1. King Curtis
2. Sam "The Man" Taylor
3. Lee Allen
4. Maceo Parker
5. Big Jay McNeely
6. Clifford Scott
7. Mike Terry
8. Herb Hardesty
9. Steve Douglas
10. Andrew Love
11. Clarence Clemons
12. Alvin "Red" Tyler
13. "Daddy" Gene Barge
14. Maxwell Davis
15. St. Clair Pinckney
16. Plas Johnson
17. Willis "Gator" Jackson
18. Boots Randolph
19. Hal Singer
20. Gil Bernal
21. Bobby Keys
22. Jimmy Wright
23. Rudy Pompilli
24. David "Fathead" Newman
25. Earl Bostic
26. Red Prysock
27. Junior Walker
28. Doc Kupka
29. Pee Wee Ellis
30. Frank "Floorshow" Culley
31. Lenny Pickett
32. Big Al Sears
33. Charles Chalmers
34. Hank Cosby
35. Buddy Lucas
36. Tom Scott
37. Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams
38. Roland Alphonso
39. Budd Johnson
40. Jesse Powell
41. Floyd Newman
42. Arnett Cobb
43. Jerry Martini
44. Rusty Bryant
45. Wild Bill Moore
46. David Sanborn
47. Chuck Rio (Danny Flores)
48. Tom Archia
49. Paul Bascomb
50. Jimmy Forrest
51. Thomas "Beans" Bowles
52. Cornelius Bumpus
53. Jim Horn
54. Joe Arnold
55. Grady Gaines
56. Jack Schoer
57. Charlie Ferguson
58. Alto Reed
59. Sam Peake
60. Raf Ravenscroft
61. Ace Cannon
62. Michael Brecker
63. Freddie Mitchell
64. Don Myrick
65. David Jackson
66. Chris Wood
67. Joe Houston
68. Dennis "D.T." Thomas
69. Ronald Bell
70. Mel Collins
71. Chuck Higgins
72. Gilbert Caples
73. Dean Fraser
74. Gene Upshaw
75. Kasuka Mafia (Norris Patterson)
76. Red Holloway
77. Leroi Moore
78. Big Jim Wynn
79. Lynn Hope
80. Ernie Watts
81. Sil Austin
82. Oliver Sain
83. Edgar Winter
84. Bob McNeely
85. Bill Justis
86. Buddy Savitt
87. Lester Sterling
88. Phil Kenzie
89. Zach Zackery
90. Mark Rivera
91. James Von Streeter
92. Leon Michels
93. Richie Cannata
94. Harry Haller
95. Lee Thompson
96. Packy Axton
97. Andy MacKay
98. Noble "Thin Man" Watts
99. Jackie Kelso
100. Saxa (Lionel Martin)
Gene Barge, R&B Saxophonist Who Played on Landmark Hits, Dies at 98
Known as Daddy G, he recorded with Jackie Wilson, Chuck Willis and
others, but he was best known for the Gary U.S. Bonds smash “Quarter to
Three.”
By Bill Friskics-Warren
Feb. 4, 2025, 7:11 p.m. ET
Gene Barge, one of the last surviving saxophonists of the golden age of
R&B, whose career ran the gamut of 20th-century Black popular music,
died on Sunday at his home in Chicago. He was 98.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Gina Barge.
Known by the nickname Daddy G, Mr. Barge played on landmark hits of the
rock and soul era, beginning with Chuck Willis’s swinging remake of the
blues standard “C.C. Rider.”
Galvanized by Mr. Barge’s moaning tenor saxophone, “C.C. Rider” reached
No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1957 and stalled just outside the Top 10 on
the pop chart. In 1963, Mr. Barge was featured on Jimmy Soul’s
calypso-derived “If You Wanna Be Happy,” a No. 1 pop and R&B hit.
Mr. Barge also played the wailing tenor part on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue
Me” (1965) and supplied the rhythmic drive, with members of the Motown
house band the Funk Brothers, for Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps
Lifting Me (Higher and Higher)” (1967). Both records topped the R&B
chart and crossed over to become Top 10 pop hits.
His greatest acclaim, though, came in 1961 with “Quarter to Three,” a
No. 1 pop single recorded with the R&B shouter Gary U.S. Bonds. Hoping
to capitalize on the success of “New Orleans,” his first big hit, Mr.
Bonds created “Quarter to Three” by adding lyrics to “A Night With Daddy
G,” a churning instrumental that Mr. Barge had recently written and
recorded with his band the Church Street Five.
“Oh, don’t you know that I danced/I danced ’til a quarter to 3/With the
help, last night, of Daddy G,” Mr. Bonds sings on the opening chorus.
(“A Night With Daddy G” would prove doubly auspicious when Dion borrowed
its melody for “Runaround Sue,” a finger-snapping wonder that topped the
pop chart in late 1961.)
Despite having the benefit of Mr. Barge’s snaking saxophone runs — and
despite the record’s affinity with the twist dance craze of the day —
“Quarter to Three” was an unlikely sensation. Muffled and lo-fi, it
sounded as if it had been recorded in a bathroom or a stairwell.
“This record is fuzzy, muzzy and distorted,” the British television
producer Jack Good wrote in a 1961 issue of Disc, the popular weekly
music magazine later absorbed into Record Mirror. “According to
present-day technical standards it is appalling. However, for my money,
the disc is not just good, it’s sensational and revolutionary.”
Mr. Good’s assessment of the record proved prescient. An exuberant
fusion of doo-wop, Black gospel and incipient frat rock, “Quarter to
Three” not only inspired the big-beat rock ’n’ roll of the Beatles and
the garage-rock of bands like the Kingsmen and the Sir Douglas Quintet.
It also provided a blueprint for the sax-and-vocal exchanges between
Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen, a rapturous call and response
that came to define the E Street Band, which often performed “Quarter to
Three” in concert.
Breaking into pop music when the saxophone was ascendant (and before it
was supplanted by the electric guitar), Mr. Barge was as distinctive and
versatile a stylist as King Curtis, if less well known. Over six
decades, he played on or produced records by Muddy Waters, the Chi-Lites
and the incendiary Detroit funk band Black Merda. He also toured with
Ray Charles, Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones.
Sources differ as to how Mr. Barge came to be known as Daddy G. The
sobriquet, though, was already gaining traction before the release of
“Quarter to Three,” when the Philadelphia disc jockey Hy Lit adopted “A
Night With Daddy G” as the theme song for his radio show. Shortly
afterward, the doo-wop group the Dovells paid homage to Mr. Barge on
their 1961 hit “Bristol Stomp,” singing, “We ponied and twisted and we
rocked with Daddy G.”
James Gene Barge Jr. was born on Aug. 9, 1926, in Norfolk, Va., the
oldest of eight children of James and Thelma (Edwards) Barge. His father
played banjo and worked as a welder in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. His
mother managed the home.
Mr. Barge played clarinet in high school and took up the saxophone only
after his father brought home a waterlogged tenor that he had found on a
torpedo-damaged ship. He was 20 at the time and had just completed two
years in the Army Air Forces.
After graduating from West Virginia State College in 1950 with a degree
in music, he taught high school and pursued music as an avocation. Jazz
was a formative influence, especially the effervescent phrasing of the
great tenor saxophonist Lester Young.
The first recordings Mr. Barge made under his own name were a pair of
instrumentals for Checker, a subsidiary of Chess Records, in 1956.
“Country,” his first single, was a hit along the Eastern Seaboard.
“When Chess heard it, they said, “What the hell is that?” Mr. Barge said
of the record in a 2007 interview with Virginia Living magazine.
“They had never heard a saxophone sound like that before. They even gave
it a word: funk. That was the reputation I got — that Gene Barge could
play funky.”
Around 1960 Mr. Barge began his brief but fruitful association with the
producer Frank Guida, whose Legrand label released “A Night With Daddy
G” and Mr. Bonds’s early singles. Mr. Barge and Mr. Bonds had a second
major hit together with “School Is Out,” which reached the Top 10 in
1961, but enjoyed only modest success after that.
In 1964, as independent record labels with national distribution
increasingly dominated regional markets, Mr. Barge abandoned teaching —
and Norfolk’s small Legrand imprint — and moved to Chicago to work for
Chess Records. While there he played on R&B hits like Little Milton’s
“Grits Ain’t Groceries” and Koko Taylor’s “Wang Dang Doodle” and
produced albums, including Buddy Guy’s acclaimed 1967 effort, “Left My
Blues in San Francisco.”
In the late 1960s, he also directed the musical ensemble of the Chicago
chapter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Operation Breadbasket,
an organization headed locally by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Mr. Barge later ran the gospel division of Stax Records and, over the
ensuing decades, worked as a freelance musician, producer and arranger,
most notably on Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning single “Sophisticated Lady
(She’s a Different Lady).” In the late 1970s he took a detour into
acting, working locally in Chicago (he made his screen debut in the
independent 1978 film “Stony Island”) before eventually landing roles in
Hollywood action thrillers like ”Under Siege” (1992) and “The Fugitive”
(1993).
Mr. Barge remained active into the 2000s, serving as a consultant for
Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS documentary series “The Blues” and playing on
records like Public Enemy’s “Superman’s Black in the Building” and with
the avant-garde jazz trumpeter Malachi Thompson.
“Gene Barge is the flyest octogenarian I know,” Chuck D of Public Enemy
told Virginia Living in 2007. “To go from Muddy Waters to Public Enemy
is a good trick.”
In addition to his daughter Gina, Mr. Barge is survived by another
daughter, Gail Florence; three siblings, Celestine Bailey, Kim
Williamson and Milton Barge; two grandchildren; and several
great-grandchildren. His wife, Sarah Barge, died in 2008. His first
marriage ended in divorce.
Mr. Barge’s career might not have gotten off to the start it did with
Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider” were it not for his patience and good humor.
After playing the grinding riff on the demo that persuaded Ahmet Ertegun
and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records to record it as a single, he was
flown to New York for the session, only to find that another saxophonist
had been hired instead.
“Ertegun and Wexler told me they were going to pay me, but they didn’t
want me to play,” Mr. Barge told Virginia Living.
“I went down to the liquor store, man, got me a pint and sat down on the
floor to listen to them. They did 27 takes and weren’t satisfied. So
Chuck said, ‘Look, why don’t you let Gene run down one to get the feel?’
So I ran down one and they said, ‘Hold it, that’s it, you got it. Let’s
cut it.’”
