Howdy Friends, I'll be back on WORT FM tomorrow morning from 9am-noon and I'm excited to share some of my K-Ark collection with y'all. K-Ark is one of the strangest record labels out there and one of the most fun to collect. Starting in St. Louis in the late ‘50s and then moving to Nashville around 1965, John Capps revived his custom vanity label in Tennessee to primarily recruit mostly unknown regional country singers.
In the mid-60s, K-Ark offered these bright-eyed hopefuls a Nashville recording experience and a stack of 45s for $600. If the artist had $2,500, they could record a full-length LP and get 500 copies of it AND 100 copies of a 45. Much like Cuca Records in Wisconsin, K-Ark had their own pressing plant, so printing costs were low. They paid Nashville’s top session men under the table and were eventually shut down by the musicians union in 1971 for underpaying and skimming union wages. Shady as all that is, for record collectors like myself, that all boils down to some really great musicianship, coupled with some super scarce pressings, and some insanely weird records!
Most famous are Eddie Noack’s deranged murder ballads, “Psycho” and “Dolores,” which are both great and truly strange. But there are also songs about living on the lam because you slept with your mother-in-law and your father wants to kill you (a Wisconsin country masterpiece!), about being too drunk to watch your son’s football game, about the various warnings that should be on cigarette packs, and a whole lot of epic and forgotten trucker tales. K-Ark made some of the earliest recordings of Tony Booth, the Dillards, Karen Wheeler, and Doug Kershaw's first solo recordings. They recorded country veterans, too, like Benny Martin, Onie Wheeler, Jim Eanes, Buck Trent, and Hylo Brown after they had been dropped by the majors. K-Ark pressed a lot of great country fuzz guitar records, two great singles by my pal (and Stonewall's older brother) Wade Jackson, and a whole mess of really cool steel guitar-dominant country rockers. They were so good that even though Cuca Records offered free recording services to regional bands, many Wisconsin singers made the trip to Nashville to record for K-Ark w/ the A-teamers and I’ve got a bunch of those, too!
There were hundreds of different K-Ark records pressed over the years. Some are gold. Quite a few are pretty amateur. But fear not! I’ve got ‘em all sorted out and I’ll be playing three hours of the very best from my collection. As an added bonus, years ago I found a super rare 7” by K-Ark label owner John Capps narrating his sales pitch for why artists should come to Nashville and record with K-Ark. It’s an amazing 10 minutes of K-Ark history and I’ve never seen another copy! Rare gems galore on Back to the Country, W-O-R-T 89.9FM Madison, community-sponsored radio. Wednesday 6/17 from 9am-noon CST and streaming via wortfm.org.
