The Record
The Music
From Stock Boy to the Capitol Tower
Eddie Ray was not a musician. His instrument was the label — distribution, promotion, A&R, sales — and across more than sixty years he played it at Decca, Aladdin, Central Record Sales, Imperial, Capitol/Tower, MGM, and Cream/Hi. Along the way he helped build the careers of some of the most recognizable names in American popular music, and put his own name on a #1 record as a songwriter besides.
1946–1954
Aladdin & Central Record Sales
A shipping-room job at Aladdin Records puts a 19-year-old from North Carolina inside the record business for the first time. He discovers an arranger named Ernie Freeman, marries Tessie, and becomes the boss nobody expected at Central Record Sales.
Aladdin Records
1955–1964
Imperial Records
As Imperial’s national sales director, Eddie Ray takes Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, Dave Bartholomew, and Slim Whitman’s records to radio and retail across the country — including through the segregated South, where doing that job well took more than salesmanship.
Louise Julia Cousin, via YouTube
1964–1970
Capitol / Tower Records
At Capitol’s Tower Records division, Eddie Ray personally exercises the option to sign a young British band named Pink Floyd for U.S. release — the group that would go on to become one of the biggest in the world — and gives a teenage Mike Curb his first break in the business.
1970–1974
MGM Records
Reunited with Mike Curb at MGM, Eddie Ray is part of a label on a run — “Spill the Wine” with Eric Burdon & War, “One Bad Apple” with the Osmonds, and chart records for Freddie & The Dreamers, Ian Whitcomb, Solomon Burke, and Jimmy Smith. It is the era Curb brings Sammy Davis Jr. to the label: “The Candy Man,” cut with the Mike Curb Congregation, goes to #1 in 1972 and becomes the biggest hit of Davis’s career.
Beat-Club, via YouTube
1974–1989
Cream / Hi Records
A move to Memphis puts Eddie Ray in the orbit of Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records sound and Al Green’s biggest years — label-side, building the business around music that was already catching fire.
Radio Rewind Tv, via YouTube
Spotlight: “Hearts of Stone”
The record man had a secret: he wanted to write. With a partner named Rudy Jackson — one working the melody, the other the words — Eddie co-wrote “Hearts of Stone,” produced it himself, and started a small label just to release it. When his arranger, Ernie Freeman, objected that the chart had too many bars, Eddie cut him off: “Ernie — I just want the feel.” The feel won. The song crossed pop, R&B, and country all the way to #1, carried by cover version after cover version — more than thirty in all.
The Mentor
A teenager named Mike Curb walked into Eddie Ray’s office at Capitol Records with no appointment — and walked out with his first break in the music business. Decades later, Curb would credit that same instinct in Eddie — to build the school he never had access to himself — as part of what led him to invest in music-business education at Belmont University’s Curb College.
Eddie founded the Tennessee College of Recording Arts and Sciences in Memphis in the 1970s, and discovered and championed arranger Ernie Freeman a generation earlier — two of the clearest examples of a career spent opening doors for other people’s music.