House of Hits

The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios

By Andy Bradley and Roger Wood

SERIES: Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Series

University of Texas Press

Founded in a working-class neighborhood in southeast Houston in 1941, Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios is a major independent studio that has produced a multitude of influential hit records in an astonishingly diverse range of genres. Its roster of recorded musicians includes Lightnin' Hopkins, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Junior Parker, Clifton Chenier, Sir Douglas Quintet, 13th Floor Elevators, Freddy Fender, Kinky Friedman, Ray Benson, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, Beyoncé and Destiny's Child, and many, many more.

In House of Hits, Andy Bradley and Roger Wood chronicle the fascinating history of Gold Star/SugarHill, telling a story that effectively covers the postwar popular music industry. They describe how Houston's lack of zoning ordinances allowed founder Bill Quinn's house studio to grow into a large studio complex, just as SugarHill's willingness to transcend musical boundaries transformed it into of one of the most storied recording enterprises in America. The authors offer behind-the-scenes accounts of numerous hit recordings, spiced with anecdotes from studio insiders and musicians who recorded at SugarHill. Bradley and Wood also place significant emphasis on the role of technology in shaping the music and the evolution of the music business. They include in-depth biographies of regional stars and analysis of the various styles of music they represent, as well as a list of all of Gold Star/SugarHill's recordings that made the Billboard charts and extensive selected historical discographies of the studio's recordings.

Authors
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Andy Bradley has been a professional recording engineer since 1978 and has served as SugarHill's chief engineer for the past 25 years. He has worked on Grammy-nominated projects with extensive credits in classical, jazz, Latin, blues, rock, folk, country, and every imaginable flavor of gospel music.

Roger Wood is the author of Texas Zydeco and Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues. A Professor of English at Houston Community College Central, he also is a contributing writer to The Roots of Texas Music, The Handbook of Texas Music, Encyclopedia of the Blues, and various other books and periodicals.