Bible & Tire Recording Company

Various Artists – The Last Shall Be First: The JCR Records Story. Volume 1 – New LP

$ 20.00

Classic comp of Memphis gospel from the 1970s, with die-cut sleeve.

Memphis, Tennessee, 1972: Seated behind a primitive mixing board in a tiny Quonset hut at 64 Flicker Street, just a stones’ throw from the Illinois Central railroad tracks, Pastor Juan D. Shipp crackles over the AM airwaves with an electrifying array of the latest and greatest in gospel quartet sounds. With an audience that spans the width and breadth of the Bluff City, from truck cabs to taxi stands, from Mid-Town to Orange Mound, from the Peabody Hotel to Payne’s Barbecue, if you’re a fan of Memphis’s thriving gospel scene, you’re locked into “Juan D” at K-WAM, “the Mighty 990,” the very station that — twenty years earlier, during its first incarnation as KWEM across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas — had first brought blues wizard Howlin’ Wolf to the ears of recording engineer Sam Phillips...The deeply satisfying music is rivaled only by a warm, on-air personality as powerful as the ten thousand watts that beam him all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas and deep into the Mississippi Delta...Shipp is a payrolled employee of K-WAM; a salaried record spinner who doesn’t need to rely on recruited sponsorship for survival. The young Air Force Veteran has done quite well for himself, beginning with marrying the woman of his dreams and building and pastoring a church in the neighborhood he grew up in. Yet there’s something that keeps bothering him in 1972, and he’s reminded of it every time he drops the needle on another locally-produced record. The disparity in sound and production quality between the big labels and the smaller, local ones is not only noticeable, it’s jaw-dropping. As he announces the upcoming gospel concert programs that feature a seemingly endless array of talented groups from the Memphis area, the voice keeps echoing through his head: “The local artists deserve a better sound.” ...And just like that, the D-Vine Spirituals record label is born. “I guess I recorded about fifty or sixty groups here in the city,” says Shipp. “Then I started getting groups from Detroit, Chicago, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas....Now, I had a secondary label for those that just didn’t make the D-Vine cut and it was called JCR.." Aside from their stellar audio and pressing qualities, Shipp’s productions — whether they were released on D-Vine or JCR— possessed something that’s even harder to achieve: their very own sound and style; a combination of distinctively deep and beautiful vocal harmonies, up-front guitar, grooving bass, explosive drums, and that ever-present overtone of rhythm and blues and country and western that swirled together under the roof of Stax Records just a few years earlier. ...The JCR sides may have been a little more rough and ready...certainly captured the raw talent that was incubating throughout Memphis and the Mid-South during this magically golden era of gospel music. His mission may have been to simply give the local groups a better sound, but along the way, Juan D. Shipp — like Sun’s Sam Phillips and Stax’s Jim Stewart before him — wound up doing so much more than that. Once in a great while, all the stars align and talent, timing and technology come together in a musical miracle the likes of which haven’t been heard before and won’t be heard again. Such was the case with JCR Records, whose democratized vision couldn’t help but unwittingly document the sound of an entire region during a particularly musically fertile time and place...there are stories within the story, and after sorting through the Tempo tape archive.. JCR may have begun as D-Vine’s secondary label back in the seventies, but after all, most of these artists wanted a record out right away, so now, all these years later, the same principle has been applied. As the Savior once predicted: “The last shall be first!” -- Michael Hurtt

Compilation produced by: Juan D. Shipp, Michael Hurtt & Bruce Watson

Mastered by Clay Jones

Design by Kerri Mahoney

Special Thanks to Frank Bruno