There He Is, Right There

He starts in a record label’s shipping room and becomes the boss nobody expected — running Imperial’s biggest acts and co-writing a #1 record of his own along the way.

Aladdin

Los Angeles, 1946. A slip from the employment agency sends a young man from North Carolina across town to the shipping room of a record company called Aladdin. It is a job, nothing more — until the owners take notice.

Aladdin belongs to the Mesner brothers, independent record men known around Los Angeles for their fancy convertibles and their taste in big bands, and for a label roster that includes names like Amos Milburn and Illinois Jacquet, whose records the new shipping clerk now packs and ships by the case. The Mesners take an interest in him almost immediately — not just as a worker but as someone worth teaching. They bring him along to recording sessions and concerts instead of leaving him in the stockroom, and somewhere in the middle of it he also finds time for night classes, earning an associate’s degree in business administration at Los Angeles City College. What stays with Eddie Ray for the rest of his life, he later writes, isn’t the packing slips — it’s what the brothers teach him, patiently and deliberately, about being a mentor. It’s a lesson he spends the next sixty years repaying, starting with a piano player he hasn’t met yet.

Love finds him fast in California. In 1947 he marries Tessie, and the children follow — Eddie Jr., Donald, and Teresa, whom he calls his special angel. The stock clerk is becoming a family man, building something of his own three thousand miles from where he started.

Around this same time, in a little club on West Adams Boulevard, he hears a piano player working his way through a master’s degree at USC. The young man’s name is Ernie Freeman. Eddie gives him his first record work.

Remember the name. This story is not finished.

There He Is, Right There

By 1950 Eddie has moved on to Central Record Sales, one of the biggest independent record distributors in Southern California, moving records by Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Sam Cooke into the region’s stores and jukeboxes. He starts on the inside, working in-house sales to the smaller retail shops and jukebox operators, and rises fast — soon the company’s chief record buyer and radio promotion man, running its purchasing and distribution outright.

One morning a salesman bursts in off the street, demanding to see the boss. He hasn’t called ahead, and he plainly has someone specific in mind. A colleague, without missing a beat, points across the room.

Well — there he is, right there.

A colleague, pointing Eddie out as the boss

In 1950s America, Eddie Ray is the boss nobody expects to find. He stays anyway, and the company is his to run — the first of several times in his career that this exact scene, in one form or another, will repeat itself.

Hearts of Stone

The record man has a secret: he wants to be a songwriter. With a partner named Rudy Jackson — one of them working the melody, the other the words — he co-writes a song called “Hearts of Stone.” He believes in it enough to produce the record himself, cutting it first with a Los Angeles vocal group called the Jewels and putting it out on a small label he starts for the sole purpose of releasing it. It does well enough around Southern California to prove the song has legs. It does not yet prove anything to the rest of the country.

For that, he calls in Ernie Freeman — the piano player from the West Adams club, grown into an arranger now, exactly as promised. Freeman studies the chart Eddie has written and balks. “You’ve got too many bars here,” he says. “This isn’t right.”

Eddie doesn’t move.

“Ernie — I just want the feel.”

The feel wins. “Hearts of Stone” does something almost no record does: it crosses pop, country, and rhythm and blues at once, all the way to number one, carried there by cover version after cover version from artists who hear in it exactly what Eddie heard. In time more than thirty different artists record their own versions of it. It becomes a standard — the rare song that belongs to no single genre — and it opens radio station doors for Eddie for the rest of his career. He is no longer only the man who can sell a record. He is also the man who can write one.

YouCanDanceToit!, via YouTube

Imperial

The whole town knows his number by now. A record man named John Dolphin calls at ten-thirty at night begging for a thousand more copies, then dedicates the next song on his radio station “to my friend, the greatest record man in the world — Mr. Eddie Ray.” That is the reputation that precedes him.

So when Imperial Records comes calling in 1955 and names him national director of sales and distribution, the industry bets he won’t last sixty days. The job doesn’t come with a network — there are no radio lists to inherit, no dealer lists to work from, nothing handed down from the man before him. So he builds one himself: city by city, station by station, handshake by handshake, the same method that worked at Central Record Sales, now applied to the entire country.

Imperial’s roster, at that moment, holds three of the hottest artists in America: Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, and Slim Whitman. Eddie likes to put it plainly: the three hottest acts in the country, at one time, under one roof — and a Black man selling all three.

Across the South

Selling Slim Whitman means selling country music in country towns, across the segregated South. There are airports with no cab that will carry him. There are meetings held on back steps, in shade that isn’t there, because the front office isn’t open to him. There is an Atlanta radio station where the room goes quiet at lunchtime, until the host quietly orders sandwiches sent up to the desk, because no restaurant in town will seat his guest.

None of it is incidental, and it comes on top of the ordinary work of the job — the driving, the pitching, the waiting in station lobbies for five minutes with a program director. He does the back-step meetings with the same care and the same preparation he’d give a meeting in a corner office, because the account still has to close and the records still have to move. Eddie notices everything. And he keeps selling.

What He Sold

What he sells makes history. Fats Domino cooks him red beans and rice in a hotel room and turns an IRS letter into a running joke — this time, Fats, you’ll be walking home to New Orleans — a punchline that somehow becomes the song “I’m Walkin’.” He carries Ricky Nelson’s records past a million copies. A young Philadelphia disc jockey named Dick Clark is amazed that a distributor has actually come to see him in person, instead of just calling on the phone like everyone else.

The Ed Sullivan Show, via YouTube

The instinct that found Ernie Freeman in a club on West Adams Boulevard hasn’t gone anywhere. In a noisy Atlanta club, Eddie is the only man in the room listening to a skinny young comedian, and he offers Flip Wilson his first record deal. At a Hollywood party, he hears Irma Thomas quietly playing a song she wrote herself, stops the party to listen, and puts “Wish Someone Would Care” on her next album. It becomes her biggest hit. It is the same eye the Mesner brothers once turned on him, still finding people worth betting on.

Imperial celebrates its first ten-million-dollar month. But success carries a cost at home — missed dinners, a Thanksgiving suitcase by the door, tears he doesn’t always see. In time, he and Tess part ways; they remain friends for life.

One night on tour, he walks back into the grandest hotel in Milwaukee — the same hotel where a cup of coffee had once cost him half a day’s thought. This time the entire floor is reserved in his name. He puts his feet up, lights a cigar, and thinks the thought he will carry with him for the rest of his life: Mama — I wish you could see me now.