Big Jamboree: The Dave Lewis Combo, at the Jantzen Beach Ball Room, Jantzen Beach, OR, September 29, 1956

This flier advertises a dance, headlined by the Dave Lewis Combo, at the ballroom of the former Jantzen Beach Amusement Park in Portland, Oregon. The park, nicknamed the “Coney Island of the West,” was home to the Big Dipper roller coaster and a four-row carousel built by C. W. Parker (1854 – d. unknown). This performance by the Dave Lewis Combo would have taken place following a summer of touring the Northwest with Bill Haley (1925-1981) and His Comets, one of the leading Rock and Roll bands in the country at the time.

Although he was born in Texas, Dave Lewis (1938-1998) grew up in Bremerton and then Seattle after his family moved to the area for work in the 1940s. Both of Lewis’s parents were musicians, and his father even gave music lessons to a teenage Quincy Jones (b. 1933), but Lewis took most of his inspiration from his mother’s piano playing and the music of Ray Charles (1930-2004), who he would sneak into nightclubs to see perform. Lewis’s first band was the Five Checks, a Doo-Wop vocal group, which he helped create to perform in the Edmond Meany Junior High talent show. The group was popular enough that they continued to perform at school pep rallies and other assemblies. 

Moving on from the Five Checks, in 1955 Lewis formed and led the Dave Lewis Combo, a Rhythm and Blues band which began playing small venues but eventually became popular enough to help desegregate the Seattle music scene. At the time, Seattle musicians were represented either by AFM Local No. 76 if they were white, or AFM Local No. 493 if they were black. The white union, No. 76, had historically laid claim to venues in downtown Seattle to the exclusion of black musicians in No. 493, but the popularity of the Dave Lewis Combo led to them booking events in ‘white’ venues. When the band eventually booked a show at a premier venue, Parker’s Ballroom, in 1956, No. 76 union leaders threatened to boycott and picket the venue unless the show was canceled. The ballroom’s manager refused to cancel and responded with his own threat to never book No. 76 musicians again if the union representatives did not drop the issue. Ultimately, the Dave Lewis Combo was able to perform at Parker’s Ballroom and within two years the two unions merged into one, integrated union. 

By 1961 Lewis had dissolved the Dave Lewis Combo and started a new band with Jerry Allen (b. unknown), Jim Manolides (b. unknown) and Don “Candido” Mallory (b. unknown), which recorded the hit “J.A.J.” Then in 1962, Lewis formed another new band with Joe Johansen (b. unknown - 1997) and Dicky Enfield (b. unknown) and released major hits including “Little Green Thing” and “David’s Mood (Part 2)”.