Bill Logsdon & the Royal Notes

Bill Logsdon and the Royal Notes, ca. early 1960s
Pat Logsdon on guitar behind the microphone

Come to My House Rock!

The Story of Bill & Pat Logsdon and the Royal Notes

The Royal Notes was an Ohio based band led by Bill Logsdon. The band started out as a rock'n'roll band, than transformed into a Top 40 group and finally morphed into a country and bluegrass act. The Royal Notes played in the Lorain, Amherst, and Sandusky areas, which are part of the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area.

William Carlos "Bill" Logsdon was born on June 26, 1937, to William Hampton and Cornelia Logsdon. He grew up with six siblings. In the 1950s, Logsdon met Patricia Ann "Pat" Jarvis from Amerst, who was born in 1937 in Sandusky. Love blossomed and the twosome married, giving birth to their son William D., nicknamed Billy. The made their home in Amherst.

Both Bill and Pat Logsdon were talented musicians. Bill played guitar, bass, banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, while Pat was an adept bass player and sang. Around 1959, the couple founded their own band, the Royal Notes, which also included Mike Hunter on drums and probably Boyd Rogers on guitar. They began playing teen dances in area. In 1960, they got in touch with Jon Ryan, who operated the Athena record label in Lorain. Ryan produced a primitive rock'n'roll single with the Royal Notes, featuring a sparse brushed drum, aggressive lead guitar, and powerful vocals by Pat Logsdon. The results were a vocal number, "Come-To-My-House-Rock", and an instrumental called "Spitfire".

The Sandusky Register
November 21, 1961

Released on Athena at some pout during 1960, the single was soon re-released by Bob Sellers on Destiny Records, also based in Lorain. This release featured the complete version of "Come-To-My-House-Rock", which included a short guitar intro that was cut off in the Athena version. The Destiny single saw mention in Billboard at the end of the year and was perhaps a solid seller locally but did not caught any attention outside of the area it seems.

Billboard November 21, 1960, pop review

The Royal Notes continued to play around town, including a regular stint at the Radio Inn in Sandusky. In 1964, another record of the band appeared on Athena, comprising "Come Dance with Me" featuring Pat's vocals backed with the instrumental "Cool It". It may have been Bill that played the lead guitar parts on their recordings. By then, they had added a sax player to their line-up.

Throughout the 1960s, the Royal Notes played the region's club circuit - everything between Cleveland and Lorain. They added a bit of country music to their top 40 repertoire as the years went by and landed a spot on radio WWIZ in May 1967, having a regular show there for several months. At that time, the Royal Notes included - apart from Bill and Pat Logsdon - Boyd Rogers on guitar and Ralph Jenkins on drums. 

In 1977, the Logsdons and their Royal Notes recorded a single in Cincinnati for the Queensgate label called "Turning Back the Pages" / "Big Black Train". By then, the Royal Notes had developed into a fulltime country/bluegrass band and featured the Logsdons' son Billy on drums. They performed well into the 1980s but Bill and Pat eventually divorced. Pat left the band and married Dennis B. Jarvis in 1984. She spent her final years in Vermillion and passed away in Cleveland in 1996 at the age of 59 years.

Bill Logsdon continued to play music with different bands, bringing the Royal Notes to an end after Pat dropped out. He had been a member of the Gospel Echos in the late 1970s and also performed with the Bear Mountain Boys in Red Lick, Kentucky, in the early 1990s. Logsdon reformed the Royal Notes in 1993. Sadly, he died on May 20, 1994, in Estill, Kentucky at the age of 56.

Discography

Athena 729: Come to My House Rock / Spitfire (ca. 1960)
Destiny 501: Come-to-My-House-Rock / Spitfire (1960)
Athena ARCO201: Come Dance with Me / Cool It (1964)
Queensgate 7112Q15: Turning Back the Pages / Big Black Train (1977)

Sources
• Buckeye Beat
• Bill Logsdon Find a Grave entry and Pat Logsdon Find a Grave entry
• 45cat entry
• Rockin' Country Style entry
• Discogs

Jimmie Skinner on Blue Grass Special

Jimmie Skinner - Doin' My Time (Blue Grass Special 45-EP-604), 1961

Jimmie Skinner was an artist of his own. Neither strictly bluegrass, neither mainstream country, Skinner developed his very own sound. Bear Family once said, if the term "alternative country" had been already invented in the 1950s, Skinner would have fitted it 100 percent. Although Skinner was not part of the Nashville establishment, he graced the world with a few classic, like "Doin' My Time". This song has been covered numerous times, including both well-known and obscure versions by Flatt & Scruggs, Johnny Cash, Jeff Johnson, Red Allen, Sherwin Linton, Bill Flagg, Jimmy Martin and others.

James "Jimmie" Skinner was born on April 27, 1909, in Blue Lick, Kentucky, near the town of Berea to William and Emma Skinner. When Skinner was a teenager, the family moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where he began performing on local radio and with his mother and grandmother on the streets. By the early 1930s, Skinner had become an accomplished musician, deeply rooted in the traditional mountain folk music of Kentucky and Ohio. With his older brother Esmer, who was born in 1906, he auditioned unsuccessfully at Gennett Records in 1931.

The brothers tried again in 1941 with the folks at Bluebird to no avail. Skinner had his first success as a songwriter in 1946, when Ernest Tubb recorded his "Let's Say Goodbye (Like We Said Hello)". Afterwards, Skinner's career really took off. He began recording for Red Barn Records in 1947, having two singles released on the small independent label, then signed a management contract with Lou Epstein and switched to Radio Artists Records, the E. T. Herzog Studio in-house label from Cincinnati. This association provided Skinner with his first success, a cover of Jimmy Work's "Tennessee Border". In those years, Skinner was often accompanied on record by his brother Esmer on fiddle or banjo and Ray Lunsford on electric mandolin, which gave many tracks a distinct bluegrass feel. It was a sparse line-up that melted with Skinner's recognizable voice into a sound of its own. 

Jimmie Skinner, 1950s

In the early 1950s, Skinner opened the Jimmie Skinner Music Center, a mail-order and retail record story in Cincinnati. The store was heavily advertised on the powerhouse WCKY radio station and Skinner also hosted a rad show out of his shop that was carried by WNOP from Newport, Kentucky. In 1950, Skinner signed with Capitol Records and switched to Decca in 1953. His most successful phase began when he began recording for Mercury in 1956, scoring such hits as "Will You Be Satisfied That Way", "Dark Hollow", and "I Found My Girl in the U.S.A.". He made another change when he joined Starday Records' roster in 1963.

In the early 1960s, Skinner produced some mail-order EPs on his Blue Grass Special label, including today's selection. These sides were recorded at the King Recording Studio in Cincinnati with Rusty York and the Kentucky Mountain Boys, including Willard Hole, Curley Tuttle, Harold Kress on fiddle, and Billy Thomas on bass.

In 1963, Skinner's manager Epstein died, which led to a downfall of his career. He resurrected it by becoming a regular on bluegrass festivals and continued to record for small labels, including Rich-R-Tone. Skinner moved to Nashville in 1974 and passed away on October 28, 1979, at the age of 70 years.

Recommended reading

• Country Music Hall of Fame

• Bear Family Records 6CD set

Sources

• Find a Grave entry

• Bear Family Records page

• Grit - Rural American Know-how

• SecondHandSongs

• 45cat entry / 45wporlds/78rpm entry

• Discogs

• Praguefrank's Country Music Discographies entry

Mid-Day Merry-Go Round

The WCPO-TV studio, where the Mid-Day Merry-Go Round was broadcasted from. At far left you can see Big Jim Stacy talking with an WCPO employee.

Every person who deals with early country music crossed paths with the Mid-Day Merry Go-Round on WNOX out of Knoxville, Tennessee. Stars like Bill Carlisle, Don Gibson, Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters, Chet Atkins, and many more. But Cincinnati's Mid-Day Merry-Go Round is a much more less known country music show that never gained as much fame as its Tennessee counterpart.

WCPO-TV signed on the air on July 26,1949, in Cincinnati, Ohio. The first show that was broadcasted was the country & western outfit "Mid-Day Merry-Go Round", hosted by "Big" Jim Stacy. Stacey remembers his first show as follows:

The logo appeared on the screen for my show - 'Midday Merry-Go-Round'. You heard the Ramblers playing in the background, then the announcer's voiceover. Dick Woods was his name. He went into his intro... 'And now, here's BIG JIM STACY!' Then you saw me in my cowboy hat. 'Howdy, friends and neighbors, and welcome to the very first Midday Merry-Go-Round...

The group Stacy mentions were the Bluegrass Ramblers, the house band for the show that provided also music for the next show, "Meet the Ladies". The Mid-Day Merry-Go Round was on the air every day from noon to 1 p.m. During one hour, Stacy presented country music artists from Cincinnati and the region, such as Al Runyon, the Davis Sisters and Delbert Barker. Runyon (1918-1998) was also a member of WCPO's Corn Husker Jamboree and recorded for Carl Burckhardt's budget labels such as Gateway, Big 4 Hits, and others - just as Delbert Barker did. He performed on the Mid-Day Merry-Go Round from 1951-1953 and was discovered by Burckhardt on one of the shows. From 1951 to 1956, Barker recorded for Burckhardt.

Davis Sisters

Delbert Barker

Al Runyon

Big Jim Stacy

It appears that the Mid-Day Merry-Go Round was on the air during the 1950s and the early 1960s, where it ceased broadcasting at some point. Host Jim Stacy died in 2001.

Sources

• Jim Friedman: "Cincinnati Television", Arcada Publishing
• Hillbilly-Music.com
• Special thanks to Delbert Barker