Please, Mr. Jailer - Wynona Carr with Bumps Blackwell Band

Wynona Carr (August 23, 1924 – May 12, 1976) was an African-American gospel, R&B and rock and roll singer-songwriter, who recorded as Sister Wynona Carr when performing gospel material.
Wynona Merceris Carr was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where she started out as a gospel singer, forming her own five-piece group The Carr Singers around 1945 and touring the Cleveland/Detroit area. Being tipped by The Pilgrim Travelers, who shared a bill with Carr in the late 1940s, Art Rupe signed her to his Specialty label, giving Carr her new stage name "Sister" Wynona Carr (modelled after pioneering gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and cutting some twenty sides with her from 1949 to 1954, including a couple of duets with Specialty's biggest gospel star at the time, Brother Joe May.

Not having too much success on the charts (except for "The Ball Game" (1952), which became one of Specialty's best selling gospel records), Carr grew increasingly unhappy with the straight gospel direction of her career and pleaded with Rupe to let her record "pops, jumps, ballads, and semi-blues". Rupe relented and from 1955 to 1959 Carr recorded two dozen rock & roll and R&B sides for Specialty, which, like her gospel songs, she mostly wrote herself. Despite scoring an R&B hit with "Should I Ever Love Again?" in 1957, overall the change from spiritual to secular music didn't help Carr much in terms of sales or recognition. Unfortunately she also contracted tuberculosis around this time, which kept her from doing the necessary promotional work and touring for two years, effectively ending her tenure with Specialty in the summer of 1959.

In 1961 Carr signed with Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records and released an unsuccessful pop album. She moved back to Cleveland, sinking into obscurity and suffering from declining health and depression; she died there in 1976.

Robert "Bumps" Blackwell was a musician, producer and composer who worked with the top names in early jazz and rock and roll. Blackwell was born in Seattle on May 23, 1918. By the late 1940s his Seattle-based "Bumps Blackwell Junior Band" featured Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, and played with artists like Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway and Billy Eckstine. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and hired on with Art Rupe's Specialty Records.

In 1955, Blackwell flew to New Orleans to record Little Richard (Richard Penniman), a singer who they hoped would become the next Nat King Cole. During a break in the tepid recording session everybody headed to a nearby bar where Mr. Penniman started banging out an obscene club song on the piano. "Daddy Bumps" knew he had a hit so he brought in a local songwriter to clean up the lyrics. "Tutti-Frutti, good booty" became "Tutti Frutti, all rootie," and Little Richard became a star. Bumps wrote or co-wrote other early rock hits including "Good Golly Miss Molly," "Long Tall Sally," and "Rip It Up."

Blackwell produced the hit "You Send Me" against Rupe's wishes. Rupe feared Sam Cooke's crossover from gospel to pop would hurt the sales of his gospel records. Rupe fired Bumps who then took Cooke and his recording cross town to Keen Records where it became the first #1 hit by a solo black artist. He went on to garner 17 Gold Records while producing a variety of artists including Sly Stone, Lou Rawls, the Fifth Dimension, the Chambers Brothers, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, the Coasters, Ike and Tina Turner and Bob Dylan.

Blackwell taught his artists the business side of music, "because I don't want my pupils to be unprepared like I was, like [Little] Richard was, like we all were." The Blackwell International Academy of the Performing Arts was opened after his death in 1985.
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