Old Gold: Specialty 625
The Titans – Don’t You Just Know It
Yes, this is a cover of Huey “Piano” Smith’s classic ditty, Don’t You Just Know It – but as covers go, this 1958 effort is pretty darn good - although it is almost identical to the original and came out only a few months later so it was never going to cause a sensation…
The Titans, despite selling fuck-all records, are actually an interesting bunch to read about. The founder of the band, Larry Greene started his working life as a cab driver and ended it as a record company executive. One of the band, a certain Curtis McNair, could blow a mean tenor sax and had a good voice on him. By 1965 he’d changed his name to Curtis Knight and formed a band called The Squires. In October that year he hired a guitar player called Jimmy James who’d played on a Lonnie Youngblood session and who had recently been fired by Little Richard. James only played with The Squires for about three months before signing up to play with King Curtis. In 1966 James left King Curtis, travelled to England and changed his name to Jimi Hendrix. It was Curtis McNair/Knight (of The Titans) that wrote Jimi: An Intimate Biography Of Jimi Hendrix in 1974…
All this information (and more!) was gleaned from the enlightening Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks.