Danceland Records · Lovelane Music Publishing · Lovelane Music · Boo-Ga-Loo Records · Lovelane Music Group
It Started With Danceland
The story begins in the late 1940s, when Morris Kaplan founded Danceland Records in Detroit. This was before Motown, before Detroit was a household name for American popular music. The city was full of players — blues singers who had come up from the South, jazz musicians working the clubs, gospel groups out of the East Side churches — and almost none of them had anywhere to put a record out.
Danceland was one of the small independents that gave them somewhere. Morris Kaplan pressed records, worked the local shops and jukebox routes, and learned the business the way everyone learned it then: one release at a time. That operation is the root system everything else grew out of.
1960: Lovelane Music Publishing
Morris’s son Sammy Kaplan grew up inside that business — around the records, the writers, and the studio time. In 1960, the Motor City native started his own company: Lovelane Music Publishing.
Sammy’s instinct was to go after something specific. Not a polished imitation of what was selling in New York, but the sound Detroit was actually making — R&B, blues, and the harder, greasier rhythm that would eventually get called funk. Publishing was the smart position to take. Records come and go; the song is the asset that keeps earning. Sammy understood that early, and it is the reason there is a catalog to talk about sixty-five years later.
The Roster
Lovelane’s early artist and writer roster included John Lee Hooker, Mitch Ryder, Barbara Lewis, Jerry O, Candy Johnson, Richard “Popcorn” Wylie, Tony Blues Lewis, Tommy J. Jefferson, Rose Nelson, Morris Kaplan, Roy Cohen, Tom Moers, The Sea Shells, The Soulmates, and Tom & Jerry O.
Behind them, on the demos and the records, were the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Robert White, Eddie “Bongo” Brown, and Jack Ashford. The same rhythm section that built the Motown sound was cutting Lovelane sides across town. That is not a footnote. It is the reason the records sound the way they do.
Publisher and Label
Lovelane did not stay a publishing-only operation. The name went on the label as well.
This was standard practice for an independent in that era, and it was also the shrewd move. If you owned the song and the master, you controlled both sides of the record and you did not have to split the upside with anyone. Sammy ran Lovelane Music as an imprint alongside the publishing company — signing writers, cutting sides with them, and releasing the results under the same banner that held the copyrights.
That double structure is the single most important thing about the Lovelane catalog today. Most surviving independent catalogs from the period are one or the other: publishing with no masters, or masters with the publishing long gone. Lovelane held both. It is why the catalog can be licensed cleanly for film, television, advertising, and streaming without a title chase through five decades of paperwork.
Getting Records Played
Publishing and pressing were only part of what Sammy Kaplan did. The other part — arguably the bigger part — was promotion. Sammy worked records. He got them played.
In that era, a record did not sell because it was good. It sold because somebody put in the work to get it heard: walking it into radio stations and putting it in a DJ’s hand, working the jukebox operators who decided what went into hundreds of boxes across the city, servicing the distributors and one-stops, getting it into the listening booths at the record shops. That was a job, it was a craft, and Sammy was good at it.
Critically, he did not only do it for his own catalog. Sammy promoted records for other labels, other publishers, and other artists — product he had no ownership stake in whatsoever. Independent promotion was its own line of business, and Detroit was a market you had to break through. Labels elsewhere needed somebody on the ground in the Motor City who knew which station to call, which operator to see, and which shop moved units. Sammy was one of the people they called.
That work is why the rest of it was possible. A promotion man sits at the center of the whole machine — he knows the writers, the players, the engineers, the DJs, the distributors, and the store owners, and they all know him. Those relationships are how you sign a writer before anybody else does, how you get studio time on short notice, and how a small independent competes with companies fifty times its size.
The promotion business also shaped how Sammy thought about ownership. When you have spent years pushing other people’s records and watching someone else collect on them, you learn very quickly that the person who owns the copyright is the person who wins. That lesson runs straight through everything Lovelane built.
Boo-Ga-Loo Records
By the mid-sixties the music had shifted. The shuffle was gone and something harder had replaced it — a heavier backbeat, a Latin edge in the rhythm, records built for the floor instead of the radio. It got called Boogaloo, and Detroit was one of the places it came from.
Lovelane launched Boo-Ga-Loo Records to chase it, with Jerry O at the center of the operation and Sammy’s promotion network behind it — which meant the label could actually get its records into the boxes and onto the air instead of watching them die in a warehouse.
The Boo-Ga-Loo sides are the rawest thing in the catalog. Dance records, made fast and made loud, with the Funk Brothers’ rhythm section driving them. They were built for a specific room on a specific night in a specific city, and that is exactly why they have aged the way they have. Crate diggers, DJs, and sync supervisors have been pulling from that era for thirty years.
Detroit to Los Angeles
Sammy eventually relocated to Los Angeles, and the catalog went with him — but the company kept signing rather than living off the back list.
He moved into hip-hop, signing writers and artists including Victor Newman and Nick Speed, and expanded into jazz, publishing compositions by John Fumo and Kenny Hirsch. As Sammy will tell you, Lovelane Music Publishing is a commitment to two cities: Detroit and Los Angeles.
In Film and Television
The Los Angeles years put the catalog on screen. Lovelane titles have appeared in:
Feature film — Moonlight (Academy Award winner, Best Picture), Get On Up: The James Brown Story, On The Road (from the Jack Kerouac novel), Cesar Chavez (Michael Peña, John Malkovich), Remember The Titans (Denzel Washington), The Yards (James Caan, Faye Dunaway), Resurrecting The Champ (Samuel L. Jackson), Bones (Snoop Dogg), The Bachelor (Chris O’Donnell), Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (Amazon Studios), Death Race 2050 (Roger Corman), Brown’s Requiem, Thick As Thieves, Bitter Sweet, Keep The Faith Baby, Her Minor Thing, Semi-Pro, Urban Roots, The Wayshower, Blaze You Out, and Sous La Neige (Under The Snow).
Television — Shots Fired (FOX), featuring “Gonna Buy Me A Shotgun” and “Lord Have Mercy” by Tony Blues Lewis. American Horror Story: Freak Show, featuring “Southside Saturday Night” and “Ebony Jump” by Candy Johnson, “Wayne County Ramblin’ Blues” by John Lee Hooker, and “Lazy Daisy Blues” by The Goldtones.
Lovelane Music Group Today
Four names, one continuous business: Morris Kaplan starting Danceland in the late 1940s. Sammy Kaplan founding Lovelane in 1960 and building it into a publisher, a label, a promotion house, and the home of Boo-Ga-Loo Records. And Ron Cobert, who worked alongside Kaplan for years before taking the company forward as CEO of Lovelane Music Group Inc.
Today the company works across publishing, licensing administration, sync placement, advertising, internet and FM radio, film and television, documentary, merchandising, and direct-to-consumer platforms — with the original catalog at the center of all of it.
The mandate has not changed: own the work, keep the rights clean, get it in front of people, keep the story attached to the music. Sammy worked jukebox routes and station managers. The modern version is streaming placement, sync, and audience building across platforms. Same job, different rooms.
The records were made in Detroit. Everything since has been built on them.