Record Town
It’s been over 60 years since Ray Sharpe’s “Linda Lu” was a hit on the Billboard top 100 charts. This two-minute and eight-second-long shuffle helped Sharpe define a sound and hone a career that spanned several decades. But utter this legend’s name outside of certain circles and he is all but a forgotten musician lost to the hands of time.
That was until earlier this year when a group of devoted Fort Worth music fans, and a former Sharpe bandmate took on the labor of reissuing one of his comeback performances on vinyl. The record titled “Ray Sharpe: Live at the Bluebird” is the latest in a series of Fort Worth-centric music being curated and released by the Record Town Records. This pressing is the third in a line of local records that current Record Town owner and music fan Bill Mecke has hand-picked for remastering and pressing. This small label specializes in such historic and rare recordings as Robert Ealey & His Five Careless Lovers: Live at the Bluebird, and Rocky Hill: Houston Blues Throwdown. The authenticity that Mecke brings to this latest re-issue is in his collaboration with former Sharpe keyboardist and studio musician Mike Price. He was involved with the hands-on approach of making sure the recordings for these three nights of shows were remastered to give new listeners an authentic taste of what Sharpe sounded like during this era of his career.
But no re-issue would be complete without getting some feedback from the musician on the record. So, with this in mind, my first missions for this article was to get in contact with Sharpe himself and ask him first-hand about his thoughts on the new pressing. Sharpe’s friends and cohorts at Record Town assured me that he was still very much alive and supplied me with his telephone number. After writing the number down, everyone smiled at my doe-eyed expectation of getting in touch with him. After several days of attempted phone calls, I understood why. Sharpe’s voicemail was full, so I couldn’t leave him a message. But my persistence paid off on day three when I heard the voice of the legend himself on the other end of the phone line. Sharpe was distant with me at first, but after a few minutes of talking and getting to know each other, I knew he was letting me in.
“I actually started out playing country music,” he opined when asked about his first musical inspiration. “I really liked Jimmy Rodgers, ‘The Blue Yodeler’. His music inspired me to pick up a guitar, and I learned to yodel because of him.”
After hearing Rodgers on the radio, Sharpe says he did his best to get the one thing every country singer needs — a guitar. “I was two dollars shy, but I had an aunt who lived on the south side who said she would give me the money,” he says. “So, I walked from the projects on the east side of Fort Worth to her house on the south side and walked back to the store to get that guitar.”
The next step Sharpe took was to learn everything he could about this six-string instrument. In order to do this, he says he would go to a local music store on Main Street and watch other musicians play. “There was this guy in there that worked maintenance, and he showed me how to tune the thing,” Sharpe says. “When I would get back home the guitar would be out of tune, so I would have to walk back and have him show me how to tune it again (laughs).”
Soon, Sharpe says he and that guitar became inseparable. So much so that Sharpe says he took it with him everywhere, even to school and work. “Eventually I bought a pickup (an electric add-on for guitars) from Conns Music Shop, which I placed on the guitar. Then I found myself an amp, so then I was electrified,” Sharpe says.
Shortly after this, Sharpe says he was hired for his first gig at a place called Coconut Grove on the east side of the city. “I had just sat in to play, not even of age to be in there, but the guy who owned the club wanted to hire me to perform for tips even though all I knew was three or four songs,” he says. It was at that club that Sharpe says he made his first foray into the local music scene.
It wouldn’t take long before Sharpe would find himself headlining at the Penguin Club. It was at this location that a regular would ask him to write a song about his girlfriend Linda. A task, Sharpe says, he didn’t really give too much thought to. “As a performer, I was always ribbing the regulars and giving them nicknames and such, and I remember this salesman from New York always had this girl with him that was very shapely, I mean she had a Coke bottle body shape,” Sharpe says. “They would dance all the time at the club, and when she danced man, she became the focus of attention for a lot of people.”
Sharpe says he worked on this request for a few months using this image as his inspiration until he found the right chords. “I was playing around on the guitar and piano at home one day when that melody came to mind,” he says. “My first line was ‘they call my baby fatty,’ not Patty, over the years I just let the song be the song.” When it was finished, Sharpe says he put it in his regular setlist, which garnered more attention due to its shuffle-style beat. This was one of the main reasons he says, he began to get attention from some industry bigwigs.
Among Sharpe's early supporters were "Crying in the Chapel" tunesmith Artie Glenn and his son Darrel, who enjoyed a 1953 country hit with the song. Impressed by his Penguin Club performances, the Glenns offered Sharpe leftover time at Darrel Glenn's next session, in exchange for some guitar work. The deal yielded two strong demos, a rock 'n' roll instrumental titled "Presley" and a spirited R&B shuffle "That's The Way I Feel." The senior Glenn circulated the demo to music industry contacts, finally securing meaningful interest from independent producers and music legends, Lester Sill and Lee Hazlewood.
But even with all of this momentum in place, “Linda Lu” was almost never recorded. Fate stepped in when Hazlewood asked Sharpe to record a fourth song for a B-side on “Red Sails in the Sunset”.
“Then in the winter of 1958, I went to the Audio Sounds recording studio to make a record with Duane Eddy's band backing me up," Sharpe recalled. "My producer Lee Hazlewood asked me if I had one more song to make four, and I was stuck. So, I started playing 'Linda Lu" for him.” Originally, Sharpe says he wanted to record a country song, but back then that door was not open to him. “I was before Charlie Pride and he didn’t get there for a few more years.”
"Linda Lu," with its half-stuttered phrasing and rhythmic guitar hook, was the perfect teen rocker during that era of music. Coupled with "Red Sails in the Sunset," the song was leased to Jamie Records in Philadelphia. Initially, the latter tune was considered the A-side, but once Dick Clark began playing "Linda Lu" on his show American Bandstand, there was no question as to which side was the hit. Eventually, the record rose to number 46 on the pop charts and number eleven on the R&B charts. It might have garnered more success, but the Blues Wailers, Sharpe’s backing band, felt he would be abandoning them by playing with the customary local musicians on tour. As a result, without strong management to advise him, Sharpe bowed out of an East Coast package tour that would have surely spurred his record sales.
A few years later, Sharpe would record at ATCO records with legendary producer King Curtis and a relatively unknown guitarist at that time by the name of Jimi Hendrix. Sharpe would continue to record and tour for the next few years, never again garnering as much attention as he once commanded with “Linda Lu”.
Flash forward to the early 80s when Sharpe at forty-three, had become accustomed to playing close-to-home cocktail-lounge engagements with the aid of a drum machine. It was during this era of Sharpe’s career that the idea to record a live album to spark his career was devised.
1 of 3
Stephen Montoya
2 of 3
Stephen Montoya
3 of 3
Stephen Montoya
Sharpe says he was approached by his then-producer Slim Ritchie and keyboardist Mike Price about possibly doing a three-night engagement at a place he had never played — the Bluebird Nite Club. This club was considered the sacred territory of another Fort Worth blues legend Robert Ealey. To this day Sharpe verifies that he and Ealey never shared a bill or played together on or off the stage. But since this unspoken territorial rift existed, Sharpe says he was reluctant to try and pack in a live show there. That and from what Price wrote in a bio about this legendary gig, Sharpe wasn’t sure he would be ready to perform in front of this type of crowd after playing small one-man gigs for several years.
“[Ray] hadn’t played things quite so down and dirty in many years,” Price writes. “That [and] he had grown accustomed to the comparative ‘booshwah’ normalcy of Holiday Inn Lounges and felt he might not fare so well in a rowdy juke of the Bluebirds nature.”
What finally made Sharpe change his mind is this argument was the fact that he could play to a salt-and-pepper crowd. This and Richey’s Flying High Records already secured the Bluebird as a recording venue for three nights in December of 1981. According to Nichols, Richey commandeered a sound-engineering truck from his operations at Crystal Clear Audio in Dallas and booked a month’s worth of rehearsals in a music store in Fort Worth after hours. It was from these very rehearsals that the set list for this concert, and subsequent live album, would come from.
Much like Sharpe, the original Bluebird Nite Club, still stands like a monument to an era gone by on the corner of Horne Street and Wellesley Avenue. Its freshly painted exterior blue walls hide a history of hootenannies and jam sessions that live in the annals of Fort Worth folklore. To this day, still tucked away inside this iconic club are the signatures of musicians and visitors that frequented this small venue when it was open.
“The Bluebird wasn’t considered the iconic place it is now back then,” Sharpe says. “You would see people get drunk and fight and few people have even gotten killed out there. It was a popular place with a bad reputation.”
Sharpe says, despite the Bluebird’s bad rep and Ealey’s tenure, the club was known by word of mouth in the global blues music scene. Even the famous Bob Dylan himself had graced the club in the mid-70s when he was doing his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, fellow bandmate T Bone Burnett by his side. The reality of it all is that the Bluebird was a small club that could barely hold more than 70 people comfortably. The cramped stage or lack thereof was nestled in the southeast corner of the space, separated by a small dance floor and bathroom entrance.
With all of the rehearsals done and the setlist finalized, Sharpe and his band were ready to tackle the legendary club. What came from this three-night event was enough music for two live record volumes. But with the recent re-issue, the best performances from each night were cherry-picked and placed on one record. Even the original artwork was used with a quick revamp of color on Sharpe’s suit to make him pop out from the background.
As for the legacy of Sharpe’s biggest hit, it has been covered and revered by such artists as ZZ Top, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Michael Bloomfield just to name a few.
“I was a believer in what I’ve done and when I played, I put it all out there on the stage and the audience; especially the audience,” Sharpe says. “Because it was the audience that made me what I was, when I was, and where I’m at today.”
Ray Sharpe: Live at the Bluebird track highlights include “Dust My Blues”, “Hideaway,” Sharpe originals “Chilé con Como” and “Miss LaVerne,” and slower songs like “Caress Me, Baby” and “Long, Lonely Nights”. This release is only available through Record Town.
