The comprehensive King Records documentary, which premiered in March at the OTR International Film Festival, will be distributed nationwide to PBS television stations starting Oct. 10.
The King Of Them All: The Story of King Records from local director Yemi Oyediran will be seen on WCET-TV and Dayton’s WPTD-TV at 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10.
James Brown, Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, Grandpa Jones, Merle Travis, Cowboy Copas, and the Stanley Brothers were once regulars at Syd Nathan’s record factory.
“The Twist,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and Brown’s “Please, Please Please” were first recorded in the Evanston studio and production plant which operated from 1943 to 1971. King Records cranked out 250 hit songs and more than 150 million country, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, and rock ‘n’ roll records.
The film explains how King was so revolutionary by:
- Recording country, rhythm and blues, funk, or rock in the same studio, and mixing those musical influences;
- Doing the writing, recording, pressing, packaging, promotion, and distribution under one roof;
- And doing all that with a racially integrated staff.
PBS describes the show as a "feature-length documentary about King Records, the scrappy Cincinnati label that reshaped American music. Founded in the 1940s by Syd Nathan, a brash outsider dismissed by the industry, King dared to put everything under one roof. In a single building, records were written, recorded, pressed, and shipped — capturing performances with an urgency the industry giants couldn’t match.”
King Of Them All received a lot of local attention last spring for its premiere at the OTR International Film Festival. Oyediran, Shake It Records co-founder Darren Blasé and Afghan Whigs bassist John Curley talked about the film with Lucy May on WVXU-FM’s Cincinnati Edition.
“I think Cincinnati has a very legitimate claim to be the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll,” Curley says in the film.
King of Them All includes color and black-and-white performance videos, still photos, archived audio of Nathan, animation and cool scenes of 1950s Cincinnati in color and black-and-white.
Among those interviewed were two multiple Grammy winners, country musician Vince Gill and jazz composer Christian McBride; former King executive Seymour Stein; former King musicians Otis Williams and Philip Paul; King audio engineer Chuck Seitz; and music historians Jon Hartley Fox, Randy McNutt and Curley.
King of Them All will air multiple times on WCET-TV (Channel 48), CET Arts (Channel 48.3), and the WPTD-TV (Channel 16) multiplex stations. It will be available to stream on the PBS App from Oct. 10 to Friday Nov. 7, says Joan Butcher, program director for WCET-TV, WPDT-TV and WPTO-TV.
After that the film will be available on the CET/ThinkTV Passport (which gives donors and supporters extended access to an on-demand library) for three years, from Nov. 8 this year until Oct. 9, 2028, she says.
“We’re really excited about having it. CET will promote the program quite a bit,” Butcher says.
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