Confession Blues
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Single (B): Down Beat 171, February 1949, b/w I Love You, I Love You.
Compilation album: The Way I Feel, Proper, 22 Oct 2007.
Recorded in Seattle (possibly at the KOL radio studios), February 1949.
The Maxin Trio: Ray Charles – voc, p; Gosady McKee – g; Milton S. Garred – b.
From Linden Records: Seattle’s “lost” post-war music company: “By early 1946 Bobrow met up with Linden and they agreed to make a record together. By that time Linden’s son Jimmy (1914 – 1972) was working as an audio engineer over at the KOL radio studios in the basement of the Northern Life Towers (1220 3rd Avenue) and a session was booked there. The result became Linden Record Company’s commercial debut – and perhaps the first locally recorded, locally issued, popular jazz record: a 78RPM single featuring two Irving Berlin songs The Dark Town Strutter’s Ball and Alexander’s Ragtime Band, as performed by Jones’ Orchestra with vocals by Bobrow.
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But it was another historically significant early Seattle record – Ray Charles’s 1949 debut disc Confession Blues – that holds out a possible connection to the Linden family tale.
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Note Maxim Trio and Swing Beat label.
What little is known about the circumstances surrounding that record is this: Charles and his trio (who were hosts of a weekly KRSC radio show where they advertised their upcoming nightclub gigs) were discovered in town by a traveling Los Angeles-based music exec. A deal was struck and, according to Charles’s autobiography, they proceeded to ‘a little recording studio in Seattle.’ It is the exact name of that studio that has remained a puzzle all these years – but it seems quite likely, given the paucity of studios existing at the time, that Charles’s session took place at KOL with Jimmy Linden participating.
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