For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South: An article from Southern Cultures 17:4, The Music Issue

By Joshua Clark Davis

Record selling certainly had its glamorous moments; retailers could regale younger customers with stories of nightlife and even rubbing elbows with famous musicians and celebrities."

African-American owned and operated record stores once provided vibrant venues for their communities, and close to 1000 of these shops operated in the South during their heyday.

This article appears in the 2011 Music issue of Southern Cultures.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807872550

Joshua Clark Davis

Joshua Clark Davis earned his PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. He is currently a Fellow in the History of Consumption at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is researching the globalization of African American music and consumer culture.

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For the Records

How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South

Joshua Clark Davis

In the postwar United States, record stores like Curt’s (here) in Greensboro, North Carolina, were perhaps the place where consumers most commonly interacted with people who made their living from popular culture. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 400 to 500 black-owned record stores—and probably closer to one thousand—were in operation throughout the region during this period. Photograph courtesy of Curt Moore (here), owner of Curt’s.

Records is a market that can be used to brighten the future of lots of black people with jobs and higher prestige all over the country," Jimmy Liggins announced in 1976 to the readers of the Carolina Times, Durham, North Carolina’s most prominent African American newspaper. Liggins, a minor rhythm and blues star of the 1950s, was publicizing his Duplex National Black Gold Record Pool, headquartered in Durham, which sought to help and assist black people to own and sell the music and talent blacks produce. With the aid of this self helping program, aspiring hit-makers could record and release music that Black Gold sold through mail order and at Liggins’s shop, Snoopy’s Records, in downtown Durham.¹

Kenny Mann vividly recalls his frequent trips to Snoopy’s as a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Liggins was like a god to Mann and other young customers who patronized the store. Everybody knew Liggins and his two business partners, Henry Bates and Paul Truitt. These guys, I was listening to them talk about bringing Tyrone Davis and Johnny Taylor and Al Green to town . . . It was fun to go [to their store] because it felt like the place to be; there were girls in there, and I was twelve, thirteen years old. Not only that, but Mann never felt the pressure to buy something like he did in stores in his hometown of Chapel Hill, where white shopkeepers frequently followed young African American shoppers around their businesses, suspecting they might shoplift. They had a double standard, Mann remembers. Chapel Hill really was set up as if they didn’t want to do business with us black people. In sharp contrast, Liggins envisioned Snoopy’s as our mall— a hang out where black consumers could buy black music in a record store owned and operated by African Americans. Black-owned record stores like Snoopy’s represented a crucial nexus where African American enterprise, consumer culture, community, and of course, music all met. And by the early 1970s, Liggins was booking and promoting shows for Mann’s band, which eventually became Liquid Pleasure, the popular Chapel Hill-based funk and