Henry Glover (May 21, 1921 – April 7, 1991[1]), was an American songwriter, arranger, record producer and trumpeter. Glover was one of the first successful black executives in the music industry. He first rose to prominence in the late 1940s with the Syd Nathan independent (and white-owned) King label. Glover served at various times as a producer, arranger, songwriter (sometimes under the alias Henry Bernard), engineer, trumpet player, talent scout, A&R man, studio constructor, and later on as a label owner in his own right. Eclectic in his musical tastes, Glover worked with country, blues, R&B, pop, rock, and jazz artists over the course of his long career, plus he played a major role in building King Records into one of the biggest independents of its era. He is a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
Glover was born Henry Bernard Glover, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He grew up listening to all kinds of music on local radio, and as he got older, he moved freely among the different types of music available on the local club scene. A skilled trumpet player through high school and college, he joined Buddy Johnson's big band in early 1944, and with Lucky Millinder's orchestra as both a musician and arranger early in 1945. It was there that he met King Records founder Syd Nathan, who was impressed enough with Glover to hire him as an A&R man, with an eye towards beefing up King's roster in the area then dubbed "race music." Glover signed on and quickly proved himself in a variety of areas in addition to A&R, even physically helping to build King's first recording studio.
A country fan since his boyhood, he produced sessions for the label's already-established set of country artists, including The Delmore Brothers, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Moon Mullican, Grandpa Jones, Wayne Raney, and The York Brothers among others. The Delmore Brothers concert in particular was groundbreaking: Glover co-wrote "Blues Stay Away from Me" with them, rearranging saxophonist Paul Williams' "The Hucklebuck" for country audiences; not only was the record a pre rock and roll fusion of black and white sensibilities, it also made Glover first black producer in country music history. His first success with black audiences came with Bull Moose Jackson's 1945 cover of Joe Liggins' "The Honeydripper", and over the next two years Glover produced a steady stream of releases on King's subsidiary label, Queen Records.
