Record man Art Rupe, who started a small Los Angeles-based independent label called Specialty Records in 1946 and went on to help launch the careers of artists including Little Richard, Sam Cooke, …
By Randall Roberts | Los Angeles Times
Specialty’s national success, starting in the late 1940s, helped establish the L.A. independent music industry, which before the war was dominated by New York labels with West Coast satellite offices. As Specialty began banking genre hits by gospel, jazz and early R&B artists including the Pilgrim Travelers, Lloyd Price and Sister Rosetta Carr, Rupe scoured the country in search of Black artists with shock-of-the-new approaches to popular music.
“The name Art Rupe should be spoken with the same reverence as any of the giants: Sam Phillips, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, or Leonard Chess,” wrote Billy Vera, singer and author of the 2019 book “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” in the liner notes to a recent Specialty 75th-anniversary release.
Rupe was born Arthur Goldberg in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 5, 1917, and raised in nearby McKeesport. The son of an Austrian immigrant laborer and a stay-at-home mother, Rupe first heard Black gospel music on Sunday mornings, when he would sit outside a neighborhood Baptist church and listen to the soaring voices. “He fell in love with that soul and that feeling,” Vera said in a 2019 interview, adding that “before anybody was using the word ‘soul,’ called it soul.
One of Specialty’s earliest stars was Roy Milton, a jump-blues drummer-singer-bandleader who from 1946-1953 tallied 19 top 10 hits. Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers earned Specialty its first R&B Billboard chart-topper in 1950 with “Pink Champagne.” The label chased it with a No. 1 by L.A.-based singer Percy Mayfield.
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