The Rev. Carlton "King" Coleman, 71 years old, is wide awake at 3:00 a.m. and halfway through his Nothing But Love! show on Miami Beach gospel station WMBM-AM (1490). The phones light up. "Look at that!" he thunders, reaching for line one. "They never stop!"
Steve Satterwhite
Steve Satterwhite
Earlier this year a small New York record label put together a vinyl compilation of the King's greatest hits
"WMBM, we rolling!" he bellows into the receiver, his deep voice crackling with excitement. "Yeah, we can play that! What's your name? Marlene? Where you from, Marlene? What? You won't tell me?" A playful grin stretches his gray goatee. "Now, Marlene, you the queen! Why you have to be so mean? ... You're from Miami? Okay, I got ya!" In a flash he cues up a Hezekiah Walker tune and dedicates it to "Marlene the Queen."
Coleman removes his headset and marvels at his situation. "I'm so blessed that I don't have to stick to any format," he says. Indeed this freewheeling set ranges from choir-heavy chestnuts by the Winans family to newer, funkier tracks by A.J. Wright. And when folks want to hear a song they've caught in the middle, he backs it up and starts it over. "I play what the listenerswant," he explains. "That's why I'm number one in my time slot."
It's similar to the brand of radio Coleman practiced in this very studio from 1957 to 1959, back when WMBM played rhythm and blues and he rhymed his way through the station's popular drive-time morning show. ("Put your left foot on the floor -- get out the front door. Rush, rush, rush -- get on that bus! If you wasn't on your heels -- you could be driving a brand-new automobile!") "Rock and roll was at its peak then, and I noticed no one was playing the blues," he recalls. "Remember BJ the DJ in Tampa? I took his format. I played T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Guitar Slim. Overnight I was a hit, playing the blues!"
As Coleman reminisces, he leans over to punch up commercials on a digital recorder. "There's a lot less work these days," he says. "I used to spend half my day rewinding tape. Things are meant to get better." He plays a station ID, then follows it up with a CD containing one of his signature raps: "Like an alley cat chasing a rat across a railroad track ... stay tuned, I will be right back." He nods in appreciation. "Look at that! I ain't gotta say nothing!"
And he doesn't have to say -- or do -- a thing to cement his place in music history, either. That happened back in 1959, when a contract dispute between James Brown and his record label paved the way for Coleman to take Brown's lead-vocals slot on "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes," a number-eight BillboardR&B hit by Nat Kendrick and the Swans (a pseudonym for Brown's band). A follow-the-bouncing-ball blues shuffle with a cappella "potato" shouts (Mashed potatoes, yeah! French-fried potatoes, yeah!) every twelve bars, "(Do The) Mashed Potatoes" spawned an international dance sensation that compelled millions of fans around the world to mash imaginary potatoes with their heels, moving pigeon-toed to the beat. From then on, no matter what he did onstage, King Coleman was the "Mashed Potato Man."
Yet his most enduring musical legacy is as the grandfather of Miami rap. Coleman's DJ rhymes, show-stealing emcee gigs, and dance-party singles ("The Boo Boo Song") influenced the young Clarence Reid, whose career took off in the early Seventies via his "Blowfly" persona, a caped and masked funky superhero who specialized in sex raps and filthy parody tunes ("What a Difference a Lay Makes"). While Blowfly's first recorded raps appeared on 1974's Weird World of Blowfly, his 1980 single, "Rapp Dirty," is acknowledged by music historians to be one of the first rap records; some maintain that Reid invented the genre. But the King Coleman-Blowfly lineage is unarguably responsible for Miami's indigenous rap subgenre, Miami bass.
Coleman dropped his first rhyme, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- Hit 'em in the head with a cornbread crust," in 1936, when he was only four years old. "My mother gave me the gift of rhyme," he says. "My daddy and brothers went hunting and fishing. I didn't like that. I didn't like getting dirty. I never liked killing things. I ain't never liked the outdoors. My momma and grandma rhymed everything, that's how rhyming became part of my heritage. They'd tell me, 'Your brain is your thang, but muscle ain't your hustle!'" And hustling was the game in his Tampa neighborhood. "The house of prostitution was across the street," he says, "and they sold moonshine next door. Minnie Coon sold the moonshine. Maddy Foys had the whorehouse."
As a teen, Coleman played drums with a local dance band until the day he turned on the radio and heard Billy Eckstine's haunting baritone. "It was all over after that!" he declares. Closing his eyes, he grabs his suspenders and croons, "Toooniiiiiight you find meeee ..." in the deep-velvet vibrato Eckstine was famous for. In the tenth grade he won a Tampa talent show sponsored by the Charles Taylor Bronze Mannequin Revue, a Long Island-based song-and-dance show that traveled by train with carnival attractions in the summer and played theaters in the winter. The winner was guaranteed a spot in the show, and Coleman dropped out of school to claim it. "Geography class messed me up!" he says. "I wanted to see it, not read about it!" He was just fifteen at the time, and at a handsome six-foot-four, the revue's featured vocalist.
