Don’t Have to Follow the Crowd

Memphis soul, a school built where one was once denied him, and a call from the White House.

Memphis

The mid-1970s bring Eddie Ray to a new city and a new sound. He moves with his wife, Joyce, and their sons, Michael and Tracy, to Memphis, Tennessee — into the beating heart of American soul music. There he becomes executive vice president and general manager of Cream Records and Hi Records, built around the warm, horn-and-organ groove producer Willie Mitchell has spent years perfecting.

That groove belongs to Hi’s biggest stars, Al Green and Ann Peebles, whose records carry out of Royal Studios and up the national charts. Eddie’s job is not the mixing board — that’s Mitchell’s domain — it’s the label desk: sales, distribution, promotion, the machinery that turns a Memphis session into a national hit. Family photographs from these years place him alongside Hi’s Rufus Thomas and, in 1975, songwriter George Jackson — Eddie in a suit among the artists and writers who make the Hi sound, always on the business side of the glass. By now he has done nearly every job the record business offers, and Memphis puts all of them to work at once, on one of soul music’s defining rosters.

ShoutFactoryMusic, via YouTube

They are, his sons will later say, the backyard years — Michael and Tracy’s Memphis childhood, the version of home they remember plainest, even after everywhere else the family will go.

But Eddie is not in Memphis only to run a label.

A School of His Own

In the spring of 1975, he does something no Memphis record executive of his stature has done: he founds the Tennessee College of Recording Arts and Sciences — operated as a division of his own company, Eddie Ray Music Enterprises — a vocational school built to teach the commercial music business from the label side out: production, promotion, publishing, distribution, the same ground Eddie has covered himself, one job at a time, since a stockroom in Milwaukee. Students come to learn the whole machinery of the trade, taught by a man who has, by now, run nearly every part of it himself.

The founding carries a weight the Memphis papers don’t fully know. Franklin, North Carolina, once had no high school that would admit Eddie as a Black teenager; at sixteen he left home to find one that would. Now, in Memphis, the boy once turned away is the one building a school, his own name on the letterhead.

His résumé, by the back half of the decade, reads like it belongs to several men: label chief, college founder, university adviser, trustee of the Recording Academy — the organization behind the Grammy Awards, and not a trusteeship handed to just anyone. One Memphis columnist sums it up best:

Seldom has a newcomer to any city contributed as much to his new home as Eddie Ray…

A Memphis newspaper columnist

For the boy once turned away from a high school on account of his race, it reads like vindication.

A Door Reopens

The marriage does not survive the decade, and when it ends, Eddie does what he has always done with a closed door: he finds another one. In 1979, he moves back to California — the state that gave him nearly three decades of career before Memphis, and where an old and famous friendship is about to open a very different kind of door.

Waiting there is a familiar name. Mike Curb — the teenager who once auditioned a song in Eddie’s office and became his most famous protégé — is by now a music-industry mogul in his own right, and, since 1978, the Lieutenant Governor of California. This time Curb is the one holding a door open, and he pulls his old mentor through it: into politics. It’s a long way from a five-hundred-record pressing order placed on a Capitol Records telephone, but Eddie has never been a man to turn down an open door, whatever room it leads to.

Eddie builds his own operation — phone banks and campaign buttons, a committee of thirteen Black professionals backing Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president. When rival camps come calling, the committee has a standard answer: “We haven’t supported anyone — except Reagan.” The loyalty gets noticed in the places that matter. By now Eddie has worked every side of the record business there is — sales, distribution, publishing, the label desk — a rare executive equally fluent in the music and the money. Washington is about to need exactly that combination.

Washington

In the months after Reagan’s 1980 win over Jimmy Carter, Eddie’s phone rings. It’s Curb. A seat is opening on the United States Copyright Royalty Tribunal — the federal panel that decides how America’s artists get paid — and the incoming administration has asked Curb who should fill it. The teenager from the Capitol Tower is now opening doors for the man who once opened one for him.

President Reagan appoints Eddie Ray to the Tribunal, and the United States Senate confirms him as Commissioner. Over roughly eight years in Washington, he rises to Chairman, then Acting Chairman, presiding over the Tribunal for about four of them — the executive who once stocked records in a Milwaukee stockroom now gavels a federal hearing room in the nation’s capital. A federal order from 1984, preserved among the family’s papers, carries his signature as chairman — about as close as the Tribunal ever comes to a seal of its own.

One hearing produces a photograph the family still keeps: Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, seated at the witness table, testifying before Chairman Eddie Ray. It’s a striking image on its own — the Commissioner of Baseball testifying before the Chairman of the Copyright Royalty Tribunal — and more striking still given where Eddie started: the grandson of a man once sold at auction, now presiding in the nation’s capital over how American musicians get paid.

Washington gives him more than a title. Leaving the office late one evening, he meets Jeanette Matthews — by the 1981 Inaugural Ball she is at his side, and she remains there for the rest of his life.

1989

Eddie retires from the Tribunal in 1989, leaving the way he has left every job before it — moving toward an open door rather than away from a closed one. The Tennessee College keeps teaching students in Memphis the entire time he is in Washington — two institutions, half a country apart, both carrying his imprint. He takes with him eight years of federal service, a school of his own founding, and a career that has, by now, touched nearly every side of the music business: sales, distribution, publishing, artist development, commercial education, federal copyright law. Few people in the record business are ever asked to run a label, found a school, and then run a piece of the federal government. Fewer still would have said yes to all three.

His mother had told him, on a hillside above Franklin, that he did not have to follow the crowd. Sixty years on from that hillside, the record speaks for itself — Memphis and Washington, a classroom and a chairman’s gavel, one more set of threads in a tapestry that is nowhere near finished.