Lloyd Price

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the golden age of rock and roll became a prevalent source of music that combined the likes of jazz, gospel, blues, and country into a single genre. This genre produced the likes of Elvis "The King" Presley,  Antoine "Fats" Domino Jr, and Little Richard. However, a less known but as influence artist, Lloyd Price was born in New Orleans Suburbs of Kenner, Louisiana on March 9th, 1933. Price was the eighth in the family of eleven children. Immediately at an early age, Price was exposed to the sounds of music. He was given formal musical training in both the trumpet and piano, sang in his church's gospel church, and played in a band with his brother Leo who played for the local audience and radio stations.

Price worked in his mother's restaurant, Fish 'n' Fry, where one of New Orlean's big band musicians Dave Bartholomew discovered him playing the piano. Immediately, Bartholomew asked Price to come to his label's studio and introduced him to Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records. Price played his original "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" to Rupe and he quickly told Price to come back in two weeks to record the full song. Those two weeks later, joined with Bartholomew's band, Price and company recorded his song in just one rehearsal and one take. On June 1952, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" became the Number One R&B Record in America, where it spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart, and became the R&B Record of the Year. It had enormous sales and was the only song that both Elvis and the Beatles covered later in their careers. This song was one of the most important and influential songs that gave way to the transformation from rhythm & blues to rock & roll.  He later released four more songs with Specialty Records, "Oooh, Oooh, Oooh," "Restless Heart," "Tell Me Pretty Baby," and "Ain't It a Shame", all however never reached the charts.

Unluckily, his heightened success fell when Price was drafted into the Korea War on November 1953. To his surprise when he returned to the states on October 1955, he saw that he was replaced by a new up and coming artist,  Little Richard. He decided to settle down in Washington D.C. where he formed his own record, KRC Records. Through this label, he recorded and released multiple national hits from 1957 to 1959. Throughout the rest of his career, he opened up a club called "The Turntable" in New York, founded two more labels, Double L and Turntable, moved to Nigeria after his partner was murdered in 1969, toured Europe in 1993, and went on his final tour with soul legends Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler, and Ben E. King called the "Four Kings of Rhythm and Blues" tour. By the end of his career, he released twenty-seven albums over fifty years.

Price received the Pioneer Award at the sixth annual Rhythm and Blues Foundation ceremonies in Los Angeles in 1994 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. On March 9, 2010, his 77th birthday, in New Orleans, Price was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. He currently manages Icon Food Brands which makes a line of primarily Southern-style foods, has an avenue named after him as well as an annual "Lloyd Price Day" celebrated in his hometown, Kenner, Louisiana. 

https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/lloyd-price
https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/lloyd-price
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0697012/bio
https://peoplepill.com/people/lloyd-price/