Nathan's biggest mistake was failing to hang on to the Platters. Signed in 1953 they had three recording sessions. The last one included "Only You" but was never released. The Platter's manager Buck Ram managed the Penguins, too. Mercury Records was interested in the Penguins and Ram told Mercury if they wanted the Penguins they had to take the Platters, too. The Platters would go on to be the most successful vocal group of the fifties.
Nathan was in a good position when rock and roll came on the scene, but had never found that artist who could cross over and sell to white teenagers. "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett was his biggest rock and roll record.
Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino's writing and producer at Imperial Records, recorded "My Ding-a-Ling" for King Records in 1952. It went nowhere. Chuck Berry featuring it in his concerts would have a number one hit with it twenty years later.
Seven or eight months Willie Littlefield recorded the the original version of Leiber and Stoller's Kansas City. It was released as K.C. Loving rather then Kansas City.
Little Willie John was born in Arkansas and raised in Detroit. Identified early as a prodigy many bandleaders courted him and eventually he signed with Paul Williams. In June, 1955 he signed with King and a year later he had his biggest R&B hit "Fever."
The music business began to change in the late fifties with the F.C.C. payola hearings. Nathan had made no secret of his payments and they had been made by check and used as a business deduction. As the hearings progress he made fall guys out of A&R men Henry Glover and Ralph Bass. King might have been in trouble, but the label had concentrated on LPs which accounted for sixty five percent of the companies business. Nathan re-recorded his back catalog onto albums, brought titles from failing labels and licenses from abroad.
In 1958 The Midnighters contract expired with King. Ballard went to Miami and cut a session that included "The Twist." The session somehow ended up with Vee- Jay Records. Somehow Nathan got the Midnighters back and signed them to the King label. Now called Hank Ballard and the Midnighters with "the Twist" being the first song recorded under the new contract. "The Twist" was the b side of "Teardrops On Your Letter" and went nowhere. However, Ballard kept playing it at show dates along with a dance routine he had worked up. Buddy Dean, a Baltimore host of a TV dance show saw the excitement that "The Twist" was creating, called Dick Clark who invited Ballard onto the show. Ballard was hung up in Atlanta with a woman, so Clark had Ernest "Chubby Checker" Evans perform the song. The rest is history.
Ballard then came up with "Finger Poppin Time" which started a second dance craze.
The star of King's later years was James Brown who was signed to the Federal label in 1956. A branch manager in Federal's Georgia office gave a dub to Ralph Bass to listen to. After hearing it Bass drove to Macon, Georgia and signed him on the spot for two hundred dollars.
Bass took the Flames back to Cincinnati and recorded "Please, Please, Please" the song he had heard on the dub. After hearing the record Nathan said
" That's the worse piece of crap I've heard in my life. It's someone stuttering on a record only saying one word. You spent all that money bringing those people up here, giving that man two hundred dollars....." Syd Nathan
Nathan was proved wrong when "Please, Please,Please" eventually charted #5 on the R&B charts, but ultimately seemed to have been right as the next nine went nowhere. 1958s "Try Me" saved Brown from being dropped and he became a fixture on the R&B charts for the next twenty years.
Nathan, who was never healthy, began having heart problems while in his fifties. A month and half shy of the official retirement age and six months shy of King Record's twenty-fifth anniversary Nathan died of heart disease complicated by pneumonia on March 5, 1968 in Miami, Florida. In October King was sold to Starday Records with the understanding Starday would be sold to Lin Broadcasting in Nashville. Three years later Tennessee Recording and Publishing, owned by Leiber and Stoller, ex-King vice-president Hal Neely and music publisher Freddy Bienstock, purchased King Starday from Lin. In the July before the sale Lin had sold the James Brown contract and catalog to Polydor while retaining the rest.
Tennessee Recording and Publishing sold the King Starday masters, but not the the music publishing, to its current owner GMI, Inc. of Nashville in 1975. GML later acquired the masters of Sceptor/Wand, Musicor and other labels making King Starday part of the largest independently owned vault of masters in the world.
Ralph Bass was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991
Syd Nathan was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997