Bill King's Podcast with Rob Bowman On His Malaco Records Project
Talk! Conversations in All Keys: Interviews with the icons of the music industry.
By Bill King
Talk! Conversations in All Keys: Interviews with the icons of the music industry.
Professor Rob Bowman pioneered popular music studies at York University. He lectures, publishes and broadcasts in many areas of popular music, from country, R & B and gospel to reggae, rap and funk and has written liner notes for dozens of recordings and regularly authors, produces and advises on major documentary and CD reissue projects for record companies in Europe and North America.
A six-time Grammy Award nominee, he won a Grammy in 1996 for Best Album Notes for his 47,000-word monograph accompanying the 10-CD boxed set of The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975, which he co-produced. His nominations include Best Album Notes for the 4 CD box set The Stax Story, Best Album Notes for The Malaco Records Story: The Last Soul Company and The Complete Stax Singles, Vol. 1 1959-1968, and Best Historical Reissue for The Otis Redding Story. He received his sixth Grammy nomination in December 2018, for Best Historical Album for Jackie Shane: Any Other Way.
Bowman’s book, Soulsville, U.S.A. – The Story of Stax Records (1997), a definitive history of the legendary Memphis-based record label, has garnered numerous honours, including winner of the 1998 ASCAP-Deems Taylor and ARSC Awards for Excellence in Music Research. In 2013 Soulsville U.S.A. was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis.
Last month, Malaco Records published Bowman’s latest music history: The Last Soul Company: The Malaco Records Story that celebrates the legacy of the longest running independent record label in the United States, as well as a leading force for the promotion of gospel, soul, blues and Black music in general.
Running 200 pages and filled with stories, dozens of never-before-seen photographs, and other ephemera from the label’s 50-plus year history that highlights the careers of such seminal artists as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bobby Blue Bland, Z.Z. Hill, Johnnie Taylor, Little Milton, and James Cleveland.
Professor Bowman is the first in a new series of FYI podcast interviews conducted by Bill King. We hope you will enjoy.
