James B. Conkling
Jim Conkling (born James Brewster Conkling, March 1, 1915 – April 12, 1998) was a record producer and recording executive, who, in a short career of less than 17 years, rose to become the first vice president and head of A&R (artists and repertoire) for Capitol Records, then President of Columbia Records and founder and president of Warner Bros. Records. Working with five friends who were trying to create an awards program for the record industry, he co-founded NARAS (National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences) and its Grammy Awards, and served as the first national chairman and producer of those first Grammy Awards.
While president at Columbia, he helped organize and became an early president of the RIAA (Record Industry of America) and worked closely with BMI and ASCAP song licensing organizations. He later headed the Voice of America in the early 1980s.
At Capitol, he produced hits with all their major stars: Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, and dozens more, including signing the initial contract with guitar virtuoso, Les Paul. He also worked with future Capitol president, Alan Livingston, to come up with a children’s division for the label; this led to the invention of Bozo the Clown.
At Columbia, his team discovered Johnny Mathis and Dave Brubeck, signed Tony Bennett, and bought “My Fair Lady” and brought it to Broadway. Working closely with recording greats Goddard Lieberson, Mitch Miller, George Avakian, Hal Cook, and others, the list of top artists continued, and the same executives started “The Columbia Record Club” (now Columbia House), which soon drove subscription sales of records to ever-increasing heights.
In 1958, Jack Warner wanted a record company and hired Jim Conkling to make him one. The going was rough at first, but with the signing of The Everly Brothers and discovery of comedian Bob Newhart, the label was profitable within three years and on its way to enormous influence in the pop and rock music industry. Conkling retired from the record industry in 1961, but in 1980 was asked by Ronald Reagan to come to Washington to run the Voice of America under the US Information Agency. He presided and saw the organization through its 40th anniversary and continued working in many charity and religious organizations until he began suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s disease about 1990.
Biography
His father, Gurdon, was a vice president at McGraw-Hill Publishing and was married to Ruth Beidleman; he was the oldest of six children. He was born in East Orange, New Jersey, and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. In junior high, he had a crush on a girl trumpeter and asked his mother if he could take trumpet lessons. She found the best trumpet teacher in Manhattan and drove him into the city once a week for lessons. He fell in love with his newfound instrument.
He attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and while loving music, was convinced by his father (in the midst of the Depression) to study something more practical, such as government and economics. While at Dartmouth, he played in the school’s Barbary Coast Jazz Band, where he became fast friends with a future famed musician, Paul Weston.
He attended graduate school in Pennsylvania and began working for the DuPont Company in a junior executive program. His boss was influential (when the war came, he would send letters from and to each of “his boys in the armed services” to build morale and keep them in touch), but while Conkling was inspired by that leadership concern, he was not passionate about the work, which he considered routine and not much more than “pencil sharpening” for almost seven years.
During World War II, he enlisted in the Navy and became a junior lieutenant, carrying on a number of intelligence missions with men along the East Coast suspected of leaking information to Germany. He was also set to captain a supply ship to Norway when an accident between two boats nearly ripped his arms apart, and he spent several months recuperating.
Early career
Getting out of the navy a year or so before the war ended and before other G.I.’s began returning allowed him to get a head start in the business world. His old college friend, Paul Weston, did two things for him: 1) he introduced him to the King Sisters, who, with guitarist Alvino Rey, were a popular singing act in the Big Band era (Jim would eventually marry Donna King Driggs, one of those sisters, a marriage that lasted over 50 years and produced five children); 2) Weston introduced him to Johnny Mercer and Glenn Wallichs who had just started Capitol Records in 1942 (with Buddy DeSylva). Jim convinced them that he had an extensive musical background and business background as well (via DuPont) and was hired.
His first record session was a jazz session with Stan Kenton, whose manager, the legendary Carlos Gastel, took a look at the young man (still in his Navy uniform) and called Mercer to complain, “Who the hell is this damned Boy Scout you sent over here?” Jim would eventually win over Gastel (who also represented Mel Torme, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and many other superstars), and they would remain closest of friends throughout their lives.
Conkling helped produce many hit records with the likes of Mel Torme, Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gordon McCrae, Ray Anthony, Jackie Gleason, Stan Freberg, Andy Griffith, Woody Herman, Bob Hope, Stan Kenton, Johnny Mercer, Billy May, Pied Pipers, Tex Ritter, Duke Ellington, Dean Martin and dozens more. After two years, the founders of Capitol made him Capitol’s first vice president and head of all artists, A&R, Artists and Repertoire. According to Billboard Magazine, Capitol was selling about $5 million a year when he became VP. Four years later, they had more than tripled in size to $17 million a year, while singles jumped from 48 to 230 in number, and albums from 14 to 74.
He worked closely with another new hire, Alan Livingston, to develop a record division aimed at children’s entertainment and education at Capitol, and they introduced Bozo the Clown to the world. He also worked with the avant-garde composer, Eden Ahbez, who lived camping outdoors “in nature” and wrote a great Nat King Cole hit, “Nature Boy.” Another famous hire was Les Paul. Upon hearing some spectacular guitar licks and overdubbing, Conkling wrote a contract on the spot on the back of an envelope and instantly gave Les Paul a home at Capitol, another lifelong friend and associate (as told in Ian S. Port’s The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul and . . .).
Working closely with Nat King Cole, Conkling also became a lifetime member and contributor to the NAACP and became deeply involved in civil rights causes.
This was also a time of difficulty in the record business. There were several major union strikes and the internal “battle of the three speeds” with different companies favoring the older 78 rpm (rotations per minute), the singles 45 rpms, or the long-playing (LP) 33 1/3 rpm albums (plus the eventual “hi-fi” monaural vs. stereo technology of a decade later). Each label sponsored its own preferred technology (think Betamax vs. VHS, or Apple technology when it was incompatible with Microsoft). Conkling was heavily involved in all these battles.
Columbia Records
In 1951, Columbia Records came looking to find why the upstart new company, Capitol, was creating so many hits and offered to make Conkling president of Columbia Records. Conkling was 36 years old and moved his family to New York for five years. This could have been another precarious position for him, as Columbia’s famed Mitch Miller and Goddard Lieberson were both seniors to the new man who was hired over them, but he soon made fast friends with them, gave them great creative freedom and authority, and they all remained close throughout their lives. George Avakian was an influential jazz aficionado and talent scout under Conkling who signed Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, and Dave Brubeck to the label. Both Mathis and Brubeck have written letters implying they might not have had much of a career without Conkling’s willingness to take a chance on them. His team also started the Columbia Record Club modeled after the Book of the Month club, where people would buy discounted records through the mail on a subscription basis. Further, working with Lieberson, they bought the play “My Fair Lady” and brought it to Broadway. Among the major talent at Columbia during those years were Liberace, Doris Day, Gene Autry, Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Burt (Christmas carols), Nelson Eddy, Percy Faith, Mitch Miller, The Hi-Lo’s, Judy Holliday, Johnny Horton, Burl Ives, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Edward R. Murrow, Eugene Ormandy, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Lefty Frizzell, Mel Tillis, Paul Weston (and his wife Jo Stafford), Louis Armstrong, Burl Ives, and many more.
A particularly touching story involves a young trumpeter and highly talented, inventive arranger, Alfred Burt, who worked in the band of Alvino Rey, Conkling’s brother-in-law. Burt’s father, a minister, had sent out Christmas cards each holiday season with an original Christmas carol included. Burt followed suit, but trained in classical music and jazz, his songs included sophisticated and complex yet classically-sounding chords and melodies. In 1953, Burt learned that he had contracted incurable lung cancer. Rey’s wife and her sisters, the King Sisters, gathered a group of professional musicians in an old Mormon church in Burbank, CA to make a demo of all the songs on some semi-professional taping equipment owned by Yvonne King and her husband, organist Buddy Cole. This was in hopes that someone might produce the songs, thus giving an income to Burt’s widow and infant daughter. Burt was pulled in a wheelchair to help conduct. Never thinking his songs would reach beyond a few personal friends, he said that hearing them recorded was the happiest day of his life. The tapes were sent to Conkling who rushed them through the lawyers and the Howie Richmond organization to have them published and represented for posterity. The same day the contracts arrived back at Burt’s home from New York was the very day Al Burt died, at age 33. Conkling pushed the songs with his best artists, and soon “Caroling, Caroling,” “Some Children See Him,” “The Star Carol,” and others became staples on many Christmas albums, popularized through the years by everyone from Nat King Cole, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Andy Williams to Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor.
While at Columbia, Conkling was also working with others to increase the legal and political clout of the record industry—and was thus one of the founding board members and early president of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America).
As Louis Barfe described Conkling’s time at Columbia: “Conkling was a worthy successor to Wallerstein [at Columbia]. In George Avakian’s view, Conkling was another visionary, the pair being . . . ‘by far the two best record company presidents of all time. Wallerstein strove for seventeen years to get a long-playing record on the market, and Conkling recognized that it was the most important record medium . . . William Paley hired Conkling to come in for five years and those five years . . . really set Columbia up for all time . . .’ ” (in Where Have all the Good Times Gone? The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry).
In a personal 1998 letter, Avakian wrote: “Jim Conkling was creative in a quiet way. He never drew attention to himself, although he was blessed with a warm, outgoing personality and movie-star charm and good looks, but his innovative mind opened new avenues . . . Jim never compromised in the belief that quality would sell best in the long run. In so doing, he changed the record business as few men have since the invention of the phonograph record, particularly in the expansion of the popular LP to the point where it dominated the industry worldwide and set the stage for today’s business . . .”
The famous classical conductor, Eugene Ormandy, wrote with similar affection, in 1952, “I have wanted to write to you ever since Gretel and I had the pleasure of meeting you and Mrs. Conkling, to tell you that we have never loved two people more quickly and more deeply than we have the two of you on first meeting. That Sunday morning we were strangers, and when we parted in the evening we were old friends.”
His time at Columbia was so successful that in 1956, the CBS two top men, William S. Paley and Frank Stanton, asked Conkling to become the number three man over all of CBS (records, television, radio, etc.). Conkling turned the golden offer down for personal reasons (he felt more confident with music than with all the rest), and now feeling somewhat disloyal, and for family reasons, stepped away from CBS altogether and moved his growing family back to California.
Awards
In semi-retirement, he met with old associates who were trying to start an awards system for records, similar to the Oscars. They invited Conkling to use his organizational skill to start NARAS (the National Association for Recording Arts and Sciences) and its not-yet-then-named Grammy Awards. Conkling became the first acting national chairman, working on the new television shows. In those days, there was no pay for such an honor. Several people have said that without his unique skills, the Grammys might not exist.
Warner Bros.
About the same time, Jack Warner was convinced to try another record company to keep income from movie musicals in-house rather than licensing them out. The Warners had bought Brunswick Music in 1931, but with the Depression and newly-popular radio killing many record sales, the investment had failed; now Jack Warner was convinced to try again in 1958, but, as he said, only if he could hire “the legend,” Jim Conkling.
They met, and Conkling convinced Warner that for the price of one picture that might flop (an everyday risk) he could make him a record company. Many of Conkling’s associates—Paul Weston, George Avakian, Hal Cook, and others—wanted to keep working with him and followed him to new companies.
Conkling established a large professional staff but struggled in the early years to make many hit records (Warner’s TV stars such as Tab Hunter, Connie Stevens, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, did create some modest hits), but not enough to make the company profitable. Some said that Conkling’s taste and emphasis was too adult middle-brow and not enough in tune with the youth market and the emerging sounds of rock ‘n’ roll (despite having signed Les Paul). He was also blamed for starting the label with a full executive and sales staff before they had the hits to support the size. Warner began to think of writing off the record company as a loss once again.
Warner put stricter financial controls in place which made Conkling buckle, and Conkling had to release most of his staff. He further volunteered to cut his own salary in half. Fortunately, at that time he was able to buy a contract with the Everly Brothers, and their first Warner’s record “Cathy’s Clown” was a huge hit. George Avakian not only produced that song but also heard a young comedian in Chicago and invited Conkling to meet Bob Newhart. He listened to a couple of minutes and they agreed to a contract, again on the spot. Newhart saved the company and made Warner Bros. Records very profitable at last. Other acts were soon to follow: Bill Cosby, Alan Sherman, and Peter, Paul and Mary (the biggest music act in America until the Beatles arrived).
As Phil Everly wrote in the official Warner Bros. record company history: “There was another thing that attracted us to Warner Bros., however, and that was Jim Conkling. We loved Jim. He was a great man. When we met him, we found him inspirational. It made us keen to go to the label.”
But Conkling exercised his stock options on the day they matured, and Jack Warner thought that was a disloyal act; they mutually agreed that Conkling should begin seeking his replacement. Still, Warner gave him a huge, hilarious, men-only (“stag”) farewell at the Beverly Hilton where many of his stars and associates paid him great compliments. It was 1961, and Conkling was 46, less than 17 years since his first job in the record business. Within the month, the presidents of Warner Bros. Records (Mike Maitland), Columbia (Goddard Lieberson), and Capitol (Alan Livingston), three of the four biggest record companies in America, were all men who had worked for Jim Conkling.
Later work
In retirement, Conkling remained active but with somewhat less success. He was involved in charity work (Crippled Children’s Society, Nat King Cole Cancer Foundation), was sent to China to help them set up a record industry, and helped out an acquaintance by financing a small ski lift in Utah, named Gorgoza. Friends began to call it his personal Vietnam. With state road closures and other continual problems, good money chased bad, which ended up draining much of Conkling’s former earnings and his energies.
Upon leaving the record industry, he was able to quit smoking and join his wife’s Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and was put on their Bonneville International Corporation Board of Directors (which owned a dozen radio stations nationwide). Working with top religious leaders was a new experience for him, which he found rewarding and fascinating.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Charles Z. Wick (another old associate of Conkling) to head up the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), and Wick asked Conkling to move to Washington, D.C. to head up the Voice of America. Conkling, a former Democrat but current independent, did not feel his work in Washington very successful, although he presided as the Voice of America celebrated its 40th birthday. Conkling found that liberals and Democrats were rather vicious and would steal documents, while the conservatives and Republicans wanted to turn the Voice into an ultra-political, pure propaganda medium. He resigned in frustration after only a year in office.
Personal life
Conkling, by virtue of his marriage to a King Sister, married into a diverse and very talented family. In the mid-1960s, they had a weekly show on ABC every Saturday night, called The King Family Show, where the entire family of nearly 40 performed all the songs and comedy routines. One brother-in-law was famous big band leader and guitar aficionado, Alvino Rey (whose grandsons created the band, Arcade Fire). Rey, who made the “talking” guitar famous, was the first inductee into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame. Another in-law was famous jazz organist Buddy Cole. Conkling put out albums by both Alvino (as “Ira Ironstrings”) and Cole when trying to build the initial catalogue at Warners. Another in-law, William Burch, was a vice president at Universal Studios; another, Howard Lloyd, president of Technicolor; another, movie actor (“The Hideous Sun Demon,” “Man from Planet X”), Robert Clarke; another, famed trombonist, Kent Larsen. Among his nieces and nephews were Lex de Azevedo, musical conductor on the Sonny and Cher TV show, Tina Cole who starred with Fred MacMurray on the TV sitcom My Three Sons, and many other talented singers and musicians. His wife, Donna King, with her sisters released over 150 records during their five-decade career as “The King Sisters.”
His five children are Candy Brand (who sang with “The Four King Cousins” on the John Davidson Show), Jamie Miller (who authored almost a dozen books for William Morrow and Co. Publishers), Chris Conkling (who co-wrote the animated United Artists Tolkien film, “Lord of the Rings” for Ralph Bakshi), Xandra Albright (who authored “The King Family Cookbook”), and Laurette Walton (who was a featured “station break” child star as one of the King Kiddies). Three of his children ended up working in public education and colleges as instructors and counselors. Conkling eventually had 23 grandchildren and over 50 great-grandchildren.
About 1990, Conkling started showing signs of dementia, eventually moving to the Sutter Oaks Alzheimer’s Center in Sacramento, California. The Grammy Awards held a Musicares Fund Raising Dinner for Sutter Oaks in 1995 to honor Conkling, hosted by many old friends with Stan Freberg and Bob Newhart as M.C.’s. Conkling died on April 12, 1998, at age 83, in Sacramento, and is buried in Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills.
When Billboard Magazine celebrated its 90th anniversary on December 15, 1984, it listed the “90 who made it happen . . . the giants and geniuses”, Conkling was listed (alphabetically) between Dick Clark and Bing Crosby.
Background information Birth name James Brewster Conkling Born March 1, 1915 East Orange, New Jersey, U.S.
Died April 12, 1998 (aged 83) Sacramento, California
Occupation(s) Recording Company Executive Instruments Trumpet and Trombone Years active 1945–1961–1990 Labels Capitol, Columbia, Warner Bros., The Grammy Awards, Record Industry Association of America, Bonneville International Radio Corporation Associated with avant-garde, Parisian, left bank doodling impressionist: Raoul Duvinage
Jim Conkling with Don and Phil Everly
James B. Conkling with Bob Newhart
James B. Conkling with Jack L. Warner
President Ronald Reagan and James B. Conkling at the VOA 40th anniversary
References
--Louis Barfe, Where Have all the Good Times Gone? The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry, Atlantic Books, 2005, pg. 174-175, 244.
--Billboard Magazine (many issues).
--Stan Cornyn, Exploding: The highs, hits, hype, heroes and hustlers of the Warner Music Group, Harper, 2002, pp.14-21.
–Reynolds Dodson, “The Boy who Heard the Future: Les Paul,” in Reader’s Digest, July 1993, pp. 40-41.
--Fortune Magazine, “Father Knows Best,” “How Executives Live,” 5 February 1996, July 1955.
-- , Capitol Records Fiftieth Anniversary 1942-1992, Capitol Records Publishing, 1992.
--David Konjoyan (Editor), The 46th Annual Grammy Awards Program. Cosette Productions.
--, The Label: The Story of Columbia Records, Da Capo, 2007.
--Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. Pantheon, 2003.
--Myrna Oliver, “James Conkling, Record Industry Pioneer,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1998
--News Service, “James Conkling; Legendary Recording Industry Executive, Dies at 83,” Washington Post, April 16, 1998.
-- Ian S. Port, Scribner, 2019.
--Warren Zanes, Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records: The First Fifty Years, Chronicle Books, 2008, pg. 42.
James B. Conkling
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