Podcasts about be bop a lula

Apologies for the gap since the last episode. The “Studio” has now moved from Pyrmont to Port Macquarie. Also, and alas, those wonderfully-titled “Side-Effects of Chemo” have continued. Anyway, this episode is Part 3 of The Col Joye Story, covering the period from late-1961 to December 1963. The biggest hit in this period was “Today's Teardrops” and perhaps, the low-point was the nursery rhyme turned pop song, “Ring Around My Rosie”. I've cherry-picked some songs from Col's LPs and EPs, including a song titled “What About Me” (Don Gibson - not the Moving Pictures song). Take a listen to the opening chords of the song which, to my ear, sound very much like those used in the introduction to a major hit in 1979. Towards the end of the episode there are a couple of real ‘rockers'; “Be Bop A Lula” and “I Need Your Love Tonight”. Enjoy Part 3 of the Col Joye Story!

Het zevende Spinvis-album Be-Bop-A-Lula kreeg liefst vijf sterren van de Volkskrant. Muziekblad OOR noemde Be-Bop-A-Lula: ‘een geraffineerde balans tussen licht en donker, opbeurend en weemoedig” en Dansende Beren spreekt over: ‘een prachtig plakboek' dat ‘uitblinkt…Continue Reading "Spinvis toert met Be-Bop-A-Lula"

Gijs is op bezoek bij muzikant Spinvis op zijn demografische lotsbestemming: Nieuwegein. In een studio vol computers, gitaren en een piano praten ze over het maakproces van de creatieveling. En natuurlijk over zijn nieuwe album Be-Bop-A-Lula. Onze journalistiek steunen? Dat kan het beste met een (digitaal) abonnement op de Volkskrant, daarvoor ga je naar  www.volkskrant.nl/podcastactie Presentatie: Gijs Groenteman Montage: Daan Hofstee Redactie: Tamar Bot, Fanny van der Reijt, Corinne van Duin, Tiemen Hageman, Eva van Leeuwen  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Veel reuring in festivalland sinds de vorige Festivalpodcast. Twee weekenden Coachella en een kritiekstorm bij Down The Rabbit Hole zijn achter de rug. In deze nieuwe aflevering gaan we alles na wat er in de woestijn te zien was en meer. Je hoort de volgende onderwerpen langskomen: Veel te doen over de (inmiddels teruggedraaide) VIP kaarten van Down The Rabbit Hole. Was de kritiek terecht? Heel! Veel! Coachella! We nemen je mee langs de beste shows van het grootste festival van Amerika, maar natuurlijk ook de dikke tegenvallers en andere opvallendheden. Inclusief veel muziek en dito knaldrang voor onze eigen festivalzomer. De Bevrijdingsfestivals komen eraan! Maar waar naartoe? We pikken de beste lineups eruit. En we blikken terug op Record Store Day inclusief veel platen om de komende tijd te luisteren! De tips-van-om-de-week: Jos: Het nieuw album van Noel Gallagher, Council Skies, dat vrijdag 2 juni uitkomt. Julia: Het nieuwe album van The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, dat deze vrijdag op 28 april uitkomt. Judith: Het nieuwe album van Spinvis, Be-Bop-A-Lula, wat gewoon al uit is. Verder staande ovaties, oneindige karmapunten en spontane confettidouches voor: Mick Hummel voor een schitterend podcast logo. Wietze Wempe & Malou Gouders voor ons intro anthem. Malou Gouders en Joris Timmerman als de immer stralende podcastredactie en de montage. En jou, als lieve luisteraar! Vind je het leuk? Abonneer je dan! Je checkt de show op Spotify,  Apple Podcasts, KINK.nl of waar jij het liefst naar je podcast luistert. Het Festivalpodcast-anthem uit je hoofd leren? Hieronder de lyrics: Werelden vol avontuur van Main Stage tot aan Dixieland.Muntjes op en vrienden kwijt, maar nog is hier niks irritant. Te vroeg gepiekt, maar geen paniek. Je slaapritme toch al verziekt.Hé een laser, confettiregen, yoga overwegen. Met een grote klodder mayo, op je broodje knakworst.Lauwe halve liter, maakt niet uit heb toch dorst. Luchtbed leeggelopen,Tent weer afgebroken. Al m’n geld verbrast,‘t is de Festivalpodcast!

Veel reuring in festivalland sinds de vorige Festivalpodcast. Twee weekenden Coachella en een kritiekstorm bij Down The Rabbit Hole zijn achter de rug. In deze nieuwe aflevering gaan we alles na wat er in de woestijn te zien was en meer. Je hoort de volgende onderwerpen langskomen: Veel te doen over de (inmiddels teruggedraaide) VIP kaarten van Down The Rabbit Hole. Was de kritiek terecht? Heel! Veel! Coachella! We nemen je mee langs de beste shows van het grootste festival van Amerika, maar natuurlijk ook de dikke tegenvallers en andere opvallendheden. Inclusief veel muziek en dito knaldrang voor onze eigen festivalzomer. De Bevrijdingsfestivals komen eraan! Maar waar naartoe? We pikken de beste lineups eruit. En we blikken terug op Record Store Day inclusief veel platen om de komende tijd te luisteren! De tips-van-om-de-week: Jos: Het nieuw album van Noel Gallagher, Council Skies, dat vrijdag 2 juni uitkomt. Julia: Het nieuwe album van The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, dat deze vrijdag op 28 april uitkomt. Judith: Het nieuwe album van Spinvis, Be-Bop-A-Lula, wat gewoon al uit is. Verder staande ovaties, oneindige karmapunten en spontane confettidouches voor: Mick Hummel voor een schitterend podcast logo. Wietze Wempe & Malou Gouders voor ons intro anthem. Malou Gouders en Joris Timmerman als de immer stralende podcastredactie en de montage. En jou, als lieve luisteraar! Vind je het leuk? Abonneer je dan! Je checkt de show op Spotify,  Apple Podcasts, KINK.nl of waar jij het liefst naar je podcast luistert. Het Festivalpodcast-anthem uit je hoofd leren? Hieronder de lyrics: Werelden vol avontuur van Main Stage tot aan Dixieland.Muntjes op en vrienden kwijt, maar nog is hier niks irritant. Te vroeg gepiekt, maar geen paniek. Je slaapritme toch al verziekt.Hé een laser, confettiregen, yoga overwegen. Met een grote klodder mayo, op je broodje knakworst.Lauwe halve liter, maakt niet uit heb toch dorst. Luchtbed leeggelopen,Tent weer afgebroken. Al m’n geld verbrast,‘t is de Festivalpodcast!

Vandaag één van de fijnste en eigenzinnigste artiesten uit onze Lage Landen. Erik de Jong aka Spinvis brak in 2002 door met zijn gelijknamige debuutplaat en ruim 20 jaar later staat hij aan de vooravond van de release van zijn 7de album Be-Bop-A-Lula. Het werd een gesprek over het vak, maar vooral ook over het leven. Erik is niet alleen een fantastische muzikant maar ook een waanzinnig interessante mens. Volg Spinvis via http://www.spinvis.nl.

Vincent Eugene Craddock was a musician way ahead of his time who managed to chart with his first song. While most will recognize his name from his only hit "Be-Bop-A-Lula", Gene Vincent, as he went by artistically, was much more influential and pioneering to the Rock and Roll and Rockabilly genres. Join us this week as we take a deep dive into his life, and what happened? Songs in this episode: Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps - Be-Bop-A-Lola Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps - Race With The Devil Stray Cats - Gene And Eddie The Cramps - Off The Bone Find us! LinkTree --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imvibespodcast/support

#40-36Intro/Outro: Oh What a Nite by The Dells40. Come Go With Me by The Del-Vikings39. At the Hop by Danny & the Juniors38. Tequila by The Champs37. Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps36. Maybellene by Chuck BerryVote on your favorite song from today's episodeVote on your favorite song from Week 2

Episode 136 The Lunar Saloon Every Friday from 11P - 1A PST 99.1 FM Long Beach Streaming at KLBP.org Airdate: November 5, 2021 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Cover Songs!! Don Harper, Dr. Who Theme, Homo Electronicus The Moog Cookbook, Are You Gonna Go My Way?, The Moog Cookbook Bud Melvin, Lovesong, Shaking Like Milk Lili De La Mora & 12hz, Let's Go To Bed, Stardrive With Robert Mason, Want To Take You Higher, Intergalactic Trot Okko, A Day In The Life, Sitar & Electronics The Esso Trinidad Steel Band, I Want You Back, Esso Cosmonauti, The Look Of Love, That's New Pussycat - Surf Tribute To Burt Bacharach The Main Ingredient, Summer Breeze, Yacht Soul Sandy O'Neil, Make It With You, Mystery Nile Marcia Griffiths, Here I Am (Come And Take Me), Soul Sides Volume Two: The Covers Alaskalaska, A Girl Like You, Covered in Gloria Roberto Sandrini, Occhi Su Di Me (Eyes Without A Face) (Psychemagik Edit), Undercover Lovers Dallas, Dallas, Générique Du Feuilleton TV The Staple Singers, Slippery People, Slippery People Suzy Andrews, Der Komissar, Light Sounds Dark Presents: We Bang The Bomb Bill Wolfer, Papa Was a Rolling Stone, Papa Was A Rollin' Stone Synths Versus Me, Goodbye Horses (Remastered), Memories Of A Dream EP Big Ben Tribe, Heroes (Tony Carrasco Mix), Heroes Steve Strange Project, In The Year 2525, In The Year 2525 The Reels, Bad Moon Rising, Bad Moon Rising Anika, I Go To Sleep, Anika EP Mo-Dettes, Paint It Black, The Story So Far Michigan & Smiley, Tom's Diner, Tom's Diner Mattiel, Guns of Brixton (Rub a Dub Style'), Double Cover Byron Lee & The Dragonaires, And I Love Her, Trojan Beatles Tribute Jeriko, Hey Joe, Peru Bravo: Funk, Soul & Psych From Peru's Radical Decade Señor Coconut, Homecomputer (Merengue), El Baile Alemán Pernett, Blue Monday (I-Robots Reconstruction) (feat. Lido Pimienta & Quantic), We Are Opilec...! Vol. II Colourbox, You Keep Me Hanging On (12"" Version), You Keep Me Hanging On David Essex, Be Bop A Lula, Be Bop A Lula The Stranglers, Walk On By, The Collection 1977-1982 Bauhaus, Night Time, Swing the Heartache · The BBC Sessions Claude Denjean, Come Together, Moog!"

Hey, y'all. I am Shay. This is thebuzzr podcast. Welcome & enjoy. Episode 60. First, music history for July 6th. Today in 1957 John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time at The Woolton Church Parish Fete where The Quarry Men were appearing. As The Quarry Men were setting up for their evening performance, McCartney eager to impress Lennon picked up a guitar and played "Twenty Flight Rock"(Eddie Cochran) and "Be-Bop-A-Lula" (Gene Vincent). Paul impressed Lennon. Even more so when McCartney showed Lennon and Eric Griffiths how to tune their guitars, something they'd been paying someone else to do for them. Today The Sophisticated Psychos made up of Nicky Scorpio and Katie Chonacas are on the show. The duo's focus is to promote morals, ethics and values guides their art, music and creative expression. Enjoy the show! Tracks "Irregular" Nicky Scorpio 17:37 "Playing House" KYRIAKI aka Katie Elizabeth Chonacas  24:34 From The Duo This duo consisting of Nicky Scorpio and multi-talented renaissance woman, Katie Chonacas created a collective called The Sophisticated Psychos. Their focus is on promoting the power of love in a real way. The Sophisticated Psychos are out to promote morals, ethics and values through art, music and expression. https://youtu.be/AZ7Y0lnrLyU Self-produced debut solo single, "Irregular". In collaboration with Subtle Energy Sciences, this song is encoded with all 9 solfeggio frequencies. Meaning, the more you listen the better you will feel. https://youtu.be/MvQaf2XAdyM Facebook Youtube Instagram Apple Spotify Soundcloud Link

Terminamos el repaso del fabuloso elepé doble recopilatorio que lleva ocupándonos unos días V.A. – BLUES & ROCK Decca – DCS 15020/21 España 1972 Lista de canciones pendientes D1 Frijid Pink– Sing A Song For Freedom 3:00 D2 Amen Corner– Good Times 2:52 D3 Warren Philips & The Rockets– Be-Bop-A-Lula 2:18 D4 The Keef Hartley Band– The Time Is Near 7:45 Luego cumplimos una promesa que en su momento no pude complacer. Me rompí una pierna con Filomena y durante unos cuantos meses he tenido impedida la movilidad, hasta el punto de no poder acceder a un tocadiscos para transcribir y poneros un extraordinario vinilo de 1968 que no tiene equivalente en el mercado internacional, publicado en España en 1968. Casi todas las canciones están en antologías digitales, pero no todas. Además con su programación quiero destacar cómo conocimos el rock and roll en España, que por supuesto nos llegó, pero nunca en una antología tan buena, completa y tan bien elegida. Os pongo la edición única española en mono y sin retocar, tal como la leyó el tocadiscos analógico. V.A. ¡ESTO ES ROCK AND ROLL! Liberty, Hispavox, España 1968 Listado de canciones A1.- LARRY WILLIAMS Bonnie Moronie A2.- JERRY LEE LEWIS Great Balls of Fire A3.- BILL JUSTIS Raunchy A4.- FATS DOMINO Ain't that a Shame A5.- JOHNNY RIVERS Memphis A6.- BILLY WARD & THE DOMINOES Stardust A7.- EDDIE COCHRAN Long Tall Sally B1.- THE TRASHMEN Surfin' bird B2.- LARRY WILLIAMS Short Fat Fannie B3.- BILL BLACK COMBO Hearts of Stone B4.- FATS DOMINO Blueberry Hill B5.- BUDDY KNOX Party Doll B6.- JOHNNY & THE HURRICANES Red River Rock (Valle del Jarama) B7.- EDDIE COCHRAN Summertime Blues Bonus: MUDDY WATERS The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock and Roll Escuchar audio

Terminamos el repaso del fabuloso elepé doble recopilatorio que lleva ocupándonos unos días V.A. – BLUES & ROCK Decca – DCS 15020/21 España 1972 Lista de canciones pendientes D1 Frijid Pink– Sing A Song For Freedom 3:00 D2 Amen Corner– Good Times 2:52 D3 Warren Philips & The Rockets– Be-Bop-A-Lula 2:18 D4 The Keef Hartley Band– The Time Is Near 7:45 Luego cumplimos una promesa que en su momento no pude complacer. Me rompí una pierna con Filomena y durante unos cuantos meses he tenido impedida la movilidad, hasta el punto de no poder acceder a un tocadiscos para transcribir y poneros un extraordinario vinilo de 1968 que no tiene equivalente en el mercado internacional, publicado en España en 1968. Casi todas las canciones están en antologías digitales, pero no todas. Además con su programación quiero destacar cómo conocimos el rock and roll en España, que por supuesto nos llegó, pero nunca en una antología tan buena, completa y tan bien elegida. Os pongo la edición única española en mono y sin retocar, tal como la leyó el tocadiscos analógico. V.A. ¡ESTO ES ROCK AND ROLL! Liberty, Hispavox, España 1968 Listado de canciones A1.- LARRY WILLIAMS Bonnie Moronie A2.- JERRY LEE LEWIS Great Balls of Fire A3.- BILL JUSTIS Raunchy A4.- FATS DOMINO Ain't that a Shame A5.- JOHNNY RIVERS Memphis A6.- BILLY WARD & THE DOMINOES Stardust A7.- EDDIE COCHRAN Long Tall Sally B1.- THE TRASHMEN Surfin' bird B2.- LARRY WILLIAMS Short Fat Fannie B3.- BILL BLACK COMBO Hearts of Stone B4.- FATS DOMINO Blueberry Hill B5.- BUDDY KNOX Party Doll B6.- JOHNNY & THE HURRICANES Red River Rock (Valle del Jarama) B7.- EDDIE COCHRAN Summertime Blues Bonus: MUDDY WATERS The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock and Roll Escuchar audio

Fabuloso disco recopilatorio de Discos Columbia, de 1972. Empezamos a repasarlo el viernes; hoy nos ocupa todo el programa y lo terminaremos mañana. Es el mejor de la serie. Consta principalmente de artistas de la Escuela Británica de Blues, con algún añadido. Os pongo copia original española analógica que suena de forma extraordinaria. V.A. – BLUES & ROCK Decca – DCS 15020/21 España 1972 Lista de canciones A4 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers & Peter Green– Greeny 3:53 A5 Champion Jack Dupree & Mickey "Guitar" Baker– Barrelhouse Woman 2:01 B1 Eddie Boyd– Blue Coat Man 2:30 B2 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers & Peter Green– Out Of Reach 4:41 B3 Champion Jack Dupree & Mickey "Guitar" Baker– I Feel Like A Millionaire 2:43 B4 Savoy Brown– Someday People 4:31 B5 Ten Years After– Feel It For Me 2:40 C1 East Of Eden– Jig-A-Jig 3:38 C2 Savoy Brown– Poor Girl 5:20 C3 Warren Phillips And The Rockets– Blues Suede Shoes 2:20 C4 Frijid Pink– Sloony 3:35 C5 The Moody Blues– Go Now 3:14 C6 Ten Years After– I'm Going Home 4:15 D1 Frijid Pink– Sing A Song For Freedom 3:00 D2 Amen Corner– Good Times 2:52 D3 Warren Philips & The Rockets– Be-Bop-A-Lula 2:18 D4 The Keef Hartley Band– The Time Is Near 7:45 Mañana terminaremos este doble elepé y recuperaré "Esto es Rock and Roll" de Liberty 1968 que quedó pendiente hace unos meses. Escuchar audio

Fabuloso disco recopilatorio de Discos Columbia, de 1972. Empezamos a repasarlo el viernes; hoy nos ocupa todo el programa y lo terminaremos mañana. Es el mejor de la serie. Consta principalmente de artistas de la Escuela Británica de Blues, con algún añadido. Os pongo copia original española analógica que suena de forma extraordinaria. V.A. – BLUES & ROCK Decca – DCS 15020/21 España 1972 Lista de canciones A4 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers & Peter Green– Greeny 3:53 A5 Champion Jack Dupree & Mickey "Guitar" Baker– Barrelhouse Woman 2:01 B1 Eddie Boyd– Blue Coat Man 2:30 B2 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers & Peter Green– Out Of Reach 4:41 B3 Champion Jack Dupree & Mickey "Guitar" Baker– I Feel Like A Millionaire 2:43 B4 Savoy Brown– Someday People 4:31 B5 Ten Years After– Feel It For Me 2:40 C1 East Of Eden– Jig-A-Jig 3:38 C2 Savoy Brown– Poor Girl 5:20 C3 Warren Phillips And The Rockets– Blues Suede Shoes 2:20 C4 Frijid Pink– Sloony 3:35 C5 The Moody Blues– Go Now 3:14 C6 Ten Years After– I'm Going Home 4:15 D1 Frijid Pink– Sing A Song For Freedom 3:00 D2 Amen Corner– Good Times 2:52 D3 Warren Philips & The Rockets– Be-Bop-A-Lula 2:18 D4 The Keef Hartley Band– The Time Is Near 7:45 Mañana terminaremos este doble elepé y recuperaré "Esto es Rock and Roll" de Liberty 1968 que quedó pendiente hace unos meses. Escuchar audio

Eine tragische Liebesgeschichte und das Ende eines Rock´n Roll-Stars: Three steps to heaven - Rock´n Roll-Legende Eddie Cochran ist sie viel zu früh hochgelaufen. Er starb bei einem Verkehrsunfall im April 1960, bei dem Cochrans Freund Gene Vincent (Be bop a lula) und Cochrans Verlobte Sharon Sheeley schwer verletzt wurden. Heute gilt Cochran mit seinen Hits "C´mon everybody" und "Summertime Blues" als der erste Rocker. Dieser Podcast erzählt die Geschichte der Drei bis hin zum tragischen Unfall.

#395-391Intro/Outro: We Built This City by Starship395. Lean on Me by Bill Withers394. You Lie by The Band Perry393. Up On Cripple Creek by The Band392. Hello Hurricane by Switchfoot391. Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent & the Blue CapsCorrection: "The Band" was the second album by The Band, not their debut album. Their debut album was "Music from Big Pink" (1968).

En El Guateque (orm.es; domingos, 22,05h) rescatamos olvidadas melodías del ayer. Recordamos a Junior, que se marchó hace siete años. El 19 de abril de 1968 se publicó en el Reino Unido, 'Odessey & Oracle' , segundo album del grupo británico The Zombies. UN 23 de abril de 1936 nació en Vernon (Texas) el compositor y cantante norteamericano Roy Orbison, uno de los auténticos pioneros del rock and roll.Con Enrique Lozano ya fuera de la formación, Los Íberos editan en 1970 dos sencillos con temas extraídos de su único LP, editado el año anterior. Los Mitos en la época de Fernando Brosed como voz líder del grupo, produjo canciones sin igual, la mayoría son alegres y otras muy sublimes. Tony Ronald produjo a unos catalanes llamados Siglo XX. Rosalía cantó una versión de la victoriosa eurovisiva “Muñeca de cera”, con la que France Gall ganó el concurso en 1965.Enrique Guzmán se convirtió en cantante de moda en España a comienzo de 1963. Hilda Aguirre, la actriz mexicana, protagonizó filmes como Sor ye-yé .En aquel periodo, bajo la influencia del rock and roll que invadía Italia, Mina grabó en inglés los sencillos "Be Bop A Lula" y "When" con el nombre artístico de Baby Gate, El primer gran éxito de Adriano Celentano fue 24000 Baci con la que quedó segundo en la edición de Festival de San Remo de 1961. Brown Eyed Girl', con su ritmo pegadizo y su letra nostálgica, supuso el debut en solitario de Van Morrison después de su paso por Them. La chica de los ojos marrones de la que trata la canción primero fue una chica de piel morena, ya que ‘Brown Skinned Girl' era el título original que, según la leyenda, el cantante se vio obligado a cambiar debido a la presión de su discográfica. A principios de 1967 Los Ángeles graban un primer single "Escápate / ¿Has Amado Alguna Vez?" con el que entren en el top 10 nacional y su nombre empieza a escucharse por doquier. Al margen del Merseybeat, y con líricas que festejaban o penaban el amor, la amistad o las ansias de libertad, Los Brincos, el grupo de Arbex estaba influenciado también por la energía y voces de unos Who o Yardbirds; y de las iniciales pautas R&B de los Rolling Stones del 64, que configuraron un vibrante sonido garage rock. Se fue joven Karen Carpenter, víctima de una enfermedad que en ese entonces, nadie había escuchado mencionar: anorexia nerviosa. La voz armoniosa de Karen parecía un regalo enviado del cielo y algo que distinguía a "Sing" era la participación de un coro de niños que le daba elegancia a la canción. Gelu recurrió en este EP de 1966 a dos temas sacados directamente de las listas de éxito de Gran Bretaña para ser traducidos al español de urgencias. Le ha fallado el éxito. El reconocimiento no ha estado a la altura de su talento. José María Guzmán, una leyenda del pop, La trayectoria de Guzmán resulta menos sorprendente si se tiene en cuenta que compuso Calles del viejo París a los 14 años.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “16 Candles” by the Crests. 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—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Bye Bye Love” by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Fat Fannie” by Larry Williams.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers’ early material available. I’d recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We’ve talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we’ve not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we’ve already seen, is the vocal group sound — the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It’s the sound of a collection of individual personalities, working together but to their own agendas. Another style which we’re going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus — it’s the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who’s in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems, and the friends will respond with something supportive. Then there’s the style which Elvis used — a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing “oohs” and “aahs”. The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. But there’s one style which would be as influential as any of these, and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act — a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn’t ever going to go through that a third time. He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as “Travis picking” after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis — though Travis himself usually referred to it as “Muhlenberg picking”. Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly, and Ike’s friend Mose Rager, who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country-blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, “Blue Smoke”] Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his “Ike Everly’s Rag” was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, “Ike Everly’s Rag”] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. But even when playing country, he wasn’t just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs, and teaching them to his sons. He would play songs like “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”, which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as “Little Donnie”, as well as performing with his family. The Everly family would perform their show live, first thing in the morning — they were playing country music and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years. One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings. I’ve not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show — Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly’s old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, “Rattlesnake Daddy”] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time — Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly Brothers as singing “bluegrass harmonies”. This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as “Mac and Bob” — Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly-enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everlys’ style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine”] The style is known as “close harmony” because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices — and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, “Oh So Many Years”] But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style — the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “Midnight Special”] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose “Sittin’ in the Balcony” we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album “Satan is Real”, which often makes those Internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone — they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, Phil Everly said “We’ve only ever had one argument. It’s lasted twenty-five years”, and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives. There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father’s favourite, to Don resenting Phil’s sweeter voice upstaging him — he was once quoted as saying “I’ve been a has-been since I was ten”. But fundamentally the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics — Don is a liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican — and their views on how life should be lived. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that’s possible. But talent on its own doesn’t necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio — it was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted. The Everly family’s radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville, to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville working as a barber. While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer, not only of Ike Everly’s guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well — according to at least one account I’ve read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike’s. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer — he carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don’s songs, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”, when Don was only sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”] That became a top twenty country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, “Here We Are Again”, was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, “Here We Are Again”] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys’ mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn’t want Don to be a solo star — she wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on. She took Don’s royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians’ union cards — in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly’s future. Margaret wanted the Everly Brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that. Chet Atkins was going to help *both* her sons. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”, written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it — Phil said of the two songs on that single “they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!” Columbia weren’t interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. Don, in particular — who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records — wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with. Despite the brothers’ lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they’d agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with “Country Boy”, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy”] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they’d placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, “Bye Bye Love”, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. They hadn’t been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”: [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn’t strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn’t strong enough as it was, he just shouldn’t record it at all. But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins’ new proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant’s barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this — around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers’ harmonies. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s voices, and a superb musicality. It’s interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love (take 1)”] That’s Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. Now, if you’re familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil’s singing there isn’t the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version. There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record. But what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers. It’s not the harmony part that would become famous, but it’s a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. Don had written a song called “Give Me a Future”, which he’d intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley’s rhythm in the stop-start guitar part: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Give Me a Future”] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants’ song, and with the help of Chet Atkins’ lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new — a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] The brothers were, at first, worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Bye Bye Love”] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce’s version did chart — reaching the top ten in the country charts — it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with “Wake Up Little Suzie”, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety — even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Suzie”] These records would usually incorporate some of Don’s Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like “Devoted to You” and “All I Have to Do is Dream”, which while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them — Boudleaux Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices. One of the things that’s very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it’s just because Boudleaux is the one who used to demo the songs for them and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell — probably a combination. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, Boudleaux was only interested in making money — and he’d often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice — but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants’ son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says “Now, lots of times I will say, ‘My father.’ I mean Dad and Mom”. As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants’ songs were some of the best songs ever written. Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like “All I Have to Do is Dream”, wasn’t so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns. He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves — though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career — was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote. And on the evidence of their first album, that’s certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don’s repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country — apart from a version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, all the covers are of R&B hits of the time — two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, “I Wonder if I Care as Much”, is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “I Wonder If I Care As Much”] Don’s songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they’re often rather more interesting than the A-sides. While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers’ artistic reputation rests. It’s been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial. That might be the case, but I don’t think so — and if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it’s still, sixty years on, a consistent seller. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like — an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don’s acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It’s quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it’s had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that’s just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly Brothers were on top of the world. They’d had a run of classic singles, and they’d just released one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we’ll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.  

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode forty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and how Vincent defined for many what a rock and roll star was. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf. —-more—- Resources There are far, far more books on Gene Vincent than one would expect from his short chart history — a testament to how much he influenced a generation. The two that I used most are Race With the Devil by Susan VanHecke, and Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. Of the two, I’d recommend the latter more. There are many compilations of Gene Vincent’s early rock and roll work. This one contains everything he recorded up until 1962. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Ian Dury and the Blockheads, “Sweet Gene Vincent”] So sang Ian Dury, one of the greats of the rock and roll generation that came up in the seventies, a generation that grew up on listening to Gene Vincent. In the USA, Vincent was more or less regarded as a one-hit wonder, though that one hit was one of the most memorable of the 1950s, but in the UK, he was to become one of the biggest influences on everyone who sang or played a guitar.   Gene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock, and he would have been perfectly happy in his original career as a sailor, until 1955. Then, something happened that changed his life forever. He re-enlisted in the Navy, and got a nine-hundred dollar bonus – a huge sum of money for a sailor in those days – which he used to buy himself a new Triumph racing motorbike.   The bike didn’t last long, and nor did Gene’s Navy career. There are two stories about the accident. The one which he told most often, and which was the official story, was that he was not at fault – a woman driving a Chrysler ran a red light and ran into him, and the only reason he didn’t get compensation was that he signed some papers while he was sedated in hospital.   The other story, which he told at least one friend, was that he’d been out drinking and was late getting back to the Naval base. There was a security barrier at the base, and he tried to ride under the barrier. He’d failed, and the bike had come down hard on his left leg, crushing it.   Whatever the truth, his left leg was smashed up, and looked for a long time like it was going to be amputated, but he refused to allow this. He had it put into a cast for more than a year, after which it was put into a metal brace instead. His leg never really properly healed, and it would leave him in pain for the rest of his life. His leg developed chronic osteomyelitis, he had a permanent open sore on his shin, his leg muscles withered, and his bones would break regularly.   Then in September 1955, finally discharged from the naval hospital, Gene Vincent went to see a country music show. The headliner was Hank Snow, and the Louvin Brothers were also on the bill, but the act that changed Gene’s life was lower down the bill – a young singer named Elvis Presley.   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”]   The story seems to be the same for almost every one of the early rockabilly artists, but this is the first time we’ve seen it happen with someone who didn’t go on to sign with Sun – a young man in the Southern US has been playing his guitar for a while, making music that’s a little bit country, a little bit blues, and then one day he goes to see a show featuring Elvis Presley, and he immediately decides that he wants to do that, that Elvis is doing something that’s like what the young man has already started doing, but he’s proved that you can do it on stage, for people.   It’s as if at every single show Elvis played in 1954 and 1955 there was a future rockabilly star in the audience — and by playing those shows, Elvis permanently defined what we mean when we say “rock and roll star”. The first thing Gene did was to get himself noticed by the radio station that had promoted the show, and in particular by Sheriff Tex Davis, who was actually a DJ from Connecticut whose birth name was William Doucette, but had changed his name to sound more country. Davis was a DJ and show promoter, and he was the one who had promoted the gig that Elvis had appeared at. Gene Craddock came into his office a few days after that show, and told him that he was a singer. Davis listened to him sing a couple of songs, and thought that he would do a decent job as a regular on his Country Showtime radio show.   Soon afterwards, Carl Perkins came to town to do a show with Craddock as the opening act. It would, in fact, be his last show for a while – it was right after this show, as he travelled to get to New York for the TV appearance he was booked on, that he got into the car crash that derailed his career. But Tex Davis asked Carl to watch the opening act and tell him what he thought. Carl watched, and he said that the boy had potential, especially one particular song, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, which sounded to Carl quite like some of his own stuff.   That was good enough for Tex Davis, who signed Craddock up to a management contract, and who almost immediately recorded some of his performances to send to Ken Nelson at Capitol Records.   Capitol at the time was the home of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole, and other than its small country music division had little connection to the new forms of music that were starting to dominate the culture. Capitol had been founded in the early 1940s by the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote many standards for Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett and others, and also recorded his own material, like this:   [Excerpt: Johnny Mercer, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”]   Mercer was a great songwriter, but you can imagine that a record label headed up by Mercer might not have been one that was most attuned to rock and roll. However, in 1955 Capitol had been bought up by the big conglomerate EMI, and things were changing at the label.   Ken Nelson was the head of country music for Capitol Records, and is someone who has a very mixed reputation among lovers of both country music and rockabilly, as someone who had impeccable taste in artists – he also signed Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers among many other classic country artists – but also as someone who would impose a style on those artists that didn’t necessarily suit them.   Nelson didn’t really understand rockabilly at all, but he knew that Capitol needed its own equivalent of Elvis Presley. So he put a call out for people to recommend him country singers who could sound a bit like Elvis. On hearing the tape that Tex Davis sent him of Gene Craddock, he decided to call in this kid for a session in Nashville.   By this point, Craddock had formed his own backing band, who became known as the Blue Caps. This consisted of guitarist Cliff Gallup, the oldest of the group and a plumber by trade, drummer Dickie Harrell, a teenager who was enthusiastic but a good decade younger than Gallup, rhythm guitarist Willie Williams, and bass player Jack Neal. They took the name “Blue Caps” from the hats they all wore on stage, which were allegedly inspired by the golf caps that President Eisenhower used to wear while playing golf. Not the most rebellious of inspirations for the group that would, more than any other rock and roll group of the fifties, inspire juvenile delinquency and youthful rebelliousness.   The session was at a studio run by Owen Bradley, who had just recently recorded some early tracks by a singer from Texas named Buddy Holly. The song chosen for the first single was a track called “Woman Love”, which everyone was convinced could be a hit. They were convinced, that is, until they heard Gene singing it in the studio, at which point they wondered if perhaps some of what he was singing was not quite as wholesome as they had initially been led to believe:   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Woman Love”]   Ken Nelson asked to look at the lyric sheet, and satisfied that Gene *could* have been singing “hugging” rather than what Nelson had worried he had been singing, agreed that the song should go out on the A-side of Gene’s first single, which was to be released under the name Gene Vincent – a name Nelson created from Gene’s forenames.   It turned out that the lyric sheet didn’t completely convince everyone. Most radio stations refused to play “Woman Love” at all, saying that even if the lyrics weren’t obscene – and plenty of people were convinced that they were – the record itself still was.   Or, at least, the A-side was.   The B-side, a song called “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, was a different matter:   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps: “Be-Bop-A-Lula”]   There are three stories about how the song came to have the title “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Donald Graves, a fellow patient in the naval hospital who was widely considered to have co-written the song with Gene, always claimed the song was inspired by the 1920s vaudeville song “Don’t Bring Lulu”.   [Excerpt: “Don’t Bring Lulu”, Billy Murray]   As Tex Davis told the story, it was inspired by a Little Lulu comic book Davis showed Vincent, to which Vincent said, “Hey, it’s be-bop a lulu!”   Davis is credited as co-writer of the song along with Gene, but it’s fairly widely acknowledged that he had no part in the song’s writing. Almost every source now says that Davis paid Donald Graves twenty-five dollars for his half of the songwriting rights.   Far more likely is that it was inspired by the Helen Humes song “Be Baba Leba”:   [Excerpt: Helen Humes, “Be Baba Leba”]   That song had been rerecorded by Lionel Hampton as “Hey Baba Reba!”, which had been a massive R&B hit, and the song is also generally considered one of the inspirations behind the term “be bop” being applied to the style of music.   And that’s something we should probably at least talk about briefly here, because it shows how much culture changes, and how fast we lose context for things that seemed obvious at the time. The term “bebop”, as it was originally used, was used in the same way we use it now — for a type of jazz music that originated in New York in the mid-1940s, which prized harmonic complexity, instrumental virtuosity, and individual self-expression. The music made by people like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on, and which pretty much defined what was thought of as jazz in the postwar era.   But while that was what the term originally meant, and is what the term means now, it wasn’t what the term meant in 1956, at least to most of the people who used the term. Colloquially, bebop meant “that noisy music I don’t understand that the young people like, and most of the people making it are black”. So it covered bebop itself, but it was also used for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even rockabilly — you would often find interviewers talking with Elvis in his early years referring to his music as “Hillbilly Bop” or “a mixture of country music and bebop”.   So even though “Be-Bop-A-Lula” had about as much to do with bebop as it did with Stravinsky, the name still fit.   At that initial session, Ken Nelson brought in a few of the top session players in Nashville, but when he heard the Blue Caps play, he was satisfied that they were good enough to play on the records, and sent the session musicians home. In truth, the Blue Caps were probably best described as a mixed-ability group. Some of them were rudimentary musicians at best — though as we’ve seen, rockabilly, more than most genres, was comfortable with enthusiastic amateurs anyway.   But Cliff Gallup, the lead guitarist, was quite probably the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world of rockabilly. Gallup’s guitar style, which involved fast-picked triplets and the use of multiple steel fingerpicks, was an inspiration for almost every rock and roll guitarist of the 1960s, and any group which had him in would sound at least decent.   During the recording of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, the young drummer Dickie Harrell decided to let out a giant scream right in the middle of the song — he later said that this was so that his mother would know he was on the record. Cliff Gallup was not impressed, and wanted to do a second take, but the first take was what was used.   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Be Bop A Lula”, scream section]   “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is by any standards a quite astonishing record. The lyric is, of course, absolute nonsense — it’s a gibberish song with no real lyrical content at all — but that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is the *sound*. What we have here, fundamentally, is the sound of “Heartbreak Hotel” applied to a much, much, less depressive lyric. It still has that strange morbidity that the Elvis track had, but combined with carefree gibberish lyrics in the style of Little Richard. It’s the precise midpoint between “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti”, and is probably the record which, more than any other, epitomises 1956.   A lot of people commented on the similarity between Vincent’s record and the music of Elvis Presley. There are various stories that went round at the time, including that Scotty and Bill got annoyed at Elvis for recording it without them, that Elvis’ mother had told him she liked that new single of his, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, and even that Elvis himself, on hearing it, had been confused and wondered if he’d forgotten recording it. In truth, none of these stories seem likely. The record is, sonically and stylistically, like an Elvis one, but Vincent’s voice has none of the same qualities as Elvis’. While Elvis is fully in control at all times, playful and exuberant, Gene Vincent is tense and twitchy. Vincent’s voice is thinner than Elvis’, and his performance is more mannered than Elvis’ singing at that time was.   But none of this stopped Vincent from worrying the one time he did meet Elvis, who came over and asked him if he was the one who’d recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Vincent was apologetic, and explained that he’d not been intending to copy Elvis, the record had just come out like that. But Elvis reassured him that he understood, and that that was just how Gene sang.   What fewer people commented on was the song’s similarity to “Money Honey”:   [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Money Honey”]   The two songs have near-identical melodies. The only real difference is that in “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Vincent bookends the song with a slight variation, turning the opening and closing choruses into twelve-bar blueses, rather than the eight-bar blues used in the rest of the song and in “Money Honey”. Luckily for Vincent, at this time the culture in R&B was relaxed enough about borrowings that Jesse Stone seems not to have even considered suing.   The follow-up to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” did much less well. “Race With the Devil” — not the same song as the one later made famous by Judas Priest — was one of the all-time great rockabilly records, but the lyrics, about a hot-rod race with the actual Devil, were, like “Woman Love”, considered unbroadcastable, and this time there was no massive hit record hidden away on the B-side to salvage things:   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Race With The Devil”]   The single after that, “Blue Jean Bop”, did a little better, reaching the lower reaches of the top fifty, rather than the lower reaches of the top hundred as “Race With the Devil” had, and making the top twenty in the UK:   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Blue Jean Bop”]   But there were three major problems that were preventing Vincent and the Blue Caps from having the success that it seemed they deserved.   The first was Ken Nelson. He was in charge of the material that the group were recording, and he would suggest songs like “Up a Lazy River”, “Ain’t She Sweet”, and “Those Wedding Bells are Breaking up That Old Gang of Mine”. Vincent enjoyed those old standards as much as anyone, but they weren’t actually suited to the rockabilly treatment – especially not to the kind of rough and ready performances that the original lineup of the Blue Caps were suited to.   And that brings us to the second problem. There was a huge age gap, as well as disparity in ability, in the band, and Cliff Gallup, in particular, felt that he was too old to be touring in a rock and roll band, and quit the group. Gallup was actually offered a regular gig as a session guitarist by Ken Nelson, which would have meant that he didn’t have to travel, but he turned it down and got a job as a high school janitor and maintenance man, just playing the occasional extra gig for pin money. When he was contacted by fans, he would get embarrassed, and he didn’t like to talk about his brief time as a rock and roll star. He never signed a single autograph, and when he died in 1989 his widow made sure the obituaries never mentioned his time with Gene Vincent.   But Gallup was just the first to leave. In the first two and a half years of the Blue Caps’ existence, twenty different people were members of the band. Vincent could never keep a stable lineup of the band together for more than a few weeks or months at a time.   And the third major problem… that was Vincent himself. Even before his accident, he had been an impetuous, hot-headed man, who didn’t think very carefully about the possible consequences of his actions. Now he was in chronic pain from the accident, he was a rock and roll star, and he was drinking heavily to deal with the pain. This is not a combination that makes people less inclined to rash behaviour.   So, for example, he’d started breaking contracts. Vincent and the Blue Caps were booked to play a residency in Las Vegas, where they were making three thousand dollars a week – for 1956 a staggering sum of money. But Tex Davis told Vincent that the owner of the casino wanted him to tone down some aspects of his act, and he didn’t like that at all. It wasn’t even enough to convince him when it was pointed out that the man doing the asking was big in the Mafia. Instead, Gene went on stage, sang one song, found Tex Davis in the crowd, caught his eye, flipped him off, and walked off stage, leaving the band to do the rest of the show without him. Unsurprisingly, the residency didn’t last very long. Equally unsurprisingly, Tex Davis decided he was no longer going to manage Gene Vincent. Legal problems around the fallout from losing his management caused Vincent to be unable to work for several months.   While both “Race With the Devil” and “Blue Jean Bop” were big hits in the UK, the closest they came to having another hit in the USA was a song called “Lotta Lovin'”:   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Lotta Lovin'”]   That was written by a songwriter named Bernice Bedwell, who is otherwise unknown — she wrote a handful of other rockabilly songs, including another song that Vincent would record, but nothing else that was particularly successful, and there seems to be no biographical information about her anywhere. She sold the publishing rights to the song to a Texas oilman, Tom Fleeger, who does seem to have had a fairly colourful life — he wrote a memoir called “Fidel and the Fleeg”, which I sadly haven’t read, but in which he claims that Fidel Castro tried to frame him for murder in the 1940s after a dispute over a beautiful woman.   Fleeger was soon to start his own record label, Jan Records, but for now he thought that the song would be suitable for Gene Vincent, and got in touch with him. “Lotta Lovin'” was quickly recorded at Gene’s first session at Capitol’s new studio at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood.   The B-side was a ballad called “Wear My Ring” by Warren Cassoto, the future Bobby Darin, and Don Kirshner.   [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Wear My Ring”]   “Lotta Lovin'” went to number thirteen on the pop charts, and number seven on the R&B charts, and it looked like it would revitalise Gene’s career. But it was not to be. Vincent’s increasingly erratic behaviour — including pulling a gun on band members on multiple occasions — and Capitol and Ken Nelson’s lack of understanding of rock and roll music, meant that he quickly became a forgotten figure in the US.   But he had a huge impact on the UK, thanks to a TV producer named Jack Good.   Jack Good was the person who, more than anyone else, had brought rock and roll to British TV. He’d been the producer of Six-Five Special, a BBC TV show that was devoted to rock and roll and skiffle, before moving to ITV, producing its first two rock and roll shows, “Oh Boy”, and “Boy Meets Girls”. And it was Good who suggested that Vincent switch from his normal polite-looking stagewear into black leather, and that he accentuate the postural problems his disability caused him.   Vincent’s appearances on “Boy Meets Girls”, dressed in black leather, hunched over, in pain because of his leg, defined for British teenagers of the 1950s what a rock and roller was meant to look like. At a time when few American rock and roll stars were visiting the UK, and even fewer were getting any exposure on the very small number of TV shows that were actually broadcast — this was when there were only two TV channels in the UK, and they broadcast for only a few hours — Gene Vincent being *here*, and on British TV, meant the world. And on a show like Boy Meets Girls, where the rest of the acts were people like Cliff RIchard or Adam Faith, having a mean, moody, leather-clad rock and roller on screen was instantly captivating. For a generation of British rockers, Gene Vincent epitomised American rock and roll.   Until in 1960 he was on a tour of the UK that ended in tragedy. But that’s a story for another time…

Recorded by Andre Marais. - 8:30am to 9:00am ZAST. Just the very first 2 minutes of the Tony Newman show are included here. Part 6 of 6 of the Alan Mann Breakfast Show from January 29th 1981. Be Bop A Lula by Gene Vincent Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour by Lonnie Donegan Sports News by Barry Lambert Song for Katrina by Steve Forbet Diamond Girl by Seals and Croft Traffic sponsored by Datsun Datsun Pulsar advert Richelieu Brandy advert Kawasaki Z1000J advert De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da by The Police Cold Love by Donna Summer  My Mothers Eyes by Bette Midler  News at 9am - Shawn Johnson Beginning of Tony Newman's show I Go to Rio by Bahian Gipsies

On the afternoon of 6 July 1957 the Quarrymen skiffle group played at the garden fete of St Peter's Church, Woolton, Liverpool. In the band were John Lennon (vocals, guitar), Eric Griffiths (guitar), Colin Hanton (drums), Rod Davies (banjo), Pete Shotton (washboard) and Len Garry (tea chest bass). Their repertoire consisted mainly of Skiffle songs; skiffle blossomed in England, just before Rock &R oll replaced it from 1958 onwards. They played various Lonnie Donnegan songs,interspersed with songs by Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis.This Quarrymen's set, remarkably, was recorded by an audience member, Bob Molyneux, on his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. In 1994 Molyneux, then a retired policeman, rediscovered the tape. The tape was sold on 15 September 1994 at Sotheby's for £78,500. The winning bidder was EMI Records, who considered if for release as part of the Anthology project: performencas of Lonnie Donegan's Puttin' On The Style and Elvis Presley's Baby, Let's Play House were released, but EMI chose not to release more than half a minute or so, as the sound quality was deemed substandard.The BDJ engineers carefully reconstructed the tape using state-of-the-art digital techniques and so 10 minutes of the set were reproduced. The sound quality is as poor as the Anthology release, but true Beatles fans will appreciate these 10 minutes for their historic value.Setlist: Puttin on the Style, My Baby Left Me, Be-Bop-A-Lula, Maggie Mae, Baby Let's Play House, Blue Suede Shoes.

The story behind "Be-Bop-A-Lula"