{"id":8845,"date":"2015-11-16T05:30:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T10:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8845"},"modified":"2024-03-25T16:02:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T20:02:41","slug":"lloyd-price-taks-about-sumdumhonky-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/11\/16\/lloyd-price-taks-about-sumdumhonky-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Only in America: The Lloyd Price Interview, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Lloyd Price<\/strong> is a pop music legend. The Kenner, Louisiana native scored an impressive string of major hits, beginning with 1952’s \u201cLawdy Miss Clawdy\u201d (#1 r&b), and continuing to rack up nearly thirty singles in the top 100 of U.S. pop and\/or rhythm and blues charts. Several of his songs have gone on to become standards, including \u201cJust Because\u201d and \u201cPersonality.\u201d Price toured successfully in support of those singles, and even after the hits stopped coming \u2013 his last charting single was in the mid 1970s \u2013 he remained a popular concert draw.<\/p>\n

\"price_sumdumhonky\"<\/p>\n

Today at age 82, he’s still a vital, active man: he has a number of successful businesses, and recently published his second book, Sumdumhonky<\/em>. A frank and often harrowing look back at Price’s experiences growing up black in the United States, Sumdumhonky<\/em> isn’t a comfortable read; Price the author takes readers down some dark memory lanes as he recounts stinging examples of racism and bigotry. Sumdumhonky<\/em> is an important book, even though at times it may make readers squirm.<\/p>\n

Some readers might come away from reading the book suspecting that Price is an angry man. Not so. \u201cI do see progress,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt’s nowhere near what it was when I was a kid in Louisiana. That was a long time ago. There’s progress: there’s a black guy in the White House!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I’m mostly talking about,\u201d he explains, \u201cis how and why progress was made. It was made with music. Music brought all of the black and white teenagers together, and now those people are the grandparents. It was that DNA…not just in America, but worldwide. That music has been able to bring people together the world over.\u201d And Price takes justifiable pride in being a part of that phenomenon.<\/p>\n

As Price recounts in the pages of Sumdumhonky<\/em>, his early performances in the American south were eye-opening with regard to racial discrimination. \u201cThe first place where I really recognized it was in Raleigh, North Carolina,\u201d he recalls, \u201cback in 1953, when I first went on the road. I saw that it was really, really against the law for young black and white kids to be together. The policemen stopped the dance! Because the promoter was letting the white kids come in as spectators. If you were a white kid, you could come into a black dance, but only as a spectator.\u201d White kids couldn\u2019t participate in the dance; they had to remain seated in the balcony. And it was the same for African American kids at white dances.<\/p>\n

The history of music is full of accounts in which musicians got screwed over by labels, by management, by promoters. And African Americans suffered disproportionately in these kinds of situations. Here, too, Price believes that real progress has been made, and he’s certain where at least some of the credit belongs. \u201cWhat made it better \u2013 believe it or not \u2013 was the hip hop community. [Initially], these kids had such a gangsta mode, they could not get a major label to sign them. But then this guy out in L.A., Suge Knight<\/strong>, started taking in the gangsta hip hop acts. They started getting a little bit more respectable, and then bigger companies \u2013 the majors \u2013 started to distribute the independent recordings. And then the artists started getting paid a little better.\u201d The acts’ costs were low, Price notes, because \u201cthey were making their records in their house, on their iPad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only way that progress is made,\u201d Price believes, \u201cis through someone else’s experience. And that’s what Sumdumhonky<\/em> is about: how it was, and how it is today.\u201d And in the pages of Price’s book, readers learn that things weren’t exactly rosy on Price’s ancestral continent. \u201cIt was a major disappointment to me when I got to Africa; I saw how Africans treated each other. It absolutely blew my mind! The world over, the big ones eat up the little ones. And it didn’t have anything to do with color or political [affiliation]; somebody’s gotta be over somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Sumdumhonky<\/em>, Price tells the story of how he ended up fighting in Korea. \u201cI got drafted because I was having so many hits, and the songs were bringing black and white kids together.\u201d The U.S. War Department’s Sole Survivor Policy (created after the deaths of the celebrated \u201cfighting Sullivan brothers\u201d in 1942) should have precluded Price being drafted, as he already had five brothers serving in the military. As Price tells it, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Senator Richard B. Russell<\/strong> of Georgia \u2013 a vocal opponent of the civil rights movement \u2013 decided he’d make an example of the popular singer, and instructed the Draft Board to call up Price for military service. Lloyd Price served with honor, but some of his stories from his days in Korea \u2013 chronicled in Sumdumhonky<\/em> \u2013 will shock even modern-day readers.<\/p>\n

Click to continue<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Lloyd Price is a pop music legend. The Kenner, Louisiana native scored an impressive string of major hits, beginning with 1952’s \u201cLawdy Miss Clawdy\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41,49,51,60,62],"tags":[1336,2082],"class_list":["post-8845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-interview","category-new-release","category-pop","category-rb","category-rawk","tag-lloyd-price","tag-sumdumhonky","cat-10-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-60-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8845"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27324,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845\/revisions\/27324"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}