Fred Foster started the Monument Record label in 1958. The output of the label was popular music, country and western, rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
Foster was born in Appalachia. At 17, he moved to Washington, DC, to work in a small restaurant. Through one of his customers, a nightclub owner, he was put in touch with music publisher Ben Edelman, and Foster started putting words to songs Edelman was publishing. His first effort was "Picking Sweethearts," which was recorded by the McGuire Sisters in 1953. Although he'd never produced a record before, he was allowed to supervise a session by Jimmy Dean and the Texas Wildcats, a combo that was working in Washington's Covered Wagon bar. Shortly after this, he got a job as a promotion man for Mercury Records and in 1955 went to ABC-Paramount. Although he was a regional promotion director for ABC, he did bring talent he discovered to the label, including George Hamilton IV and Lloyd Price (who at the time was living in the Washington area).
He grew tired of the traveling that the ABC job required, so he took a job with J & F (Record) Distributors in Baltimore, Maryland, a short distance from Washington, DC. Using his life savings, in September 1958, he started the Monument Record Company (so named after the Washington Mounument in DC). His first recording was a reworking of the traditional "Done Laid Around," which was retitled "Gotta Travel On," sung by a former member of Jimmy Dean's Wildcats, Billy Grammer. The record went to number 4 on the popular charts. Foster then set up a second office for the record company in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville.
Not long after, Foster's partner Bob Moore, a top session bassist in Nashville and well-connected with the musicians, felt that Roy Orbison was not being promoted properly by RCA, and brought Orbison to Monument. At his first session for Monument, Roy recorded "Paper Boy," "With the Bug" and "Double Date." In order to make the soft-singing Orbison heard above the band, the producer placed Roy's microphone behind a acoustical barrier that would pick up far less of the band, which had the additional side effect of alleviating Orbison's painful self-consciousness. This technique of an "isolation booth" had grown out of the musicians' experimenting informally, but had not generally been used in Nashville recordings. Orbison's next sessions for Monument produced "Uptown," which reached a respectable number 72 on the pop charts in January 1960. The next release, "Only the Lonely," was a smash hit, and started Orbison and Monument on a long string of hits through 1965. Orbison had two #1 records for Monument, "Running Scared" in 1961 and "Oh, Pretty Woman" in 1964. The stereo versions of Orbison's albums "Lonely and Blue" and "Crying" are particularly in demand because of the superb stereo recordings by Foster.
Throughout Orbison's stay at Monument, his backup band was a group of all-star studio musicians led by Bob Moore, and it was the play of Orbison's amazing voice against the dynamic yet uncluttered sound of the band that gave Orbison's records such a unique, highly identifiable sound. Moore, who is generally acknowledged at the top country session bassist of his era -- maybe ever -- was on thousands of pop and country songs, including over 500 chart records (including almost every type of music, from Elvis Presley to Marty Robbins to Pat Boone to Clyde McPhatter). Moore had a top 10 single under his own name in 1961, "Mexico," which was a forerunner of the trumpet-and-guitar sound Herb Alpert used effectively starting about two years later. Alpert later mentioned the Moore hit as one of his influences, and wondered that Moore didn't have a followup in the same vein.
So as not to change the relationships he had with fellow musicians, Moore kept the fact that he owned 37% of Monument secret for years. It was only when Foster applied for a credit account at Owen Bradley's studio that the secret was uncovered. Bradley looked up Monument with Dunn & Bradstreet as a credit check, and noticed Moore's part ownership. Moore recalls that Bradley called him and said, "Good for you." But by the mid-1960s, Moore and Foster had a falling out over a business deal that Foster made that he apparently neglected to tell his partners about. Moore asked to be bought out. It was about this time (1965) that Moore helped Roy Orbison leave Monument for MGM Records.
Orbison was certainly the most important artist on Monument, and without Orbison and Moore, the label declined. The label did have a strong country roster, however, and scored sporadic hits with Boots Randolph, Dolly Parton, Billy Walker, Jeannie Seely, Henson Cargill, and Charlie McCoy. Later, Foster became the first to record singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, with considerable success.
In 1963, Foster formed a subsidiary label called Sound Stage 7. Over the years, they have issued singles by some well-known talent, including Arthur Alexander, Roscoe Shelton, Allen Orange (Allen Toussaint), Ivory Joe Hunter, the O'Jays, Alvin Cash, and of course Joe Simon. The first album release was by the Dixie Bells (with "Cornbread & Jerry"), titled Down at Papa Joe's, after their hit of the same name. Most of the subsequent albums on Sound Stage 7 were by Joe Simon, as the label was little used for album releases. This left most of the label's output unavailable in stereo, although it doubtlessly was recorded in that mode. For example, a smooth 1964 top-50 single by the Monarchs, "Look Homeward Angel," has apparently never been issued on LP.
Another Monument subsidiary label, Rising Sons, was active in 1967-68. Although they had singles out by Robert Knight, Bobby Russell, Billy Swan, Ral Donner, Troy Seals, Charlie McCoy, and others, their only real hit was Knight's "Everlasting Love," which prompted an album of the same name.
At the start of 1971, Foster entered into a distribution arrangement with CBS, and the catalog numbering system for the albums changed to the CBS numbering system. Since CBS had a "consolidated" numbering system (i.e., all labels under their distribution shared the same numbering series, with prefixes designating Columbia, Epic, "other," etc.), the albums issued on Monument from 1971-76 are not numbered consecutively. At that time the label design also changed.
By 1976, Foster apparently opted to switch distribution, and signed a deal with PolyGram. The items then in his catalog were renumbered from the CBS system and reissued using a system of consecutive numbers in one of several new Monument-only series. The label design also changed from the rather unattractive brown label used for the CBS years to a nifty new black label with "MONUMENT" in three dimensional letters of carved stone.
Monument continued into the early 1980s and Fred Foster even had another opportunity to record Roy Orbison, when Orbison came back to Monument to record the album Regeneration in 1976, but the two failed to rekindle the magic they had in the early '60s.
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