Rupe founded Specialty Records, which helped establish the L.A. music industry and jump-started careers of Little Richard and a gospel-era Sam Cooke.
Record man Art Rupe, who started a small Boyle Heights-based independent label called Specialty Records in 1946 and went on to help launch the careers of artists including Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Percy Mayfield and dozens of other jazz, blues, gospel, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll artists, died Friday. He was 104.
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.
A driven businessman who loved the music while at the same time signing his artists to exploitative record deals — “Tutti Frutti” sold more than 500,000 copies but, at a royalty rate of a half-cent per record, reportedly netted Little Richard a mere $25,000 — Rupe harnessed the cultural upheaval that was rock ‘n’ roll to make household names of Specialty stars.
Rupe was born Arthur Goldberg in Greensburg, Pa., 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,’ [Rupe] called it soul.
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