Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes who was gay and Jewish very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh.
Many of the titles will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? And so we come to our last look at Johnny Otis, one of those people who has been turning up throughout the early episodes of the podcast.
Indeed, he may continue to appear intermittently until at least the late sixties, as an influence and occasional collaborator. But the days of his influence on rock and roll music more or less came to an end with the rise of the rockabillies in the mid fifties, and from this point on he was not really involved in the mainstream of rock and roll. But in one of those curious events that happens sometimes, just as Otis was coming to the end of the run of hits he produced or arranged or performed on for other people, and the run of discoveries that changed music, he had a rock and roll hit under his own name for the first and only time.
The way this podcast works, telling stories chronologically and introducing new artists as they come along, can sometimes make it seem like the music business in the fifties was in a constant state of revolution, with a new year zero coming up every year or two. It can be both an ethnic and a cultural identifier, and it has also been used in the past as a racial slur. And not only that, his birth name was Ron Gregory, and he was of Jewish ethnicity, and from a Hungarian-American family from Massachusetts.
Apparently at some point he had run away from home and travelled to LA, where he had been taken in by a Mexican-American woman who had raised him as if he were her own son. But then fate intervened, in the form of Mickey Katz.
