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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.

.

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.”

.

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.”

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.”

.

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.”

.

“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.”.

.

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.”

.

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).

.

Thereafter, Sonny Knight lived out his days in Hawaii.   He died September 5, 1998, following a stroke two

years earlier.  Finally he had become an author, when his book The Day the Music Died was published

under his God-given name by Grove Press in 1981.  The book–which remained in print for a quarter

Century–was a tale of racism and corruption in the music industry.