Arnett's Early Music Years Part One

Arnett Howard’s Early Musical Days
Part One

July 21, 2007 marks the fortieth anniversary of my beginnings as a professional musician. I would like to leave a record of my musical history, in case it should become a subject of interest to some future musicians, historians and friends that I have made because of the thousands of concerts that I have played since 1967.
It was at Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Marysville, Ohio, that Delores Grettavon Williams Howard, mother to four loud boys, sang solos with the choir. our father, George Howard, supervised the Sunday Schools and the boys tinkled on the church piano. Mom found a used, upright piano and brought it to her new Plain City home’s recreation room and arranged for her two oldest boys, Arnett and Gerald, to take piano lessons from the pastor’s wife, Mary Liggins.
The Howard house became a magnet for musical instruments in 1960; a guitar and field drum came from Uncle Al Turner in Twinsburg Heights, Ohio, a bugle from Billy Leftwich down the street in Frazier Estates, a classic drum set and percussion toys from Mrs. Cornetta Palmer, whose late husband, Pete, played with jass bands and a home reel tape recorder that was Delores’ pride.
Our first neighborhood band was called The Soul InterNationals (Music So Good It’s a Sin!) and the songbook was made up of Motown hits (Junior Walker, The Four Tops, Temptations...), Memphis soul (Sam and Dave, Dyke and the Blazers, Booker T & M.G.s...) and of course, the hardest workin’ man in show business, James Brown. We played neighborhood parties and teen radio dances thanks to a uncle of two of our players who was an announcer on WVKO-AM & FM.
During the winter of 1967, Uncle Bill Chapman recommended his young trumpeter, Arnett, aged sixteen, to a Westside recording studio that was doing a four track session with a London, Ohio band called The Vadicans (as opposed to the Vatican, home of Pope Benedictus). The band like the kid and by mid-July, after I finished performing in Kenley Players Summer Theater (Bye Bye Birdie), they ask me to join them onstage at their Saturday show.
I hitched a ride with a neighbor from Plain City and rode the bus to the Arena Bowling Alley Lounge, at Columbus’ 1436 East Main Street and Miller Avenue. I hooked up on the bus with a fellow session horn player, Mickey Wallace and when we walked in the doorway of the lounge, the Vadican’s were playing the new James Brown hit, Cold Sweat. Although Mickey and I were underaged, we walked straight to the stage blowing our horns.
I traveled to Black nightclubs throughout Central Ohio with the Vadicans that summer and weekends during my entire senior year at Jonathan Alder High School in Plain City. My band director, Ray Starrett, was so enthusiastic about his prized student’s professional travels that he loaned his Bach Stradivarius trumpet when the kid left his horn in the recording studio and it was lost.