House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the musical heritage of the Lone Star State at large, but it also evokes the particular essence of Houston, of Quinn’s self-taught genius, and of many of the producers and artists who have made music on the site that he established.

    Maybe it is just a certain Texan instinct, informed as it is by the mythos of defi ant independence that is part of the state’s lore. Perhaps it comes down to a kind of stubborn self-trust, fueled by a tinge of healthy disdain for East Coast or West Coast cultural hegemony. For here in the largest city on the Gulf Coast, many folks—including oil-fi eld wildcatters and record producers alike—have dared to defi ne their own paths, whatever the consequences.
    That mentality, of course, implies a type of strong-willed, critics-be-damned motivation that some outsiders might consider to be cocky, naïve, or even crazy. And yes, it is brash, sometimes reckless, and often more than a bit d o m e s t i c c r u d e
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    crude in its various manifestations. But at its core lies a self-suffi ciency that
    can sometimes lead to rare and, despite the contradictions, even wonderful phenomena—such as a major metropolis without zoning laws, for instance.
    Given his peripatetic background, Quinn could have just as well settled somewhere else. Perhaps elsewhere he could have even successfully started a career in the recording studio business. Yet the fact that he came to and stayed in Houston, becoming a naturalized Texan of sorts in the process, is essential to understanding how and why this particular man was ultimately able to transform his very residence into a storied studio complex in which the no-zoning mentality extended to musical styles and performers—a place where anything might have seemed possible for anyone who dared to dream big and trust his gut.
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    The Independent Quinn
    illiam russell (“bill”) quinn was born in Amesbury,
    Massachusetts, on January 8, 1904, the son of an Irish im-
    migrant mother and a father about whom we have no infor-
    mation. Not quite seventy-two years later, on January 4, 1976, he passed away in Houston, a death apparently noted in print at the time only in a brief Houston Post obituary. Though he may have departed this life and his adopted home city without much fanfare, during the many years that he resided there, Quinn created, expanded, and eventually sold the ongoing multifaceted enterprise that Ray Cano Jr. defi nes in Texas Music History Online as
    “the oldest continuously operating recording facility in Texas.”

    Known during most of Quinn’s proprietorship as Gold Star and today as SugarHill, this studio complex has been, as described by William Michael Smith in Paste magazine, “a virtual open mic for the sounds swirling through the honky-tonks and juke joints that dot the Gulf Coast.” Thus, as both a businessman and a music documentarian, Quinn is a signifi cant fi gure in state history and American culture. Yet in some respects, it seems he only casually aspired to achieve much success in either arena, making his accomplishments all the more remarkable.
    Despite being an amateur musician himself (who reportedly played the button accordion, organ, and bass), Quinn may have originally been more interested in the technology of recording and disc pressing than in the regionally distinctive styles of music that his self-taught skills would eventually capture and preserve. For example, as Andrew Brown writes in his Harry Choates essay, Quinn operated “more in the manner of a glorifi ed hobbyist . . . [who had] realized his ambition when he discovered the secret to pressing records”
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    ness.” However, Quinn had settled in the right place at an opportune time to make some important recordings.
    The exact