Dial Records was a

Nashville Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...

-based soul label established by music promoter, publisher and producer Buddy Killen in 1964.

History

Dial Records was formed specifically so Buddy Killen could record perhaps his best-known discovery,

soul The soul is the purported Mind–body dualism, immaterial aspect or essence of a Outline of life forms, living being. It is typically believed to be Immortality, immortal and to exist apart from the material world. The three main theories that ...

singer

Joe Tex Yusuf Hazziez (born Joseph Arrington Jr.; August 8, 1935 – August 13, 1982), known professionally as Joe Tex, was an American singer and musician who gained success in the 1960s and 1970s with his brand of Southern soul, which mixed the style ...

. After a few tries and misses, Tex came up with a song called " Hold What You've Got", a 1964 ballad that bridged traditional

rhythm and blues Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated within African American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predomina ...

with the emerging Southern soul style and also pointed toward a future of rap thanks to Tex's spoken, almost testifying homily midway through the song. (Tex, in fact, was actually nicknamed "The Rapper" in these years.") "Hold What You've Got" got Killen's Dial label a distribution deal with

Atlantic Records Atlantic Recording Corporation (simply known as Atlantic Records) is an American record label founded in October 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. Over the course of its first two decades, starting from the release of its first recor ...

. Joe Tex was the anchor star of this Dial label (he rolled up almost thirty soul hits, some of which hit the pop charts, especially "Skinny Legs and All" and "I Gotcha") until he all but retired from music in the 1970s and died of a heart attack at age 49. Dial had a few distributors over the years including London Records,

Mercury Records Mercury Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. It had significant success as an independent operation in the 1940s and 1950s. Smash Records and Fontana Records were sub labels of Mercury. Mercury Records released ...

, Epic Records and T.K. Records. Killen shut down the label in 1979 to concentrate on his other music interests. He owned Tree International Publishing. Sony/ATV Music Publishing owns the Dial Records catalogue today.

Artists

* Bobby Marchan * Clarence Reid * Paul Kelly * Chris Harris & The Soul Agents * Clarence "Frogman" Henry * Gunilla Hutton * Frederick Knight * Annette Snell * King Floyd * Jean Knight * Little Archie * Len Wade * Wayne Handy * The Allman Joys

Label variations

Dial Records had the distinction of going through four different distributors: * London-distributed label (early-1960s, numbered in the 3000s): black and red label, large logo at top * Atlantic-distributed label (mid-to-late-1960s, 4000s): same label as above * Mercury-distributed label (early-1970s, 1000s): yellow and orange label, smaller logo at top * TK-distributed label (late-1970s, 2800s): yellow, blue and green label, small logo at top

References

{{Authority control American record labels Soul music record labels Record labels established in 1964

History

Artists

Label variations

See also

References