Biography
Chicago’s roster of enterprising businessmen and vivid personalities once included producer and club proprietor Narvel Eatmon, known professionally as Cadillac Baby. He is chiefly associated today with the imprint Bea & Baby Records, which he launched in 1959 and on which he documented many of the city’s leading blues artists; the resulting masters have been reissued in scattered fashion since his death in 1991. Born in Cayuga, Mississippi, on July 3, 1914, Eatmon had followed the familiar northward path taken by numerous musicians he would eventually record. His commercial standing rested on several concurrent retail ventures—an appliance-repair shop, a well-supplied record outlet, and a candy store warmed by a wood-burning stove.
The most visible elements of his holdings were Cadillac Baby’s Showbar, located at 47th and Dearborn, and the Bea & Baby label he operated with his wife Bea, along with its Keyhole and Miss subsidiaries. Across the years those imprints issued an extensive sequence of recordings by Roosevelt Sykes, James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Homesick James, Eddie Boyd, Hound Dog Taylor, Earl Hooker, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Little Mac Simmons, L.G. McKinley, Willie Williams, Johnny Littlejohn, Detroit Junior, Hammie Nixon, Porter Kilbert, Oett “Sax” Mallard, Tall Paul Hankins, Sleepy John Estes, Arlean Brown, Menard Rogers, Willie Hudson, Andrew McMahon, and vocal-harmony ensembles such as the Chances, the Daylighters, and Faith Taylor & the Sweet Teens. The label’s strongest commercial release came in 1960 with Bobby Saxton’s “Trying to Make a Living.”
A fire near the close of the 1970s consumed the record store and label headquarters, eliminating stocks of LPs and 45s as well as tapes, photographs, and paperwork. Eatmon nevertheless sustained his promotional work through Michael Frank, an acquaintance since 1974, and the two men jointly oversaw a recording project for rapper 3D during the 1980s. Cadillac Baby died in 1991. After segments of the Bea & Baby catalog appeared piecemeal on haphazard compilations, Michael Robert Frank undertook a systematic reissue of the entire legacy on his Earwig label. In 2008, however, public attention was diverted by the release of the motion picture Cadillac Records, which dramatized the history of Chess Records—an irony sharpened by the fact that both Vee Jay and Chess had ranked among Bea & Baby’s chief rivals.
The most visible elements of his holdings were Cadillac Baby’s Showbar, located at 47th and Dearborn, and the Bea & Baby label he operated with his wife Bea, along with its Keyhole and Miss subsidiaries. Across the years those imprints issued an extensive sequence of recordings by Roosevelt Sykes, James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Homesick James, Eddie Boyd, Hound Dog Taylor, Earl Hooker, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Little Mac Simmons, L.G. McKinley, Willie Williams, Johnny Littlejohn, Detroit Junior, Hammie Nixon, Porter Kilbert, Oett “Sax” Mallard, Tall Paul Hankins, Sleepy John Estes, Arlean Brown, Menard Rogers, Willie Hudson, Andrew McMahon, and vocal-harmony ensembles such as the Chances, the Daylighters, and Faith Taylor & the Sweet Teens. The label’s strongest commercial release came in 1960 with Bobby Saxton’s “Trying to Make a Living.”
A fire near the close of the 1970s consumed the record store and label headquarters, eliminating stocks of LPs and 45s as well as tapes, photographs, and paperwork. Eatmon nevertheless sustained his promotional work through Michael Frank, an acquaintance since 1974, and the two men jointly oversaw a recording project for rapper 3D during the 1980s. Cadillac Baby died in 1991. After segments of the Bea & Baby catalog appeared piecemeal on haphazard compilations, Michael Robert Frank undertook a systematic reissue of the entire legacy on his Earwig label. In 2008, however, public attention was diverted by the release of the motion picture Cadillac Records, which dramatized the history of Chess Records—an irony sharpened by the fact that both Vee Jay and Chess had ranked among Bea & Baby’s chief rivals.