The “Golden Hits Of The 50s”
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SONNY KNIGHT
“CONFIDENTIAL“
(Dorinda Morgan)
Dot 15507
No. 17 November 24, 1956
UPDATE & REWRITE, June 11, 2015
Joey C. Smith (b. May 17, 1934, Maywood, Illinois) was going to be an author, or a jazzman. Joey would
practice some on Ma’s piano and listen to Dizzy Gilespie on the jukebox. One story has him saved from an
early death by “the Queen,” Dinah Washington. He and a buddy had snuck into one of her band’s practice
sessions. Some older punks spotted the 12- year-old and flipped Joey over a balcony railing, when Dinah
intervened and stopped his possible termination.
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By the early ’50s, Joey and his family were living in L. A. There he attended Belmont High and L.A. City
College, wrote a novel that would be rejected, and played local theaters and talent shows with a drummer.
“There was this one particular girl who used to come in and listen to me,” Knight told Goldmine’s Randall
C. Hill. “She suggested I get into recording, that I was as good as the folks who were getting airplay. So I
looked in the L.A. phone book, starting, naturally, at the ‘A’ section. Aladdin was the first company I
came upon.”
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Joey called the label’s Eddie Mesner, who told him to come on down the next day for an audition. “
[Mesner] heard me play, then he called in his wife. I played the same few songs for her. They left the
room for 10 minutes, and the guy came back alone and asked me if I wanted a contract. So I signed a
record contract and a manager’s contract and was unknowingly in with the sharks.”
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From his first record on, except for a 1955 Cal-West single, Joey was “Sonny Knight.” “My cousin and I
were working on a car. It was hot and we were drinking a lot of beer. We thought the name was a clever
joke. I never thought that I’d have to live with it.”
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Aladdin issued “But Officer” and “Baby Come Back.” When the royalties failed to appear, Sonny switched
to Specialty Records. STEVE ALLEN would later record a cover of Sonny’s “But officer and by this time
his idol Amos Milburn recorded a tune he had written, “Vicious Vicious Vodka.” One release later,
Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell introduced him to the Morgans, Hite and Dorinda. They were songwriters
and had a recording studio in their home. After a bit, Sonny and the Morgans worked up a song called
“Confidential.”
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“I was disillusioned [by this point],” Knight recalled to liner-note writer Bill Millar. “I was working at a
really bad club, A Bucket Of Blood on Central Avenue. They had the front door open, and I could see the
funeral home where my mother was lying in state and that was traumatic. My mother never wanted me
to be a musician and I thought I was letting her down… eventually, I thought, I don’t have to spend the rest
of my life doing this, and went into the studio.”.
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The session–utilizing the backup of the ERNIE FREEMAN Combo–Sonny debated attending produced his
“potential” money- making moment. Unfortunately, two record companies–the Morgan’s tiny Viva and
nationally distributed Dot–issued the track, and neither, according to Sonny, reported an accurate count
on the number of disks sold. “The case was settled out of court, eventually… out of the whole thing, I got
$2,100.”
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Lee Hazelwood–soon to be the eccentric man behind Duane Eddy’s stardom and decades of oddities–
produced Sonny’s initial follow-up efforts. All the disks are and were hard to locate; and received little
airplay, aside from two charters in the mid’60s–“If You Want This Love” (#71, 1964) and “Love Me As
Through There Were No Tomorrow” (#100, 1964).
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