Podcasts about Albert Ammons

Music includes: Scrapple From the Apple by Charlie Parker, Lover by Stan Kenton, Easy Living by Billie Holiday, Shake That Thing by Turk Murphy, I Want To Be Loved by Benny Goodman and Boogie Woogie Stomp by Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. 

Today's show features music performed by Clara Smith and Albert Ammons

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour  | I Leave You In Peace  | Friendlytown  |   | Mark Hummel  | Mr Two-Thirds  | True Believer  |   | Ilana Katz Katz  | Woman, Play the Blues  | In My Mind  |   | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour  | Lay It On Down  | Friendlytown  |   | Errol Linton  | Bo Diddit  | Break The Seal  |   | Hubert Sumlin With James Cotton & Little Mike And The Tornadoes  | Juke  | Heart And Soul  |   | Joe Louis Walker  | Keep The Faith  | Hornet's Nest  |   | Samantha Fish  | Let's Have Some Fun  | Black Wind Howlin'  |   | Albert Ammons  | Ammons Stomp (Young)  | Albert Ammons 1946-1948  | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour  | Too Much Stress (feat Brian May)  | Friendlytown  |   | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils  | Sorry My Jesus  | Cheap  |   |   | Fats Domino  | Don't Lie to Me  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 7 1951  | Son Of Dave  | Rock & Roll Talent Show  | Shake A Bone  |   | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour  | Reality Check  | Friendlytown  |   | Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown  | Trick Up My Sleeve  | Electrified  |   | Canned Heat  | So Sad  | Finyl Vinyl  | 

Sintonía: "Home James" - Harry James & The Boogie Woogie Trio"Honky Tonk Train Blues" - Meade Lux Lewis; "Boogie Woogie" - Pete Johnson; "Woo-Woo" y "Jesse" - Harry James & The Boogie Woogie Trio; "Boogie Woogie Man" - Pete Johnson; "Walkin´ The Boogie", "Sixth Avenue Express" y "Movin´ The Boogie" - Pete Johnson & Albert Ammons; "Cafe Society Rag" - Albert, Pete & Meade; "Low Down Dirty Shame" - Joe Sullivan & His Cafe Society Orchestra; "Basin Street Boogie" - Will Bradley´s Six Texas Hot Dogs; "The Munson Street Breakdown", "Central Avenue Breakdown" y "Bouncing At The Beacon" - Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra; "K. K. Boogie" - Henry "Red" Allen & His OrchestraTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (3xCD) "Boogie Woogie & Blues Piano 1935-1942" (Mosaic Records, 2008)Todas las músicas seleccionadas (compiladas) por Klaus Faber.Escuchar audio

The great trumpeter and blues singer's records for Commodore - with Chu Berry's Jazz Ensemble in 1941 (Chu Berry, Clyde Hart, Al Lucas, Jack Parker), Albert Ammons' Rhythm Kings in 1944 with Vic Dickenson, Don Byas, Ammons, Israel Crosby and Sid Catlett) and his own bands in 1944 (Earl Bostic, Byas, Lucky Thompson, Lem Johnson, Hart, Ace Harris, Catlett, John Simmons and others) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Música

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |  | Janice Harrington  | 05 Telephone Blues  | 80 years of International Friendship | Bob Corritore And Friends  | 07 Josephine  | You Shocked Me  |   |  | The Leathercoated Minds (JJ Cale)  | Arriba  | A Trip Down The Sunset Strip (met de Leathercoated Minds) | MonkeyJunk  | Travelin' Light  | Moon Turn Red  |   |  | George Lamb  | Holes In My Pockets  | Family & Friends  |   |  | Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson  | Boogie Woogie Prayer, Part 1 & 2  | Deep South Piano Blues - Rockin The House | Sharon Lewis & Texas Fire  | Mojo Kings  | The Real Deal  |   |  | Eddie Shaw & The Wolf Gang  | We're Gonna Make It  | Can't Stop Now  |   |  | Amos Milburn  | Drifting Blues  | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD3 | Backbone Blues Band  | Paying Your Dues  | Which Way To The Blues  |  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | 13 Little David  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Bo Diddley  | Hey! Bo Diddley  | Jungle Music (The Blues Collection) | Freddie Bell & The Bell Boys  | Voo Doo  | Rock & Roll...All The Flavors  |  | Jamie Porter Band  | Where We Belong  | MMXXI  |   |   | 

Pianists include: Floyd Cramer, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Sviatoslav Richter, Hazel Scott, Nat King Cole, Albert Ammons,, Pete Johnson, Art Tatum, Pinetop Perkins & Henry Cowell. Music includes: Over the Rainbow, In the Wee Small Hours, Fancy Pants, Prelude In C Sharp Minor, Pinetop's Boogie Woogie, April In Paris, The Man I Love and the Banshee.

We open with Maurice Rocco- Rocco's Booogie Woogie and Tonky blues. An Australian Pressing on Decca, 1940. Never released in Britain. Rocco played piano standing up. Way before Jerry lee Lewis. Succesful during the 40s his star began to wane in the 1950s. A great shame, as what a performer and composer he was. He was murdered in Thailand in 1976. Big Joe Turner(vocals) and Pete Johnson(piano)- Roll 'em Pete and Going away blues. Roll 'em Pete is regarded as one of the most important precursor songs to Rock and Roll.  Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis,  Pete Johnson and Joe Turner-  Cafe Society Rag. Meade Lux lewis- Whistling Blues. Wingie Carpenter, Trumpter, singer and bandleader- Put me back in the alley. Vocals by Mae Hopkins. Who was mae Hopkins? Nothing about her on the internet, other than cutting four sides for Decca with Mozelle France in 1940. Sam Price and his Texan Bluesicians- How 'bout that mess. Pianist who performed  in numerous bands right up until the 1980s. Throughout the 1960s and 70s he was a civil rights campaigner and activist. An amazing man. Vic Filmer and his Murray Club Band- If you can't sing whistle(1931). Excellent advice in my case. Nice quality track on the Piccadilly label. Been waiting for a Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson and his West Indian Dance Band record to turn up for a while. Here we have Seventeen Candles and Last time I will fall in love. Johnson was an important figure in the history of black British music. Originally from British Guyana his West Indian band brought a real flavour of US style band music to Britain. Johnson was sadly killed in a bombing raid in 1941, he was playing at The Cafe Paris in London. Members of the band joined other British groups and influenced British jazz for years to come. Yorke Desouza, Dave Wilkins and Joe Deniz worked extensively with F.S favourite Harry Parry. We have a wee flavour of George Formby Senior from 1920. This is on an Ariel Grand Records disc. He died the year after this recording, aged 46. He was a huge music hall and recording star at the begining of the 20th century. Elements of his act may well have inspired Chaplin's tramp. His upbringing was incredibly harsh and impoverished. A strong contrast to the height of his career when he was earning £350 a week(£40k in 2022). He was reluctant to allow his son into show business and sent him away for jockey training. Didn't stop young George though. He went on to become an even greater star. We finish with Buddy's Blues from Buddy Featherstonehaugh and his Radio Rhythm Club and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Yeah I know he's hardly forgotten but when do you hear him played directly from a 78 record?       

Albert Ammons was born in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were pianists, and he had learned to play by the age of ten. His interest in boogie-woogie is attributed to his close friendship with Meade Lux Lewis and also his father's interest in the style. Both Albert and Meade would practice together on the piano in the Ammons household. From the age of ten, Ammons learned about chords by marking the depressed keys on the family pianola (player piano) with a pencil and repeated the process until he had mastered it. This episodic features the late great Oscar Brown Jr. as Ammons, as well as 17 year piano wiz A J Salas. They both join host donnie l. betts for an after-show conversation and performance that is not to be missed. Follow @nocreditsproductions on Facebook and Instagram, and @donniebetts on Twitter. #Blackradiodays #socialjustice #destinationfreedomblackradiodays #donniebetts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shellac "The End of Radio"Booker T & The MG's "Green Onions"Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers "55th Street Boogie"Merle Travis "Blue Smoke"James Booker "Tico Tico"Cleo Brown "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"Spade Cooley and His Orchestra "Three Way Boogie"Chet Atkins & Les Paul "Caravan"Etta Baker "Carolina Breakdown"Fleetwood Mac "Albatross"Otis Spann "Five Spot"Jimmy Bryant "The Night Rider"Daniel Bachman "Levee"Trans Am "Armed Response"Albert Ammons "Boogie Woogie At The Civic Opera"Shake 'Em Up Jazz Band "Washboard Wiggles"Tyler Childers "Midnight on the Water"Pete "Guitar" Lewis "Ooh Midnight"Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys "Draggin' The Bow"Bob Dylan "Main Title Theme (Billy)"Little Walter "Blue Lights"Dizzy Gillespie "Salt Peanuts"Albert Collins "Frosty"Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton "Hyena Stomp"Various "Traveling Through The Jungle"Beastie Boys "In 3's"Max Roach "Triptych ( Prayer, Protest, Peace )"Freddy King "Hide Away"Fats Waller "Handful of Keys"Joel Paterson "Because"Funkadelic "Maggot Brain"Tuba Skinny "Deep Henderson"Dr. John "Mac`s Boogie"Cindy Cashdollar "Waltz for Abilene"Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"John Coltrane "Alabama"Little Freddie King "Bad Chicken"James Brown "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose"Gastr Del Sol "For Soren Mueller"John Fahey "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home"Bo Diddley "Aztec"Tom Waits "Closing Time"Fred McDowell "Amazing Grace"

Billie Holiday "I Cover the Waterfront"James Booker "Classified"Ike Gordon "Don't Let The Devil Ride"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Freeway Church Of Christ"Howlin' Wolf "Drinkin' C.V. Wine"Cedric Burnside "I Be Trying"Bob Dylan "Romance In Durango"Superchunk "City of the Dead"Emmylou Harris "Sweet Old World"Merle Haggard "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"Memphis Minnie "Night Watchman Blues (Take 2)"Wanda Jackson "Rip It Up"Fats Waller "Functionizin'"Sonny Boy Williamson "T.B. Blues"Jimmie Rodgers "Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes (Alternate Take)"Lucero "Sometimes"Hayes Carll "Another Like You"Gillian Welch "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor"Josh White "Strange Fruit"Jack Purvis and His Orchestra "Poor Richard"Slim Harpo "Rainin' in My Heart"Kathleen Edwards "Empty Threat"Valerie June "Colors"Hank Williams "Cold, Cold Heart"Billie Holiday and His Orchestra "Long Gone Blues"George Henry Bussey "When I'm Sober I'm Drunk Blues"Neil Young "No Wonder"Adia Victoria "Lonely Avenue"Adia Victoria "Dead Eyes"The Mountain Goats "New Monster Avenue"Arliss Nancy "Abacus"Lefty Frizzell "Long Black Veil"Blaze Foley "The Moonlight Song"Lucinda Williams "Drunken Angel"Buddy Guy "I Smell a Rat"Built to Spill "Conventional Wisdom"Guitar Junior "The Crawl"Dave Van Ronk "God Bless The Child"Big Joe Turner "Ice Man Blues"Willie Nelson "Railroad Lady"Robert Wilkins "Old Jim Canan's"Albert Ammons "Bass Goin' Crazy"Drag the River "Lucky's"Tom Waits "I Wish I Was In New Orleans [in The Ninth Ward]"Jimi Hendrix "Red house"Billie Holiday, Eddie Heywood's Orchestra "I'll Be Seeing You"

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Little G Weevil  | Early In The Morning  | Live Acoustic Session | Prakash Slim  | Me And The Devil Blues  | Country Blues From Nepal | Moonshine Society  | Biscuits, Bacon, and the Blues (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson  | Ballerina  | Pay Day  |   |  | Doc Watson  | Rising Sun Blues  | Vibraphonic Acoustic March 2005 | Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton  | Handsome Molly  | Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton | Big Bill Broonzy w Albert Ammons  | Done Got Wise (Carnegie Hall 1938 Concert)  | Big Bill Broonzy (Document Vol 8) | Half Deaf Clatch  | Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues  | A Tribute To Charley Patton | Stompin' Dave  | Fool Me Round  | Acoustic Blues  |  | Furry Lewis  | Billy Lyons And Stack OLee  | The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of | Blind Lemon Jefferson and his feet  | Hot Dogs  | The Best Of Blind Lemon Jefferson | Lightnin' Hopkins  | My Black Cadillac  | The Swarthmore Concert (1964) | Jerimiah Marques  | Sitting On Top Of The World  | Down By The River  |  | Neil Bob Herd and the Dirty Little Acoustic Band  | The Colour of History  | Every Soul a Story | Buckwheat Zydeco  | When The Levee Breaks  | TR Downloads 2010-2 | Blind Blake  | Cherry Hill Blues  | All The Recorded Sides

Lady Bianca (Lookin' At My Man); Luther Badman Keith (Bluesman Looking For Love); Michael Hill's Blues Mob (Bluesman At Heart); Jim Byrnes (Big Bill's Blues); Muddy Waters (Just A Dream (On My Mind)); Jeff Healey (Stop Breaking Down); Albert Ammons and His Rhythm Kings (Early Mornin' Blues); Meade Lux Lewis (Albert's Blues); Ramblin' Minds (Ain't No Big Deal On You); Little Milton (Mother Earth); Renovation Blues Band (No Beg Or Borrow); The Beat Daddys (Beg Borrow Steal); Tedeschi Trucks Band (Love Has Something Else To Say); Richard Koechli (Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying); Harpdog Brown (Reefer Lovin' Woman).

Songs include: Honky Tonk Train Blues, Barrelhouse Boogie, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat, Roots of the Blues and Woo Woo. Performers include: Meade lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Count Basie, Charlie Barnet and Jimmy Yancey.

Drop by to play along with the second of a two-part episode exploring an eclectic blend of boogie woogie, in the key of rhythm and blues. There will be enough piano pounding, toe-tapping, and slick percussion to feed the need for musical speed in our show this week. The usual suspects will keep the line moving and we'll also bring out some old favorites including performances from Hadda Brooks, Gladys Bentley, Oscar's Chicago Swingers, Rosco Gordon and Albert Ammons. This second episode keeps true to the sound that surfaced in the early century, blending juke joint rhythms and house party dance celebrations. Be sure to check us out on our new web site player or at the Live365 web site.

Minneapolis-based vocalist Lila Ammons joins us to discuss her own journey of musical discovery. Through that journey, she continues to discover a great deal within her own family legacy - thanks in part to the music of her grandfather, pianist Albert Ammons, and uncle, saxophonist Gene Ammons. More at lilaammonsmusic.com.

The Speed Trap. We like punishing people in this country. Give me a two lane highway any day over a four lane express lane. I once owned land but the truth is you only get to borrow it. I was caught speeding near a small town but the punishment was to pay for the salary of the town's police officer, judge, and attorney. George Floyd's death was a punishment by a white police officer correcting a black man's conduct. He didn't deserve to die. Why did Chauvin kill Floyd not how did he kill him? There's reasons for that and they're cultural. MUSIC Hank Williams, Albert Ammons, Lonnie Thomas-Clara Smith, Sons of the Pioneers, Julio Eglesias

SUNDAYS OF BLUES Nº 12 1- DRIFTING – JOHN LITTLEJOHN 2- THAT´S ALL RIGHT – JIMMY ROGERS 3- A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION – GUITAR SHORTY 4- I´M A WOMAN – DEBORAH COLEMAN 5- ANOTHER BLUES SINGER – LITTEL JIMMY KING 6- HEARTBROKEN MAN – ROOSEVELT BOOBA BARNES 7- NIGHT LIFE – HIP LINKCHAIN 8- EVERYTHING´S GONNA BE ALL RIGHT – CAREY BELL 9- GET BACK – BIG BILL BROONZY 10- BOOGIE WOOGIE STOMP – ALBERT AMMONS

A particularly upbeat selection of music this time round. Two from Bob Crosby and two Shakespeare sonnets, fabulous vocals from Marion Mann. Two from Bob Skyles and the Skyrockets- Lets play love and My darling Texas cow girl. Elias and his zig zag jive flutes with Tom Hark, the original and a massive world wide hit. Its in the Kwela style, South African penny whistle with a skiffle type beat. Two from Red Nichols. Nat Gonella and Lionel Hampton. Fab 1920s music from The High Hatter, vocals by Frank Luther and Maestro Paul Laval and his Woodmindy Ten. Pioneering jazz guitar and violin from Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Fletcher Henderson masquerading as Duke of Harlam and his Flunkies. Talking of maestros- we have the three boogie woogie pianos of Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. If that wasn't enough we have the man who produced the first commercial record with the term Boogie Woogie on it, Pine Top Smith. Flipping the side of this Brunswick reissue of a 1928 recording we have Pine Top Smith's Blues. Smith was a real pioneer but sadly died of gunshot wounds at the age of 25 in 1929. Harry Parry sees us out with the superb Softly as in a morning sunrise. Joyous stuff.

Guitar in High - Teddy Bunn . . great guitarist whose career stretched from the 1920's to the 1960's. Here we will listen to sides from 1938-40 including those he made with the Mezzrow-Ladnier Quintet (Mezz Mezzrow, Tommy Ladnier, Pops Foster and Manzie Johnson), Rosetta Crawford (Mezzrow, Ladnier and James P. Johnson), the Frankie Newton Quintet/Port of Harlem Jazz Men (Frankie Newton, J.C. Higginbotham, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pops Foster, Sid Catlett), Sidney Bechet Quartet (Bechet, Foster, Catlett) and by himself in a virtually unique solo guitar session from 1940 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I’ve used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I’ve also used Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards’ Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner’s pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I’ve used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones’ singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what “rock music” means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as “rock and roll”. We’re going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We’re going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at “I Wanna Be Your Man”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Rolling Stones’ story doesn’t actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won’t be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn’t cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in the early episodes — after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn’t, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We’ve seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine — his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more — records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, “Milk Cow Blues”] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain’s pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist — a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine — but he wasn’t just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he’d ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on “Rock Island Line”. If that had been Barber’s only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important — after all, without “Rock Island Line”, it’s likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn’t have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released “Petit Fleur”, engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, “Petit Fleur”] And Barber didn’t even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead — a band who aren’t releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz — a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano — unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene — people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax — who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism — and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax’s friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson’s early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close — the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn’t a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we’ll see — but it’s generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British “blues scene” was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate — and more importantly play — music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he’d found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?”] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That’s because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn’t the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we’ve looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, “Tain’t Nobody’s Business”] And we’re lucky enough that many of the Barber band’s shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we’ll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, “Peace in the Valley”] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, “This Little Light of Mine”] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians’ unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you’d reach Muddy Waters — did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber’s confusion was fairly straightfoward — Barber was thinking of Waters’ early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He’d travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress — apparently he didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn’t find Johnson, he’d found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to — Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever — but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson’s biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Be’s Troubled”] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes — Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy’s record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he’d been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Can’t Be Satisfied”] But soon he’d partnered with Chess’ great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess’ other big star Howlin’ Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters’ current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn’t really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of “Hoochie Coochie Man” to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann’s faces lit up — they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber’s band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though — the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters’ first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they’d played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn’t like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group’s version of “Midnight Special”: [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, “Midnight Special”] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, “This Train”] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed — they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan’s singing — he’d even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band — and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined “Skiffle is Piffle”, in which he said in part: “It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement…British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment”. Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn’t skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, “Skip to My Lou”] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group’s name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, “Death Letter”] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele’s lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, “3/4 AD”] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer — his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould — and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber’s trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous — the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn’t actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, “How Long How Long Blues”] But Burbridge wasn’t their regular drummer — that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn’t yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn’t bring his guitar, he’d just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them — “Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger”. Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group — he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ — it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two — they’d play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies’ disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they’d bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger’s arm — one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he’d ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren’t out in the UK yet. They’d bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, “Beautiful Delilah”] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin’ Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones — Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant — Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed — though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart’s piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically “and you must be the Chuck Berry artist”. Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn’t make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “You Can’t Judge a Book By its Cover”] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player — they didn’t like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it — he had a really good amplifier that they wanted — but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner’s wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style — Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin’ Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer’s club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group’s manager, though he didn’t have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “Diddley Daddy”] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off — even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn’t have any money to heat the flat. The group’s live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine’s editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he’d already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He’d worked for Mary Quant, the designer who’d popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he’d taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles’ London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he’d found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn’t like it, and didn’t care — he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain’s answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings — at the time in Britain you needed an agent’s license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them — even though he’d not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise — though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group’s leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group’s leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he’d taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that’s what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called “Come On” — though they changed Berry’s line about a “stupid jerk” to being about a “stupid guy”, in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Come On”] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn’t include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record — the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn’t poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it’s usually told — that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say — are false, and so it’s likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death — he just wasn’t allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn’t the only change Oldham made — he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin’. He also changed Keith Richards’ surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. “Come On” made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs — nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones’ second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing — as Lennon said of the song, “We weren’t going to give them anything great, were we?”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] For a B-side, the group did a song called “Stoned”, which was clearly “inspired” by “Green Onions”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Stoned”] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge — Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton’s time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation — if you’re going to make records you need songs, and you can’t just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We’ll see how that went in a few weeks’ time, when we pick up on their career.  

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "The Monkey Time" by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes -- The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner's pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I've used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what "rock music" means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as "rock and roll". We're going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We're going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at "I Wanna Be Your Man": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Rolling Stones' story doesn't actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won't be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn't cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in the early episodes -- after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn't, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We've seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine -- his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more -- records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, "Milk Cow Blues"] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain's pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist -- a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine -- but he wasn't just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he'd ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on "Rock Island Line". If that had been Barber's only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important -- after all, without "Rock Island Line", it's likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn't have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released "Petit Fleur", engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, "Petit Fleur"] And Barber didn't even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead -- a band who aren't releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz -- a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano -- unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene -- people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax -- who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism -- and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax's friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson's early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close -- the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn't a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we'll see -- but it's generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British "blues scene" was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate -- and more importantly play -- music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he'd found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?"] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That's because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn't the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we've looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, "Tain't Nobody's Business"] And we're lucky enough that many of the Barber band's shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we'll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, "Peace in the Valley"] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, "This Little Light of Mine"] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians' unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you'd reach Muddy Waters -- did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber's confusion was fairly straightfoward -- Barber was thinking of Waters' early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He'd travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress -- apparently he didn't know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn't find Johnson, he'd found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to -- Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever -- but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson's biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Be's Troubled"] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes -- Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy's record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he'd been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] But soon he'd partnered with Chess' great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess' other big star Howlin' Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great "Hoochie Coochie Man", which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters' current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn't really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of "Hoochie Coochie Man" to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann's faces lit up -- they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber's band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though -- the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters' first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they'd played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn't like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group's version of "Midnight Special": [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, "Midnight Special"] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, "This Train"] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed -- they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan's singing -- he'd even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band -- and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined "Skiffle is Piffle", in which he said in part: "It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement...British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment". Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn't skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, "Skip to My Lou"] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group's name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, "Death Letter"] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin' Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele's lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer -- his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould -- and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber's trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous -- the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn't actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "How Long How Long Blues"] But Burbridge wasn't their regular drummer -- that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn't yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn't bring his guitar, he'd just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them -- "Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger". Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group -- he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ -- it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two -- they'd play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies' disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they'd bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger's arm -- one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he'd ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren't out in the UK yet. They'd bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, "Beautiful Delilah"] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin' Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones -- Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant -- Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed -- though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart's piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically "and you must be the Chuck Berry artist". Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn't make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "You Can't Judge a Book By its Cover"] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player -- they didn't like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it -- he had a really good amplifier that they wanted -- but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner's wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style -- Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin' Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer's club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group's manager, though he didn't have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "Diddley Daddy"] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off -- even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn't have any money to heat the flat. The group's live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine's editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he'd already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He'd worked for Mary Quant, the designer who'd popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he'd taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles' London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he'd found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn't like it, and didn't care -- he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain's answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings -- at the time in Britain you needed an agent's license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them -- even though he'd not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise -- though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group's leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group's leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he'd taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that's what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called "Come On" -- though they changed Berry's line about a "stupid jerk" to being about a "stupid guy", in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Come On"] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn't include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record -- the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn't poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it's usually told -- that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say -- are false, and so it's likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death -- he just wasn't allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn't the only change Oldham made -- he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin'. He also changed Keith Richards' surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. "Come On" made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs -- nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones' second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing -- as Lennon said of the song, "We weren't going to give them anything great, were we?": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] For a B-side, the group did a song called "Stoned", which was clearly "inspired" by "Green Onions": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Stoned"] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge -- Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton's time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation -- if you're going to make records you need songs, and you can't just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We'll see how that went in a few weeks' time, when we pick up on their career.  

I have a shelf of records in the studio, favourites that I keep returning to and this is a quick selection from those tracks. No notes, less blether. In no particular order we have: The Rhythm Maniacs- Singin' in the bathtub, Phyllis Robins- In my little bottom drawer and I'll string along with you, Effie Atherton-My young man's ever so nice, Albert Ammons- Boogie Woogie Stomp, Lucky Thompson- Boppin' the blues- Geoffrey Goodheart-  I like pie, I like cake, Jimmie Rodgers- Away out on the mountain, Tom Wright- McGinty's Meal and Ale, Tom Foy- Lizzie, Harry Torrani- My Lancashire yodelling lass, Hoagy Carmichael- My Resistance is low, Dinah Shore- Lavender Blue, Harry Parry-Softly as in a morning sunrise, Carson Robinson Trio- Sweetheart of the prairie and the Light Crust Doughboys with Beer drinking mama.

Performers include: Art Tatum, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Albert Ammons, Jimmy Yancey, Jess Stacy, James P. Johnson, Thomas "Fats" Waller And Willie The Lion Smith. Works include: Sporting House Rag, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Tea For Two, Monday Struggle and Yancey Stomp.   

Empezamos con una comparación entre el Harlem stride y el boogie woogie. El boogie woogie centrado en Chicago, con orígenes en Texas, Kansas, Memphis. Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Otis Spann sus principales exponentes. El gordo Waller, Fats: compositor extraordinario (Handful of keys, Ain't misbehavin' Honeysuckle Rose y más de 400 temas en solo 39 años de vida, sin contar los que le robaron o mal vendió). Pianista vibrante, exquisito, organista, cantante y showman. Primer vals jazzístico, el Jitterbug Waltz. Chismes: toca en el  cumpleaños de Capone.  Las “primas” del gordo. Y saben en qué coinciden Sir Edward Elgar, Fats Waller, The Beatles y Pink Floyd?

The first of many bespoke podcast recordings to come. Its the usual eclectic mix of tunes. The mysterious Nino Rico orchestra play Rico Vacilon. Who were these fellas? Jane Forrest is another artist with no online biography. Glasgow born Tommy Watt had a long career as a band leader and arranger and is father to Ben Watt from Everything but the Girl. Joe Daniels and his Hot Shots, Winifred Atwell and The Light Crust Doughboys make another appearance. Short tributes to listeners in Virginia with Spring time in the Blue Ridge Mountains and California with The Californian Ramblers. Sadly both records are a little scratchy. Boogie Woogie Stomp from Albert Ammons, 1936. Great friend of Mead Lux Lewis, they were both taxi drivers in the 1920s. Imagine being picked up by them! Baritone Gilbert Austin sings a plaintive 'Why can't we be sweethearts.' He sang under at least 12 other names. Suzette Tarr was a cockney stage and radio star from 1930s and 40s. She sings 'Alf.' Hildegarde was born Loretta Snell in Wisconsin in 1906. She was an international cabaret star and inspired other artists such as Miss Piggy and Liberace! We end going out in to the dark beyond with the theme from the 1950s BBC radio series 'Journey into Space.' Now that is spacey.  

Lila Ammons lives in Minneapolis and travels the world singing blues and Jazz. Lila happens to be the dranddaughter of jazz pianist Albert Ammons and the niece of saxophone player Gene Ammons. Through her family and her travels, Lila has heard many kinds of jazz, and all those influences come out in Lila’s new CD, Geneology. Lilas’ CD release party is at the Dakota, Sunday August 4 at 7PM. She talked to Phil Nusbaum about the project.

Het hele weekend staat Co Live! in het teken van Blue Note! Naar aanleiding van het 80-jarig jubileum hoor je veel klassieke Blue Note opnames en een gesprek met Sophie Huber, maakster van de documentaire Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes. Playlist: Albert Ammons & Maede ‘Lux' Lewis - The Blues, Part One Albert Ammons & Maede ‘Lux' Lewis - Twos and Fews Cannonball Adderley & Miles Davis - Autumn Leaves Thelonious Monk - Round Midnight Robert Glasper - Butterfly Herbie Hancock - Butterfly Blue Note All-Stars ft. Wayne Shorter & Herbie Hancock - Masquelero Blue Note All-Stars - Witch Hunt Wynton Marsalis & Dionne Reeves - Feeling of Jazz Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy Pat Martino - Earthlings US3 - Cantaloupe Erik Truffaz - Bending New Corners Kijk voor meer informatie op https://www.nporadio2.nl/soulenjazz.

Het hele weekend staat Co Live! in het teken van Blue Note! Naar aanleiding van het 80-jarig jubileum hoor je veel klassieke Blue Note opnames en een gesprek met Sophie Huber, maakster van de documentaire Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes. Playlist: Albert Ammons & Maede ‘Lux’ Lewis - The Blues, Part One Albert Ammons & Maede ‘Lux’ Lewis - Twos and Fews Cannonball Adderley & Miles Davis - Autumn Leaves Thelonious Monk - Round Midnight Robert Glasper - Butterfly Herbie Hancock - Butterfly Blue Note All-Stars ft. Wayne Shorter & Herbie Hancock - Masquelero Blue Note All-Stars - Witch Hunt Wynton Marsalis & Dionne Reeves - Feeling of Jazz Bobby McFerrin - Don’t Worry Be Happy Pat Martino - Earthlings US3 - Cantaloupe Erik Truffaz - Bending New Corners Kijk voor meer informatie op https://www.nporadio2.nl/soulenjazz.

Hoy os ofrecemos el primer monográfico dedicado al 80 aniversario del sello Blue Note. Fue el pasado 6 de enero y le vamos a dedicar una serie de capítulos donde escucharemos y hablaremos de las leyendas que vivieron bajo los auspicios de aquella idea que convirtió en realidad Alfred Lion. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver o Lee Morgan entre otros sonarán en esta primera edición.

Hoy os ofrecemos el primer monográfico dedicado al 80 aniversario del sello Blue Note. Fue el pasado 6 de enero y le vamos a dedicar una serie de capítulos donde escucharemos y hablaremos de las leyendas que vivieron bajo los auspicios de aquella idea que convirtió en realidad Alfred Lion. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver o Lee Morgan entre otros sonarán en esta primera edición.

Boogie Woogie classics from 1939. Tunes include: Steady Rock Blues, Shout For Joy, Deep Fives, Woo Woo and Pinetop's Boogie Woogie. Performers include: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Harry James, Woody Herman and Clarence Lofton.

For over 50 years, John Mayall has served as a pioneer of blues music, rightly earning him the title, "The Godfather of British Blues". After decades of touring and recording, in 2013 John signed with producer Eric Corne's label, Forty Below Records, and has since been experiencing an artistic and career renaissance, including a Blues Hall of Fame induction in 2015.  This Friday Forty Below Records will release Nobody Told Me, Mayall’s  new studio album. Born in the UK in 1933, Mayall first became attracted to jazz and blues through  his father's 78s  record collection, listening to guitarists like Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Leadbelly. However once he heard the sounds of boogie woogie piano giants Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis, he was hooked.  As a young teen, he began learning the guitar and  later, the harmonica, inspired by Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter. The rest is history: mentoring future stars like Paul McCartney, Mick Fleetwood,  and Eric Clapton, moving to Los Angeles, more live and studio albums, and world touring his band The Bluesbreakers. Never stopping, he recently recorded albums in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and began playing live as a trio. His 2017  European tour resulted in the critically acclaimed live recording Three for the Road that showcased his skills on organ, piano and harmonica. In 2018, he recruited Texas blues guitarist Carolyn Wonderland -- the first female guitarist in his permanent lineup- for recording and touring in 2019.   Mayall also has a  new studio album in the works which features a full blown lineup with guest contributions from an impressive list of extraordinary, well-known guitarists.   

Edição de 17 de janeiro 2109

Hey All...….This weeks show:Out opening salvo:*The Shangri-las - Bulldog [Red Bird 1965] From the LP "Leader of the Pack"ALL BEDS: The Jimmy Gordon Orch. - Buzzzzzz [Challenge 1963] Drummer Jimmy Gordon with his 1st 45 rpm.Set 1: Savages & Hail Marys…* The Savage Resurrection - Thing in "E" [Mercury 1968] LP-S/T...killer only LP by San Francisco / Oakland w/ 16 year old Randy Hammon on guitar..they morphed out of a band called The Boys.* The V.I.P.s - I wanna be free [Island 1966] EP. Cover of Joe Tex killer grinder. Mike Harrison and Greg Ridley pre-ART, pre-Spooky Tooth.* Circus Maximus - The Wind [Vanguard 1967] LP - S/T. Jerry Jeff Walker and Bob Bruno before they went folk / jazz...respectively.* The Bennito Sextet - Psychedelic Soul [Tico 1968] LP - The Bennito Sextet + 1 * Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Mary Mary [Elektra 1966] LP - East West. Great version of The Monkees / Mike Nesmith song.* BED: see aboveSet 2: Broken Sky Pilots* International Submarine Band - Sum up broke [ Columbia 1966] 45 rpm. Best record ever of this band that included Gram Parsons & Chris Etheridge pre- Flying Burrito Brothers.* Flying Burrito Brothers - Wheels [A&M 1969] LP - The Guilded Palace of Sin* The Onion Radio News - A coroner works from home* The Tremeloes - Suddenly winter [Epic 1967] 45 rpm. Great track! * Traffic Sound - Sky Pilot [MAG 1968] 45 rpm. Peru's favorite pop / psychsters! * BED: See aboveSet 3: Rockets & Rhumbas* Pete Johnson - Rocket 88 Boogie [Downbeat 1949] 78 rpm. one third of the Boogie Woogie Trio along with Albert Ammons & Meade Lux Lewis.* Lowell Fulson - Blues Rhumba [Checker 1957] 45 rpm. Too good! Next weeks show: Christmas in Jail

    Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald,  For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties.   But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar.   To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall.   We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it).   One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other.   The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult.   But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music.   In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey.   (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier).   Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies.   [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”]   That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history.   But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey.    Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since.   He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”.   That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this:   [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”]   That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration.   And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands.   Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive.   Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is.   The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe.    Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended.   While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether.    This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”.   Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it.   At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all.   This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about.    It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches.   But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly.    From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to.   Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness.   She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway.   In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface.   So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it.   Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records.   Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”.   [excerpt of “Rock Me”]   Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single.   When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance.   [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall]   The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance.   Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better.   While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board.   Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad.   Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years:   [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”]   With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe.   Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X.  The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there.   However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like   [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”]   And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one.   [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”]   So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first.    This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano.   Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee.   But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”.   [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”]   Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure.   Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973,   The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus.   And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her.   While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano:   [excerpt “This Train”]   That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy.   There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband.   Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain”   [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt]   By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time:   [Excerpt of “My Babe”]   Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think.   Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout!   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

    Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe's music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe's life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald,  For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it's really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe's performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it's dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but don't say I didn't warn you when I get to the nineties.   But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar.   To find out why, we're going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall.   We've talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I'd talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that's a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally -- they had problems, but weren't all bad. Far from it).   One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. "From Spirituals to Swing". It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative -- one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It's like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other.   The fact is, most of the narrative about "primitive" music -- a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes -- is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn't because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn't afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult.   But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music.   In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man -- Thomas Dorsey.   (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we've mentioned a couple of times earlier).   Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name "Georgia Tom" he'd collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song "It's Tight Like That", from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form -- and it sold seven million copies.   [excerpt of "It's Tight Like That"]   That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made -- you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who's ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history.   But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he'd been playing. It's rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey.    Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since.   He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns -- at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like "Peace in the Valley" and "Take My Hand, Precious Lord".   That's a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this:   [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"]   That's not "primitive" music. That's not music that is unsophisticated. That's not some form of folk art. That's one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration.   And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn't need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands.   Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive.   Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it's probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that's where it's based, and that's where most of its membership is.   The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it's the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it's a Pentacostal church, because that's something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe.    Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I'm going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you're a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I'll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended.   While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe -- if they're "born again" to use a term that's a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism -- to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be "baptised in the Holy Ghost". This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call "water baptism" -- though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether.    This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), "All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them".   Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they're going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you're going to Heaven. You're going to Heaven once you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that's an end of it.   At least, it's an end of it so long as you continue with what's called "outward holiness", and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit's entered into you, you're going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don't do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all.   This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it's a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn't just about fear and living right, it's also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about.    It's no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches -- at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there's a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches.   But while most of the performers we'll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we'll see a lot in the history of rock -- the pull between the spiritual and the worldly.    From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn't generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of -- because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage -- to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her -- broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to.   Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness.   She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway.   In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen -- at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated -- only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a "jungle musician". The name itself -- the Cotton Club -- was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface.   So it's not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she'd been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course -- in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist -- but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be "Holy Rollers", mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it.   Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement -- and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money -- and her role was simply to be one of many acts who'd come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records.   Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled "Hide Me in Thy Bosom" but given the newer title "Rock Me" by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey's original, with one important exception -- where he had written "singing", Tharpe sang "swinging".   [excerpt of "Rock Me"]   Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to "Rock Me", and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single.   When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and "That's All", backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe's performance.   [excerpt of "That's All" from Carnegie Hall]   The sound quality of these recordings isn't great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance.   Tharpe's performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better.   While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together -- Mo Gale, Millinder's manager, was also Chick Webb's manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he'd seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder's Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder's band, said that it was Millinder's idea, not Gale's, to get Tharpe on board.   Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she'd been performing earlier -- her gospel repertoire -- but with a big band backing her. She'd also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary -- where before she'd had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad.   Her remake of "Rock Me" with Millinder's band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years:   [excerpt of 1941 "Rock Me"]   With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That's just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn't how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe.   Soon after she joined Millinder's band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York -- regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X.  The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after -- allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn't allow that -- although as Malcolm X said, it wasn't as if they were dragging the white women in there.   However, Millinder's band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course -- she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like "Tall Skinny Papa", which wasn't particularly gospel-like   [excerpt "Tall Skinny Papa"]   And it's not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn't sing on that one.   [excerpt "Big Fat Mama"]   So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first.    This was in the middle of the musicians' union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day", with Sam Price on piano.   Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn't playing in a normal jazz key. He didn't like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe's mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee.   But nonetheless, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe -- and it's yet another song often credited as "the first rock and roll record".   [Excerpt "Strange Things Happening Every Day"]   Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days -- and it's entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church -- but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe's friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi -- although of course we will never know for sure.   Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe's funeral in 1973,   The two of them toured together -- and Tharpe toured later on her own -- in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, because they were with a white man -- if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus.   And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn't even make the connection to how necessary it was for her.   While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe's most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she'd first recorded in 1938, "This Train", again featuring Sam Price on piano:   [excerpt "This Train"]   That's a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you'll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy.   There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums -- and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* -- her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid's arrow. Even Tharpe's half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband.   Rosetta Tharpe's popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There's fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time -- along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with "Didn't It Rain"   [Didn't It Rain TV performance excerpt]   By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she'd always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she'd had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn't even realise. "This Train" was not written by Tharpe, exactly -- it dates back to the 1920s -- but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time:   [Excerpt of "My Babe"]   Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe's UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who'd had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of "My Babe". Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you'd think.   Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you've ever liked rock guitar, you've got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout!   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Here's the second episode, on "Roll 'Em Pete" by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue -- in the episode, I say that "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That's not actually true for the original version -- it is true for Bill Haley's cover version, and Elvis' and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner's version the part we now know as the chorus didn't come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. ----more---- Resources As always, I've put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has "In the Mood" and "the Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller, "Roll 'Em Pete" and "It's All Right Baby" by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Joe Turner, "I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl" by Bessie Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, and "Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton's autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that's also out of print -- this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they'll get a rerelease at a reasonable price.   Transcript "It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" -- in Chuck Berry's classic song "Rock and Roll Music", that's the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it's something that had predecessors in rock's pre-history.   If you don't know what a backbeat is... well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you'd have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you'd expect from the name, it's a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you'd generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.   The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm -- so much so that often you'll see "shuffle rhythm" and "swing time" used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to "In the Mood" by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song].   That's a shuffle. That's swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It's a good, strong, sound -- there's a reason why it was popular -- but... it's a little bit polite. A little bit tame.   A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar -- boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It's a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That's the rhythm that made rock and roll.   Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says "I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn't even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming."   And that's what a backbeat does -- it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR.   But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn't even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called "Roll 'Em Pete".   Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that "generally credited". There are two problems with it -- the first is that "Roll 'Em Pete", at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn't have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that's the way of these things, as we'll see over and over again. The first anything is messy.   But "Roll 'Em Pete" is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let's have a look at it.   Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player -- yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline -- you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] -- while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and "eight to the bar" was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time.   But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you'll hear a rhythm which isn't so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. "Roll 'Em Pete" changed that.   Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his "Spirituals to Swing" concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts -- one in 1938 and one in 1939 -- were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That's not an exaggeration, by any means, it's just a fact.   At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event -- it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music.   For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from "primitive" folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA.   And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who's who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died -- Johnson's place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet.   For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And "shouter" was the word for what Turner did. If you don't know about blues shouters, that's unsurprising -- it's a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer -- usually a man -- who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could.   Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn't very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder -- blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie's.   But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever.   "Roll 'Em Pete" has the first recorded example -- as far as anyone has been able to discover -- of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson's piano part -- in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he's playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry's guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there.   Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself "I don't really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song -- are you sure it's got more of a backbeat?"   If you are, I don't blame you -- but there's a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that's the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier -- that performance is titled "It's Alright Baby" rather than "Roll 'Em Pete" on the official recordings, but it's the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly.   Now this isn't a clearcut differentiation -- you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that's a lot of what's going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a "first backbeat record" is almost as ridiculous as talking about a "first rock and roll record" or a "first soul record". And the more I've listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it's a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it's one you can clearly point to and say "that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that's massively different from its predecessors, but like "Flying Home", which we talked about last time, it's as good a place to start as any.   And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers.   Before we go into why, we'll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics -- or, more precisely, the way that they aren't really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we'll be seeing a lot of in the future -- a blues tradition called "floating lyrics". A song like "Roll 'Em Pete", you see, isn't really a song in the conventional sense. There's a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they'd tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. "Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman's tryin' to quit me, Lord, but I love her still" is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics -- though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don't believe she will, or doesn't love me but her sister will.   Most of Turner's songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we'll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We'll see several examples of people taking credit as "songwriters" for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result.   Turner and Johnson could stretch "Roll 'Em Pete" out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance -- and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all.   But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form -- it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music -- every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about "the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B" and wanted you to "beat me daddy, eight to the bar" (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to "scrub me mama to a boogie beat"). Tommy Dorsey recorded "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" (renamed as "TD's Boogie Woogie"), and you got... well, things like this.   [play excerpt of "The Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller]   That's the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don't write them like that any more.   Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren't directly about being boogie-woogie -- like, say, Glenn Miller's "Chatanooga Choo Choo" -- you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like "when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far".   And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever.   Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry -- men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands.   But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott.   The American Society of Composers and Publishers was -- and still is -- an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs -- in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing.   And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute.   This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn't been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music -- the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn't think was important.   Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing "I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair".  And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles.   And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history -- the musicians' union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn't affect anyone playing on the radio -- so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years.   This had several effects, all of them profound.   Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current -- at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture.   Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That's right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them.   Third -- and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers -- there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth   And fourth -- the strike didn't affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey's band couldn't record anything, but Dorsey's old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers.   The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman -- or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra -- and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton's and Count Basie's, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars.   Seventeen years after "Roll 'Em Pete", Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone -- though he was using the name "Charles Calhoun", because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one -- but you can hear that there's a very, very clear line to "Roll 'Em Pete". The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is a rock and roll song.   We'll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs' time, but for now we'll just talk about this song. That's Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that "whap, whap" snare drum playing. It's safe to say that's not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential.   "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is definitely the *same kind of thing* as "Roll 'Em Pete", isn't it? The piano playing is similar, Turner's blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But "Shake Rattle and Roll" is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term "rock and roll".   So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there's a few other things as well -- influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll.   There's the obvious one, of the saxophone. That's from rhythm and blues, and it's something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet's solo on "Flying Home" from last episode? That's a very clear progenitor for this.   But there's also the influence of another type of song -- one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don't even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into "blues".   The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like "Fishing Pole Blues", which has lines like "want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you'd better have a great big pole", or songs called things like "Banana in my Fruit Basket", I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll", "It's Tight Like That" and "Warm My Weiner".   There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like "Bull Dyke Blues", but I won't look at those in any more detail here as I don't want this podcast to get put in an "adults only" section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material.   And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren't the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead.   And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It's the pattern of "Tutti Frutti", of "Maybelline", of "Rock Around the Clock", and of "Shake Rattle and Roll". And "Shake Rattle and Roll", while it's not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter.   (Hilariously, Bill Haley's cover version is famously "cleaned up" -- they took out lines like "the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through" and "I believe to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose" in case they were too dirty. But they left in "I'm like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store"...)   So that's what rock and roll was, in its early stages -- a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from "Roll 'Em Pete", and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the "Spirituals to Swing" concerts.   But wait... isn't the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where's all the country music in this?   Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn't have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we'll have to wait until next episode.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Here’s the second episode, on “Roll ‘Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue — in the episode, I say that “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That’s not actually true for the original version — it is true for Bill Haley’s cover version, and Elvis’ and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner’s version the part we now know as the chorus didn’t come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has “In the Mood” and “the Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller, “Roll ‘Em Pete” and “It’s All Right Baby” by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner, “I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl” by Bessie Smith, “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton’s autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that’s also out of print — this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they’ll get a rerelease at a reasonable price.   Transcript “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it” — in Chuck Berry’s classic song “Rock and Roll Music”, that’s the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it’s something that had predecessors in rock’s pre-history.   If you don’t know what a backbeat is… well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you’d have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you’d expect from the name, it’s a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you’d generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.   The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm — so much so that often you’ll see “shuffle rhythm” and “swing time” used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to “In the Mood” by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song].   That’s a shuffle. That’s swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It’s a good, strong, sound — there’s a reason why it was popular — but… it’s a little bit polite. A little bit tame.   A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar — boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It’s a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That’s the rhythm that made rock and roll.   Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says “I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn’t even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming.”   And that’s what a backbeat does — it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR.   But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn’t even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called “Roll ‘Em Pete”.   Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that “generally credited”. There are two problems with it — the first is that “Roll ‘Em Pete”, at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn’t have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that’s the way of these things, as we’ll see over and over again. The first anything is messy.   But “Roll ‘Em Pete” is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let’s have a look at it.   Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player — yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline — you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] — while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and “eight to the bar” was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time.   But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you’ll hear a rhythm which isn’t so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. “Roll ‘Em Pete” changed that.   Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts — one in 1938 and one in 1939 — were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That’s not an exaggeration, by any means, it’s just a fact.   At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event — it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music.   For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from “primitive” folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA.   And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who’s who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died — Johnson’s place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet.   For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And “shouter” was the word for what Turner did. If you don’t know about blues shouters, that’s unsurprising — it’s a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer — usually a man — who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could.   Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn’t very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder — blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie’s.   But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever.   “Roll ‘Em Pete” has the first recorded example — as far as anyone has been able to discover — of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson’s piano part — in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he’s playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry’s guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there.   Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself “I don’t really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song — are you sure it’s got more of a backbeat?”   If you are, I don’t blame you — but there’s a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that’s the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier — that performance is titled “It’s Alright Baby” rather than “Roll ‘Em Pete” on the official recordings, but it’s the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly.   Now this isn’t a clearcut differentiation — you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that’s a lot of what’s going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a “first backbeat record” is almost as ridiculous as talking about a “first rock and roll record” or a “first soul record”. And the more I’ve listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it’s a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it’s one you can clearly point to and say “that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that’s massively different from its predecessors, but like “Flying Home”, which we talked about last time, it’s as good a place to start as any.   And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers.   Before we go into why, we’ll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics — or, more precisely, the way that they aren’t really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future — a blues tradition called “floating lyrics”. A song like “Roll ‘Em Pete”, you see, isn’t really a song in the conventional sense. There’s a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they’d tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. “Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman’s tryin’ to quit me, Lord, but I love her still” is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics — though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don’t believe she will, or doesn’t love me but her sister will.   Most of Turner’s songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we’ll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We’ll see several examples of people taking credit as “songwriters” for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result.   Turner and Johnson could stretch “Roll ‘Em Pete” out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance — and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all.   But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form — it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music — every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about “the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B” and wanted you to “beat me daddy, eight to the bar” (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to “scrub me mama to a boogie beat”). Tommy Dorsey recorded “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” (renamed as “TD’s Boogie Woogie”), and you got… well, things like this.   [play excerpt of “The Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller]   That’s the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don’t write them like that any more.   Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren’t directly about being boogie-woogie — like, say, Glenn Miller’s “Chatanooga Choo Choo” — you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like “when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far”.   And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever.   Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry — men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands.   But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott.   The American Society of Composers and Publishers was — and still is — an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs — in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing.   And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute.   This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn’t been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music — the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn’t think was important.   Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing “I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair”.  And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles.   And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history — the musicians’ union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn’t affect anyone playing on the radio — so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years.   This had several effects, all of them profound.   Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current — at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture.   Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That’s right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them.   Third — and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers — there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth   And fourth — the strike didn’t affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey’s band couldn’t record anything, but Dorsey’s old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers.   The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman — or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra — and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton’s and Count Basie’s, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars.   Seventeen years after “Roll ‘Em Pete”, Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone — though he was using the name “Charles Calhoun”, because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one — but you can hear that there’s a very, very clear line to “Roll ‘Em Pete”. The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is a rock and roll song.   We’ll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs’ time, but for now we’ll just talk about this song. That’s Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that “whap, whap” snare drum playing. It’s safe to say that’s not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential.   “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is definitely the *same kind of thing* as “Roll ‘Em Pete”, isn’t it? The piano playing is similar, Turner’s blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But “Shake Rattle and Roll” is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term “rock and roll”.   So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there’s a few other things as well — influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll.   There’s the obvious one, of the saxophone. That’s from rhythm and blues, and it’s something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet’s solo on “Flying Home” from last episode? That’s a very clear progenitor for this.   But there’s also the influence of another type of song — one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don’t even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into “blues”.   The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like “Fishing Pole Blues”, which has lines like “want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you’d better have a great big pole”, or songs called things like “Banana in my Fruit Basket”, I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll”, “It’s Tight Like That” and “Warm My Weiner”.   There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like “Bull Dyke Blues”, but I won’t look at those in any more detail here as I don’t want this podcast to get put in an “adults only” section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material.   And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren’t the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead.   And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It’s the pattern of “Tutti Frutti”, of “Maybelline”, of “Rock Around the Clock”, and of “Shake Rattle and Roll”. And “Shake Rattle and Roll”, while it’s not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter.   (Hilariously, Bill Haley’s cover version is famously “cleaned up” — they took out lines like “the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through” and “I believe to my soul you’re the devil in nylon hose” in case they were too dirty. But they left in “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store”…)   So that’s what rock and roll was, in its early stages — a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from “Roll ‘Em Pete”, and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts.   But wait… isn’t the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where’s all the country music in this?   Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn’t have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we’ll have to wait until next episode.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Shellac Stack No. 111 wobbles your way with hot jazz from Marty Grosz, Albert Ammons, Clifford Hayes' Louisville Stompers, and Chris Powell and the Five Blue Flames. We hear from tenor Colin O'Moore, pianist Carroll Gibbons, dance along with Sam Lanin and Bob Haring, and listen in on an Italian band of the “old school” … Continue reading »

To greet 2017 The Hot Box embarks on a series that features jazz pianists across all styles, countries of origin and eras, spanning most of the hundred years of recorded jazz, and starting with the letter "A", working over time - a long time! - to “Z". The Piano Series will run for once each month. “A" takes us back to the boogie-woogie of Albert Ammons, to the unique style of the recently departed Mose Allison, up to the present day Lynne Arriale, Monty Alexander and more. Enjoy the letter "A", and keep a look out for the letter B in February. We are still seeking recordings by Irish pianists, so if you know of any, let us know. We have a B…Cian Boylan, but more are needed! Contact please donald@jazzireland.ie 

Hur påverkar själva livet musikens uttryck? Hur påverkar musiken det liv som utövaren lever? Och hur påverkas sångdiktare och musiker av sina medmänniskors liv? I detta fjärde program medverkar pianisten, kompositören och entertainern Robert Wells, med svensk mamma och nordamerikansk pappa. Robert Wells kallar sig både hovnarr och gathörns-trubadur och har måttot Less is Less More is Best. Wells har nämligen skrivit och spelat in ouvertyrer till gigantiska evenemang som VM i ishockey och konståkning, och till OS I friidrott. Under nio år såg och hörde vi Robert Wells som ackompanjatör i SVT-programmet Så ska det låta. Rhapsody in Rock, som 2011 firade 25-årsjubileum, har Wells som dynamisk kapellmästare och kreativt nav. Konserterna har hållits på jättelika arenor som Ulllevi, Dalhalla och Råsunda och turnéerna har gått över hela världen. Wells är pianoprofessor i Kina, har pianoskolan King of Piano  på nätet och arbetar med stiftelsen Tummeliten till stöd för för tidigt födda barn. Hans pianistiska förebilder är de tre afroamerikanska boogie woogie-legenderna Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons och Meade Lux Lewis. Men även europeiska pianister älskar han, inte minst de två Vladimir, nämligen Horowitz och Ashkenazy. Och Arthur Rubinstein. 2010 gav Robert Wells ut sin första soloplatta Close up Classics med egna tolkningar av pianistiska pärlor av Chopin, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Debussy, Beethoven, Stenhammar och Grieg. Robert Wells var den yngste eleven någonsin vid solistlinjen på Musikhögskolan i Stockholm. Myten att han hoppade av studierna är falsk, men det var när Robert Wells hörde den svenske pianisten Charlie Normans boogie woogie-tappning av Griegs Anitras Dans, som han bestämde sig för att mixa musikstilar. Det berättar Robert Wells för Birgitta Tollan när de möts i hans studio i Stockholm där han tar plats vid sin digitala flygel och säger: - I min värld är ingen musik finare än den andra. Jag älskar att spela och jag älskar musik. Så enkelt är det!   Spellista:   Spellista Musik & Liv 4:   Yemandja Angelique Kidjo, sång, m fl Aye Island Records Mango 74321 16646 2     Minute Waltz Frédéric Chopin Robert Wells, piano Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107           Bumble-Bee Boogie Rimskij-Korsakov. Robert Wells Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Rhapsody In Rock no VIII Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Nut Rocker Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Sing Me Another Song Robert Wells. Jakob Samuel. Plusquam Records     Anitras Dans Edvard Grieg Robert Wells, Charlie Norman, pianon Norman & Wells Carlton Home Entertainment 751589     honky tonk train blues Meade Lux Lewis Meade Lux Lewis, piano     Hungarian Rhapsody No II Franz Liszt Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6                                                                                      Fantaisie-Impromptu Frédéric Chopin Robert Wells, piano. Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107           Clair De Lune Claude Debussy Robert Wells, piano. Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107     Honeysuckle Rose Fats Waller. Andy Razaf. Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6                                          River Deep Mountain High Ike & Tina Turner Robert Wells, piano. Sanne Salomonsen, sång. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Sommarnatt Robert Wells Robert Wells, piano och sång. SCRANTA SACD                 The Typewriter Leroy Anderson Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Belleville Rendez-Vous Benoît Charest, music. Sylvain Chomet, text. Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     1812 Overture Tjajkovskij Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6

Music includes: For Sentimental Reasons, Divorce Me COD, Good Morning Heartache, Lover Man, Prisoner of Love, Chopin Prelude #6 and Down In the Valley. Performers include: Billie Holiday, Burl Ives, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker, Merle Travis, Arthur Rubinstein, Albert Ammons and Spike Jones.

For National Piano Month, a collection of piano music from the first half of the 20th Century. Artists include: Jelly Roll Morton, Teddy Wilson, Albert Ammons,  Dinu Lipatti, Moon Mullican, Art Tatum and Hazel Scott. Works include: Boogie Woogie Stomp, Chopin's Nocturne #8, I Left My Heart In Texas, Tiger Rag, Sweetheart O Mine and Warsaw Concerto.

Performers include: Duke Ellington DeFord Bailey, Ted Goon, Woody Herman, Albert Ammons, Peter Johnson and Arthur Fiedler. Music includes: Fast Freight Blues, Sixth Avenue Express, Bahn Frei, Dixie Flyer Blues, Locomotive and  Whistle Stop.

Celebrating 10 years of Music From 100 Years Ago; some of the host's favorite records from the first half of the 20th Century. Music selections include: Old Dan Tucker, Lover Man, French Suite #5, Stairway to the Stars, Shout For Joy, Searching the Desert For the Blues and Rose Room. Performers include: Thomas "Fats" Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, the Swift Jewel Cowboys, Albert Ammons, Louis Jordan, Bix Beiderbeck, Blind Willie McTell and Rudolf Serkin.

Dave Alexander nació un 10 de marzo de 1938 en Shreveport, Luisiana y empezó a tocar el piano escuchando a su padre Tom Elam, que tocaba el piano y la guitarra además de trabajar en el campo, también escuchaba a pianistas de boogie woogie como Albert Ammons, Amos Milburn y Pete Johnson. Al principio el joven Dave Alexander comenzó a tocar la batería y a cantar en los coros pero su madre Susie, le animó a tocar el piano en la Iglesia. Allí solía entrar cuando no había nadie para tocar la música del diablo aunque le atraparon varias veces.

Dave Alexander nació un 10 de marzo de 1938 en Shreveport, Luisiana y empezó a tocar el piano escuchando a su padre Tom Elam, que tocaba el piano y la guitarra además de trabajar en el campo, también escuchaba a pianistas de boogie woogie como Albert Ammons, Amos Milburn y Pete Johnson. Al principio el joven Dave Alexander comenzó a tocar la batería y a cantar en los coros pero su madre Susie, le animó a tocar el piano en la Iglesia. Allí solía entrar cuando no había nadie para tocar la música del diablo aunque le atraparon varias veces.

Pianists include: Thomas 'Fats" Waller, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Thelonius Monk, George Shearing, Errol Garner, Dave Brubeck, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Bud Powell. Works include: Tea For Two, Running Wild, Honeysuckle Rose, Perdido, Ruby My Dear and Barrelhouse Boogie.

Well, hey there! It's time once again for another BluzNdaBlood Show! The show will be the last show highlighting a major blues label! This show highlights many of the great releases from Delmark Records! You'll be treated to Quintus McCormick, Dave Weld & the Imperial Flames, Mississippi Heat, Detroit Junior, Dave Specter, Albert Ammons, Jimmy Johnson, Junior Wells and The Aces, Lurrie Bell, Otis Rush, Tail Dragger, Zora Young, and Willie Buck! Please keep in touch! E-mail me at dave@bluzndablood.com! The easist way to get the show is to go to iTunes and Subscribe for free! The web site is being updated! Keep the blues in the blood, Dave

Performers include: Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Charlie Christian, Bud Powell, Lu Watters, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Billie Holiday.  Songs include: Marmaduke, The Chase, Sage Hen Strut, Raincheck, Air Mail Special and There Is No Greater Love.

In this edition of The Roadhouse, you can look forward to Magic Slim & The Teardrops, Samuel James, Paul Rishell, Albert Ammons, and some new music from Robert Cray. I've got a set of acoustic blues, some piano blues, and some straight ahead Chicago stemwinders . It's all wrapped up in a clean blue package of the finest blues you've never heard - the 398th Roadhouse.

This is an energetic and rhythmic style of piano playing that originated in the Southern States of America in the early 20th century. The rumbling left-hand rhythm was often used to evoke trains and railroad travel, and the buoyant energy of the music was popular to dance to in the juke joints and barrelhouses. Famous early exponents included Jelly Roll Morton, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. Featuring Jools Holland and Peter Silvester.

Songs about Monday, including: A Monday Date, Every Day Is Monday, Blue Monday Blues, Monday Again and Sunday, Monday and Always. Performers include: Bing Crosby, Jeanne Taylor, Albert Ammons, Frankie Laine and Count Basie.

Pete Johnson was one of the three great boogie-woogie pianists (along with Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis) whose sudden prominence in the late '30s helped make the style very popular. Originally a drummer, Johnson switched to piano in 1922.Listen to our NEW Radio Station, Oldies Big Band Jazz and More   HempUSA Store       

 Musical Pairs.  Musicians include: Bing Crosby and Johnny Mercer, Tom Darby and Jimmy Tarleton, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Ella Logan. Songs include: Two Sleepy People, Big Noise From Winnetka, Barrelhouse Boogie and Till We Meet Again.

The musicians who brought boogie woogie into mainstream popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.  Pianists include: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Hazel Scott and Jimmy Yancey. Tunes include: Boogie Woogie Prayer, Bass Goin Crazy, Hazel's Boogie and Movin the Boogie.