An in depth biography and appreciation for King Floyd's contributions and talents.............
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King Floyd III was born in New Orleans in 1945, the son of King Floyd, Sr. and Lillie Pearl Dawkins. Like many other young singers of his day, he would sing on the street corners as a teenager, just hoping to get noticed. Noticed he was, by the likes of people like Earl King, Willie Tee, and one Joe August, aka Mr. Google Eyes (pictured at right). It was Joe that got him his first real job, singing at a Bourbon Street club called the Sho-Bar in 1961. Uncle Sam had other ideas, however, and King was soon drafted into the Army.
Upon his discharge in 1963, Floyd moved to NYC and signed with giant R&B management firm Shaw Artists. They got him regular work around town, and before long he got to know people like J. J. Jackson and Don Covay, who convinced him of the importance of writing his own material.
He headed out to Los Angeles the following year, and hooked up with the great Jimmy Holiday, who was riding high on the success of his top ten R&B hit How Can I Forget on the Everest Label. They wrote a song together called Walkin' and Thinkin', and Floyd began shopping it around. He was picked up by tiny Motown subsidiary Uptown, who released the tune as the B side of something called "You Don't Have To Have It".
The record didn't chart.
(Holiday would go on to wax some great sides for what was by then L.A. based Minit records, as well as writing a little number called Put A Little Love In Your Heart.)
Floyd reconnected with New Orleans expariate Harold Battiste around this time, and he intoduced him to local disk jockey Buddy Keleen. Buddy used his radio connections to land King a contract with renowned (Oldies but Goodies) DJ Art LaBoe's Original Sound label (the home of funk legends Dyke & the Blazers). Art released a new recording of Walkin' and Thinkin' as the A side of a single in 1965, with our current Floyd & Holiday composition as the flip. The record was produced by King and Jimmy as well, and has this kinda Ric and Ron meets AFO feel to it. Although I'm not sure if Battiste or his fellow exile Mac Rebennack were involved, it sure does have that cottony Crescent City sound, no?
It didn't chart either.
Battiste, who had made a name for himself on the west coast running "Soul Stations" for Sam Cooke's SAR label, was then doing production work for ATCO and Mercury subsidiary Pulsar. Floyd signed with the label in 1966 and released three more singles that went nowhere. Pulsar would issue his debut album, A Man In Love, in 1967.
He continued writing, and was contributing material for other Pulsar artists (like Al Robinson) as well, but his career was at a standstill. After a final single died in 1968, Floyd decided to call it quits, and head home to New Orleans...
In September of 1969, King Floyd had just about had it with the music business, and left Battiste, Rebennack et al to return to his native New Orleans and get a job in the Post Office. He had released an album on PULSAR ("A Man In Love") in 1967 that didn't do much, and was co-authoring some material for other artists (see last week's entry), but that wasn't puttin' no bread on the table. Floyd had written some lyrics, along with a bass line, for a new song that he submitted to Battiste, but was unhappy with the arrangement his people came back with ("...all pretty with the flutes and all of that in it..."). That was when he decided to head on home.
He shopped his tune around to some local artists without much luck. It was then that he came to the attention of the Creole Beethoven, Wardell Quezergue. Quezerque's NOLA record label had just folded, owing thousands of dollars in unpaid studio fees to Cosimo Matassa. He had worked out an arrangement with upstart MALACO records in Jackson, Mississippi that afforded him free studio time in exchange for exclusive rights on the music he produced there. Wardell, a true musical genius, would work out arrangements in his head, then rehearse the Malaco studio musicians until he felt they had it down. Once they recorded the instrumental backing tracks, he'd bring his stable of New Orleans talent up to Jackson in a rented school bus to lay down the vocals.
It was one of these artists, C.P. Love, who offered to give up his slot of studio time so that Floyd could record the song he had written back on the west coast. The vocals for "Groove Me" were recorded in one take, and the song was released as the B side of "What Our Love Needs". New Orleans disc jockey George Vinnett of WYLD flipped the record over and soon got the whole town rockin' and a boppin' to Quezergue's infectious funky beat. It wasn't long before ATLANTIC records was clamoring for distribution rights, and Floyd had a bona-fide monster hit on his hands with the number one record in the country, almost a year to the day after he left California (it would go on to top Billboard's 1970 R&B chart)!
In a way it was this sudden success that caused much of Floyd's superb subsequent output to be ignored. Although he would chart a few more times for Malaco's CHIMNEYVILLE label (most notably with "Baby Let Me Kiss You" in 1971 and "Woman Don't Go Astray" in '73), in many ways he is looked upon as a "one hit wonder".
Our current selection, the B side of the funked up "I Feel Like Dynamite", was released in 1974. This song, to me, is a true southern soul masterpiece, and shows the depth of Floyd's talents, not just as a singer, but as a songwriter as well. Quezergue's sparse guitar-driven Memphis-styled arrangement of the Malaco studio crew is just da bomb!
With that said, check out what MALACO has to say on the subject (both on the web and in the liner notes of their excellent box set, The Last Soul Company); "By 1974... Atlantic had not renewed their distribution option on Chimneyville, King Floyd had become difficult to work with, and Wardell Quezergue seemed to have lost his magic touch." (!) It seems to me more like they weren't makin' any money and were apt to overlook any of Floyd's compositions that didn't mimic the success of his first hit (for Dan Phillips' take on all of this, please check out the mighty Home of the Groove...).
A Greatest Hits album of Floyd's more obvious stuff is available, as is an excellent sampler of Wardell Quezergue's tenure at Malaco that was released last year (it appears that today's B side is even on there!).
King Floyd actually released an album on Malaco in 2000 - Old Skool Funk.
Groove me, baby.
King Floyd will be missed. He had released an album on Malaco in 2000, and was touring again. His high energy performances were legendary, as seen here in his 2002 Jazz Fest romp.
He leaves behind a wife and three children, six grandkids, and an extended New Orleans based family that can't believe he's gone.
Funeral Services will be held at the First Zion Baptist Church in Jefferson, LA this Saturday, March 18th at 10am.
God rest his soul.
The "B" side:King Floyd
