Ann Bell’s Great Music Career Celebrated With Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame Induction

By Terrell Lester
Editor at Large

She is hailed as the High Priestess of Soul.
Celebrated as the Epochal Doyenne of Funk.
She is the Voice for the Ages. Ann Bell, First Lady of the Tulsa Sound.
Ann Bell, dynamic, animated, passionate, tears into the blues with an authenticity and a palpability unmatched and unapproached for more than a half-century.
She was a night-club headliner as a Tulsa teen, embraced by rock ‘n’ roll royalty.
She was recruited and mentored by Leon Russell, toured with J.J. Cale, with Joe Cocker.
And in September, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.
She accepted her august salute as only Ann Bell could. She sang. She rocked. She wailed. She dazzled.
On a stage adjacent to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame Museum in downtown Muskogee, 70-year-old Ann Bell commanded a dynamic seven-piece band through an hour-plus performance that soared and showcased the vocal emotion and personality of a musical force of nature.
Her soulful voice, her innate rhythm, are part and parcel of the culture, the sensation, that defines the Tulsa Sound.
Her spirited vocals added a textured layer to the shuffle-infused blues and down-home rock born in tiny Tulsa clubs and exported to the world.
Popular supposition surrounding the origins of Ann Bell, Tulsa musical treasure, focuses on the late-1960s and her days at Thomas Edison High School.
Tulsa’s music scene was a potpourri of sound. Rock was beginning its second decade. Sammy Pagna was a big-band institution. Sonny Gray and Suzan Gray were forces in jazz. Leon McAuliffe and Johnnie Lee Wills were in the autumn of their country legacies.
Leon Russell and J.J. Cale had set up shop on the West Coast. Many of the Tulsa sidemen who had followed them had begun to drift back home to their musical roots.
Tulsa night clubs, the Fondalite for adults, The Machine for teens, were beginning to feature the bands of local musicians.
Ann Bishop felt the attraction of that spotlight. Felt moved by the music of the day.
Her brother, Eddie Bishop, played guitar in early bands. Ann was not far behind.
She joined with friends and Edison classmates to form the band The Rubbery Cargo.
Seemingly overnight, the band with Dick Gordon Jr., Wayne Evans, Max Wisely and Bill Phillips, featuring the vibrant brunette vocalist, was headlining The Machine, operated by Skilly Forsman, the woman who taught Tulsa to dance.
Within a year, Ann Bishop was introduced to local keyboard wizard Larry Bell. After a triumphant West Coast turn with Leon Russell and countless studio sessions, Bell was heading up a local band, the Sunday Servants – Tommy Tripplehorn, Carl Day, John Rigney, Gary Sanders. They brought aboard the effervescent Ann Bishop to expand the vocal offerings.
By 1968, Ann Bishop had become Mrs. Larry Bell, and the legend was taking shape.
Much of the rock sound from females up to that point, she said, was created by white vocalists. Leslie Gore and Sandra Dee giving way to Grace Slick and Janis Joplin.
“I was listening to the (rhythm and blues) artists of the day, Patti LaBelle and Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Gladys Knight,” Ann Bell said.
“Those girls were the ones that were really moving me. I was more into the costuming of the Black girl singers. And the soul that they sang with. That pain of heartbreak. That’s what drew me in.”
With The Rubbery Cargo, Ann was most likely to rock a Grace Slick number or two along with a few Beatles covers.
Her life changed in 1968 with a single Larry Bell intervention.
Prior to joining the Sunday Servants, she said that Larry Bell gave her two albums, one by Tina Turner, one by Aretha Franklin.
“Pick six songs between those two albums and learn them,” Larry told his future bride.
She did.
“That’s when I locked into the R&B,” she said. “I moved away from some of the white singers like Grace Slick over to the Black singers like Aretha.
“I loved it. I stayed there for the rest of my life.
“I think about the only other white thing I ever did after that was maybe a Carole King song every now and then.”
The Bells, married in 1968, and their band quickly became a local favorite. They were regularly booked for gigs at Tulsa landmarks like PJs, Jose’s, The Stables, Blue Moon.
Through Larry and his wide-ranging contacts, Ann was introduced to Leon Russell, to Joe Cocker, to J.J. Cale.
Their influences on the young singer were affecting and enduring.
In 1973, two years after her divorce from Bell, Ann went out on tour with Russell. Four years later, she joined the Cocker entourage for a five-year run.
“I had quite a colorful early upbringing with Leon and those guys,” she said. “It was overwhelming, to be like 17 when Larry and I started dating and got married.
“At that point, Leon brought me into what is being called, now Leon didn’t label it, but people did, the Tulsa Sound. Now I’m singing with people like Cale, (drummers) Chuck Blackwell, Jimmy Karstein. I was almost speechless.
“Leon mentored me. He would affirm me, validate my singing. He’d tell me: ‘Girl, just go out there and sing what you feel. Don’t worry about what (others) think.’
“That’s when I started getting my boldness. That’s when I said, OK, that’s what I’m going to do.”
There is an infectious spontaneity that envelops and defines Ann Bell when she speaks.
Any conversation with her at the center is at once a colorful portrait of Tulsa’s euphonious musical history.
Before her parents moved into the Edison district in the ‘60s, Ann said the family lived near Archer
Street and Denver Avenue.
“There was a Black church in the neighborhood,” she said. “I could hear the gospel sounds in the summer when the doors and windows were open.”
The sounds, she said, “just drove me, even as a little kid.”
“The freedom that they sang with just inspired me. I felt the emotion.”
She continues to sing with that same emotion, that same freedom.
“For me, it was always about how I really felt in the depth of my own soul,” she said.
Russell’s piano work also leaned heavily toward what Ann called “the Black gospel-rooted R&B.”
The Tulsa Sound, though never definitively spelled out, can be broken down into that gospel-rooted R&B with a shuffle beat.
“When they brought me in, really, as the first woman,” she said of the Tulsa musicians of the late ‘60s, “I was the first woman in the Tulsa Sound.
“I had found my place. When I sang my songs, I meant them. I didn’t just do them because they were in the Top 10. The songs I picked were songs that I related to from the story lines.
“I owe Leon everything,” she said.
Russell and Cale were at the forefront of the Tulsa Sound, taking their music, their beat, their influence, to the West Coast studios in the early-’60s.
Among the other pacesetters and bellwethers were drummers Jamie Oldaker, David Teegarden, Jimmy Karstein, Chuck Blackwell, Jim Keltner. In addition to Larry Bell, recognized members of the Tulsa Sound included Jimmy Markham (harmonica), Carl Radle (bass), Tommy Tripplehorn (guitar), Dick Sims (keyboard), John Rigney (keyboard), Jimmy Byfield (vocals, guitar).
“It was such a magical time in musical history,” Ann said of the decade of the ‘60s when the Tulsa Sound was impacting audiences and musicians across the country, and beyond.
“When Eric Clapton came to Tulsa, it was to hire players,” she said. “Why? Because they were the greatest players in the world.
“When Ringo (Starr), when Elton (John), when Peter Frampton, when any artist came to Tulsa, they wanted Tulsa players.
“The Tulsa players played blues better than anybody. But we had our own approach to the blues. When (outsiders) needed that feel, you came to Tulsa to get those players.
“And those were the best people you could learn from. We were all learning. It was an education. It was wonderful. It was family.
“That’s one of the things that sets the Tulsa Sound players apart from other musicians in the country, in the world. They did not crave the spotlight. They did not crave it for their own self gain. What they craved was the music. It was always about the music.
“It’s why, I think, they endured where other players have come and gone. They didn’t get intoxicated with their own celebrity. They actually had their priorities right,” she said.
Today, Ann lives in Cleveland, Tennessee with her husband, keyboardist Tom Nicholson, who was in her backing band for the hall of fame performance.
She said that plans are being made to relocate to Tulsa within a year or two.
“I want to continue to contribute to the music that’s in Tulsa and in Oklahoma,” she said.
“I want to be used however I need to be used. To do that, I want to be available. I’m wanting to mother this (musical) generation that’s coming up however I can.”
But Ann Bell cautions the new generation of local musicians: “Don’t use the term Tulsa Sound.”
The name applies, she said with feeling, only to the originals.
“You had to have lived in that time,” she said.
And Ann Bell did live in that time.
Now, it is Ann Bell’s time to bask in the glow of membership in the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. As the First Lady of the Tulsa Sound.