Hi's first single was a rocking cover of "You Are My Sunshine," by Carl McVoy, a piano-playing cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis. But starting up a label is a hard business, and the partners had to sell the record to Phillips International. Timing is everything in the music business, and the late Fifties were years of transition. Rockabilly was on the way out, and by the summer of 1959, after 16 unsuccessful singles by various artists, Cuoghi was about ready to shut Hi down. Then the label had its first hit, courtesy of Harris' old buddy, Bill Black.

      The hot young Memphis guitarist Reggie Young was back home after a stint in Shreveport backing country singer Johnny Horton. Waiting for his final draft notice, the youth was gigging around town and working in the studio for Hi. Young was playing with Bill and other musicians, "just backing up anybody who came into the studio."

      Then one night the band was messing around in the studio, trying to find a new sound to catch the fickle ears of the public, when Reggie tuned his guitar down to a low growl and played it with a pencil . The result was a shuffle blues instrumental called "Smokie Parts 1 and 2." The song hit the charts, and, says Young, "Ray Harris credits me with starting that Bill Black sound. It was just kind of a little fluke thing we came up with."

     To capitalize on the success of "Smokie," a follow-up was quickly released, the Hawaiian/honky-tonk fusion of "White Silver Sands." The song became Bill Black's Combo's (and Hi's) first Top 10 pop hit (the song went to No. 9). At that time, Hi didn't yet have a distinctive sound, it was just a bunch of musicians, some white, some black, all of them looking for something, anything, that would become a hit.

     Young recalls that, even then, when segregation was the norm and the civil rights movement was just beginning to pick up steam, it was no big deal to play in racially mixed bands in Memphis. "We never thought anything about it," he says. "I used to go down to the Manhattan Club and sit in with Willie and Al (Jackson Jr.) all the time. 

     And just as the Mar-Keys "Last Night" helped Stax get off the ground, the success of Bill Black's Combo changed Hi from a rockabilly label to an instrumental powerhouse. It was a national trend in the early Sixties, as Lonnie Mack, the Ventures, and other acts, including hometown heroes Booker T. & the MGs, were regularly scoring instrumental hits in those Twist-crazed days just before the Beatles.
  
     With Harris still calling the shots as the label's primary producer and engineer, Hi got its slice of that instrumental pie. Bill Black's Combo, former Bill Black saxman Ace Cannon and trumpeter/bandleader Willie Mitchell all kept young America frugging to instrumentals records that made money for Hi, not on the charts, but on the jukeboxes Cuoghi and his partners supplied. So many instrumentals were released that many people thought Hi stood for "Hit Instrumentals."