Chase & Gene (Port Arthur, Texas)

Personnel :

Chase Canfil  (Vocal & Guitar)

Gene Paul (Vocal & Piano)

Discography :

Chase Canfil (& Gene Paul)
1959 - Woke Up This Morning / I Had A Dream Last Night (Dart 110)
1959 - Show Me The Way / When Are You Coming Home (Dart 130)

Chase & Gene
1960 - Good Loving / Bye Bye (Dart 146)
1963 - I Ran / I'm Through Foolin' (Hall-Way 1911)
1964 - I Need Love / You're Everything To Me (Sugar 1001)

Biography:

(By Gene Paul)
Chase Canfil and Gene Paul  met up in a honky-tonk on the highway out of Port Arthur Texas (also home of Janis Joplin, who became an intimate friend of Gene Paul when she was still in high school). Gene Paul was really a jazz pianist, recently discharged from the USAF, who wound up in the area when an $8 bus ticket got him to Texas. Chase Canfil and Gene Paul started talking At Stewart’s Club, they started hanging out, visiting all the joints in the area, picked out 4 black musicians from other bands, and started our own group: Chase & Gene.

photo of the group, 1958

Chase (Charles, Chas. Chase) was a barber, always ‘calculating’ – later, they cut our first record in an empty store front, and it was really sloppy. The main side was a song Chase had written, “I Had a Dream” and they got it on tape, amd then realized every record had two sides, so they made up one on the spot. Gene started with a piano riff that he ‘borrowed’ from a Stan Kenton album, and Chase made up words, and this is the side most people like, “Woke Up This Morning”.

  
They then got a manager, Bill Hall, who also managed The Big Bopper, and later Johnny Preston, both friends of Gene and Chase.  They cut their Dart's record  in Memphis, they were supposed to do it at Jerry Lee Lewis’ brand new studio, but they couldn’t get the sound and they went across town late at night and made the record at The Hole In The Wall studio, which was owed by Cowboy Jack Clement, who later produced “Ring of Fire” with Johnny Cash.

Chase & Gene
Chase and Gene had to drop the black mixed band after a year… got too difficult, with a mixed race band… cops gave us a bad time… they could not work across the state line in Lousiana, where one of the biggest and best-paying honky-tonks was – it was against state law for mixed races to appear on the same stage at the same time. They went through maybe 5 or 7 bands, eventually cooling down to a quartet playing a private dinner club up until the end in ’64.

Songs :

    
You're Everything To Me                                 I Ran          

   
    Good Loving                                   Woke Up This Morning

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