*Below is a 1986 story about Devora Brown, co-owner of Fortune Records. The story was published in Goldmine Magazine and was written by Dan Nooger. Some images were taken from a great web site called Soulful Detroit.
DEVORA BROWN: THE FORTUNE TELLER SPEAKS By: Dan Nooger
In the Jan. 3, 1986, Goldmine, the story of Nolan Strong and the Diablos was told in separate stories by Cub Koda and Peter Grendysa. A brief history of Fortune Records was also presented by Grendysa.
 |
| Devora Brown! |
By way of a followup, I recently interviewed Devora Brown, owner and proprietress of Fortune Records. Although much of our discussion concerned Nolan Strong, for whom she retains a special love and regard nearly a decade after his death, Brown was able to shed some light on other Fortune artists as well as the label’s nearly 40-year history as Detroit’s first ‘major indie.’
To begin with, Brown pointed out that she got “a terrific reaction from the Goldmine piece, although there were some inaccuracies. I did most of all the recording and engineering, especially on the important artists like Andre Williams and Nolan -- everything that Nolan did, I recorded. I’d be running in and out from the control room to the studio.
“I wasn’t frying burgers on sessions. We did have a little hot plate in the room where the furnace is. I used to warm up coffee and bring burgers from home, but I very seldom cooked over there. My husband, Jack, used to go over to the office real early, maybe 8 o’clock and Nolan would be there. Jack would give him some money and say, ‘Go out and get something to eat.’ Nolan would say, ‘No, tell Ms. Brown to bring me a sandwich, I like hers better.’ So I’d quickly put on some hamburgers and bring them down. Then he knew that when he was there, I’d bring some down. When we were recording he’d stick his head out of the studio door and say, ‘Ms. Brown, got a sandwich?’
“We had him over to our house for dinner a lot of times. After he had a dinner at our house, he used to tell everybody how good it was. We treated him really like a son, even though he used to aggravate us sometimes. We knew that he was great, that he had something that would last.”
As far as recording techniques, Brown stated, “I didn’t cut anything with all the musicians and singers in a big circle around one mike. Jack may have done it -- sometimes he may not have wanted to be bothered, but from the very beginning we had seven mikes, and name-brand equipment. Jack did some recording when I wasn’t there, and my son, Sheldon, did some too and fixed up the equipment. Jack handled the promotion. As soon as a record was on tape he wouldn’t waste a minute getting the record out, he’d take or mail it to the cutter for mastering. In the early Detroit days we didn’t have a cutter in Detroit.”
As for the sound quality of Fortune pressings, which has come in for criticism (Grendysa wrote, “ ‘mint’ is just a state of mind, not a sound”), Brown said, “that gave the impression that we only started making good pressings in 1984. I think that’s just not so. I was listening to some of our original 45s and I don’t think ours were any worse than any of the rest of them. There might have been some problems in the beginning with the 78s, but we pressed with plants that gave good sound and told them to give us clean pressings. Maybe one or two were bad because they were pressed in the wrong place.”
On Fortune’s early days, Devora Brown remembered that “We started on a shoestring. When we first started, we did everything wrong and lost about $3,000, which was all we had. We started out doing pop stuff. We were absolutely ignorant of black records -- didn’t know a thing about black records at first. We thought we’d complete with Columbia and RCA, and it was really impossible at that time. There weren’t enough DJs to play our records at first, because they’d only play people like Perry Como. We did have one pop success with ‘Jane (Sweet As Summer Rain)’ by Russ Titus. He came from Canada and had a wonderful voice, better than Bing Crosby. He had another song called ‘It’s The Tingle Of The Wine’ -- he put so much feeling into it! It sold in Detroit, but we couldn’t get it going anywhere else. But we got letters, even then, from people who were as excited about those records as people are about Nolan.”
Soon Fortune got into recording country music and blues. “It didn’t take long after we started with the pop stuff,” Brown recalls. “Artists found out there was a record company in Detroit and they came to us.”
Fortune’s country roster included the York Brothers, Skeets McDonald and Roy Hall. “Skeets McDonald was a big guy, very good looking, and he did things for us like ‘The Tattooed Lady.’ They were all ‘party-type’ records, but not real risqué because you couldn’t do that in those days. Then he went out to California and recorded for Capitol. “Country boppers such as “You Ought To See Your Grandma Rock” and “Fingertips.”) We have some unreleased sides by him.”
“Now Roy Hall, he loved to boogie,” Devora Brown related. “He first recorded for us in the early ‘50s, then he came back later and told us about calling himself ‘Roy The Hound.’” (As he styled himself on his Pierce rocker, “One Monkey Don’t Stop The Show.”) “My husband gave him the idea for ‘The Dirty Boogie.’ They got together and he wrote it with him. We have a number of tapes with other boogies by him and we’ve got to get those out.”
Brown was less recall of the mid-‘50s rockabilly cats like Johnny Powers (“Honey Let’s Go To A Rock ‘N’ Roll Show”), Dell Vaughn (“Rock The Universe”), Jimmy Lee (“You Ain’t No Good For Me”) , and Eddie Jackson (“Rock ‘N’ Roll Baby”), because “They didn’t come in and hang around like Nolan did. They’d come in one time, cut the record and that was it.”
Powers was still active with his own production company in Detroit, was recently interviewed in Now Dig This (July 1985) and recalled his 1957 Fortune session thusly: “I went to Fortune because it was the only label that was active at the time and I wanted to get a record out. It cost me about $100 to record the session. I remember the studio in the back room had a dirt floor with an old lamp stand with a microphone draped over it -- one mike for the whole session! What you got was what you got!”
Fortune also put down some raw, tough blues by the like of Big Maceo Merriweather, Dr. Ross (The Harmonica Boss), guitarist/vocalist Calvin Frazier (“Sweet Bread Baby”), tenor sax-man/bandleader Choker Campbell (“Rocking And Jumping” -- Campbell later worked at Motown where he backed-up Stevie Wonder on his first hit “Fingertips”), Little Eddie Kirkland (“I Need You Baby”), John and Grace Brim (“Strange Man” -- “They’re from Chicago but they recorded for us. I’m going to put that out on our next blues LP”), and in common with almost every other blues label of the time, John Lee Hooker.
 |
| Nolan Strong |
“He made a bunch of records for us,” Brown related. “We’ve got two contracts that he signed with us, but it didn’t do any good to sign him. He never stayed with one label very long, he’d just hop from one to another. He was in demand all over the country, so he didn’t have to stay in one place, and as soon as he made a record, he ran away, got out of town. Other companies knew he was going good, so they’d record him. My husband likes him very much.
“Jack loved the record business, but he didn’t want to get big and have a whole staff running around the place. You see, Berry Gordy had his whole family working with him. We didn’t have anything like that. To black people, music is a god, especially their own black music. In my family, everyone just likes classical music, they didn’t think much of R&B and didn’t think it would last long.
“In fact, Berry Gordy used to come around in the early days when he was just another song writer, but I don’t think we bought anything from him. Jack loved my songs though, and he had a great sense of humor. He loved those Andre Williams records, like ‘The Greasy Chicken’ (on which Williams sings in three different languages) and the hillbilly records too.”
Fortune’s fame rests, as Devore Brown acknowledges, on its R&B records, and apart from Nolan Strong, probably the company’s best -known R&B artist is Andre Williams (“Bacon Fat,” “Jailbait,” “Mean Jean,” “Pullin’ Time”).
“Andre was originally from Chicago and came into Detroit. We had a group called the Five Dollars (“Doctor Baby,” “Hard Working Mama”) and Andre was related to the lead singer, Little Eddie, or his wife. They told him about us, and he became their lead singer. After about a year, they didn’t want to have him as leader anymore -- he though he was a great big star and became overbearing. They wanted to continue with Fortune Records, but not as just Andre Williams’ backup group. They didn’t like the idea of him taking the lead. So they decided to stay with Fortune Records as the Five Dollars, but when they recorded under Andre they called themselves the Don Juans.
“At the beginning Andre was selling as good as Nolan, but Nolan then beat him out. Andre was thinking he was a star and was probably jealous of Nolan’s success. About 1960, we had a big fight, and we told Andre to leave and never come back. Andre went out, he made his own records and put them on labels; he was real businesslike about it.”
Williams did some writing -- “Mojo Hanna” and recording -- “Rosa Lee” -- at Motown, as did his frequent partner Gino Parks; had successful releases on Checker -- “Cadillac Jack,” “The Stroke,” “Girdle Up” -- and did production work for Duke/Peacock, where he cut Bobby Bland’s classic LP Spotlighting The Man, which included Williams’ extremely Motownish “Gotta Get To Know You.”
“Eventually Andre did come back,” Brown continued, “and I was happy that he came back. He said that leaving was a mistake. We just put out a brand new single on him (“Brown Fat” / “Just Because Of A Kiss”) and his voice is as good ever.”
Fortune’s R&B roster also included Joe Weaver & the Blue Notes, who also served as house band on many sessions. Their story was also told in Whiskey, Women, and… #8 (“ ‘Baby I Love You So’ became a hit all by itself, it didn’t even go in Detroit the way it did in Boston”). Others included the Royal Jokers (“After they had recorded ‘You Tickle Me Baby’ for Atco, some years later they came to us and we cut it all over again.”), the Five Jets (“I’m Wondering” -- “We have another record we could put out on them.”) and Nathaniel Mayer.
Of Mayer’s “Village Of Love” session, Brown recalls, “At the end of that, it wasn’t that the bass singer pushed closer to the mike. I got excited and pulled up the volume. I liked what the bass man was doing and my instinct told me to pull up the volume at that point, so I just turned it up. I was a little worried about it but I did it out of instinct, and I think I was right, because people love it. I really was doing the recording from my heart.”
But the single artist for whom Devora Brown retains the most lasting affection is, beyond all doubt, Nolan Strong. “He was the King of Fortune Records,” she said. “There are so many stories about him, because he was with us all those years. We knew that he was great, and we took things from him that we wouldn’t take from anybody else. He was somebody that people get hooked on. They’d always want to hear more records by him once they bought one; there was something about him that people just have to have everything he made. We didn’t have it easy with him. He was sweet and nice, but he had his problems. You had to either go along with him or get rid of him, and we couldn’t do that because he had done too many good things for us like ‘The Wind’ and ‘Adios My Desert Love.’
“Nolan’s father was mostly white,” Brown related. “His mother was very black. His father had a beautiful voice like Eddie Fisher. Nolan brought him around a few times, and if he’d brought him around more often I might have recorded him. His mother had a real high voice, though I never really heard her sing. That’s the reason Nolan had such a wonderful voice. It’s true that Nolan didn’t have the money for his first demo. Jack was out of town, and when he heard it, he said, ‘I never heard such a high singer, he might be too high.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, it might be an extra point for him that he sings so high.’
“We cut ‘Adios’ and ‘The Wind’ twice. The first version had Joe Weaver & the Blue Notes backing up, but Joe’s piano playing was too R&B. So I cut it again with another piano player, a white guy.”
 |
| Sheldon Brown, Devora and Jack's son, recorded music for Fortune |
Of the problems that dogged Nolan’s career, Brown attributes their genesis to Strong’s time in the military. “He was fine for the first two years. He didn’t drink. In 1956, he was called into the Army and it brought all his vices together. When he came back, he was an alcoholic and a pill taker. We used to say to him, ‘You gotta stop it, it’s gonna hurt you,’ and sometimes he’d stop for a while. One day he brought us his vial, gave his pills to my husband and said, ‘Jack, take them.’ The next day I said, ‘Let’s throw them away,’ and he said, ‘No, he’s not going to let that go, he’ll come back for them,’ and about three days later he came and wanted them back. We argued with him, but finally gave them back. I didn’t think he’d hurt me, and he didn’t, but still you have to be careful.”
Yet out of his problems, Nolan was able to create art. “I loved the way he did ‘Everything They Said Came True,’ that’s a song we both wrote,” said Devora Brown. He came in feeling very sad one time, and told me that people were talking against him and it looked like everything they said was coming true. I comforted him and said, ‘No, no, don’t think like that.’ He was writing the lyrics -- he was thinking it was on account of his drinking and if he didn’t straighten up he was going to ruin his life. He was going to sing it like that, but I didn’t think that was a good thing to put into a song, so I said, ‘I don’t like what you’re singing. We’ll change that,’ so I changed the words.
“He went along with what I said. But I didn’t put my name on it, or a lot of things I wrote with him. He wouldn’t want me to put my name on, but he found it convenient to come to me for help with songs. Writing songs is work, but he found that when I helped him it wasn’t work, because I can write a song in just a few minutes.
“The song ‘You Are Love,’ for instance, I was thinking of another song by that name, thought ‘that’s a beautiful title,’ and the words and melody came to me real fast, I didn’t even have to write it down. I was walking around the room singing it, Nolan heard me and immediately sang it, he didn’t even have to rehearse it. I sang to Nolan, he went right into the studio, sang it once and that was it. That’s why it doesn’t have a big band behind him. All he did was sing it with a piano player, and later I added the drumbeats. I was lucky I had the piano player there. He was in the studio just strumming around, and he wasn’t the one I would have used, though he did turn out to be good. But he was there, that was the thing.”
At other times, recording Strong could be a struggle. “We had a lot of problems with him, because of his drinking,” Brown stressed. “Sometimes he wouldn’t want to record when we wanted him to, or he’d not come around at all. Or he’d come in but he wouldn’t be in the best shape to sing. Some of my songs, I didn’t feel he did them all his heart, but I put them out anyway. He liked to sing standards, and we did a version of ‘Old Man River,’ spent a long time on it. He’d sing part of it, stop, sing another part of it… I’ve got a whole tape of that, and I’m going to put it out sometime, but it’s going to need a lot of splicing.”
 |
| Janice Brown, Jack & Devora's daughter, was a part of Fortune |
Strong’s drinking also hampered the promotion of his records. Brown ruefully recalls the time she bought Strong $600 worth of clothes for a crucial appearance sponsored by a big DJ who was pushing “Mind Over Matter.” Strong not only failed to show up but was discovered to have run away to New Jersey! “If anybody else had pulled a stunt like that, he’d have been through,” she says. “But you couldn’t fight Nolan too much. He always apologized, he’d look at me with those big eyes and say, ‘I won’t do it again.’ It wasn’t that he was so irresponsible, it was because of his drinking.”
But for all of his problems, it was Strong’s musical talents that earned Devora Brown’s respect. “He did a wonderful job on ‘The Masquerade Is Over.’ His voice is so full of heartbreak and feeling. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to sing that song with the feeling that he put into it. And that’s what’s so great about Nolan.
“After he passed away, his sister Doris came to us and said, ‘You know, he really loved you,’ and I know he did. He didn’t want to leave us, though he had offers. Once he called and said, ‘I’m at Berry Gordy’s place and I want you to take me home.’ So my son went with another fellow that was working for us. My son said that while they were there, Berry offered Nolan $1,000 to sign, but he refused it.
“Once I gave Nolan some money, I don’t remember how much, and wrote out a receipt on a little piece of paper, ‘Nolan Strong acknowledges receipt of X numbers of dollars,’ so I’d have a record. He said, ‘Give me that,’ and I thought he was going to say something. And he wrote on it, ‘I’m going to stay with you forever,’ and I still have the piece of paper. So that’s how he felt.”
THE END
Feel free to leave comments below.
