Abstract
Charm Warren-Celestine was born in Cleveland in 1950 and grew up in the Wade Park neighborhood. Her parents owned several record stores from the 1960s through the 1990s, Dean's House of Jazz. She worked for her parents and continued her love of music with a career in radio sales and artist promotions. This 2009 interview opens Warren-Celestine sharing childhood memories of her parents' store, the radio stations she listened to, and the venues around Cleveland at which she saw concerts. She also talks about racial issues in Cleveland, describing a personal experience with racism and reminiscing about the 1966 Hough Riots. The interview closes with Warren-Celestine commenting on rap musicians, comparing them to the artists of previous generations and noting their positive contributions to African-American communities.
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Interviewee
Warren-Celestine, Charm (interviewee)
Interviewer
Aritonovich, Dana (interviewer)
Project
Rock and Roll
Date
10-12-2009
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
47 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Charm Warren-Celestine Interview 2009" (2009). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 200002.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/25
Transcript
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:00:01] Okay. Okay
Dana Aritonovich [00:00:05] I'm Dana Aritonovich. I'm a student at Cleveland State. And today we're talking to Charm Warren-Celestine. Charm, could you just kind of tell us where you live, what your occupation is right now?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:00:17] Well, currently I'm living at 10915 Wade Park Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, on the northeast side of Cleveland. I'm living in the house that I grew up in back in Cleveland after having left Cleveland in 1990 to pursue greater music opportunities in the music industry in New York. Currently I am working on a project with the rap group Naughty By Nature. I'm doing marketing and promotions for them.
Dana Aritonovich [00:00:53] And what year were you born and where were you born?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:00:56] 1950. [...] in University Hospital here in Cleveland, Ohio. So I'm a Clevelander, born, bred and raised.
Dana Aritonovich [00:01:09] And could you talk about a little bit, like, what the neighborhood you grew up in was like?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:01:14] Well, from the time I was 10 years old, the neighborhoods that I lived around was definitely the Wade Park area. My mother was a single parent up until the time I was 10 years old, and then she married my stepfather, who really raised me. So we lived around 85th and Wade Park, 76th and Wade Park, 65th and Wade Park. And eventually they bought their home in 1962 on 109th and Wade Park, which is where I reside now. So around that area, definitely always on the north northeast side of Cleveland.
Dana Aritonovich [00:01:57] And what schools did you attend, starting with elementary?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:02:00] Elementary school. I attended Wade Park Elementary School. Graduated from elementary school, from sixth grade at John D. Rockefeller, which is around Wade Avenue. I think it still exists. Let's see. Junior high school, I spent two days, two terrifying days at Addison Junior High School. Then when my parents moved to 109th and Wade Park, I attended Harry E. Davis, which was a brand new middle school at that time, or junior high school, we called it back then, not middle school, but I graduated from Harry Davis and attended John Hay High School from 65 to 68, where I graduated.
Dana Aritonovich [00:02:42] And why was Addison terrifying?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:02:44] Because it was just a- It was known as a school where you had fights continuously. It was just a rough school at that time. Just a rough school. And I was not ready to fight every day.
Dana Aritonovich [00:03:01] So you just left after two days?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:03:03] Well, because my parents ended up moving just at the beginning of school because they bought their first home on 109th and Wade Park. That took me out of that Addison Junior High district and put me into Harry Davis. Yeah.
Dana Aritonovich [00:03:20] And so what. What kind of things did you and your friends do for fun?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:03:25] Well, because in 1960, my parents became self employed. They opened up their first record shop on Addison and Wade Park. I didn't do a lot of socializing, or I should say my socializing existed or took place at work. Even though my parents didn't like people to loiter in the store. If my friends wanted to see me, had a question or whatever, they knew that that was the place to find me. But as relates to the things that we did for fun. I think a lot of us just listened to music that was definitely a pastime. If you weren't listening to music, you were emulating or imitating singers. And trying to learn and reproduce what you heard on record. That's what I did and that's what my friends did. A lot of us danced. We had recreation in school. Both in junior high and in high school. And what rec was, when lunch hours came. And I think there were three periods of lunch hours. One half of the lunch period you could eat lunch. And then the other half you could go to rec, which is where you listen to music and you danced. Or you could go see a movie. And so that was probably for about 15 or 20 minutes of that period. And I think when I look back on rec, I think that rec was an opportunity for you to expel energy. It was an opportunity for you to socialize. But it made going to school fun. They don't have rec anymore.
Dana Aritonovich [00:05:15] What kind of music were you and your friends listening to?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:05:17] Always listening to R&B artists. Especially when we were in junior high and high school. The Motown sound was very popular. So we listened to a lot of The Temptations, The Supremes, The Four Tops. We did listen to some of the local artists like a Lou Ragland or the Constellations, artists like that.
Dana Aritonovich [00:05:47] And you said that you did work in your parents' record store. And how old were you when you started working there?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:05:52] 10. 10. There ought to be a law.
Dana Aritonovich [00:05:57] What kind of things did you do in their store?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:06:00] A little bit of everything. A little bit of everything. I sold records. One thing about working in a record shop, a lot of times people don't know. They know the record that they want, but they don't know who the artist is. They don't know the name of the song. They may be able to give you two or three lyrics in the song that they want. And so you have to really be. You have to really be up on your music. Then you had to listen to the radio a lot. Or just really explore all the music that was in the store when you were working in there. One of the things that helped me to help the customers was that our stores were formatted, the music was formatted. And what I mean is that my mother insisted that when we opened the store like at 8:30 in the morning, from like 8:30 until 10 or 11, we had to play gospel music. Because when you stop and think about them opening their stores at 8:30 in the morning, people are going to work. And a lot of those people that were going to work were really into gospel or spiritual music. So again, if they don't know the name of the artist or only know a couple of words to it, you got to know. So the way that we educated ourselves about the music was to play it. So from 8:30 to 10 we played gospel music. Then from 10 until probably 7 in the evening, you could play R&B, you could play blues. But by the time 7 o' clock came, from 7 until we closed at 10, you had to play jazz. And by doing that again, you knew every piece of music that was in that store. So that if a customer came in and we didn't have what they wanted, we should have something similar to make them, you know, buy something, not go out of the store empty-handed. So that was their philosophy.
Dana Aritonovich [00:08:02] And what, what artists in particular do you remember selling when you were younger that were the most popular, at least at your parents store?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:08:10] Oh my goodness.
Dana Aritonovich [00:08:10] Let's start with like younger people. What were younger people buying at your parents store?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:08:14] Younger people were buying whatever they heard on the radio, whatever we heard on the radio in the '60s, you may remember, I guess about 62, 63, the Beatles came out. And for, for us The Beatles was just as much a phenomenon as the suburban kids. Because we heard the Beatles for a while. I think Chess and Cadet record artists like Etta James, Jackie Ross, Major Lance, Major Lance and The Impressions were also from Chicago. Those kinds of artists were popular too. So I think in Cleveland what we heard was like a regional sound. It was not just what was happening here locally in Cleveland, but what was happening in Detroit as well as what was happening in Chicago. And if my memory serves me correct, The Beatles were originally on VJ Records, which was a label out of Chicago, a Black owned label out of Chicago. So those are the kinds of artists and the kinds of music that we listen to. It was a very regional sound I think in the 60s also because of how big entertainment was in Cleveland. We were like a place that music was broken.
Dana Aritonovich [00:09:44] And who were your company customers? Were they all just from the neighborhood? Did they come from other suburbs?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:09:50] I would say they were neighborhood folks. Sometimes we. Depending on, see my parents, the first store that they opened up was on Addison and Wade Park. But eventually we ended up having four stores, even though all those stores were located on the northeast side of Cleveland. I think that sometimes if a person lived on Harvard or lived on Kinsman, because the reputation of. And the name of the store was the Dean's House of Jazz, because the reputation was that we had whatever record you wanted. People might come from Buckeye and Kinsman and Harvard to the northeast side to pick up music. But by and large, I would think that most of our clientele or customers were neighborhood folks.
Dana Aritonovich [00:10:46] And so where did you and your friends go to listen to live artists perform?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:10:51] We went to Leo's Casino. At one time there was a place. Yeah, there was a place called Versailles. Versailles was on Euclid, like 30th, something in Euclid. There's a party center that we would go to, the Coliseum. There were also, let's see, the Red Carpet. We would go to the Red Carpet on 105 and Euclid. Vel's was another place that we would go to. And there was a place. I can't remember the name of it, but it was on the second floor on Euclid Avenue between 105th and 107th. Somebody else will be able to tell you the name of it, but I can't remember the name of it. And the reason being is that because I worked weekends, it was a rarity that I got an opportunity to go out. Maybe by the time I was 16 or 17, my parents would let me date. And so it's ridiculous, girl. But the way that I would get to go to one of these events to see live music or even to go out dancing would be if it was a holiday. So if it was a holiday like Thanksgiving, the store wasn't open on Thursday on Thanksgiving night. So maybe they would let me go out on Thursday night and I could hang out with my friends and go dancing.
Dana Aritonovich [00:12:19] And what were these clubs like? Were they mixed clubs? Was it mainly people, like, from the area who went?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:12:24] Predominantly area folks came. It wasn't mixed. It wasn't mixed at all. One of the things that I remember about the '50s especially is that- And I don't know if it's because of the radio station I was listening to, but early on I remember artists like Conway Twitty and Brenda Lee and what's the other guy's name? Frankie Avalon, all of those artists I was listening to as much as I was R&B music. I think by the time I became like 9 or 10. And it could have been. See, I can't remember what year WJMO came on, but I do know that by the time I was 9 or 10, I knew those. I knew WJMO or 1490, you know, as the radio station that I could relate to because of the disc jockeys Ken Hawkins, John Slade or Will Rudd or Jockey Jack. Who is Jack Gibson. Jack Gibson became a very influential person in the music industry, but he had a career here in Cleveland as a DJ prior to, you know, going on to other things. But what I'm saying is that by the time I was 10, I probably realized that I was listening to an urban station or a Black radio station because of the kind of music that I was being fed. But prior to that, I remember hearing a mixture.
Dana Aritonovich [00:14:05] Yeah, that's something, actually, my mother has mentioned to me about the way radio used to be. It wasn't necessarily genre radio for a lot of it. A lot of stations played everything. Yes, you had country on one station, and you could play R&B and you could play absolutely. What. What musical acts did you see when. When you were allowed to go out to the clubs?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:14:27] The O'Jays, The Temptations, The Supremes. Oh, The Impressions. Oh, my goodness. I remember seeing The Impressions. Jerry Butler, probably B.B. King also. I mean, I saw my share of blues artists. I also remember my parents. I remember this one particular time there was a place called the Jazz Temple, which had to exist somewhere where that University Circle area is, around Cedar. You know how it all connects. There was a place there called the Jazz Temple. And my understanding is that it was more like a coffee shop. But I remember my parents taking me there. I had to be about 11 or 12 years old, and they could take me to that place. But I've been in bars. I remember being in bars when I was like, 10 or 11, because my mom worked as a barmaid in a place on- I want to say it was like 4th and Prospect, called the Loop Lounge. But I remember going to the Jazz Temple and seeing Dinah Washington. And the Jazz Temple was really like a coffee shop. And I- I think because the place was because of where it was located, because it catered to jazz, you then got a mixture of folks. That place was bombed or blown up. And I think, you know, the fact that races were mixing and it was so- Could have been because it was so close to Little Italy and, you know, all of that. But I remember that place.
Dana Aritonovich [00:16:11] And you mentioned WJMO what other stations were you listening to?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:16:15] WABQ, which was. Let's see, JMO was 1490. ABQ was 1540, I believe. And the difference between WJMO and WABQ is that WABQ was a daytime station, meaning that it could only broadcast when the sun was up and it had to go off the air when the sun went down. So that's called a daytime station.
Dana Aritonovich [00:16:47] So obviously, your parents were interested in music, and did they have any objections to any popular music that was going on at the time?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:16:54] You know what I remember that was objectionable was comedians. There was very. There were very few records that I remember whose lyrics were objectionable. But when it came to people like Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Markham. What was this other guy's name? Dolemite. Those were, you know, objectionable things. Those were albums that they would send us upstairs and their company would be downstairs, and they would be sitting there listening to the music. And, you know what's really, really funny is that comedians or people back then spoke in. They didn't use so much filthy language as they. You would have to be an adult to really understand the humor that they were expressing because they spoke in. What's the word? I'm trying to find symbolism, you know, so if you were a kid, the joke probably went over your head because of how they expressed themselves. To give you an example of exactly what I'm talking about, Dinah Washington had a song, and I really didn't understand this song until I became an adult. The song was called Long John. I think Long John was her dentist. And in the song, she's talking about how she would go to the dentist so that he could drill her. You know, when you're a kid, you don't get it. You know, when you become an adult, you get it. The whole song was just hilarious about how, you know, this was her lover. But when you're a kid and you. You're listening to somebody talk about their dentist, you don't realize, you know, the real deal.
Dana Aritonovich [00:19:05] That's good.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:19:09] Is that my phone? Oh, my God. I'm sorry. That is my phone.
Dana Aritonovich [00:19:14] What kind of music did your parents like?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:19:16] My parents were. And the title of their. The name of their store told it all. The Dean's House of Jazz. My parents love jazz. They love jazz. And I think that when you're a kid, you just don't like nothing. You like nothing that your parents like. Not because it's not good, but it's like, right, you have to be obstinate. But that was their choice of music. My mother, as I mentioned, worked at the Loop Lounge. And I can remember, before she married my dad, her coming home with these black-and-white pictures, autographed black-and-white pictures of people like Nat King Cole, Bill Doggett, what's the other guy's name? Fats Domino, just the Young-Holt Trio, Ramsey Lewis. Those kinds of artists, I mean, would come through Cleveland on a regular basis. And as I mentioned, the Loop Lounge, I remember was somewhere on 4th and Prospect, but it wasn't a huge place. But they had consistently great entertainers, great music coming through all the time.
Dana Aritonovich [00:20:40] So obviously music was always just as part of your life. You didn't know anything different.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:20:45] I didn't know anything different.
Dana Aritonovich [00:20:47] So how did the music inspire you? As you know, a young person in Cleveland, as a young Black girl in Cleveland, and you saw all these artists who look just like you. And the Black-inspired music really is what now is still the popular music of the day.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:21:02] Absolutely.
Dana Aritonovich [00:21:03] I mean, I don't- You might not have registered that when you were younger, but how, I mean, which artists in particular did you and your friends, you said you guys used to like to imitate some of your favorite performers.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:21:13] For me, it didn't matter who it was, especially working in the store daily. And the store was open six days a week. The only day we weren't open was Sundays. But if it was a song that I liked, whether it was a Deon Jackson, "Love Makes the World Go Round," or a Jackie Ross, "Selfish One," if it was a song that I liked, I had to learn that song. And I can remember just sitting in the store, just playing music and sitting down writing the lyrics so that I, you know, would know the words to the song. So I think that the first way that you're inspired about music is to become an artist, you know, and then I think it depends on your personality and your character as to whether or not you can really be that person behind the mic. You know, I could very easily always emulate these folks, but I wasn't really sure that that's what I wanted to do, to be that person on the forefront. And as it worked out for me, having worked in the stores and my parents having a reputation for breaking music and, you know, having the most recent songs and things of that that allowed me to segue from working in my parents store when I graduated high school to becoming a music director for WJMO. And so when I started working at the radio station, it opened up a whole 'nother world that was in Conjunction with, you know, having worked in a record shop, but a completely different industry. The. The whole industry of radio so taught me about commercials and taught me about how to do the news. And like I said, being a music director and being the receptionist, it just opened up a whole nother world being a salesperson. But while I was there and while sitting in the seat of a music director, still another industry was revealed to me, and that industry was the music industry. I found that there were people coming to see me bringing music and trying to get that music played on the radio. And so from witnessing this or experiencing this, I want to say probably in the 70s is when I determined, oh, this is what I want to do. I want to be that person that brings or takes the record into the radio station and tries to get a play. That's called a promotions person. And it took me eight years to go from working in radio to working in records. But eventually I got there.
Dana Aritonovich [00:24:16] And just to get a little bit more philosophical, what do you think? Obviously, music has inspired you your whole life. What do you think the role of music or art in general is in society? Does it have an influence on people beyond just like it's something they like to look at or listen to? Do you think it can be part of a social movement?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:24:35] Oh, my goodness, yes. I think when you talk to baby boomers, baby boomers relate to what they were doing with what song was out, whether it was the Vietnam War, the protest of that, whether it was doing something political. You know, when both Kennedys, John and Bobby, ran for office, you can relate a song to that for me, and I don't know if I'm going to too far, but what I found is once I started doing promotions and started dealing with the two generations after me, I saw that music took that Generation X, that generation that we as society consider to be at risk. It took a lot of them out of their high-risk or at-risk situations and made them millionaires. You know, I've seen it happen three or four times. Yeah. So music definitely, you know, plays a social and economic—has a bearing on all of that.
Dana Aritonovich [00:25:58] I remember in a previous conversation you were talking about when you were doing music promotions was kind of the first time you experienced racism.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:26:05] Oh, that was when I was doing radio sales. Oh my goodness. I must have been about 23 years old. I had left JMO and I started working for Nationwide Communications. There was a radio station here called WNCI. And when I worked for WNCI as a salesperson, the format was top 40. Meaning that you're going to hear popular music, and you're also going to hear some R&B music that has crossed over. Well, three months after working for top 40, WNCI, WNCI went country. And what happens is you get rid of those disc jockeys that were on the radio playing Top 40, you have to bring a whole nother crew of people that are going to play country. Well, what was different about WNCI country is that it was the first FM country station back in the early 70s. Country was AM. You know, people did not want to switch their bands, their dials from AM to fm. So this was a rough. This was really rough for me to sell country music, not just because it's FM radio, but because I'm a Black female. So I ended up going all the way out on Route 8 to a tack shop because I figured, oh, you know, if I'm going to get advertisers, I got to figure out what country listeners, what that the country listener is after. They're into motorcycles, of course, cars, Chevys, you know, Fords. But I went out to a tack shop on Route 8, and I walked in and there was a guy, a white guy behind the counter. And I walked over to him and presented him my little business card and said, hi, my name is Charm Warren at the time, and I worked for WNCI. And the guy just looked at me, but through me, and never responded. He walked away, and I followed him and reiterated, you know, my little speech. And he still didn't respond. And so finally, I want to say, like, maybe two minutes passed, and I realized that he was ignoring me because I was Black. And then I became afraid because I was so far away from the beaten path, so far away from northeast side of Cleveland, that it finally hit me that I was experiencing racism and that I was so far away from my comfort zone that I needed to get out of there, you know, so that I did not become a statistic. But it was just that apparent to me that that was not the place for me to be.
Dana Aritonovich [00:29:05] And you were 23 years old.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:29:07] Twenty-three. Never, never experienced racism. Now, I want to say, because even though living on the east side of Cleveland, which is predominantly Black, especially the northeast side, the Wade Park area that I grew up in, every now and then we in class would have a couple of white kids, but we certainly didn't treat them any different, and they didn't treat us any differently. Our teachers, most of our teachers were white, you know, and I had never experienced racism before, before that time. Yeah.
Dana Aritonovich [00:29:52] Veer off a little bit from the music. I'm just going to ask about some more maybe like political type things. I've been doing some research on the Hough Riots and looking kind of comparing the way that the Call and Post reported the Hough Riots, the way the Plain Dealer reported them and the way they were, they report the actual events is pretty similar. But the Call and Post was reporting events that were leading up to it and basically predicting that something was going to happen. And the Plain Dealer, it was like it just kind of came out of nowhere. Do you remember any conversation, you know, that you might have had or that your parents or other people might have been having around the time the Hough Riots, the Glenville Riots, that time in the mid-'60s when you know, major cities were just erupting?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:30:35] Right. I want to say that I remember the riots kind of vividly. And the reason that I remember them vividly is because my parents' stores were right in the midst of the riots. One of our stores was on Crawford and Hough when the '67 ['66] riots took place. And if you remember, you may have read that what you would have to put on your in your door to stop rioters from destroying is that this business is Black owned. But I do remember both my mom and my dad having sleepless nights or my dad having to, you know, get up and go to the store to stay in the store to protect it. So I remember that happening in '67 on Hough and then '68, if my memory serves me correct on Superior. Someone I remember reading doing some research on the riots on Superior. And this is when Ahmed Evans was, was a part of that whole eruption that it started on 102nd and Superior at a grocery store. Well, my parents' fourth store was on 112th and Superior. So again I just remember kind of vividly us having to, you know, just be there to make sure that the businesses were safe. I do know that I want to say in '67, I think there was an altercation at a bar or something on Hough, an altercation between a bar owner who was white and a patron. That's what I remember hearing. And as to how the Hough Riots started. So I think that Black people were protesting how they were being treated by those people in the community that owned businesses in the community but didn't live there. So you're extracting, you know, taking money out of the community, not living there, not putting it back into the community. So, so I, I just remember that being part of it.
Dana Aritonovich [00:33:18] So your parents stores were they, they were safe?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:33:20] Oh yeah. Oh yeah, they were safe. We didn't have a problem during either of those riots, you know, with, with our businesses being destroyed. Yeah. So we're really lucky. Really lucky. Really lucky.
Dana Aritonovich [00:33:37] I know there were also. I don't know if there were actual riots, but I know there was kind of a threat of a riot when Martin Luther King was assassinated because I know.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:33:44] 68.
Dana Aritonovich [00:33:44] Yeah. One of the issues that I talked about in the previous version of this paper was the night after the assassination in Boston, James Brown was giving a concert and they aired it on the public radio station or everybody stayed indoors. And I remember my mom telling me a little bit about, you know, being kind of afraid to go out of the house during those. Because any place you went there was a threat of something happening. What do you remember about that time?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:34:12] I do remember my parents being extremely protective and keeping us either inside, whether it was inside home or inside the store. Because again, being self employed, if you're not open, you have no resources, money doesn't come in, so you have to at some point come outside, you know, and although they were sensitive to, you know, being fearful about things happening to us, again, when you're self employed, if your business isn't open, you're not making any money.
Dana Aritonovich [00:34:56] And what do you remember about Stokes's election?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:35:02] What I remember is just that the pride, the accomplishment that everybody felt, everybody Black, felt when he became the first Black mayor of a major city. I just remember people celebrating, people just feeling that things were going to change for the better. I also remember, and this is from research also, that this, when this was taking place, I didn't realize, but the riots in '68, the riots with Ahmed Evans, was the downfall of his administration. You know, I think the riots lasted longer than anybody wanted them to. And so when something that negative happens, there has to be a fall guy. And he was the fall guy for that.
Dana Aritonovich [00:36:13] The basic idea, what I, what my paper is about is about how media music kind of, maybe not even eases racial tensions, but kind of promotes racial understanding. And we do have a big musical legacy in Cleveland that a lot of people don't know anything about.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:36:30] Absolutely.
Dana Aritonovich [00:36:32] And obviously, you know, there's still racism in the world. There still is segregation in Cleveland. It's not official anymore. But what do you think is the legacy of this Black created and Black-inspired music in Cleveland as far as race goes in the city?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:36:50] Ask me one more time.
Dana Aritonovich [00:36:53] Let me say I can try to reword it. Basically. Do you think that the music that was created by black artists in Cleveland or even music, you know, Motown, any other kind of music that was created by black artists nationally, what kind of impact do you think that maybe had on race relations in the city of Cleveland?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:37:13] Did.
Dana Aritonovich [00:37:13] I mean, since, you know, a lot of the clubs that you mentioned, you said were not. They weren't really integrated clubs.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:37:17] They weren't.
Dana Aritonovich [00:37:19] You did sell some, you know, music by white artists in your store. And, you know, when I- When I write about the Moondog Coronation Ball, it was mainly a Black audience. Alan Freed's audiences were mainly Black teenagers. But then later on, as the music became more popular, a lot more white kids started listening to it. And that's when kind of the controversy about rock and roll started, was when Black kids, white kids, like the same kind of music. And that was a big deal. So in Cleveland, what kind of impact do you think the music had on racial understanding? You know, the kids do. A book I read about the south, talked about, you know, when young white kids started listening to rhythm and blues. And they over and over, when they interviewed them, they would say, we don't have the same prejudices that our parents have. Do you think that applies to Cleveland also?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:38:09] Let's see. I think as it relates to the local music scene, that the people that were most impacted by that local music scene, especially from a black perspective, were black folks. That there still is not an appreciation of that music from people that live in Cleveland if you didn't grow up with that music. Artists like Ponderosa Twins. Ponderosa Twins Plus One. Cleveland Robinson, Lou Ragland, the Constellations. If you didn't grow up with them, you don't even know that they exist. And that, in and of itself, is a travesty. I think it happens with our music. As black folks, we see it as disposable. Music is here today and it's gone tomorrow. Even, you know, when I came back here and I just got back to Cleveland last year, October, the same music that they were playing when I left is the same music that I hear today, which is sad to a degree when you stop and you realize that there's an abundance of new music quality, great music that's not being exposed here. But I guess the upside of that is that my granddaughter is singing the same song that I sang because she is getting a steady diet of it. The music that's being recycled, though, is such a drop, a small drop of the music that I grew up with, that unless something is done, kids are not going to know about, I think rap music, and I tell people this all the time, and I don't know if people look at it from this perspective, but when rap artists start digging in the crates, and by digging in the crates, I mean going into stores or going into their parents garages and, you know, going through the music that their parents or their grandparents grew up on and they started recycling it, it not only helped that generation, but it helped those generations before that created that music because it then brought attention or focus to it and it recycled it in a manner where everybody, not just that generation that recycled it, but the generation that originated it all got paid. People don't recognize, you know, even when people, when people my age or older look at rap music, they see only the negative aspect of it, which is oftentimes the lyrics, but they don't recognize the importance what these kids did because they took what was disposed. Disposed of because it was old music. They took it and they revitalized it and they recreated it and they recreated it in a manner where everybody got paid. That's important. That's very important. People don't look at- They don't look at it from that aspect oftentimes.
Dana Aritonovich [00:41:53] Do you think that music today has the same kind of social significance that it did, especially in the '60s, the late '60s? Do you think since you said there's a lot of critique of rap music, it's very violent, it's sexist, all this. Do you think there that it can have, you know, in 40 years we're going to be talking about these artists the same way we talk about, like James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, people like that as having had some more meaning than just a song on the radio.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:42:20] Right, right. I think that music today is as impactful socially as it was in the '60s, just in a different time and so the impact is different, but the effects are similar. Again, I think that when you stop and you look at the guys that are rap artists now, or even rap artists from the 90s, a lot of these kids, I mean, using Naughty by Nature as an example, these are kids that society had thrown away. They'll never amount to anything. They'll never do anything. There was just so much negativity thrusted upon these young Black men. And these young black men have impacted positively not just themselves, but their whole crew. Because what happens often times, and you know they're criticized for it, is a lot of them, a lot of rap artists travel with five or six or seven people that aren't really on stage or aren't really creatively involved with them. However, they're exposing these individuals to things above and beyond the four blocks that they live in. And when you do that, you create or you show opportunity. And the difference between the artists that grew up in the R&B era and the artists that have grown up on the rap genre is that these rap artists take not just themselves, they have a commitment not just to themselves, but to those that they grew up with. And so if they're, if they receive something or if they're impacted positively financially, they're going to help their crew as well. Whereas the R&B artist usually was self centered, you know, it was about them making it to the top. And you know, it. Most times they bought mom a house, you know, mom always got over. But for the most part it wasn't. They, they weren't bringing two or three to say at least about 10 other people along with them. Whereas you look at this generation and they are, they're not selfish. They're looking out not just for themselves, but for their family and that extended family, their boys that grew up with them. So, you know, you talk about a social, you know, positive impact musically and that's a different kind of social impact too.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:45:22] Absolutely.
Dana Aritonovich [00:45:23] With, you know, the people who are closest to you and then that will eventually kind of disseminate out into the community.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:45:28] Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, you talk about and you see the negative aspects of it, but you're not really looking really deep down to see what's really going on because, you know, just using again, Naughty by Nature as an example, I know that those three guys use their family members to start their careers. You know, they, they. If they were getting letters, the mom and the sisters were opening up the letters, responding to the fans. I saw it for myself. I saw it create social opportunities and financial opportunities for not just those core three individuals, but anybody that was affiliated with them.
Dana Aritonovich [00:46:20] I don't think I have any other questions. Is there anything else that you'd like to add about the music or about your experiences?
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:46:28] Well, I want to say that even though, because R&B was really strong, I can remember in the '70s going to Cleveland State, listening to Chicago or listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. So I guess what I'm saying is that as we grew up, we listened to a variety of music, a variety of influences, just because I think once we got out of our four blocks, we, you know, ended up having to go to work. And then when you, when you're working, you're being introduced to a whole other set of individuals that are coming from different places or different hoods than you are. And so from that you start experiencing or experimenting with other music forms, you know, and that. That really shaped us, I think.
Dana Aritonovich [00:47:34] Great. Okay. Thank you so much.
Charm Warren-Celestine [00:47:36] Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you.
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