It’s time to sharpen those pencils: Dorchester’s Isaque ‘Brother Ike’ Rezende and radio and record-store legend Skippy White – who brought soul and rhythm & blues music to generations of Bostonians – are delivering music education classes with their radio show and podcast, “Soul School.”
The two-year old show – available at WBCA 102.9 FM Sundays at 6 p.m. or in podcast form on Mixcloud – has delivered more than 60 episodes, and the camaraderie between the 43-year-old Brother Ike, and the 89-year-old White has brought in listeners and frequent guests with an ear for great old music and a hunger for the history behind the sounds.
The co-hosts are frequently joined on the show by Reginald Gaylord Grant of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes and have hosted local musicians like ‘Boston’s Queen of the Blues & Soul’ Toni Lynn Washington, of Dorchester, and even legendary soulaArtists like Eddie Holman & Russell Thompkins, Jr. of The Stylistics.
“Brother Ike is great at asking questions and I answer questions,” said White in a recent interview in Dorchester. “He has a thirst for the history of what has happened in the past, particularly with music. We hooked up that way and it’s the basis for the program ‘Soul School.’”
Said Brother Ike: “Skippy and I have become fast friends, and it’s evolved to the point where maybe it’s like a father-son relationship and perhaps I’m the father at times.”
Said White, with a laugh: “Yeah, that’s right. I’m the son and he’s the father.”
Added Brother Ike: “We put on a lot of great music and listen to it and Skippy will tell phenomenal stories between the songs about the music, the artists, and how they are connected to the Boston soul scene.”
White, whose real name is Fredric LeBlanc, was a well-known record store owner with locations in South End, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan from the 1950s until 2019. He sparked the legendary format change for the radio station 1090 WILD in the late 1950s from pop music to a long run as the place to hear the sounds of urban contemporary musicians and singers.
He has hosted so many famous musicians that it becomes hard to remember all of them – though Brother Ike has a talent for pulling the names out of him.
There are White’s tales of attending a James Brown concert at Hibernian Hall in 1958, or having the ‘The G-Clefs’, a local doo wop group, hanging around Skippy White’s Records in the 1960s.
“We were telling people the history of what happened while playing the music,” said White. “It’s a fun dynamic. Brother Ike is very prone to Motown and I’m more into the deeper rhythm and blues music, but we’re always able to come to an agreement.”
The unlikely pair met in Harvard Square in 2022 while White was making an appearance at an album release party in his honor that featured music he had produced in the 1960s. They met again at the Grove Hall Library during another Skippy White public appearance. Soon they were going to music events together and Brother Ike was learning volumes from White about the music they both loved. At some point, they agree, it only made sense to launch a show.
White was already hosting two long-time programs called the ‘Time Tunnel’ and ‘Gospel Train’ on other stations, so they took ‘Soul School’ on a different path.
As an example, during a recent stretch where they highlighted the music of cities like New Orleans, Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago, and Boston, White and Brother Ike introduced listeners to Memphis’s Johnny Ace, who had numerous hits in the 1950s. Before playing Ace’s “Pledging My Love,’ White relayed the history of the artist’s untimely death.
Recalling a star-studded music tour that had landed in Houston with Ace as the headliner, White noted how the artist was handling a pistol backstage that he had purchased when he decided to play Russian Roulette with a single bullet in the chamber. He rolled the cylinder and fired the weapon at his girlfriend’s head, but nothing happened. Then, said White, “he pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger and that was the end of Johnny Ace in 1954.”
Another episode featured White and Brother Ike discussing the day when a woman gave birth in White’s record store on Massachusetts Avenue in the South End.
“We heard her making noises and shouting in the bathroom…and the next thing I knew a baby was crying,” said White. They followed their story with the playing of “Cry, Cry, Baby” by Garnet Mimms.
Brother Ike noted that the early episodes of ‘Soul School’ focused on White’s own history with the music scene in Boston and around the country.
Listeners learned that it was Hank Williams’s death that propelled White into soul music ahead of the ownership of a camera shop that he was looking at doing.
“There wasn’t much to listen to after that and that’s when I was turning the radio dial and that’s when I heard “Crying in the Chapel” by the Sonny Till & the Orioles. It blew me away,” he said.
White started collecting R&B records, then took a job at Smilin’ Jack’s College Music Shop on Massachusetts Avenue. It was there that he was struck by the idea that sparked the re-creation of WILD as an urban radio station – and it was from there that he set out to build his own chain of neighborhood-based record stores.
“The only way to sell records was to play it in the store one after another until you found something they liked,” White said. “My idea for the radio was that people came into Smilin’ Jack’s and didn’t know what the hits were, so we needed to get some of that music on the radio. That was my idea behind going to WILD.”
‘Soul School’ listeners are also educated on how in the mid-1950s, WILD wasn’t a cutting edge urban music station, but rather a struggling operation playing Sinatra, Perry Como and Dean Martin records. White persuaded the owner to change formats, but it took some flirting with the truth, he said.
“I didn’t go there to become a DJ; I just wanted to pick the music and program it, but when he asked if I had ever been in front of a microphone, I had to fib,” said White. “If I’d have said ‘no,’ probably this whole thing would have been shot down. I said ‘yes,’ and he said, okay.”
White and Brother Ike often banter about how that one moment led to White’s career as a DJ, and how great DJ’s like Wild Man Steve and Jimmy ‘Early’ Bird relocated to Boston to work at WILD.
So far, the episode they’ve both enjoyed discussing the most is focused on New Orleans. White said he would likely be living in the “Big Easy” if he weren’t in Boston. For his part, Brother Ike revealed the results of a DNA test done for White that showed he had some Cajun roots.
“If you go back to the 1950s with Fats Domino and Professor Longhair you had a fantastic music scene in New Orleans…It’s the sound for me. Absolutely the best sound, and I love it,” he noted.
At the moment, ‘Soul School’ is promoting ‘The Big Show,’ a concert at 7 p.m. on Aug. 23, at The Strand Theatre in Dorchester, which will have 10 R&B and soul acts and a tribute to the great WILD DJ’s. Some of the acts include Russell Thompkins, Jr. and The New Stylistics, The Temptations Revue, Blue Magic Revue, The Chi-Lites Revue, Eddie Holman, The Dramatics Tribute Band and others.
The host will be former WILD DJ Rick Anderson.
“This is going to be a fabulous show because there are 10 major acts,” said White. “We had a previous show in Medford and a lot of the people in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan couldn’t make it to Medford…The only comments we got out there from people was to have it in town at The Strand Theatre. This year we will have it at the Strand.”
Until that time, the education will continue on “Soul School,” and that’s something that Brother Ike cherishes.
“Skippy never met a microphone he didn’t like,” said Brother Ike. “He’s always on and I’ve learned from his professionalism and the man when he is off mic, too. He is very positive and funny. It’s been a privilege and honor to sit and learn from him the last two years.”
