The Billy Nichols Story

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Jimmy Vick & the Victors 'fell apart' soon after the outfit's 45 was released.

Part of the reason for this could have been Cherry Records' decision to plug the 45 as just being by Jimmy.

The studio / label placed at least 4 ads in Billboard mag at the time and 3 of these ads just attributed the single to Jimmy alone

(and these ads just showed a picture of Jimmy)..

 

BTW, Billy has his own website ..................

... https://billynicholsmusic.com/

Interesting thanks for posting.

Billy's Sue 45 track .............

His MS play "Diamond Ring" ..........

The track he produced for Flame N King ..........

The song he wrote that Billy Stewart cut (he also played on this track) .........

The Jimmy Vick & the Victors 45 he was on ....

The song he wrote & produced on his friend Eddie McLoyd ....

The Will Collins & Willpower track he produced (& his friend Allan Williams wrote) .....

Excellent stuff and he wrote all those classics for Millie Jackson and Garland Green at Spring too.

The Jimmy Vick & the Victors 45 was played on radio station WALT out of Boston.
The guys at Cherry Records were so proud of this fact that they gave the radio stn a namecheck in one of the ads they placed in Billboard magazine.
............. little did they know the following information ..........
Walter DeVenne's first exposure over the radio airwaves came when he was just 12 years old on a makeshift radio station broadcasting from the cluttered basement of his parent's Medford (Boston) home. With his friends he initially ran his radio station from his bedroom, before moving the equipment to the basement. The lads would put together six hour long tapes to ensure something was on the air while they were in school. The little radio station was broadcasting over a four year period from when he was 12 up to 16. The call letters DeVenne choose for the station was WALT.
Record promoters would send copies of records to WALT not realizing that a group of youths were operating the station. The lads were sent 100's of records and DeVenne would take many of the spare copies to the local record shops and sell them to make some extra pocket money.
I wonder if they ever had more than a handful of listeners, I guess their signal only carried for a few hundred yards.

If you were a 13 year old kid, running a makeshift radio station out of your bedroom on 'Mickey Mouse' equipment, you must have been blown away when you saw this record company ad placed in Billboard ........... I bet Walt(er) was the 'big' guy in school all that year !!!

 

Great post.

I only went to New York's Paradise Garage once, and that night (no doubt down to the Mel Cherren/West End connection) Billy did a PA peformance.

Billy Nichols was based in New York and leading Billy Nichols & the Soul Swingers from around the summer of 1966 to the end of that decade.

It was obviously during that period that he & his group went into a local studio (Delta) with the Dunn Brothers and the whole ensemble cut the Mr. Dunn track "Something Is Wrong" (LAURAdunn Records) ......mind you, the 45's label actually credits the band as being called Billy Nicholas & the Soul Swingers.

 

 

A very rare 45 (or so it seems). I've winged off an e-mail to Billy to ask what (if anything) he can recall about the recording session and the group. 

Billy Nichols got back in touch with me concerning the Mr. Dunn 45 ...... He states that ........... 

Yes that was me and my band, we did that recording but I don't remember the studio.....
I met the father of the Dunn Brothers back in 1966, Bobby Dunn. We first recorded a 45 on him called "Do The Bobby Dunn",then he hired us to record his sons..... I last saw Bobby about two years ago and he now is a preacher. 

So Billy Nichols & the Soul Swingers were the backing band on the Bobby Dunn 45 "Do The Bobby Dunn" (JAS Records) as well .......

that was cut in 1966, so it seems that the Mr. Dunn 45 must have been a late 66 or 1967 release.

BTW, the Bobby Dunn track has many admirers among funk fans (& it has been included on 'boot' funk comp CD's in the past) ........