ReCurrent: Motown of the West

Download the PDF

Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

Rita Cofield: That feels raw.

Jaime Roque: [over background chatter] I’m at the Getty with Rita Cofield, preservationist at the Getty Conservation Institute, to catch up and see what she’s working on—maybe there’s something for a ReCurrent episode.

Cofield: So, I was at a Cultural Heritage Commission meeting, and a gentleman was talking about these mom-and-pop record places—mostly run by African American people.

Roque: She then said something that instantly hooked me.

Cofield: He mentioned Dootone Records. The “Motown of the West”. What? Dootone is down the street? It’s down the street—it’s ten steps from my house. Not even down the street.

Roque: In Los Angeles? In her neighborhood? “The Motown of the West”?! And that’s all it took. I knew what my next episode would be.

[Slow guitar music plays]

Roque: Hello, my name is Jaime—and welcome to ReCurrent.

Rita’s story about learning about Dootone Records brings me back to the first time I heard about David Alfaro Siqueiros’s América Tropical mural at Placita Olvera in Downtown LA. I’d walked by for years and the story was hiding in plain sight. In a city that keeps reinventing itself, what we preserve—or forget—decides which stories Los Angeles can tell about itself.

Cofield: I’m about to get emotional, because if that is gone, the story is gone. I bet you no one… I know no one in my neighborhood knows how important that building is.

Roque: That’s why the story of Dootone Records matters. When history fades quietly, it’s not just buildings we lose—it’s memory, belonging, and pride. If no one tells these stories, they disappear—alongside the physical structures that once housed them.

But to understand what’s at stake, we need to go back to the beginning.

[Doo-wop music begins]

Roque: [Over background talking] To learn more about the founder of Dootone Records. I talk to Robert Petersen, a historian, host of Hidden Los Angeles Podcast, and an avid collector of Dootone Records.

Petersen: So for Dootsie Williams—I would probably introduce him as this trailblazing Black music executive and entrepreneur who broke barriers and left his mark—not only in the entertainment industry, but in the community.

[Countdown before music beats play]

Roque: This was around 1949, when Los Angeles was still deeply segregated—housing covenants, redlining, and racial barriers kept African Americans largely confined to South LA. The mainstream entertainment and recording industries remained overwhelmingly white and closed off to Black entrepreneurs.

Petersen: Well, it was, as we would say now, DIY. You know, the original office or headquarters of Dootone Records was his family house on Central. Basically, they had a little portion of the house—I think people say it was on the porch that they started packaging records, shipping them out.

[Percussion music plays]

Roque: Dootsie’s home on Central and East 95th was in the middle of Watts. Central Avenue is the heart of Black South LA.

Petersen: Eventually, as the business grew, Dootone took over the entire house.

Roque: Then after years of slow and steady growth, one afternoon in 1954, Dootsie’s business exploded—in a good way.

Petersen: The Penguins were this group of teenagers, Dootsie was trying to record, record some songs. They went to Ted Brinson’s studio, which still stands—it’s in a garage, the house is still there, the garage is still there. Ted Brinson was this bass player, who also is a very important figure in this time in LA music. And when I say studio, it’s not like what you imagine today—a fancy studio with mics and different isolated booths for recording—it was basically a garage with a couple mics, a piano, and that’s it.

[Vocals for doo-wop song “Earth Angel” fades in]

Petersen: The recording session for “Earth Angel”, which I think what you hear is one take, but I think they probably did multiple takes and picked the best one.

Roque: The session wraps, and with the record in hand, Dootsie heads home, planning to add more instruments later.

Petersen: But on the way home after recording, he stops by this legendary record store: Dolphins of Hollywood. They had someone spinning records at the front—this guy named Huggy Boy, a very famous DJ.

[Audio recording plays]

Roque: Huggy Boy was the first white disc jockey to broadcast (on station KRKD) from the front window of John Dolphin’s popular all-night record store, Dolphins of Hollywood. This was one of the first Black-owned record stores in the city and it sat at the corner of Central and Vernon Avenues, just a few blocks up from Dootone’s makeshift headquarters. Huggy Boy’s late-night shows broke the color line of the airwaves, bringing rhythm and blues into the homes of white teenagers who’d never heard anything like it before.

Petersen: He sees his friend, John Dolphin of Dolphins of Hollywood, and they say, “Let Huggy Boy play it.” So they play it. Huge response. Everyone loves it. And Dootsie’s like, hey, I guess it’s good as it is. [laughs] It’s interesting that even the recording itself was rudimentary, a first draft, but it turned out to be magic. This record sells millions and becomes this iconic song.

Roque: Soon, people all over the country are listening to, and buying, the record Dootsie and The Penguins had recorded in one afternoon. This was not the usual music business formula for success.

Petersen: So, a Black artist would write a hit, release it, and one or two white artists would cover it—and the white artist version would hit the top of the charts and the Black artist’s version would not. The Penguins broke that. The Crew Cuts covered it—the Crew Cuts was a white group, I think they were Canadian, and hit the Top 10…

[Crew Cuts version of “Earth Angel” plays]

…but the Penguins’ version also hit the Top 10. It really showed that that whole idea that the music industry had was wrong.

[Percussion music begins]

Roque: From a porch and a garage, Dootone establishes itself as a real force in the music industry. With the success of “Earth Angel”, Dootsie now has the financial means—and the confidence—to branch out.

Then Dootsie tries something even riskier: putting stand-up on vinyl. His choice is a working Black comedian: Redd Foxx. 


[Clip of comedy record Redd Foxx Uncensored]

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Redd Foxx! [applause]

Redd Foxx: You might as well have fun while you’re here…

Petersen: When Dootsie met Redd Foxx, he was performing at the Oasis Club on Santa Barbara, now MLK.

He was very resistant when Dootsie Williams said “Hey, let’s record your comedy bits on a record”. And Redd Foxx was like, wait a minute, “If you put it on a record, no one’s gonna see me live.” and that was the sentiment at the time.

Roque: Dootsie is convinced it will work and gets Redd Foxx on board. And it pays off, Laff of the Party was a gigantic hit, sold millions and really set off comedy records.

Redd Foxx’s 1956 album, Laff of the Party, is the country’s first comedy record. And Black humor—unfiltered—moves into the living rooms of people that never would’ve bought a ticket to a live show.



It’s this Dootone Records—and all the history, music, laughs, joy that comes with it—that Rita learned started in an unassuming house with a big front porch across the street from her. But in the years since Dootsie lived and worked there, that house has become barely recognizable.

[Street noises, ambient sounds of being outside]

Okay, there it is… oh wow. I’m walking up to this modest, cream-colored building with a dark green awning and big purple letters across the top that read “A New Way of Life.” The awning makes these soft arches over the front windows and the door—little traces of an earlier house still peeking through the remodel. A black iron fence, topped with barbed wire, wraps around the property, separating it from the traffic that rolls down Central Avenue.

In my hand I’m holding a photo I found of this same address from the 1950s. In the picture, Dootsie Williams is standing on a big front porch, and above him, instead of those purple letters, there’s a simple sign that says “Dootone Records.” The roofline is the same—the peak of the original house still pokes up over the facade here today—but that’s about all that’s left of the world Dootsie knew.

On the side wall now, there’s a bright mural of a woman in glasses, paired with a quote about strength and belonging. It’s a clue to what happens inside. Today, A New Way of Life—founded by Susan Burton after her own years in and out of prison—is a reentry home that hires and supports formerly incarcerated people in this neighborhood.

Standing here, it hits me: this is the kind of place you could easily drive past a hundred times and never stop to think about it. And that’s what gets me—it’s so wild how you can move through a neighborhood every day and have no idea of the incredible history, the lives, the second chances that have passed through a small building like this, and still do.

Which raises an important question for a historic preservationist like Rita: how do you save this larger than life story—and stories like it—in a city that’s always changing?

[Slow, melodic music begins]

Cofield: Sometimes we are defining things as they are found out, but again, preservation is coming around to saying no, we should really look at things that have to do with regular people. It’s in our ordinance to look at cultural significance, to look at buildings that are associated with people, places, events, and important architecture.

Roque: When you think about historic preservation, you probably think about great architecture or spaces that let you step back in time. But today, preservationists like Rita are thinking more holistically, especially in the neighborhoods that were not considered worth saving before, and often because they weren’t rich enough or white enough.

Cofield: Like who is fighting for places that are in communities and neighborhoods that are less…that are underrepresented, underserved, which is why Getty has AAHPLA, African American Historic Places LA, because we are truly asking community what are places that are important to you? What are places that are important in your community? And so for me, Dootone is in my community and that’s like… there’s the Motown of the West. Like who would say, nah, that’s not important and how do we keep these important sites in the forefront of people’s minds? We have to…’cause it’s those community stories. Again, I should have known that Dootone was in the community, in my community.

[Doo-wop music begins]

Roque: What does preserving these stories look like in practice? Rita mentions how Robert is already starting to do something about it, even if it’s a small start.

Cofield: So what he's doing is actually, I mean, that is low hanging fruit collecting the intangible and the ephemeral stories, pieces to what makes this important.

Roque: Rita also mentions how the advancements in technology are helping in the preservation space.

Cofield: There’s a professor at Tuskegee, Professor Quincey Daniels, and he teaches architecture and preservation, but he’s teaching his students how to gather data, doing it virtually, like doing AR/VR, and digitizing information because some of these places won’t be there. Some of these places are already gone and he can recreate that through digitization.

So saving a building is one way that we can preserve the history and the culture and the storytelling and how important things are, but there’s also other ways. Robert is collecting these things and someday they’ll be displayed in a museum or an exhibition space, and so that is another form of protecting and preserving something that is no longer there and we have to keep telling about these spaces. And how do you do that? You celebrate them.

Roque: Like StylesVille barbershop, the oldest Black owned barbershop in Los Angeles.

Cofield: So we had a plaque unveiling for Stylesville barber and beauty shop in Pacoima. I feel like everybody in the Black community there knows how important Stylesville is, but nobody else knows. Having the plaque on the wall—the plaque installation, I was there for it, it was done, and we had a mother and daughter walk by and look at it and go, that’s beautiful. So they would’ve never known how important, and you know, be in awe of what we are in awe of.

Roque: And that’s how a survey line becomes a sidewalk moment—through plaque designations and neighborhood tours that keep these places in people’s path.

Cofield: You know, all of these important people are connected to places, and those places are connected to important people.

Jaime: Dootsie’s home sat inside a larger cultural network, Central Avenue, where clubs, record shops, and small businesses built culture together. He could drive down the street from a garage recording studio to a record shop to his home office—and change American culture in the process.

While Rita works on marking the physical space, passionate history nuts and amateur archivists, people like Robert, are making sure the sounds and stories don’t slip away.

Petersen: I have been obsessively collecting and trying to put together… I almost have every single record that he did. I even found, got hold of some old contracts and old correspondence from Dootsie Williams, just trying to collect as much as I can. It’s hard to find it, I’ve tried to—ideally, I want to put together the entire history of all the records as much as possible.  I just want to find an archive where this stuff can be saved.

Roque: Rita and Robert understand that this history of Dootone is valuable because of the incredible influence the record label had on what came next

Cofield: You know, there’s a foundation that musicians today build off of.

Petersen: Dootone is really, I think, one of the most important labels of Los Angeles. I think you see the legacy of Dootsie Williams in a lot of different places, but Dootone was also interesting 'cause it wasn't just Doo Wop. It really was R & B, early Rock, Gospel music. And it really showed that that whole idea that the music industry had was wrong. People would buy and respond well to Black artists, and that laid the groundwork for The Platters, which laid the groundwork for New Edition, for Boys to Men, and up to today.

Roque: And it’s not just music.

Petersen: They produced a speech by Martin Luther King when no one was doing that. Also, comedy records. You’re watching Dave Chappelle, you’re watching Eddie Murphy Delirious or Raw, these great specials. Well, you keep on going back and you look at Dootsie Williams and Redd Foxx, Dootsie Williams—it was Dootsie Williams' idea of, hey, let’s put comedy on a record, and also a little risque comedy, you know, a little push the boundaries a little bit.

[Clip from comedy record Laff of the Party]

Redd Foxx: …and during the war they made a lot of money and threw it away on foolish things like food, rent, and clothing…

And he convinced Redd Foxx, also, to record and put out Laff of the Party, which is a legendary comedy record.

[Clip from comedy record Laff of the Party begins]

Redd Foxx: …everybody bought something worthwhile, something that you’d get a hold of and call your very own. Everybody in my hometown bought a jackass. [crowd laughs]

So when you listen to all these great comedians, all these great comedy shows on Netflix, you go back in time, there’s a line that goes back and Dootsie Williams and Redd Foxx really helped open the door.

[Piano music begins]

Roque: I asked Rita: how does recognizing Dootone change the way we think of preservation?

Cofield: I think it will continue to prove to people, and also the community, that preservation is not just about the elite. Or the architecture. It’s also about the people and the places that are right in your neighborhood.

[Jazz music plays]

Roque: That’s the heart of it. Dootone wasn’t just a physical facade. It was a risk someone took. A song a DJ spun in a window at a record store. It’s proof that culture lives where people gather, experiment, and pass things hand to hand.

Roque: When we say “preservation,” we’re not just saving square footage—we’re carrying forward a practice, a sound, a way of making things together. Naming Dootone widens the map of who gets remembered in Los Angeles. It tells anyone walking down Central Avenue that this story could be in the history books too.

ReCurrent was written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle. And for transcripts, images, and additional resources for this episode, visit Getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent.

[Jazz music fades out]