J. D. "Jay" Miller
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J. D. "Jay" Miller (1922 - 1996) was a record producer from Crowley, Louisiana, whose Cajun, swamp blues, and swamp pop recordings made a notable impact on American popular culture.
Miller was born in Iota, Louisiana, but spent many childhood years in El Campo, Texas. However, he resided most of his life in Crowley, where in the late 1930s he played guitar with several Cajun bands, including Joseph Falcon and His Silver Bell Band, the Four Aces, the Rice City Ramblers, and the Daylight Creepers. In the mid-1940s he began to record Cajun musicians, most notably the Cajun string band Happy, Doc, and the Boys.
In the 1950s he began to record swamp pop artists, including King Karl, Guitar Gable, Warren Storm, Rod Bernard, and Johnnie Allan, among others.
Around this time he also began to record swamp blues artists like Lightnin' Slim, Lazy Lester, and Slim Harpo. It was Miller who produced Harpo's "I'm a King Bee" and "Rainin' In My Heart," significant swamp blues recordings later covered (re-recorded) respectively by The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, to name a few.
During his lifetime Miller's studio attracted a handful of mainstream recording artists, including Paul Simon and John Fogerty. Simon, for example, used the studio to record "That Was Your Mother," a track from his acclaimed Graceland album, while Fogerty traveled to Crowley to record a cover of zydeco musician Rockin' Sidney's "My Toot Toot."
Although he claimed to be a segregationist, Miller nonetheless used interracial studio bands during the Jim Crow era, when black and white musicians in the South were not permitted to mingle onstage or elsewhere in public. He professed to enjoy African-American blues music more than another other musical genre, and he even penned blues songs under the pseudonym "Jay West" (a name he used to disguise his race). Yet in the 1960s he also produced and released several racist recordings on his own Reb Rebel label, most notably those of Johnny Rebel (pseudonym of local Cajun/country musician Clifford "Pee Wee" Trahan). Today, compact disks of Miller's racist recordings can be found for sale on various racist and hate group web sites.
Miller died in 1996.
[edit] Sources
- John Broven, South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1983).
- Shane K. Bernard, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).
- J. D. Miller and Floyd Soileau: A Comparison of Two Small Town Recordmen of Acadiana by Shane [K.] Bernard, originally published in Louisiana Folklife Journal, Volume XV, December 1991.
