Gene Barge, one of many final surviving saxophonists of the golden age of R&B, whose profession ran the gamut of Twentieth-century Black well-liked music, died on Sunday at his house in Chicago. He was 98.
His loss of life was confirmed by his daughter Gina Barge.
Identified by the nickname Daddy G, Mr. Barge performed on landmark hits of the rock and soul period, starting with Chuck Willis’s swinging remake of the blues normal “C.C. Rider.”
Galvanized by Mr. Barge’s moaning tenor saxophone, “C.C. Rider” reached No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1957 and stalled simply exterior the Prime 10 on the pop chart. In 1963, Mr. Barge was featured on Jimmy Soul’s calypso-derived “If You Wanna Be Joyful,” a No. 1 pop and R&B hit.
His best acclaim, although, got here in 1961 with “Quarter to Three,” a No. 1 pop single recorded with the R&B shouter Gary U.S. Bonds. Hoping to capitalize on the success of “New Orleans,” his first large hit, Mr. Bonds created “Quarter to Three” by including lyrics to “A Evening With Daddy G,” a churning instrumental that Mr. Barge had just lately written and recorded along with his band the Church Avenue 5.
“Oh, don’t you recognize that I danced/I danced ’til 1 / 4 to three/With the assistance, final night time, of Daddy G,” Mr. Bonds sings on the opening refrain.
(“A Evening With Daddy G” would show doubly auspicious when Dion borrowed its melody for “Runaround Sue,” a finger-snapping marvel that topped the pop chart in late 1961.)
Regardless of having the advantage of Mr. Barge’s snaking saxophone runs — and regardless of the report’s affinity with the twist dance craze of the day — “Quarter to Three” was an unlikely sensation. Muffled and lo-fi, it sounded as if it had been recorded in a rest room or a stairwell.
“This report is fuzzy, muzzy and distorted,” the British tv producer Jack Good wrote in a 1961 challenge of Disc, the favored weekly music journal later absorbed into Report Mirror. “In response to present-day technical requirements it’s appalling. Nevertheless, for my cash, the disc isn’t just good, it’s sensational and revolutionary.”
Mr. Good’s evaluation of the report proved prescient. An exuberant fusion of doo-wop, Black gospel and incipient frat rock, “Quarter to Three” not solely impressed the big-beat rock ’n’ roll of the Beatles and the garage-rock of bands just like the Kingsmen and the Sir Douglas Quintet. It additionally offered a blueprint for the sax-and-vocal exchanges between Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen, a rapturous name and response that got here to outline the E Avenue Band, which frequently carried out “Quarter to Three” in live performance.
Breaking into pop music when the saxophone was ascendant (and earlier than it was supplanted by the electrical guitar), Mr. Barge was as distinctive and versatile a stylist as King Curtis, if much less well-known. Over six a long time, he performed on or produced data by Muddy Waters, the Chi-Lites and the incendiary Detroit funk band Black Merda. He additionally toured with Ray Charles, Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones.
Sources differ as to how Mr. Barge got here to be generally known as Daddy G. The sobriquet, although, was already gaining traction earlier than the discharge of “Quarter to Three,” when the Philadelphia disc jockey Hy Lit adopted “A Evening With Daddy G” because the theme music for his radio present. Shortly afterward, the doo-wop group the Dovells paid homage to Mr. Barge on their 1961 hit “Bristol Stomp,” singing, “We ponied and twisted and we rocked with Daddy G.”
James Gene Barge Jr. was born on Aug. 9, 1926, in Norfolk, Va., the oldest of eight youngsters of James and Thelma (Edwards) Barge. His father performed banjo and labored as a welder within the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. His mom managed the house.
Mr. Barge performed clarinet in highschool and took up the saxophone solely after his father introduced house a waterlogged tenor that he had discovered on a torpedo-damaged ship. He was 20 on the time and had simply accomplished two years within the Military Air Forces.
After graduating from West Virginia State School in 1950 with a level in music, he taught highschool and pursued music as an avocation. Jazz was a formative affect, particularly the bubbling phrasing of the good tenor saxophonist Lester Younger.
The primary recordings Mr. Barge made below his personal identify have been a pair of instrumentals for Checker, a subsidiary of Chess Data, in 1956. “Nation,” his first single, was a success alongside the Jap Seaboard.
“When Chess heard it, they stated, ‘What the hell is that?’” Mr. Barge stated of the report in a 2007 interview with Virginia Dwelling journal.
“That they had by no means heard a saxophone sound like that earlier than. They even gave it a phrase: funk. That was the popularity I acquired — that Gene Barge may play funky.”
Round 1960 Mr. Barge started his transient however fruitful affiliation with the producer Frank Guida, whose Legrand label launched “A Evening With Daddy G” and Mr. Bonds’s early singles. Mr. Barge and Mr. Bonds had a second main hit along with “College Is Out,” which reached the Prime 10 in 1961, however loved solely modest success after that.
In 1964, as impartial report labels with nationwide distribution more and more dominated regional markets, Mr. Barge deserted educating — and Norfolk’s small Legrand imprint — and moved to Chicago to work for Chess Data. Whereas there he performed on R&B hits like Little Milton’s “Grits Ain’t Groceries” and Koko Taylor’s “Wang Dang Doodle” and produced albums, together with Buddy Man’s acclaimed 1967 effort, “Left My Blues in San Francisco.”
Within the late Sixties, he additionally directed the musical ensemble of the Chicago chapter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Operation Breadbasket, a company headed domestically by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Mr. Barge later ran the gospel division of Stax Data and, over the following a long time, labored as a contract musician, producer and arranger, most notably on Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning single “Subtle Woman (She’s a Completely different Woman).” Within the late Seventies he took a detour into performing, working domestically in Chicago (he made his display debut as a saxophonist within the impartial 1978 movie “Stony Island”) earlier than ultimately touchdown roles in Hollywood motion thrillers like “Beneath Siege” (1992) and “The Fugitive” (1993).
Mr. Barge remained lively into the 2000s, serving as a guide for Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS documentary sequence “The Blues” and enjoying on data like Public Enemy’s “Superman’s Black within the Constructing” and with the avant-garde jazz trumpeter Malachi Thompson.
“Gene Barge is the flyest octogenarian I do know,” Chuck D of Public Enemy informed Virginia Dwelling in 2007. “To go from Muddy Waters to Public Enemy is an effective trick.”
Along with his daughter Gina, Mr. Barge is survived by one other daughter, Gail Florence; three siblings, Celestine Bailey, Kim Williamson and Milton Barge; two grandchildren; and several other great-grandchildren. His spouse, Sarah Barge, died in 2008. His first marriage led to divorce.
Mr. Barge’s profession won’t have gotten off to the beginning it did with Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider” have been it not for his endurance and good humor. After enjoying the grinding riff on the demo that persuaded Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Data to report it as a single, he was flown to New York for the session, solely to search out that one other saxophonist had been employed as an alternative.
“Ertegun and Wexler informed me they have been going to pay me, however they didn’t need me to play,” Mr. Barge informed Virginia Dwelling.
“I went right down to the liquor retailer, man, acquired me a pint and sat down on the ground to hearken to them. They did 27 takes and weren’t happy. So Chuck stated, ‘Look, why don’t you let Gene run down one to get the texture?’ So I ran down one and so they stated, ‘Maintain it, that’s it, you bought it. Let’s lower it.’”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
