James Brown, Mashed Potato Miami!
Nat Kendrick and The Swans “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes Part 1″ (Dade, 1959)
Freddie & The Kinfolk “Mashed Potato, Pop Corn” (Dade, 1969)
(Click titles of each track to listen or download)
Welcome back to another Musical Episode!
Today I want to look at James Brown’s connection to a couple of records that came out on the Miami based Dade Records and more or less bookend the label’s release history. Dade is part of the Henry Stone / Steve Alaimo tree of labels which include Alston, TK, Glades, Juana, Cat and more. Today’s first record “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes” was one of a first records released on Dade preceded by only a few singles and our other Record “Mashed Potato, Pop Corn” comes a decade later and similarly had only a few releases that followed before the label went dark.
Nat Kendrick and The Swans, though sounding like a vocal quartet is actually James Brown and his band. Not an uncommon issue for James in his early days, Syd Nathan and federal didn’t want to release Brown’s instrumental dance-craze record so he did what the hardest working man in showbiz is wont to do- release the record somewhere else under another name. In this case they brought on local DJ and shouter-extraordinaire King Coleman to cover up Brown’s signature yelping and conceal their identity a bit, which we can all appreciate now in the fact that King Coleman has a heaping stack of amazing 45s, many on Dade.
Nat Kendrick was James Brown’s drummer and other than a few records on Dade and one on Lite as Nat “Mashed Potatoes” Kendrick he stuck to keeping the beat instead of pursuing a career as a solo artist. As for James Brown, well, he was right, the record was a hit and he went on to release many more records for King and subsidiaries only to have the same argument a few years later which is the source of all those wonderful organ/instrumental James Brown records on Smash.
The second half of this post is Freddie and The Kinfolk’s absolutely punchy take on a James Brown tune doing, dare I say, an even better job than the Godfather himself? Unlike the Nat Kendrick record, “Mashed Potato, Pop Corn” has Dade fingerprints all over it with two label owners Henry Stone and Stevel Alaimo credited as producers alongside longtime partner Brad Shapiro. Like the Nat Kendrick record the Freddy Scott was the drummer of the band who got the lead billing, and despite being a personality around the Miami scene, hosting shows and singing, he’s not the Freddie Scott of “Am I Lonely For You” on Shout!. Scott did have a few other records in the Dade family, namely Pow City and Same Ole Beat (on Marlin), both great 45s and very worth your time if you come across them.
Alaimo and Stone had been making huge waves with their label in the funk, soul and soon the emergent disco market so Dade didn’t have a life as the 70′s dawned, styles changed and there were no shortage of other, more widely known labels.
Hope you enjoy today’s James Brown Miami Mashed Potato 45s!
We’ll see you soon, probably with an hour long podcast and a collection of the last 15-20 singles on the blog into another Singles Mixer podcast.
-George / Snack Attack