She carried some of Macon’s most legendary tunes

Though she played a key role in helping some of Macon’s most talented musicians achieve world fame, Carolyn Spikes Killen’s died quietly.

But the 72-year-old had a full life and “was satisfied in the end,” the Rev. Edward Dawson, said at Friday morning. Dawson and Killen were friends since attending Peter G. Appling High School.

She had assured him of this when he visited her recently at a nursing home where she told him, “I sit with the rich, I sit with the famous. I done done it all and I’m just content as I can be.”

Relatives of Otis Redding and Alan and Phil Walden were among more than 100 people who celebrated her life in a service at New Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church.

“She was a real lady. She was elegant,” Dawson said. “When you talk to her, you get the feeling she’s a millionaire, that she knows something you don’t know.”

Killen went by the name Carolyn Brown in 1964 when she started an Redding fan club in Macon. She answered Redding’s fan club mail.

“She was there in the beginning,” Redding’s daughter, Karla Redding, said of the woman she’s always known as aunt Carolyn. “She’s family to us. ... She was the glue that held it all together.”

Killen also was the executive secretary at Capricorn Records and RedWal music for years.

In addition to being responsible for making sure all the equipment got delivered to music halls for Redding’s shows, she also was tasked with making sure the music star had money.

Redding was “notorious for getting stranded without a dime for a telephone call,” according to an article in Feb. 3, 1987, edition of The Telegraph.

Brown told The Telegraph that Redding had once called her from Washington, D.C., on a borrowed dime.

“I don’t know why he didn’t carry money, but he never did. He wore pants without pockets,” she said.

By the time she was 29, Phil Walden promoted her to director of all music publishing and licensing for his multiple companies.

The white stucco building at 535 Cotton Avenue is where Killen filed lyrics for copyrights then got them registered with licensing groups so that she could issue the licenses for popular songs to other companies so they could perform them.

For example, Killen handled the licensing for the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man” to be played in film “The Exorcist” in 1973.

“Lots of paperwork,” is how she described her job to a Telegraph reporter in February 1974.

Killen also told the reporter she “prefers being called plain Carolyn Brown to Mrs. or Ms.,” according to Telegraph archives.

Later in life, Karla Redding and her mother, Zelma, invited Killen to work as an administrative assistant at the Otis Redding Foundation.

Killen was buried at Middle Georgia Memory Gardens on Joycliff Road.

This story was originally published October 6, 2017 at 8:28 PM with the headline "She carried some of Macon’s most legendary tunes."