My father, the late Joe Von Battle, was an important mid-century recorder and producer of blues and gospel music in Detroit, from 1945 until 1967. He has been called the “Chess of Detroit”, referring to the iconic Chicago Record company, and is regarded by many as a cornerstone in the building of the “Detroit Sound.”

Joe Von Battle is believed to be the first African-American post WWII era, independent record producer in the U.S., and owned the legendary Joe’s Record Shop, at 3530 Hastings Street. There is no disputing his significance. He was a producer of Gospel, Blues, early R& B, and what came to be known as Rock ‘N Roll.

Hastings Street was the western border of and main thoroughfare of Black Bottom, the community to which most African Americans coming to Detroit from the South were relegated, due to segregation. After the demolition of Detroit’s Black Bottom, starting in the late 1940’s, Hastings St. survived until about 1960. The record shop was then demolished to create the I-375, aka Chrysler Freeway. After the destruction of Hastings, the record shop moved, with other surviving businesses, to the West Side of Detroit, on 12th St.

The classic Detroit blues record, “Hastings Street Opera”, which mentions Joe’s Record Shop in its lyrics, was recorded by a gentleman who went by the name of Detroit Count and sang up and down the streets of Hastings, outside the record shop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUqARhh7q58

Family history says that in 1945, a Jewish widow who was selling out her business offered him a deal on her Hastings Street storefront, and Joe soon opened up shop. He gathered up all of the record in his house – must to his kids chagrin – and started selling records. In the Michigan Chronicle newspaper he said, “I saw a man putting a “closed” sign over an establishment, inquired, and found myself in business – selling records from my personal collection for 25 cents.” As he said in the Chronicle in 1948, he was determined to be his own boss, though in “his pockets nothing more than a pack of cigarettes,”; he began by selling his own records from his house, up and down Hastings Sr.

In the same article, he states that by the late 1940’s he was making $100,00 dollars in sales (a formidable sum in those days), with an inventory of over 35,000 records. He became known near and far in Black music circles of the time as “The Mighty Joe Von Battle.” My father was born Joe Battle, but he always admitted to the elegant pretension of adding the Germanic/European “Von” to his name when he was a young man, the result of seeing many afternoon movies that starred the Austrian actor, Erich Von Stroheim.

A survivor of Southern Jim Crow and Northern discrimination, years later, he came to understand as well, after he began his recording business, that adding “Von” to Battle had served to obscure his African-American identity to various long-distance record and radio executives who would not deal fairly with Blacks. The might tolerate a black artist – singer or dancer – but had no use for an African-American man as a recorder or producer of music.

Joe Von Battle became known by many in the record industry as “Von Battle”, in the European way (like Von Trapp), to his advantage. But in real life, he – a down to earth, Southern man – used “Von” as just a middle name.

Joe Von Battle was born in Macon, Georgia in 1915, and arrived in Detroit in the 30’s during the great migration of Blacks from the South. He and his first wife, Clara, and 4 children – Joe Jr., Joanne, Peggy and Phyllis – were among those who up North to Detroit and moved from “Black Bottom” to the Brewster housing projects near Hastings. For in those days, public housing was so coveted and the competition over housing was so great, that Whites fought to keep the projects to themselves.

She was one of five pretty sisters whom he met while she was at the bus stop in front of the record shop, on her way home from their Sanctified church around the corner, on Mack Ave. – Zion Congregational Church Of God In Christ. It was founded and headed, at that time, by the great Pastor I. W. Winans (patriarch of today’s Winans musical family). The church was and is known in Detroit’s COGIC church world and beyond – due to it’s location -as “Mack Avenue.”

My mother, far right, next to her sister, Lillian, visiting their Chicago cousins, in their dark suits on the left.

My mother’s Pentocostal church upbringing of the time allowed neither movies nor secular music; doubtless, the ceaseless excitment andnightlife of this exciting music man called Joe Von Battle, and his Hastings street shop, was mesmerizing to a young beauty who loved experiencing “the world.”

She was an music lover, though she never had a love for the Blues that was so dear to my father’s heart; she had more modern, popular tastes. Nevertheless, she worked at the record shop for several years before they married. Her good looks and musicality were as appealing to the customers as my father’s charismatic presence.

Suffice it to say before long, there was a scandalous overlap between my father’s first wife, and his relationship with my mother, though they eventually married. Despite all, I arrived in the world of my beautiful mother and her five beautiful sisters, and my father, a brown, handsome music man of local fame. My early years were spent in the bright rays of her beauty and his renown.

My father was a fast, entertaining talker – a real raconteur; a sharp-dressing man with a grade school education. He was a voracious reader who kept stacks of news articles and volumes of the classics, tales of the Iliad and Odyssey and Black history that he allowed me to read.

He was a lover of animals, keeping wounded birds, dogs, cats and any hurt thing that hobbled along on Hastings, and later on 12th, nursing them back to health – cooking his chicken and rice concoctions on a hot plate in the back of the shop.

He wrote and published songs but was never really a singer or musician. What he had was a magnetic personality, an ability to discern talent in others, a fascination with recorded sound – and a love of making money. He would record virtually anything that made music or noise. He was a dedicated provider his two families – four children and his ex-wife from his first marriage, and four children and his wife in his second, in the days before child support or welfare. Despite the breaking of his first marriage, his older children loved my mother, and loved us, the children of his second marriage; we spent much time together when we were growing up.

Joe’s charisma, love of hustle and desire to provide for his both families was such that when record sales were slow, he thought nothing of having his son Joe Jr. help him sell sugarcane, or even straw hats, at the front door. Maybe that’s why, in the record Hastings Street Opera, the Detroit Count rapped “…Joe’s Record Shop, you can get anything there but a T-Bone steak.”

Sugarcane – at Eastern Market 2014, the same as it was in the 1940’s and 50’s.

As his production of Rev. C.L. Franklin’s records grew, Joe’s Record Shop was associated with a Gospel radio show, sponsored by the highly respected radio personality, Senator Bristol Bryant.

The Gospel classic, “Precious Lord” by Rev. C. L. Franklin, on the Von label; photo from Ebay Seller AuralEffects

Joe Von Battle also purchased air-time for his own show, and broadcast from CKLW in Windsor Canada, across the river from Detroit, a station with a signal so famously strong that the shows could be heard throughout regions of the South. Each week the tapes from the show were delivered – often by Joe’s eldest son, Joe Jr. – to the station’s American business offices in the Guardian Building in Downtown Detroit.

With African-Americans moving from the South to the North, hungering for connections back across the Mason Dixon Line, Rev. C.L. Franklin and Joe’s Record Shop became mythical in thousands of Black households in the U.S., as they tuned in for the ritual Sunday night sermon and Gospel music.

[I was on the radio show myself. In elementary school, I won first place for a poem I had written, and I got to read it on the show – my media debut.]

My father’s shop was the place for hanging out, with folks like Jackie Wilson, impresario Sunny Wilson, B. B. King, and some of the last of the old “Blues Boys” – Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Joe Weaver, Eddie Burns, Bobo Jenkins, Little Sonny, Little Willie John, and a who’s who of black music of the times, from the clubs on Hastings and in Paradise Valley.

Having fun in the back of the Hastings St. shop; my mother, at right in plaid, and her two of her five sisters, standing. My father is just out of camera.

Joe Von Battle’s success was real, with a magnificent home in Highland Park, where I grew up, a beautiful new stay-at-home wife, and a second family of four kids (of which I’m the eldest).

My parents’ lives, in the 50’s and early 60s, were filled with parties, clubs and horseback riding at Idlewild, the now historic all-Black resort in Northern Michigan, the only place of such leisure open to Blacks in the days of segregation. He was an avid golfer and, with my party loving mother, was a “Man about Town”. They lived a grand life for the times.

His eldest son Joe Von Battle Jr., as handsome as his father, worked alongside him after school and on weekends at the shop, since it opened in 1945, until having his own family and the lure of factory pay at Chrysler in the 1960’s pulled him away, to my father’s great grief. My brother Joe Jr., is another great storyteller with a near photographic memory, and has shared many memories with me, about those times.

Joe Von Battle, Sr.. and Joe Von Battle Jr.., family photo, in Joe Sr.’s Highland Park back yard.

In 1960, after Hastings street was urban renewed into the Chrysler Freeway, my father was forced to move his record shop from the East Side of Detroit to the West, across town to 12th street.

This massive shift was an historic urban migration, uprooting the community – including many Hastings business folks – from their entrepreneurial and residential roots – a destruction of generational wealth from which our community has never fully recovered. Many of them, having already survived the migration from the South, could not withstand yet another traumatic transition, and many African-American businesses were lost forever.

My father would go back to old Hastings St. as the freeway encroached its way North. His shop was gone, but a few holdouts remained, waiting on the wrecking ball. I remember we stood on the banks of the dirt-filled crevass, the initial diggings of the Chrysler Freeway. My daddy looked across, down into the giant pit, to the place where his record shop once stood, and he shook his head and said, “That used to be Hastings.”

The Record Shop moved from Hastings Street on the East Side, over to the West Side, on 12th Street and Pingree, then later, a few blocks away, to 12th Street and Philadelphia, where it would remain.

Business Card, reproduced in CD booklet, Battle of Hastings St., Ace Records.

The 12th Street Shop was not far from new Motown house called Hitsville, and though my father disliked the new sound – locked back, as he was, in his down-home Blues and Work With Me Annie taste in music – he was great friends with many of the Motown folks. Many of the Motown artists found their way to the shop for a “taste” and some conversation with Joe, too.

Mack Chimse, Washboard Willie and James Jamerson – who would become Motown’s bassist and Funk Brother. Album Cover, George Paulus Production

Here was the world of 12th Street of Detroit, with its intense daytime commerce and after-hours, huckle-buck nightlife; where men drove Eldorado’s with matching suits, and women wore wigs and smoked in public. But with all of its roiling activity, 12th street was not the same as the life on Hastings; although folks had come from Black Bottom, there was also a new, more urban population, many of whom disdained the old country blues that my father loved and sold records to back on Hastings St.

Joe’s Von Battle’s 12th Street Record Shop. From the collection of the late George Paulus.

In the midst of these changes, my father grew desperately ill, and no doctor could figure out the cause; he was becoming weaker by the day, and his skin, usually a pecan brown, was turning to a deep black. Finally, on deaths’s door, he found a new, young doctor who diagnosed him with Addison’s disease, a little known malady of the pancreas, that happened to afflict President John Kenny, too ( a fact of which my father was inordinately proud). He was put on new, miracle drug called “cortisone”, and was on this medicine for the rest of his life.

Though things were different, we became a part of the West Side life – we’d have breakfast at the Cream of Michigan cafe, daddy would drive a few blocks and get corned beef from the Jewish deli called Esquire, and we’d watch folks with fringed, spangled dresses and silk-and-wool suits, who had just left a night of partying at the 20 Grand and after hours clubs join the church folks having a bite before Sunday service.

II spent weekends and summers of the 60’s with my younger brother Darryl splicing tapes, reading Billboard and ringing up the latest 45’s, and mastering the art of discerning a customer’s request within a song’s first bar (an unfair music trivia advantage that we retain today).

I remember many a Saturday afternoon in the later days of the shop, affixing labels to records, unloading them from boxes, and always, playing all the music we wanted and doing the Shing-a-ling and Boo-ga-loo in the middle of the floor, to the delight of the customers and the chagrin of my father, who wanted us to get back to work and sell records (ignoring the fact that, dancing was the best way to sell them).

Joe Von Battle, in the doorway of his record shop on 12th St. A large photo of my younger sister in the window – he was proud of her good report card. Circa 1966.Photo by Mike Rowe.

Sometimes our baby sister and brother, Andrea and Lawrence, would come too, and Darryl and I – old and experienced pre-teens – would have to keep them from getting too exposed to the 12th street life. We’d spend all day dancing and playing the records the customers wanted to hear and buy.

I remember when I went “up North” with Daddy to the record pressing plant in Owasso, Michigan, or to Chicago to see the Chess Brothers, Phil and Leonard, where I listened to Bo Diddly masters – with Bo Diddly. Years before me, my elder half-brother Joe had sat in the Chess studios talking with Muddy Waters and the Chicago “Blues Boys”. I was a full-grown middle-aged woman before I understood that the box lunches my mother prepared for our trip were made because we could not depend on being able to eat at the roadside diners and rest stops, due to the still intense segregation, even up North.

Joe Von Battle, left, in the studio on Hastings St., From Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks website, The Thrillers. Photographer unknown.

Our father’s Blues friends were a part of our life. Wilson Pickett laid the sod in our front yard in Highland Park, taught my younger brother Darryl how to push the giant roller over the new grass. Famous blues men helped my father do repairs on his house, and shared a drink in the back yard, but to us they were all just Daddy’s friends from “Down South.”

On many Sunday nights, Darryl would go with my father to New Bethel Baptist Church, now on Linwood on the West Side, just like my father’s oldest son, Joe, before him on Hastings, dragging the mics and tape recorder in the big leather case to record the next homiletic masterpiece by “Frank”, as my father called Rev. C.L. Franklin.

After the mics and tape recorder was set up, my brother would sit behind the pulpit with the deacons, his legs too short to reach the floor, dangling from the big chairs on the altar. Then they all set to listening to Rev. Franklin whoop and sing and teach the urban Gospel (though often, my little brother would fall asleep in the middle of the making of music history).

Joe Von Battle at his reel-to-reel.

My father recorded everywhere, obsessively; in the back room of the shop, in pulpits, in the streets, in our living room – once I came home from school to the sight of his amps and mics trained on man called Washboard Willie playing the – you guessed it – in our back yard. This, to cool, pre-teen me, was an act of bumpkinism that embarrassed me to no end in front of my Beatles and Motown loving friends.

I spent most weekends and summers working at the record shop, during the tumultuous years of cultural change, and cataclysmic shifts in music. Album covers were my windows on the musical world, and I spent hours studying them, and puttering around in the behind-the-counter chaos of plastic red and yellow disks, red and green Scotch tape boxes and slotted metal slabs for splicing tape.

Joe Von Battle, after the move from Hastings, in the doorway of the 12th Street Shop, early to mid-60’s. Photo attributed to Mike Rowe.

As the 60’s progressed, the trends in music had clearly changed in the Black community, and less customers asked for Blues and the old music. Motown – “The Soundtrack of Young America” – the new Soul music, Rhythm and Blues – and even Rock ‘N Roll – were now what customers wanted. This was all to my delight at the record shop turntable – but to the chagrin of my father, who still insisted on trying to to sell the Blues. On Sunday mornings he still – defiantly – played the old Gospel for the passersby, who were increasingly listening to the “new music” and leaving the old sounds behind.

The inroads of the big record sellers also took it’s toll. I remember walking with my father through Sears and Roebucks in Highland Park, where there was a “new, improved” record department, chock full of many of the records he was trying to sell on 12th street – and Sears was selling them at a much cheaper price.

To our shock, there were rows and rows of Black music, which years before, Sears and other big sellers would never have handled in such quantities, calling it “race music.” My father became a broken man – at home and at work. At the time, I didn’t understand his grief and fury, the fact that we were in the maelstrom of the destruction of the independent record sellers and producers of that era.

JVB and my mother, Shirley, in our Highland Park back yard (our dog had busted through our back fence). Mid sixties. My father’s skin had turned dark, from Addison’s disease.

To add to this commercial and musical threat to Joe’s life’s work was two afflictions – Addison’s Disease, and chronic alcoholism. The many “tastes” in the back room of the record shop and at the bars on 12th street had long before morphed into full-blown alcoholism. My mother’s love for parties and the Twenty Grand club took it’s toll, as well. If my early years were spent in their amazing, musical life, by the time I was in middle school, the parties that they loved had turned into the insanity of drink and vicious marital wars.

My brother Darryl and I, young teens, ran the record shop on the weekends in those days, aware that our fun, weekly chore was now helping to keep the shop alive. My father was a shell of his former self; tormented, tormenting and addled by drink; our family suffered mightily.

There were record collectors who acquired records and materials from Joe during that time. There were also record sharks in the business, who moved in to take advantage of his decline and his desire to share the music of his life – as well as his need to support his second family. Some acquired masters and tapes less than scrupulously, as he weakened.

The beginning of the end came on July 23, 1967; a wave of destruction and police violence made it’s way down 12th Street, to become Detroit’s 67’ Riots – also known as The Rebellion. My father’s record shop was in its path. But that is a whole ‘nother story.

12th Street scene during ’67 Riots. Joe’s Record Shop in foreground outside of view, right side side of street. Iconic Stock photo.

I think that Joe Von Battle really died the day he returned to his shop, to trudge through mounds of charred and melted records and fire-hose soaked reel-to reel tapes, unwound and slithering like water snakes; thousands of songs, sounds and voices of an era, most never pressed onto records – gone forever.

He was never the same, and neither was our home-life. But he wasn’t actually pronounced dead until 1973, doubtless from complications from the Addison’s disease that he had for years, and from more than a few “tastes” too many in the back of the shop, at our backyard bbq’s, and increasingly, after the loss of the shop, just ceaseless drinking at home on the couch.

A long time friend, Dave Usher (who was to become the manager of Dizzy Gillespie) extended help to Joe, allowing hm to work for a time on the ships of his family’s business on the river. But it was too late; Joe had never again “worked for another man” since he opened his shop in 1945, and in the bedraggled shape he was, it was not time to begin. My father drank himself to death, another broken hearted music man.

But even though music had moved on to the new Motown sounds and beyond, and even embittered with life and addled with drink, he always understood the importance of what he had done, what he had captured in those long, brown ribbons of celluloid tape. It was the ending of an era of African American music, and the beginning of another.

The looting of Joe’s Record Shop, photo by Detroit photographer Diggs, part of the Detroit ’67 exhibit of the Detroit Historical Museum

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All of my life, I was accustomed to my father being called, “The Mighty Joe Battle“; in fact he often referred to himself that way, only half in jest. The late Famous Coachman, the grand Blues man of Detroit, always called my father “The Legendary Joe Von Battle”.

In Detroit, at the Charles Wright Museum of African-American history, there have been prominent displays of Aretha’s first record, on the JVB label, sometimes with words about Joe Von Battle, though few in Detroit have known much about him. I am always touched by these museum recognitions.

Early album by Aretha and her father, and the singer, Little Sammy Bryant – who was a ‘little person” with a big Gospel voice.

I have come to know, since I posted my father’s story, that even though he died in relative obscurity in Detroit, there is a significant number of collectors world-wide – in England, Holland, Australia, Japan, Wales, Spain, etc., who are well aware of the work of Joe Von Battle, and very knowledgeable about his voluminous recordings and discography. My father’s records are now collected and sold in auctions online, some highly coveted and worth hundreds of dollars for a single 45 (I cringe when I remember how we played frisbee with them without a second thought, back in the day).

I’ve run across re-issues of music my father recorded; a bittersweet accolade. Yes, it’s hard to see others produce this work for their own gain, but I’m gratified that there are those who value those sounds that he captured forever, over a half-century ago and are producing these records for collectors to enjoy today.

Joe Von Battle deserves special recognition for his role in recording the final songs and sounds as we changed from a people of the rural South into a new, urban community. He recorded the post-war sound of Detroit, and forever etched in vinyl some of the earliest works of those who became household names, as well as those whose music would never have been recorded but for him. May his musical legacy live forever.

In honor of the works and memory of my father –

The Late, Great, Legendary, Mighty Joe Von Battle.

My father’s first wife, Clara, passed away in 2006.

His eldest son, Joe Von Battle Jr., lives in Detroit, almost 80, and still as handsome as his father. He is a repository of the early history of these first moments in the new music.