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Spunky East Austin electric blues

There are many “unknowns” in the Sonobeat Records archives, and here’s one of them: we can place the location but not the exact date of blues vocalist-guitarist Jean Manor’s (pronounced “May-nor”, like the well-known east Austin road) recording session with Sonobeat. Sonobeat co-founder Rim Kelley (Bill Josey Jr.) doesn’t recall producing or engineering Jean’s session, so we feel fairly confident that co-founder Bill Josey Sr. recorded Jean after Rim left Sonobeat in September 1970, placing the session somewhere between November 1970 and mid-1971. But we surmise that the session most likely occurred in early spring ’71 for reasons we’ll explain in a moment.

There are no session notes in the Sonobeat archives, so we did some online digging to gather information about Jean, where we learned that she was headliner for Austin rhythm & blues band Jean and the Rollettes (sometimes spelled Rolletts, without the second “e”, in newspaper ads). The Rollettes were all seasoned R&B and jazz side men, including Jean’s husband A.J. and brother Leo. In the July 4, 2003, issue of The Austin Chronicle newspaper, Jean was listed as one of two dozen Eastside “MVPs” – singers and musicians who made their mark in East Austin before the 1970s. We also traced Jean back to December 1959, through Austin American-Statesman newspaper ads, when she began performing with the Rollettes. In fact, we found Jean was still fronting the Rollettes and playing gigs throughout Texas until she retired in 1989. Unfortunately, none of this information helped us pinpoint the exact date of Jean’s Sonobeat session which produced only one track, Jean’s original instrumental that she introduced at the head of the master tape as Sorry ’Bout That Shuffle. Jean played a wicked Chuck Berry-inspired lead on the track. The Sonobeat archives contain no other information about the session, but we have no reason to believe any band other than The Rollettes backed Jean in this club-style performance, although the funky overdub sure sounds like it was provided by James Polk and The Brothers’s horn section, which included Reginald “Wimp” Caldwell on tenor sax and Donald “Duck” Jennings on trumpet. Jean and James were Austin contemporaries, good friends in fact, and James recorded a 1969 Sonobeat 45 RPM release that included his full horn section. James was back in the Sonobeat Western Hills Drive studio beginning in March ’71 to record a (sadly, unreleased) album, and it’s our belief that James brought Jean to Bill Josey Sr.’s attention and that, as a result, Bill brought Jean in for her session while James was still working on his album and could provide the horn section overdub.

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There’s no stereo mix-down in the Sonobeat archives of Jean’s Sorry ’Bout That Shuffle, just the half-inch 4-track master with the basic instrumental backing on tracks 1 and 2 and horn overdubs on tracks 3 and 4, so in 2018 we created a new mix-down. We feel confident the recording was tracked at Sonobeat’s Western Hills Drive studio in northwest Austin. Jean’s would have been an easy, comfortable session to hold in Sonobeat’s small home-based studio. Jean’s combo was small, the guitars and bass sound like they were plugged directly into Sonobeat’s mixing console to eliminate the need for amps and speaker boxes, Sonobeat’s Western Hills Drive studio included a drum isolation booth, and the horns clearly were overdubbed after the basic track was recorded.

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Born in 1941 in La Grange, Texas (home from 1917 until 1973 to Edna’s Fashionable Ranch Boarding House, better known as the Chicken Ranch brothel, made famous in the Broadway musical and subsequent feature film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and whose closure was simultaneously celebrated and mourned in ZZ Top’s 1973 raucous roadhouse rocker La Grange), Gloria Jean Brown-Manor passed away in 1999. In November 2011, she was inducted posthumously into the Austin Music Memorial.

Music journalist Norman Darwen took a deeper dive into the story of Jean and the Rollettes in the Texas Blues Tapes feature in the September 2020 (No. 352) edition of the U.K.’s popular Blues & Rhythm magazine; however, issue 352 now appears out-of-print.

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