Charles Walker Is Dy-no-mite!

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By: Andy Tennille

The Dynamites Featuring Charles Walker

Even as a young boy growing up in Nashville in the 1940s, Charles Walker knew he was a little bit different from the rest of the kids his age.

“As a kid, I was always tap-dancing or singing around our house,” Walker remembers. “A lot of my siblings and friends could sing too, but they never made a career out of it. I guess I was kind of the bastard child in a way.”

Nicknamed “Wigg” by his mother for the inordinate amount of hair with which he was born, Walker got his start in music like so many other aspiring artists of that era – through performing in his local church.

“I grew up singing in church in the children’s choir, mostly hymns and gospel music,” he says. “Eventually, I started with a singing group called The Bel Aires. It didn’t take long for me. I was out singing at a pretty early age.”

In 1959, Walker cut his first records – Slave to Love and No Fool No More – for Nashville’s Champion record label under the direction of producer Ted Jarrett with support from labelmates The Kinglets and Larry Birdsong.

“It was mostly just blues and country back then in Nashville, but I got hooked on that R&B sound from listening to people like Jackie Wilson on the radio,” Walker says. “One of the reasons I left home for New York was because I just did not see any possibility of doing that kind of music in Nashville at that time.”

A year after his recording debut, Walker moved to the Big Apple to pursue music full-time, recording some demos for various labels before joining the J.C. Davis Band as its new lead singer. Walker toured the country with the band for nearly five years, opening for the likes of Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and James Brown.

“James used to fire and hire me constantly,” Walker recalls about The Godfather of Soul. “He always would tell me to do one or two songs before he would come on, but I would try to make a medley out of the songs and go a bit longer. Eventually, he would just walk out. My job was to warm up the audience. Sometimes, James said I was doing a little too much warming.”

Charles Walker

In 1964, Walker split from Davis to form his own group, Little Charles and the Sidewinders, comprised of many of the musicians who formed his former employer’s band. The Sidewinders became one of the hottest bands in the New York, performing shows at legendary Harlem institutions such as The Apollo Theater and Small’s Paradise while cutting sides for both the Chess and Decca labels.

“If you did not meet people on tour, you would meet them at Small’s,” Walker says with a grin. “Everyone would be at Small’s – James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Vic Mabel, Ruth Brown, Wilson Pickett, really everyone was there one night or another. Pickett and I were good friends. I did a couple of shows with him but we would hang out together a lot. He was always down at Small’s when I was down there. Small’s was the Mecca of the music business in New York.”

The Sidewinders stayed together throughout the ’60s and ’70s, playing gigs in hotels, nightclubs and casinos before Walker disbanded the group in 1979 to join Motown Records as a staff writer. Walker spent the better part of the ’80s in Europe, where his Sidewinders sides attracted a cult following in England’s Northern Soul scene and led to some gigs and recording projects, before ultimately returning home to Nashville in 1993. Walker played the Nashville club circuit for several years before recording Leavin’ This Old Town, which was nominated for a Handy Award in 2000 for Comeback Album of the Year. But it wasn’t until a chance meeting with local producer Bill Elder in 2005 that Walker had met his musical match with Nashville’s The Dynamites.

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I just feel like soul and funk music and its derivatives are the purest form of popular music. Just on an ethereal level, it is the language that everyone understands. To me, it never went away. -Bill Elder

Photo of The Dynamites Featuring Charles Walker

Charles Walker by Andy Tennille

Bill Elder: I would definitely trace the origins of this band back to Doyle Davis’ radio show. He’s done a show at WRVU-91 Rock in Nashville for the past few years called “D-Funk.” It’s one of those deep funk, super soul radio shows that lots of people in Nashville, including me, listen to religiously every Friday night. It was just such good music he was playing and I hadn’t heard a lot of it. Every single tune he played just hit and was different from the one he’d played before. I’d call up and say, “What the hell is that, man?” Doyle would tell me and we’d talk about it. All of it predated James Brown, The Meters, Funkadelic – all the stuff that I was into. So I really became a deep funk junkie. Through all of my other musical pursuits in Nashville, it was always a dream of mine to be able to do this kind of music; music that was so beautiful back then but nothing has really been able to touch it since.

At that time, I thought I had pretty much left my playing days behind and I was primarily producing and working in the studio. So I thought it might be cool to just put together a soul night at a local bar. I knew all these heavy cats in Nashville who were all influenced by the same music and everybody just got on board. It wasn’t about the money and it was not about doing this serious thing all over the country. I spoke with Doyle about it and he offered to do the show at the bar underneath his store.

Doyle Davis: I own a record store in Nashville called Grimey’s and there is a club downstairs called The Basement that my business partner at the store runs. Around the time that Bill approached me about doing a soul night at the bar, the “Night Train in Nashville” exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame was going on. I went to one of their events and spoke with Michael Gray, who curated the exhibit and the CD series they did which Charles was featured on. Michael had seen Charles at one of those “Night Train in Nashville” shows at B.B. King’s club in Nashville while the exhibit was going. He said Charles was the real deal, had not lost any of his chops and if he had the right band, he’d be great. It was just like a light bulb went off in my head. For two years Bill had been talking to me about a band he was trying to put together and he never could find the right person to front it. I got Charles’ phone number from Michael and passed it to Bill.

Bill Elder: So Doyle passes along Charles’ phone number and I gave him a call. We talked a little bit about what I was thinking about doing and decided to meet. We went and had a beer together and I played him a couple of CDs of the kind of direction that I wanted to go. Charles was into it, so he said, “Let’s do this show.”

JamBase: When you guys first got together and rehearsed, what did you think when you first heard Charles sing live?

Bill Elder by Andy Tennille

Elder: When we got done with that first song, I was like, “Whoa! We’ve got something here.” I absolutely felt it from the start. I don’t know what the word for it is but it became very real very fast once I heard what Charles could put on the music. We ended up doing the show and it sold out. It was like the second biggest crowd that had ever been in this club. I remember after that show, Charles comes out after everyone was gone and was like: “So what are we going do with this man?” [laughs.]

JamBase: What happened next?

Elder: Everything changed right after that show. We got a booking deal pretty much within the next two weeks and Doyle signed on as our manager. The cool thing about the deep funk scene is it’s all about 45s, so we didn’t have to churn out a whole record right off the bat. So I sat down and wrote the tunes for the 45 – “Come On In” and “Slinky.” We had the 45s pressed and for sale at our second show.

Davis: I went out to the recording session for those tracks on a Friday and the following Friday, I dropped the needle on a test pressing of the 45 on the air on my radio show. It was so old school.

Elder: After the 45 came out it became apparent that touring was going to really need to be the next thing. We needed to see if that could work and if we could define a few cities and get people excited about it based around the 45. So we just started hitting Atlanta, Cincinnati, Memphis, Nashville, Oxford, New Orleans and a couple of other Southern towns.

After touring some, we knew that doing a full-length record was next, so I just kind of mapped out some time to do that and then we recorded the rest of the record precisely a year after the 45. After recording the first 45, I could hear where Charles’ strengths were. So I wrote straight for that on every single song. I spent a lot of time thinking of the keys that it was going to be written in, which came from working with Charles on the road and seeing what he does live.

JamBase: How influential were bands like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and their label, Daptone Records, in giving you the confidence to pursue this?

The Dynamites Featuring Charles Walker

Elder: I cannot say enough about Gabe Roth and the folks at Daptone. They have paved every ounce of this road for everyone that is doing it. They have really done a whole lot for us. We have the same European booking agent and just booked a six-week European tour, part of which is going to be playing with them. Gabe has answered the phone and answered emails. Their hearts are totally in the right place for this style of music and they are doing something a lot deeper than just cutting records. They know that the people that are coming up along side them as a result of their music is the greatest compliment in the world to them, so I really cannot give high enough props to those guys.

JamBase: Why has traditional soul and funk music seen a revival in the last five to 10 years and why is it important to you to continue that tradition?

Elder: I just feel like soul and funk music and its derivatives are the purest form of popular music. Just on an ethereal level, it is the language that everyone understands. To me, it never went away. The perfect example is Alicia Keys. That tune “If I Ain’t Got You” was totally worthy of an Aretha Franklin record and it got huge. People responded to it and it’s not because the label or the industry was pushing this retro soul thing. It was because she went in and poured her emotions into that song. People will respond to music that is real and speaks to everybody.

I don’t know if the right word is authentic or what, but when we go out and talk to people about our music after our shows, the word “real” keeps coming up. That is totally what this band and music is about. Let’s make real music written by real people about real things played on real instruments and recorded on real equipment.

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