Benny Salter (on the right with his first guitar: a red '56 Fender Stratocaster — in this photo it looks lighter than a red guitar would appear in a black-and-white photograph) fronting the Detroit band The Meteors before heading to the U.K. (around 1960) to form The Tupelos. For the gutsy, landmark solo work on The Tupelos 1965 mega-hit "White Tail Deer" Benny used a 1954 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top.

Following on the heels of their single "White Tail Deer" (a mega-hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1965) Decca released the eponymous album WHITE TAIL DEER in early 1966. Although it was The Tupelos' second LP for the domestic market in the UK, it was marketed as a debut album to the rest of the world. Decca decided to issue the US version for export to the rest of Europe while still pressing it in UK.
     The best way to distinguish the two pressings is to check the catalogue number in the bottom left corner of the album cover. it reads as FV91 = 83-55 for the export version (see illus.): the "=" symbol was a misprint; it should have been a dash.
     On the record itself, the lineup of songs is different on the US/European LP. Decca wanted to ensure that the follow-up hit from the Summer of 1966, the bluesy, proto-metal, "Makes Me Wanna' Be" would be prominently featured as the first cut on the B side.

Arlen Denison - Berlin

From: Berlin Cabaret - Jazz and Joy in Weimar Germany (1973, Photoplatz-Pendulum)

Coney Wilkins... the beginning

Coney Wilkins,  circa 1935
(photographer unknown)

Coney Frederic Wilkins (February 16, 1911 – circa 1942) was a blues performer, composer and guitarist born in Moorhead, Mississippi. His watershed recordings from (December 3) 1938 for Vocalion Records and the recent discovery of works dating from 1941 have come to be accepted as the "missing link" between American blues music and Rock and Roll.
    The mystery surrounding his sudden disappearance in 1942 has led many to believe that Coney Wilkins was murdered. Some evidence points to a shoe store owner from Moorhead, Mississippi who had been allegedly cuckolded by Wilkins; but other evidence suggests that Coney Wilkins had simply moved out of state and changed his name. Another account suggests that he returned to his childhood roots in the Baptist Church, renounced his "evil ways" and ceased performing.
     His records, sporadically released by Vocalion before and after his disappearance in late 1942, drew little attention. It was not until a reissue of his music ("The Coney Wilkins Story" - Columbia) in 1961 that the import of his guitar technique and the haunting lyricism of his compositions placed Wilkins among the great innovators and pioneers of what is known today as Rock and Roll. The works that subsequently came to light in 2005, and the controversy that surrounds the unearthing of a long-lost 1941 tape recording of a Coney Wilkins session in Vicksburg, MS (and the alleged plagiarism that made "White Tail Deer" one of the best-selling records of the mid-sixties [see: The Tupelos]) has only enhanced his reputation as one of the outstanding contributors to the canon of Twentieth Century music.

The first Coney Wilkins record ever released by Vocalion: "Leland Blues" (from the San Antonio, Texas sessions of 1938)

THE CONEY WILKINS STORY was released in 1961 (Columbia/Heritage). As an easily-available, remastered compendium of the entire Coney Wilkins' catalog, it became one of the "fertilizers" (as one critic called it) of the resurgence of Blues in the mid-to-late Sixties. Its profound influence on blues/rock musicians and composers on both sides of the Atlantic was not matched until the discovery of the so-called "Vicksburg (1941)" sessions in 2005.