The Fabulous Wailers Featuring Rockin’ Robin And Gail Harris – At The Castle

“Bobby Blue” Bland, James Brown, Freddy King: the Wailers all had that roots music imbedded in us, we played black music but white people thought it was ours. It was our interpretation of it. When we leaned into that stuff, it was probably after Rich Dangel had been in the service and picked up on it. Rich was the driver there, he was a real music person and he absorbed and he learned. He was the guy who every time I saw him he’d have his guitar in his hand. And Rockin’ Robin Roberts and Gail Harris, the singers, they would choose their material too, bringing it back to the group to learn. Man, that was a great time for us, because everyone was contributing. We just did what we felt was real good and had the best feeling to it. The Wailers was a good foundation for all of the local musicians in the Pacific Northwest, because we got into it with a bit more depth, as to where we took our music and our ideas from. We were really listening a lot, and going and seeing these great R&B performers who had these shows together that were so tight. But any time we recorded anybody else’s tunes, the idea was to make it your own. And the kids would come up at the dances and go wow, these are your songs. This was before anybody had focused on their writing skills. We were in another situation, where we had to create our own music. The creativity was starting to happen with our instrumentals, it was starting to gel-.-you could do that, you didn’t need somebody else’s song to go into a recording studio, and that was kinda what prompted us to record. We knew we had to follow up our Louie Louie hit with something, we knew we had to do another project – everybody at the time said we couldn’t do our own album, like they had said, you can’t have your own label. We just went ahead and did it anyway!” – Buck Ormsby

Label: Etiquette Records – ETALB 1

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album

Country: US

Released: 1961

G+/G+. looks rough plays VG