YEAR
2010
INDUCTED BY
Carole King
CATEGORY
Ahmet Ertegun Award
Jesse Stone was on the frontlines of Atlantic’s stampede toward a new sound.
Jesse Stone was too good to ignore. Songs written by Stone such as “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Money Honey” demanded to be heard by black and white audiences alike, leading to further integration in the music realm and the popularization of R&B with white audiences.
Jesse Stone
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Tony Fletcher
Perhaps no other American popular-music composer straddled the twentieth century quite like Jesse Stone, and not only because he witnessed its every single year.
Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock & roll sound than anybody else, said Ahmet Ertegun, and that was surely because his trajectory embodied all the creative black-music forms of the early twentieth century. Born in Kansas in November 1901 into a long line of musicians, Jesse Albert Stone was singing in his family’s minstrel show — alongside a trained dog — at the age of just 4.
By the mid-192os, he was an accomplished piano player, ensconced on the Kansas City jazz scene, where his group the Blues Serenaders recorded a handful of enduring cuts for the preeminent Okeh Records.
