brenston’s “Rocket 88.”

In fact, southern Black musicians had been playing rock-and-roll-sounding music – albeit under a different moniker – long before either of those recordings. It is doubtful, however, that Ed Wiley, Goree Carter, Jackie Brenston, Ike Turner, Earl Hooker, Harvey Fuqua or any of the 1940s- and ’50’s-era architects of rock and roll realized the historic role they would play in the development of that genre or other forms of modern music.

After moving from Baltimore to Philadelphia in the early ’50s, Wiley’s bands took on a distinctive new look for the next several years. He would only occasionally revisit the road, joining Big Joe Turner, Al Hibbler and Brook Benton, among others. In 1954, Wiley married singer Maye Robinson, whom he had signed with the band the previous year while touring through Chester, Pa. And, over the next several years, his groups often featured Maye – sometimes leading a Supremes-like trio, called The Inversions.

Having worked in Baltimore and New York with organist Fabulous Preston, Wiley discovered that his favorite ensembles were organ trios. He capitalized on the organ craze that had engulfed the City of Brotherly Love during the mid- to late-’50s, and began featuring such organists as Shirley Scott, Bill Hathaway and Bill Miller. “, was a piano player in Philly, and she had never played Hammond organ before,” Holley quotes Wiley on his liner notes for “In Remembrance,” which features Scott on piano. “I was the first group that she ever played organ with. She’s been a heck of a musician for as long as I’ve ever known her. She’s a heck of an arranger, and she did some of the arrangements on this recording.”

Hathaway would appear with Wiley on his 1971 release “Stretchin’ Out,” a funky, driving instrumental with organ, trumpets, bass, drums and percussion. The reverse side, “Young Generation,” a call for youths to guide a war- and race-obsessed nation toward peace, showed for the first time that Wiley could also sing. The 45 was recorded for Na-Cat records, a small Philadelphia imprint owned by Nate and Cathy Strand.

By 1960, Wiley had given up the road altogether, becoming a machinist and taking local and regional gigs. But he still appeared with many of Philadelphia’s leading jazz and R&B exponents of the day, including trumpeter Johnny Coles, and singers Harold Melvin, Billy Paul and Teddy Pendergrass. His Na-Cat release would be his last recording for the next nine years. From 1971 to 1984, Wiley – now with seven children to support – played only in church on Sunday mornings.