Podcasts about before elvis

    After Gurdip & Justin discuss the latest FTDs: The Making of King Creole, The Last Tour Volume 2 and The Girl Happy Sessions, the guys answer a handful of listener emails, landing on one from fellow patron Robin, whose visit back to an early TCBCast episode that touched upon the subject of Elvis's Black influences, which conveniently leads us right into our main topic. For the main discussion, John Michael Heath of EAP Society taps in as we're joined by Preston Lauterbach, author of acclaimed books such as "The Chitlin' Circuit," "Beale Street Dynasty," "Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers" and several others about Black musicians in the early 20th century, whose latest book, "Before Elvis: The African-American Musicians Who Made The King" is being published by Hachette Books on January 7, 2025. Keen-eared Elvis fans may also recognize Preston's voice as an interviewee from 2018's "Elvis Presley: The Searcher."  Preston's new book examines the life stories of Arthur Crudup, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, Junior Parker and Calvin and Phineas Newborn and numerous other major and minor figures that factor into their stories and complicated, nuanced relationships with Elvis both as a person and as a phenomenon as they impacted him, and he in turn impacted them. It's a book for Elvis fans and non-fans alike, even Elvis skeptics are sure to find it extremely revealing as Preston thoroughly dispels many rumors and accusations thrown at Elvis over the decades, with receipts, while centering his narrative around lifting and celebrating the voices and life stories of these figures far beyond a mere connection to Elvis. Yet it never shies away from hard truths, all informed by a history of Memphis, the political landscape of the Deep South in the 1950s, inner workings of the record and music publishing industries, and the ways both white and black audiences responded to changing perceptions of artists, genres and influences across the decades. It's likely to be the most in-depth discussion about the book to be done in its release media cycle, as Preston was extraordinarily generous with his time, answering all our questions, geeking out with us about Memphis music history, and having a thorough discussion that we hope will help this episode stand on its own, well into the future beyond the publication date. You can learn more about "Before Elvis" and where to buy it at: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/preston-lauterbach/before-elvis/9780306833083/?lens=hachette-books And you can follow Preston's blog on Substack at: https://thechitlincircuit.substack.com/  If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. 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/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

Before Elvis and Chuck Berry, the woman who inspired these great musical talents was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Picking up the guitar at 3, she was more than a master at 20. Not only was she the godmother of Rock 'n Roll she was also responsible for the British Invasion! Listen to hear the story of this influential Black musician! Follow us on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @GreetingsTAC, email us at GreetingsTAC@gmail.com, or leave us a voicemail at ‪‪915-317-6669 if you have a story to share with us. If you like the show, leave us a review, tell a friend, and subscribe! Visit us on the web at TechnicallyAConversation.com Contest: https://www.technicallyaconversation.com/Contest Episode Page: https://www.technicallyaconversation.com/episodes/Sister-Rosetta-Tharpe Listen to Dark Tales From The Road Follow them on Instagram Listen to Active Shooter Follow them on Instagram Sources: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/544226085/forebears-sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-godmother-of-rock-n-roll https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/sister-rosetta-tharpe-rocknroll-pioneer/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why-sister-rosetta-tharpe-belongs-in-the-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-123738/ https://www.vulture.com/2022/06/sister-rosetta-tharpe-rock-legacy.html https://player.fm/series/they-did-that/the-revolutionary-rocker-sister-rose --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/technicallyaconversation/message

Jeremy Doner is a co-writer on one of 2022's most exciting movies: EVLIS, directed by Baz Luhrmann. For his work on the script, Jeremy is nominated for an Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award. Before Elvis, he was staffed on two critically acclaimed TV crime dramas: DAMAGES and THE KILLING, writing multiple episodes and scoring WGA-award nominations for both shows. On today's show, he discusses how he got involved with Elvis, why he connected with the story, and his "take" - one of the most important components of pitching a biopic. JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thescreenwritinglife/support

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 479, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Around The Horn 1: The southernmost point in South America, Cape Horn is part of this country. Chile. 2: SE of Cape Horn is the "South" version of this Scottish island group that shares its name with dogs and ponies. the Shetlands. 3: This strait that separates the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is named for a Portuguese guy. Magellan. 4: Cape Horn is the southern extremity of this fiery archipelago. Tierra del Fuego. 5: The largest desert in the Americas is in this Argentinean region visited by Darwin on his Beagle trips. Patagonia. Round 2. Category: Singing The "Blue"S 1: According to Elton John, "Baby's got" these. Blue eyes. 2: Before Elvis sang this song in a 1961 movie, Bing sang it in 1937's "Waikiki Wedding". Blue Hawaii. 3: Back in 1984, David Bowie had just met a girl named this. Blue Jean. 4: In 1977 Linda Ronstadt had a hit with this Roy Orbison tune. Blue Bayou. 5: In a song from the '20s, "Just Mollie and me, and baby makes three, we're happy in" this place. My Blue Heaven. Round 3. Category: The Crusades 1: At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Urban II proclaimed the 1st Crusade against this group of infidels. Saracens//Muslims. 2: The deadly rivals of the Hospitalers, these knights lent their name to a fictional "saint". Knights Templar. 3: Leading the third Crusade, this English king captured Cyprus. Richard the Lionhearted. 4: During the third Crusade, Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, made this Syrian city his headquarters. Damascus. 5: Walter the Penniless and this Peter led early groups of poor peasants into the fray. Peter the Hermit. Round 4. Category: Canadian Songbirds 1: In December 2007 this chanteuse gave her last performance of the Vegas spectacular "A New Day". Celine Dion. 2: This singer from Halifax, Nova Scotia had hits with "Adia" and "Sweet Surrender". Sarah McLachlan. 3: She must be a Keith Jackson fan, as she titled one of her albums "Whoa, Nelly!". Nelly Furtado. 4: She put her initials on duets of "Crying" with Roy Orbison and "What A Wonderful World" with Tony Bennett. k.d. lang. 5: Leslie is the first name of this "1234" singer who was a dancer at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Feist. Round 5. Category: Gopher The Gusto 1: Genesis 6 says it was made out of gopher wood and was 300 cubits long. the ark. 2: Bill Murray fights troublesome golf course gophers in this comedy classic. Caddyshack. 3: It's where the small rodent known as a pocket gopher has its pockets. its cheeks. 4: Gopher is a document delivery system to retrieve information from this system that dates back to the 1960s. the Internet. 5: Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" takes place in Gopher Prairie in this state. Minnesota. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!

“Before Elvis there was nothing” said John. But if Elvis’s sound could be viewed as the Rock ‘N’ Roll equivalent of the big bang, The Beatles mid 60’s sonic experimentation represented a quantum leap into the future. But how did it start and where did Lennon go next? Over four 25 O’ Clock Show specials, I’ll be taking a sideways look at Lennon’s creative process, I’ll be exploring his musical roots, and I’ll be uncovering some lesser-known Beatle facts. So, Join me The Velvet Curtain for Across The Universe Part 1. In The Beginning. 1958-1965. (out now) hughthelistener@yahoo.com

This week's episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned -- Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session.   For those who didn't hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast -- I'm taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I'm planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take,   But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I'm going to be answering those questions.   Now, I'll be honest, I wasn't even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I'd have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I've actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I'll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week's episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week.   Anyway, to start with, a question that I've been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked -- what's the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show?   [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”]   The song is called "Rock and Roll", and it's from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase "rock and roll" in those words -- there was an earlier song called "rocking and rolling", but I think it's the first one to use the phrase "rock and roll".   It's performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare.   They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple -- they're the people who wrote "On the Good Ship Lollipop" -- but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead.   The version I'm using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That's just because the film version was easier for me to obtain.   As for why I'm using it, a few reasons. One is that it's of historical note, as I said, because it's the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it's in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they're short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn't, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain.   Next we have a question from David Gerard: "piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", why "*democratic* fellows named Mack"? what's that line about?"   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”]   Well, I've never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong.   The boring and probably right one is very simple -- the word "democratic" scans, and there aren't that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some -- "existential", "sympathetic", "diuretic" -- but not that many, and "democratic" happens to be assonant with the song's rhyme scheme, too -- the "cratic" doesn't actually rhyme with all those "alack", "track" "jack", and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that.   The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case.   Now, the character in "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is a soldier returning from the second world war -- we know this from the first two lines, "Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I'm tired of transportation in the back of a hack", plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we've got someone who's recently been discharged from the army and has no job.   BUT, given it's Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what's known as the second great migration -- the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we've touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B -- and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations -- possibly the single biggest destination -- for black people looking to move around this time.   And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he's travelling by train to somewhere where there's no job waiting for him, and there's no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he's someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he's looking for work and doesn't have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he's looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”]   Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge -- basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn't have any special qualifications, if you weren't a "man with a knack" as the song puts it -- especially a sinecure where you didn't have to work very hard -- the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party.   Now, in Chicago -- again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too -- the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people.   So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you'd have to do favours for Kelly's Irish Democrats -- you'd have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”]   Now I come to a few questions that I'm going to treat as one -- questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I'm going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don't plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I've got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get.   These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I'm going to address them all together here. If any of you don't think I've addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I'll come back to it next week.   Now, I don't have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what's important. So far, in the first fifty, I've not really had to make any difficult choices at all -- the only things I've wished I could include have either been things where there's just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I'd decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn't set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock.   Maybe I'll do that as a project when I've finished this one.   But even those people I've excluded, I've ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I've not really had to leave anything out.   But that means so far, since we're still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on -- in the sixties there are so many important records that I'm going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I'll just have to gloss over. But right now I've had to make no tough decisions.   Now, the way I do this -- I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I'm pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I'm sure nobody will be surprised to find that I'll be covering, say, "Peggy Sue", "Satisfaction", "Stairway to Heaven", "God Save the Queen" and "Walk This Way". You can't leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That's my sort of master list, but I don't consult that all that often.   What I do, is at any given point I'm working on the next ten scripts simultaneously -- I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I'm planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I'm writing. I'll also, when I'm doing that, add any more titles I've thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I'm going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that.   That means that I can't necessarily say for certain who I *won't* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don't get included, but I can't say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I've determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast -- even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books -- I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series -- a song from 1999 -- and I'm going to use that.   Related to that, William Maybury asked "Why 1999?"   Well, a few reasons -- partly because it's a nice cut-off point -- the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it's about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture -- I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off -- well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I'm going to cover came out then, and it's a good ending song.   William also asked "What's the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about "Ooby Dooby" before "Crying," are we going to hear about "Take My Tip" before "Space Oddity"? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)"   [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”]   That's an interesting question... there's no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It's more that notability is just one of a number of factors I'm using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I'm choosing one to include isn't just "is this song influential or important?" though that's a primary one. There's also "is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?" "Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?", “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, "does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?" There are also things like "have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?" because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn't just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that.   And there's *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they'll be hearing about for the first time -- you have to cover "Satisfaction" because everyone would notice it's missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever's-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody's going to hear anything they can't get in a million different places.   So to take the example of "Ooby Dooby", it's only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison's career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit.   So... as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won't be too much of a surprise to those who've read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I'll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees -- and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That's an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time -- and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved.   [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain's Fat Theresa Shoes”]   I'm not *definitely* going to cover that, but I'm likely to -- and I'm likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track.   Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I've covered so far. That's a good question. I'm actually going to name more than three, though...   The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it's absolutely wonderful, but it's also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he'll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings.   Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum's book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I've done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It's not a book you read for fun. It's a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you're willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954.   The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I've always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I'd never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn't read it I would then get people asking questions like, "But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?"   But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It's exhaustively researched, and it's written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one.   The book that's been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw -- an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people -- many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn't be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn't exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B.   But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick's books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick's written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick's biographies, I've come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn't flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I've got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I've read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else.   Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I've discovered, that I hadn't heard before doing the podcast, is.   Well, I've discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I've covered that I didn't know before starting work on the podcast was "Ko Ko Mo", and I can't say that one was a favourite of mine -- it's not a bad record by any means, but it's not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I've heard that I didn't do full episodes about but which made an impression -- the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen.   [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”]   What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I'd been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously -- I just hadn't got him -- but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed.   I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I'd given him the credit for previously.   Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don't have very good recording equipment -- I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don't have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there's only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically... fairly horrible... house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It's a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby.   While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours' arguments or the TV shows they're watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted.   So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I've not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I've been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on.   And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, "my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?"   The answer to whether I'm a musician is "yes and no", I'm afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I'm dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments -- I've been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings -- and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up.   Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I've not done much of that in over a decade, as I don't really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here's an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep.   [Excerpt: The National Pep, "Think Carefully For Victory"]   In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt -- who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to -- sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced.   So, sort of a musician, sort of not.   As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I'm growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I'm also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It's very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable -- normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don't think you can.   Anyway, that's all for this week. I'll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you'd like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you've not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books.   Thanks for listening.

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned — Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session.   For those who didn’t hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast — I’m taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I’m planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take,   But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I’m going to be answering those questions.   Now, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I’d have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I’ve actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I’ll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week’s episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week.   Anyway, to start with, a question that I’ve been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked — what’s the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show?   [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”]   The song is called “Rock and Roll”, and it’s from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words — there was an earlier song called “rocking and rolling”, but I think it’s the first one to use the phrase “rock and roll”.   It’s performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare.   They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple — they’re the people who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop” — but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead.   The version I’m using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That’s just because the film version was easier for me to obtain.   As for why I’m using it, a few reasons. One is that it’s of historical note, as I said, because it’s the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it’s in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they’re short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn’t, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain.   Next we have a question from David Gerard: “piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”, why “*democratic* fellows named Mack”? what’s that line about?”   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Well, I’ve never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong.   The boring and probably right one is very simple — the word “democratic” scans, and there aren’t that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some — “existential”, “sympathetic”, “diuretic” — but not that many, and “democratic” happens to be assonant with the song’s rhyme scheme, too — the “cratic” doesn’t actually rhyme with all those “alack”, “track” “jack”, and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that.   The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case.   Now, the character in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is a soldier returning from the second world war — we know this from the first two lines, “Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I’m tired of transportation in the back of a hack”, plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we’ve got someone who’s recently been discharged from the army and has no job.   BUT, given it’s Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what’s known as the second great migration — the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we’ve touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B — and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations — possibly the single biggest destination — for black people looking to move around this time.   And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he’s travelling by train to somewhere where there’s no job waiting for him, and there’s no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he’s someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he’s looking for work and doesn’t have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he’s looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge — basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn’t have any special qualifications, if you weren’t a “man with a knack” as the song puts it — especially a sinecure where you didn’t have to work very hard — the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party.   Now, in Chicago — again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too — the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people.   So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you’d have to do favours for Kelly’s Irish Democrats — you’d have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Now I come to a few questions that I’m going to treat as one — questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I’m going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don’t plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I’ve got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get.   These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I’m going to address them all together here. If any of you don’t think I’ve addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I’ll come back to it next week.   Now, I don’t have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what’s important. So far, in the first fifty, I’ve not really had to make any difficult choices at all — the only things I’ve wished I could include have either been things where there’s just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I’d decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn’t set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock.   Maybe I’ll do that as a project when I’ve finished this one.   But even those people I’ve excluded, I’ve ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I’ve not really had to leave anything out.   But that means so far, since we’re still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on — in the sixties there are so many important records that I’m going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I’ll just have to gloss over. But right now I’ve had to make no tough decisions.   Now, the way I do this — I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I’m pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I’m sure nobody will be surprised to find that I’ll be covering, say, “Peggy Sue”, “Satisfaction”, “Stairway to Heaven”, “God Save the Queen” and “Walk This Way”. You can’t leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That’s my sort of master list, but I don’t consult that all that often.   What I do, is at any given point I’m working on the next ten scripts simultaneously — I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I’m planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I’m writing. I’ll also, when I’m doing that, add any more titles I’ve thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I’m going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that.   That means that I can’t necessarily say for certain who I *won’t* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don’t get included, but I can’t say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I’ve determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast — even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books — I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series — a song from 1999 — and I’m going to use that.   Related to that, William Maybury asked “Why 1999?”   Well, a few reasons — partly because it’s a nice cut-off point — the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it’s about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture — I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off — well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I’m going to cover came out then, and it’s a good ending song.   William also asked “What’s the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about “Ooby Dooby” before “Crying,” are we going to hear about “Take My Tip” before “Space Oddity”? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)”   [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”]   That’s an interesting question… there’s no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It’s more that notability is just one of a number of factors I’m using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I’m choosing one to include isn’t just “is this song influential or important?” though that’s a primary one. There’s also “is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?” “Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?”, “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, “does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?” There are also things like “have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?” because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn’t just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that.   And there’s *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they’ll be hearing about for the first time — you have to cover “Satisfaction” because everyone would notice it’s missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever’s-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody’s going to hear anything they can’t get in a million different places.   So to take the example of “Ooby Dooby”, it’s only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison’s career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit.   So… as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won’t be too much of a surprise to those who’ve read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I’ll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees — and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That’s an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time — and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved.   [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes”]   I’m not *definitely* going to cover that, but I’m likely to — and I’m likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track.   Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I’ve covered so far. That’s a good question. I’m actually going to name more than three, though…   The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it’s absolutely wonderful, but it’s also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he’ll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings.   Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum’s book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I’ve done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It’s not a book you read for fun. It’s a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you’re willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954.   The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I’ve always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I’d never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn’t read it I would then get people asking questions like, “But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?”   But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It’s exhaustively researched, and it’s written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one.   The book that’s been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw — an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people — many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn’t be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn’t exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B.   But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick’s books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick’s written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick’s biographies, I’ve come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn’t flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I’ve got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I’ve read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else.   Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I’ve discovered, that I hadn’t heard before doing the podcast, is.   Well, I’ve discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I’ve covered that I didn’t know before starting work on the podcast was “Ko Ko Mo”, and I can’t say that one was a favourite of mine — it’s not a bad record by any means, but it’s not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I’ve heard that I didn’t do full episodes about but which made an impression — the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen.   [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”]   What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I’d been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously — I just hadn’t got him — but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed.   I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I’d given him the credit for previously.   Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don’t have very good recording equipment — I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don’t have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there’s only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically… fairly horrible… house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It’s a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby.   While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours’ arguments or the TV shows they’re watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted.   So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I’ve not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I’ve been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on.   And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, “my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?”   The answer to whether I’m a musician is “yes and no”, I’m afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I’m dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments — I’ve been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings — and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up.   Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I’ve not done much of that in over a decade, as I don’t really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here’s an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep.   [Excerpt: The National Pep, “Think Carefully For Victory”]   In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt — who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to — sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced.   So, sort of a musician, sort of not.   As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I’m growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I’m also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It’s very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable — normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don’t think you can.   Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you’ve not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books.   Thanks for listening.

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned — Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session.   For those who didn’t hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast — I’m taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I’m planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take,   But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I’m going to be answering those questions.   Now, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I’d have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I’ve actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I’ll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week’s episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week.   Anyway, to start with, a question that I’ve been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked — what’s the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show?   [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”]   The song is called “Rock and Roll”, and it’s from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words — there was an earlier song called “rocking and rolling”, but I think it’s the first one to use the phrase “rock and roll”.   It’s performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare.   They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple — they’re the people who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop” — but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead.   The version I’m using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That’s just because the film version was easier for me to obtain.   As for why I’m using it, a few reasons. One is that it’s of historical note, as I said, because it’s the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it’s in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they’re short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn’t, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain.   Next we have a question from David Gerard: “piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”, why “*democratic* fellows named Mack”? what’s that line about?”   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Well, I’ve never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong.   The boring and probably right one is very simple — the word “democratic” scans, and there aren’t that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some — “existential”, “sympathetic”, “diuretic” — but not that many, and “democratic” happens to be assonant with the song’s rhyme scheme, too — the “cratic” doesn’t actually rhyme with all those “alack”, “track” “jack”, and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that.   The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case.   Now, the character in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is a soldier returning from the second world war — we know this from the first two lines, “Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I’m tired of transportation in the back of a hack”, plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we’ve got someone who’s recently been discharged from the army and has no job.   BUT, given it’s Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what’s known as the second great migration — the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we’ve touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B — and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations — possibly the single biggest destination — for black people looking to move around this time.   And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he’s travelling by train to somewhere where there’s no job waiting for him, and there’s no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he’s someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he’s looking for work and doesn’t have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he’s looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge — basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn’t have any special qualifications, if you weren’t a “man with a knack” as the song puts it — especially a sinecure where you didn’t have to work very hard — the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party.   Now, in Chicago — again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too — the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people.   So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you’d have to do favours for Kelly’s Irish Democrats — you’d have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac.   [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”]   Now I come to a few questions that I’m going to treat as one — questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I’m going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don’t plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I’ve got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get.   These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I’m going to address them all together here. If any of you don’t think I’ve addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I’ll come back to it next week.   Now, I don’t have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what’s important. So far, in the first fifty, I’ve not really had to make any difficult choices at all — the only things I’ve wished I could include have either been things where there’s just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I’d decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn’t set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock.   Maybe I’ll do that as a project when I’ve finished this one.   But even those people I’ve excluded, I’ve ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I’ve not really had to leave anything out.   But that means so far, since we’re still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on — in the sixties there are so many important records that I’m going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I’ll just have to gloss over. But right now I’ve had to make no tough decisions.   Now, the way I do this — I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I’m pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I’m sure nobody will be surprised to find that I’ll be covering, say, “Peggy Sue”, “Satisfaction”, “Stairway to Heaven”, “God Save the Queen” and “Walk This Way”. You can’t leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That’s my sort of master list, but I don’t consult that all that often.   What I do, is at any given point I’m working on the next ten scripts simultaneously — I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I’m planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I’m writing. I’ll also, when I’m doing that, add any more titles I’ve thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I’m going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that.   That means that I can’t necessarily say for certain who I *won’t* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don’t get included, but I can’t say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I’ve determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast — even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books — I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series — a song from 1999 — and I’m going to use that.   Related to that, William Maybury asked “Why 1999?”   Well, a few reasons — partly because it’s a nice cut-off point — the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it’s about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture — I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off — well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I’m going to cover came out then, and it’s a good ending song.   William also asked “What’s the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about “Ooby Dooby” before “Crying,” are we going to hear about “Take My Tip” before “Space Oddity”? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)”   [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”]   That’s an interesting question… there’s no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It’s more that notability is just one of a number of factors I’m using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I’m choosing one to include isn’t just “is this song influential or important?” though that’s a primary one. There’s also “is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?” “Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?”, “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, “does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?” There are also things like “have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?” because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn’t just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that.   And there’s *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they’ll be hearing about for the first time — you have to cover “Satisfaction” because everyone would notice it’s missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever’s-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody’s going to hear anything they can’t get in a million different places.   So to take the example of “Ooby Dooby”, it’s only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison’s career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit.   So… as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won’t be too much of a surprise to those who’ve read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I’ll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees — and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That’s an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time — and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved.   [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes”]   I’m not *definitely* going to cover that, but I’m likely to — and I’m likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track.   Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I’ve covered so far. That’s a good question. I’m actually going to name more than three, though…   The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it’s absolutely wonderful, but it’s also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he’ll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings.   Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum’s book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I’ve done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It’s not a book you read for fun. It’s a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you’re willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954.   The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I’ve always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I’d never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn’t read it I would then get people asking questions like, “But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?”   But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It’s exhaustively researched, and it’s written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one.   The book that’s been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw — an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people — many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn’t be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn’t exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B.   But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick’s books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick’s written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick’s biographies, I’ve come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn’t flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I’ve got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I’ve read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else.   Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I’ve discovered, that I hadn’t heard before doing the podcast, is.   Well, I’ve discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I’ve covered that I didn’t know before starting work on the podcast was “Ko Ko Mo”, and I can’t say that one was a favourite of mine — it’s not a bad record by any means, but it’s not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I’ve heard that I didn’t do full episodes about but which made an impression — the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen.   [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”]   What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I’d been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously — I just hadn’t got him — but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed.   I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I’d given him the credit for previously.   Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don’t have very good recording equipment — I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don’t have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there’s only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically… fairly horrible… house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It’s a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby.   While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours’ arguments or the TV shows they’re watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted.   So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I’ve not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I’ve been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on.   And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, “my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?”   The answer to whether I’m a musician is “yes and no”, I’m afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I’m dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments — I’ve been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings — and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up.   Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I’ve not done much of that in over a decade, as I don’t really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here’s an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep.   [Excerpt: The National Pep, “Think Carefully For Victory”]   In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt — who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to — sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced.   So, sort of a musician, sort of not.   As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I’m growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I’m also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It’s very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable — normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don’t think you can.   Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you’ve not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books.   Thanks for listening.

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Birmingham Bounce" by Hardrock Gunter. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll.  The information about the "Yancey Special" bassline and its history comes from "Before Elvis", by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the "Fats Domino" tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we're going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting -- something which we haven't really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled -- Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we're talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you're looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we'll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with "Ain't That A Shame". He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he'd been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds -- rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren't even normally directly to their audiences -- they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino's audience -- he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s -- they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it's true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs -- enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino's first album, Rock and Rollin' With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material -- mostly hit singles he'd had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we've looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin'. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn't sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino's commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino's shows were often disrupted by riots.   We've been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the "inappropriate" behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his "pulsating jungle rhythms" -- and there's not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that -- but there was little shocking about Domino's actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. "My Blue Heaven" had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, "My Blue Heaven"]   Domino's version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with "I'm In Love Again" on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "My Blue Heaven"]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula -- one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as "I'm in the Mood for Love", "As Time Goes By", and "When My Dreamboat Comes Home".   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd -- whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple -- whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who'd thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether -- they'd either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman -- trying to avoid another riot because of "race mixing" -- said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren't allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn't turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was "Honey Chile", a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called "Shake, Rattle, and Rock":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Honey Chile"]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. "Blueberry Hill" was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We've talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino's taste for country and western music, it's possible that Autry's version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Blueberry Hill"]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong's recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: "Blueberry Hill"]   Domino loved Armstrong's version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn't get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn't been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, "We got nuthin'".   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I'm still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it's just before he starts the second middle eight -- there's a *slight* change of sonic ambience there -- but I wouldn't swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings "the wind in the willow":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino's career forever.   He couldn't have been more wrong. The song became Domino's biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino's biographer Rick Coleman, "When I'm dead and gone a million times, they'll still be playing 'da-da-da-da-dee-dah'".   Not only was Domino's version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong's version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film "Loving You":   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blueberry Hill"]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "I'm Ready"]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Tears on My Pillow"]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we're going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records -- indeed it's very similar to the one Domino used on "Ain't That a Shame", which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we've talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it's used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, "How Long Blues"]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade "Lux" Lewis, with his song "Yancey Special":   [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Yancey Special"]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, "Long Gone":   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, "Long Gone"]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to "Yancey Special", because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he'd come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn't help himself in his testimony -- he claimed, at first, that he hadn't named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called "Yancey Special" which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn't by itself be copyrightable -- which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won't repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of "Yancey Special" to come out before he'd registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on "I Hear You Knockin'", a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey "Piano" Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"]   Domino had used the bassline in "Ain't That A Shame", as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif -- he also used it in "Blue Monday", another song which he'd written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "Blue Monday"]   Domino's remake of that song would become his next hit after "Blueberry Hill", and almost as big a success. Worldwide, "Blueberry Hill" was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis' "Hound Dog" and "Heartbreak Hotel" in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat "Que Sera Sera" by Doris Day -- however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino's shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. "Blueberry Hill" made Billboard's top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We've talked before about how the recent "Old Town Road" debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino's records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn't being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino's career in chart terms, and "Blueberry Hill" was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we're going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we've barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and "Blueberry Hill" in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn't fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you'll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don't like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That's not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It's how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents -- George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it's how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Birmingham Bounce” by Hardrock Gunter. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  The information about the “Yancey Special” bassline and its history comes from “Before Elvis”, by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the “Fats Domino” tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we’re going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting — something which we haven’t really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled — Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we’re talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you’re looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we’ll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with “Ain’t That A Shame”. He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he’d been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds — rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren’t even normally directly to their audiences — they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino’s audience — he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s — they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it’s true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs — enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino’s first album, Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material — mostly hit singles he’d had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we’ve looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin’. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn’t sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino’s commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino’s shows were often disrupted by riots.   We’ve been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the “inappropriate” behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his “pulsating jungle rhythms” — and there’s not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that — but there was little shocking about Domino’s actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. “My Blue Heaven” had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “My Blue Heaven”]   Domino’s version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with “I’m In Love Again” on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “My Blue Heaven”]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula — one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as “I’m in the Mood for Love”, “As Time Goes By”, and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home”.   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd — whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple — whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who’d thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether — they’d either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman — trying to avoid another riot because of “race mixing” — said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren’t allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn’t turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was “Honey Chile”, a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called “Shake, Rattle, and Rock”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Honey Chile”]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. “Blueberry Hill” was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We’ve talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino’s taste for country and western music, it’s possible that Autry’s version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, “Blueberry Hill”]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong’s recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: “Blueberry Hill”]   Domino loved Armstrong’s version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn’t get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn’t been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, “We got nuthin'”.   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I’m still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it’s just before he starts the second middle eight — there’s a *slight* change of sonic ambience there — but I wouldn’t swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings “the wind in the willow”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino’s career forever.   He couldn’t have been more wrong. The song became Domino’s biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, “When I’m dead and gone a million times, they’ll still be playing ‘da-da-da-da-dee-dah'”.   Not only was Domino’s version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong’s version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film “Loving You”:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blueberry Hill”]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “I’m Ready”]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we’re going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records — indeed it’s very similar to the one Domino used on “Ain’t That a Shame”, which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we’ve talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it’s used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, “How Long Blues”]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade “Lux” Lewis, with his song “Yancey Special”:   [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Yancey Special”]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, “Long Gone”:   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, “Long Gone”]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to “Yancey Special”, because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he’d come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn’t help himself in his testimony — he claimed, at first, that he hadn’t named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called “Yancey Special” which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn’t by itself be copyrightable — which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won’t repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of “Yancey Special” to come out before he’d registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on “I Hear You Knockin'”, a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey “Piano” Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”]   Domino had used the bassline in “Ain’t That A Shame”, as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif — he also used it in “Blue Monday”, another song which he’d written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “Blue Monday”]   Domino’s remake of that song would become his next hit after “Blueberry Hill”, and almost as big a success. Worldwide, “Blueberry Hill” was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis’ “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat “Que Sera Sera” by Doris Day — however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino’s shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. “Blueberry Hill” made Billboard’s top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We’ve talked before about how the recent “Old Town Road” debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino’s records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn’t being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino’s career in chart terms, and “Blueberry Hill” was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we’re going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we’ve barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and “Blueberry Hill” in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn’t fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you’ll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don’t like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That’s not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It’s how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents — George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it’s how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Birmingham Bounce” by Hardrock Gunter. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  The information about the “Yancey Special” bassline and its history comes from “Before Elvis”, by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the “Fats Domino” tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we’re going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting — something which we haven’t really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled — Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we’re talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you’re looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we’ll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with “Ain’t That A Shame”. He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he’d been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds — rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren’t even normally directly to their audiences — they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino’s audience — he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s — they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it’s true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs — enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino’s first album, Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material — mostly hit singles he’d had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we’ve looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin’. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn’t sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino’s commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino’s shows were often disrupted by riots.   We’ve been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the “inappropriate” behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his “pulsating jungle rhythms” — and there’s not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that — but there was little shocking about Domino’s actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. “My Blue Heaven” had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “My Blue Heaven”]   Domino’s version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with “I’m In Love Again” on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “My Blue Heaven”]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula — one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as “I’m in the Mood for Love”, “As Time Goes By”, and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home”.   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd — whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple — whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who’d thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether — they’d either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman — trying to avoid another riot because of “race mixing” — said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren’t allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn’t turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was “Honey Chile”, a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called “Shake, Rattle, and Rock”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Honey Chile”]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. “Blueberry Hill” was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We’ve talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino’s taste for country and western music, it’s possible that Autry’s version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, “Blueberry Hill”]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong’s recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: “Blueberry Hill”]   Domino loved Armstrong’s version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn’t get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn’t been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, “We got nuthin'”.   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I’m still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it’s just before he starts the second middle eight — there’s a *slight* change of sonic ambience there — but I wouldn’t swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings “the wind in the willow”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino’s career forever.   He couldn’t have been more wrong. The song became Domino’s biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, “When I’m dead and gone a million times, they’ll still be playing ‘da-da-da-da-dee-dah'”.   Not only was Domino’s version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong’s version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film “Loving You”:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blueberry Hill”]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “I’m Ready”]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we’re going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records — indeed it’s very similar to the one Domino used on “Ain’t That a Shame”, which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we’ve talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it’s used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, “How Long Blues”]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade “Lux” Lewis, with his song “Yancey Special”:   [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Yancey Special”]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, “Long Gone”:   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, “Long Gone”]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to “Yancey Special”, because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he’d come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn’t help himself in his testimony — he claimed, at first, that he hadn’t named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called “Yancey Special” which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn’t by itself be copyrightable — which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won’t repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of “Yancey Special” to come out before he’d registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on “I Hear You Knockin'”, a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey “Piano” Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”]   Domino had used the bassline in “Ain’t That A Shame”, as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif — he also used it in “Blue Monday”, another song which he’d written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “Blue Monday”]   Domino’s remake of that song would become his next hit after “Blueberry Hill”, and almost as big a success. Worldwide, “Blueberry Hill” was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis’ “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat “Que Sera Sera” by Doris Day — however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino’s shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. “Blueberry Hill” made Billboard’s top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We’ve talked before about how the recent “Old Town Road” debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino’s records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn’t being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino’s career in chart terms, and “Blueberry Hill” was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we’re going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we’ve barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and “Blueberry Hill” in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn’t fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you’ll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don’t like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That’s not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It’s how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents — George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it’s how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Train Kept A-Rollin'" by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 "Jump, Jive, an' Wail", by Louis Prima. ----more----  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I've mostly used Billy Burnette's self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It's a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I've been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes' relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on "Train Kept A-Rollin'", and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn't seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we're going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There's a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we'll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades -- the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys... rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken -- over each other's heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette's case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They'd grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black's brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group -- the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey's at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn't like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin' Wolf. Burlison's guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf's electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf's early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I've seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On":   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I'm Moving On"]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night's show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn't just get three random people he'd never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was "you", and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn't long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, "You're Undecided", for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "You're Undecided", Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called "Rockabilly Boogie", which they didn't get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, "Rockabilly Boogie"]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word "rockabilly", and Billy Burnette, Dorsey's son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny's son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one -- that it's a portmanteau of the words "rock" and "hillbilly", to describe rocking hillbilly music -- but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it's just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison's old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they'd come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn't go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, "Shattered Dreams", although that song didn't get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "Shattered Dreams"]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They'd simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn't need them.   They didn't have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called "Tear It Up", which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of "You're Undecided":   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "Tear It Up"]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that's what they were -- a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio weren't happy at all about their recordings. They didn't want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn't know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley's studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they'd been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he'd ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley's studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we've already looked at "Rocket 88", which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville "A-Team", the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison's.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock 'n' Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry":   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"]   But that was a good five years after the Rock 'n' Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, "Honey Hush", was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Honey Hush"]   It's not one of Turner's best, to be honest -- leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work -- but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock 'n' Roll Trio's cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Honey Hush"]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called "Train Kept A-Rollin'".   "Train Kept A-Rollin'", like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called "Cow Cow Boogie", which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, "Cow Cow Boogie"]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title "Train Kept A-Rollin'":   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, "The Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison's guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The single wasn't a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words "the train kept rolling all night long".   Sadly, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio didn't last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by "Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio", and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette's backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit -- he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren't even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material -- Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents' TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like "Believe What You Say", "Waiting In School", "It's Late", and "Just A Little Too Much":   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Just a Little Too Much"]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name "the Burnette Brothers":   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, "Warm Love"]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, "There Was a Tall Oak Tree", which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a "most promising newcomer" award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey's, were in a very different style from the Rock 'n' Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, And You're Mine":   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "You're Sixteen"]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny's solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we'll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined "the Sun Rhythm Section", a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin', and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette -- Johnny and Dorsey's sons -- on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

NB This is a new version — I accidentally uploaded the wrong file previously Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. 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 “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman.  Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. This 3-CD box set (expensive on CD, but relatively cheap as MP3s) contains every surviving recording by Elvis from 1956, including outtakes. This more reasonably priced ten-CD box contains every official release he put out from 1954 through 62, but without the outtakes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before, a couple of times, about Elvis Presley and his early recordings. Those Sun records are the ones on which his artistic reputation now largely rests, but they weren’t the ones that made him famous. He didn’t become the Elvis we all know until he started recording for RCA. So today we’re going to look at the first single he put out on a major label, and the way it turned him from a minor regional country star into the King of Rock and Roll, a cultural phenomenon that would eclipse all music prior to him, and lead John Lennon to say “Before Elvis there was nothing”. As you might remember from the last episode on Elvis, a few weeks ago, Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had managed to get Elvis signed to RCA Records for a sum of money far greater than anything anyone had paid for a singer before, after Sam Phillips made what seemed like a ludicrous demand just to get Parker out of his hair. And this was a big deal. Sun Records, as we’ve seen, was a tiny regional operation. It was able to generate massive hits for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash after Elvis left, but that’s only because of the cash the label was able to make from the Elvis deal. It’s safe to say that the whole genre of rockabilly was funded by that one deal. RCA, on the other hand, was one of the biggest labels in the world. The first thing RCA did was to reissue his last Sun single, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, backed with “Mystery Train”. With RCA’s backing, the single did far better than it had on Sun, hitting number one on the country charts at the beginning of 1956. But was that enough to make the money RCA had paid for Elvis worth it? When Elvis went into the studio on January 10 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, the pressure was on him to record something very special indeed. Before going into the studio, Elvis had been sent ten demos of songs to consider for this first session. The song he ended up choosing as the main one for the session, though, was a song by someone he already knew — and for which he had a third of the songwriting credit. Mae Axton was an odd figure. She was an English teacher who had a sideline as a freelance journalist. One day she was asked by a magazine she was freelancing for to write a story about hillbilly music, a subject about which she knew nothing. She went to Nashville to interview the singer Minnie Pearl, and while she was working on her story, Pearl introduced her to Fred Rose, the co-owner of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the biggest publishing company in country music. And Pearl, for some reason, told Rose that Mae, who had never written a song in her life, was a songwriter. Rose said that he needed a new novelty song for a recording session for the singer Dub Dickerson that afternoon, and asked Mae to write him one. And so, all of a sudden, Mae Axton was a songwriter, and she eventually wrote over two hundred songs, starting with her early collaborations with Dub Dickerson: [Excerpt: Dub Dickerson, “Shotgun Wedding”] She was still also a freelance journalist, though, and it was easy for her to make a sidestep into publicity for hillbilly acts. For a time she was Hank Snow’s personal publicist, and she would often work with Colonel Parker on promoting shows when they came through Florida, where she lived. She’d interviewed Elvis when he came to Florida, and had immediately been struck by him. He’d talked to her about how amazed he was by how big the ocean was, and how he’d give anything to have enough money to bring his parents down to Florida to live there. She said later, “That just went through my heart. ‘Cause I looked down there, and there were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy.” She promised she’d write him a song, and by the end of the year, she had one for him. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] “Heartbreak Hotel” was, initially, the work of Tommy Durden, a country singer and songwriter. As Durden used to tell it, he was inspired by a newspaper story of a man who’d died by suicide, who had been found with no identification on him and a note that simply read “I walk a lonely street”. Later research has suggested that rather than a suicide, the story Durden had read was probably about an armed robber, Alvin Krolik, who had been shot dead in the course of committing a robbery. Krolik had, a few years earlier, after confessing to a string of other robberies, made the news with a partial autobiography he’d written containing the lines “If you stand on a corner with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle and have nothing to do in life, I suggest you sit down and think. This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street. I hope this will help someone in the future.” Whatever the actual story, it inspired Durden, who had a few lines of the song, and he played what he had to Mae Axton. She thought a lot about the phrase, and eventually came to the conclusion that what you’d find at the end of a lonely street was a heartbreak hotel. The two of them finished the song off, with the help of Glenn Reeves, a rockabilly singer who refused to take credit for his work on the song, because he thought it was ridiculous. Reeves did, though, record the demo for them. They’d already decided that the song should be pitched to Elvis, and so Reeves impersonated Presley: [Excerpt: Glenn Reeves, “Heartbreak Hotel”] A lot of people have claimed that Elvis copied that recording exactly, phrasing and all. Comparing the two recordings, though, shows that that’s not the case. Elvis definitely found it easier to record a song when he’d heard someone else doing it in an approximation of his style, and in the sixties he often *would* just copy the phrasing on demos. But in the case of “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis is not copying Reeves’ phrasing at all. The two are similar, but that’s just because Reeves is imitating Elvis in the first place. There are dozens of tiny choices Elvis makes throughout the song which differ from those made by Reeves, and it’s clear that Elvis was thinking hard about the choices he was making. When Mae played him the song, insisting to him that it would be his first million seller, his reaction on hearing it was “Hot dog, Mae! Play it again!” He instantly fell in love with the song, which reminded the young blues-lover of Roy Brown’s “Hard Luck Blues”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown, “Hard Luck Blues”] Elvis got a third of the songwriting credit for the song, which most people have said was insisted on by the Colonel – and certainly other songs Elvis recorded around that time gave him a credit for that reason. But to her dying day Mae Axton always said that she’d cut him in on the song so he might be able to get that money to buy his parents a house in Florida. The session to record “Heartbreak Hotel” started with the engineers trying — and failing — to get a replica of Sam Phillips’ slapback echo sound, which was a sound whose secret nobody but Phillips knew. Instead they set up a speaker at one end of the room and fed in the sound from the mics at the other end, creating a makeshift echo chamber which satisfied Chet Atkins but threw the musicians, who weren’t used to hearing the echo live rather than added after the fact. Atkins isn’t the credited producer for “Heartbreak Hotel” — that’s Steve Sholes, the A&R man at RCA Records who had signed Presley — but by all accounts Atkins was nominally in charge of actually running the session. And certainly there would be no other reason for having Atkins there — he played guitar on the record, but only adding another acoustic rhythm guitar to the sound, which was frankly a waste of the talents of probably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. That said, Atkins didn’t do that much production either — according to Scotty Moore, his only suggestion was that they just keep doing what they’d been doing. To start the session off, they recorded a quick version of “I Got A Woman”, the Ray Charles song, which had been a staple of Elvis’ live act since it had been released: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Got A Woman”] After that, the remainder of the first session was devoted to “Heartbreak Hotel”, a record that has a sense of thought that’s been put into the arrangement that’s entirely absent from the Sun Records arrangements, which mostly consist of start the song, play the song through with a single solo, and end the song. The whole point of those records was to capture a kind of spontaneity, and you can’t do much to play with the dynamics of an arrangement when there are only three instruments there. But now there were six — Scotty Moore and Bill Black were there as always, as was D.J. Fontana, who had joined the band on drums in 1955 and was recording for the first time, along with Atkins and piano player Floyd Cramer, who played on many of the biggest hits to come out of Nashville in the fifties and sixties. Atkins and Cramer are two of the principal architects of what became known as “the Nashville Sound” or “Countrypolitan” — there are distinctions between these two styles for those who are interested in the fine details of country music, but for our purposes they’re the same, a style of country music that pulled the music away from its roots and towards a sound that was almost a continuation of the pre-rock pop sound, all vocal groups and strings with little in the way of traditional country instrumentation like fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and steel guitars. And there’s an element of that with their work with Presley, too — the rough edges being smoothed off, everything getting a little bit more mannered. But at this point it seems still to be working in the record’s favour. After recording “Heartbreak Hotel”, they took a break before spending another three-hour session recording another R&B cover that was a staple of Elvis’ stage show, “Money Honey”. Along with the addition of Atkins and Cramer, there were also backing vocalists for the very first time. Now this is something that often gets treated as a problem by people coming to Elvis’ music fresh today. Backing vocals in general have been deprecated in rock and roll music for much of the last fifty years, and people think of them as spoiling Elvis’ artistry. There have even been releases of some of Elvis’ recordings remixed to get rid of the backing vocals altogether (though that’s thankfully not possible with these 1956 records, which were recorded directly to mono). But the backing vocals weren’t an irritating addition to Elvis’ artistry. Rather, they were the essence of it, and if you’re going to listen to Elvis at all, and have any understanding of what he was trying to do, you need to understand that before anything else. Elvis’ first ambition — the aspiration he had right at the beginning of his career — was to be a member of a gospel quartet. Elvis wanted to have his voice be part of a group, and he loved to sing harmony more than anything else. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet before he ever met Sam Phillips, and as his career went on he only increased the number of backing vocalists he worked with — by the end of his career he would have J.D. Sumner and the Stamps (a Southern Gospel group), *and* the Sweet Inspirations (the girl group who had backed Aretha Franklin), *and* Kathy Westmoreland, a classically-trained soprano, all providing backing vocals. However, the backing vocalists on this initial session weren’t yet the Jordanaires, the group who would back Elvis throughout the fifties and sixties. One of the Jordanaires *was* there — Gordon Stoker — but the rest of them weren’t hired for the January sessions, as Steve Sholes wanted to use members of a group who were signed with RCA in their own right — the Speer Family. So Ben and Brock Speer joined Elvis and Stoker to make an unbalanced gospel quartet, with too many tenors and no baritone. When Elvis found out at a later session that this had happened as a cost-cutting measure, he insisted that all the Jordanaires be employed at his future sessions. The next day, to end the sessions, they regrouped and cut a couple of ballads. “I’m Counting On You” was rather mediocre, but “I Was The One” ended up being Elvis’ personal favourite track from the sessions: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Was The One”] At the end of the sessions, Steve Sholes was very unsure if he’d made the right choice signing Elvis. He only had five tracks to show for three sessions in two days, when the normal thing was to record four songs per session — Elvis and his group were so slow partly because they were used to the laid-back feel of the Sun studios, with Sam Phillips never clock-watching, and partly because Elvis was a perfectionist. Several times they’d recorded a take that Sholes had felt would be good enough to release, but Elvis had insisted he could do it better. He’d been right — the later versions were an improvement — but they had remarkably few tracks that they could use. Many of those who’d loved Elvis’ earlier work were astonished at how bad “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded to them. The reverb, sounding so different from the restrained use of slapback on the Sun records, sounded to many ears, not least Sam Phillips’, like a bad joke — Phillips called the result “a morbid mess”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Yet it became a smash hit. It went to number one on the pop charts, number one in country, and made the top five in R&B. This was the moment when Elvis went from being a minor country singer on a minor label to being Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, the King of Rock & Roll. After the sessions that produced “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis went back into the studio twice more and recorded a set of songs — mostly R&B and rockabilly covers — for his first album. Almost all of these were Elvis’ own choice of material, and so while his versions of “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Tutti Frutti” didn’t match the quality of the originals, they were fine performances and perfect for album tracks. While the “Heartbreak Hotel” session had been in Nashville — a natural choice, since it was both relatively close to Elvis’ home town of Memphis, and the capital of country music, and Elvis was still supposedly a country artist — the next couple of sessions were in New York, timed to coincide with Elvis’ appearances on TV. Starting with the low-rated Stage Show, a programme that was presented by the swing bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Elvis quickly moved up the ladder of TV shows, appearing first with Milton Berle, then with Steve Allen, and then finally on the Ed Sullivan show. On his first appearances, you can see the Elvis that people who knew him talked about – even as he’s working the audience with what looks like the utmost confidence, you can see his fingers twitching wildly in a way he’s not properly conscious of, and you can tell that under the mask of the sex symbol is the quiet country boy who would never meet anyone’s eye. Each show caused more controversy than the last, as first Elvis’ hip gyrations got him branded a moral menace, then he was forced to sing while standing still, and then only filmed from the waist up. Those shows helped propel “Heartbreak Hotel” to the top of the charts, but the Colonel decided that Elvis probably shouldn’t do too much more TV – if people could see him without paying, why would they pay to see him? No, Elvis was going to be in films instead. But all that work meant that Elvis’ fourth set of sessions for RCA was fairly disastrous, and ended up with nothing that was usable. Elvis had been so busy promoting “Heartbreak Hotel” that he hadn’t had any chance to prepare material, and so he just went with Steve Sholes’ suggestion of “I Want You I Need You I Love You”. But the session went terribly, because Elvis had no feel for the song at all. Normally, Elvis would learn a song straight away, after a single listen, but he just couldn’t get the song in his head. They spent the whole session working on that single track, and didn’t manage to get a usable take recorded at all. Steve Sholes eventually had to cobble together a take using bits of two different performances, and no-one was happy with it, but it reached number one on the country chart and number three on the pop charts. It was hardly “Heartbreak Hotel” levels of success, but it was OK. It was the B-side of that single that was really worth listening to. A leftover from the album sessions, it was, like Elvis’ first single, a cover version of an Arthur Crudup song. And this one also gave D.J. Fontana his first chance to shine. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “My Baby Left Me”] By this point, it was very clear that if Elvis was given control of the studio and singing material he connected with, he would produce great things. And if he was doing what someone else thought he should be doing, he would be much less successful. A couple of months later Elvis and the group were back in the studio cutting what would become their biggest double-sided hit, both songs definitely chosen by Elvis. These days their cover version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is the better-known of the two sides they cut that day, but while that’s an excellent track — and one that bears almost no relation to Thornton’s original — the A-side, and the song that finally convinced several detractors, including Sam Phillips, that Elvis might be able to make decent records away from Sun, was “Don’t Be Cruel”, a song written by Otis Blackwell, but credited to Blackwell and Presley, as the Colonel insisted that his boy get a cut for making it a hit. Otis Blackwell is another person who we’ll be hearing from a lot over the course of the series, as he wrote a string of hits, including several for Elvis, who he never met — the one time he did have a chance to meet him, he declined, as he’d developed a superstition about meeting the man who’d given him his biggest hits. At this time, Blackwell had just written the song “Fever” for Little Willie John: [Excerpt: “Fever”, Little Willie John] That song had become a big hit for Peggy Lee, in a version with different lyrics, and Blackwell was at the start of an impressive career. We don’t have Blackwell’s demo of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but he recorded a version in the 1970s which might give some idea of what Elvis heard in 1956: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Elvis’ version showed a lightness of touch that had been absent on his earlier RCA records. He was finally in control of the sound he wanted in the studio. “Don’t Be Cruel” took twenty-eight takes, and “Hound Dog” thirty-one, but you’d never believe it from the light, frothy, sound that “Don’t Be Cruel” has in its finished version, where Elvis sounds as playful as if he was improvising the song on the spot: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Both sides of the record went to number one – first “Don’t Be Cruel” went to number one and “Hound Dog” to number two, and then they swapped over. Between them they spent eleven weeks at the top of the charts. But even as Elvis was starting to take complete control in the studio, that control was starting to be taken away from him by events. His next session after the one that produced “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” was one he had not been expecting. When he’d signed to make his first film, a Western called “The Reno Brothers”, he’d expected it to be a straight acting role with no songs — he wanted to follow the path of people like Frank Sinatra, who had parallel careers in the cinema and in music, and he also hoped that he could emulate his acting idols, Marlon Brando and James Dean. But by the time he came to make the film, several songs had been added — and he found out, to his annoyance, that he wasn’t allowed to use Scotty, Bill, and DJ on the soundtrack, because the film company didn’t think they could sound hillbilly enough. They were replaced with Hollywood session musicians, who could do a better job of sounding hillbilly than those country musicians could. Elvis didn’t have any say over the material either, although he did like the main ballad that was going to be used in the film — the other three songs were among the most mediocre he’d do in the fifties. By the time “The Reno Brothers” was finished, it had been renamed “Love Me Tender”, and we’ll be picking up on Elvis’ film career in a future episode…

NB This is a new version -- I accidentally uploaded the wrong file previously Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. 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 "The Flying Saucer" by Buchanan and Goodman.  Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I'm using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. This 3-CD box set (expensive on CD, but relatively cheap as MP3s) contains every surviving recording by Elvis from 1956, including outtakes. This more reasonably priced ten-CD box contains every official release he put out from 1954 through 62, but without the outtakes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We've talked before, a couple of times, about Elvis Presley and his early recordings. Those Sun records are the ones on which his artistic reputation now largely rests, but they weren't the ones that made him famous. He didn't become the Elvis we all know until he started recording for RCA. So today we're going to look at the first single he put out on a major label, and the way it turned him from a minor regional country star into the King of Rock and Roll, a cultural phenomenon that would eclipse all music prior to him, and lead John Lennon to say "Before Elvis there was nothing". As you might remember from the last episode on Elvis, a few weeks ago, Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had managed to get Elvis signed to RCA Records for a sum of money far greater than anything anyone had paid for a singer before, after Sam Phillips made what seemed like a ludicrous demand just to get Parker out of his hair. And this was a big deal. Sun Records, as we've seen, was a tiny regional operation. It was able to generate massive hits for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash after Elvis left, but that's only because of the cash the label was able to make from the Elvis deal. It's safe to say that the whole genre of rockabilly was funded by that one deal. RCA, on the other hand, was one of the biggest labels in the world. The first thing RCA did was to reissue his last Sun single, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget", backed with "Mystery Train". With RCA's backing, the single did far better than it had on Sun, hitting number one on the country charts at the beginning of 1956. But was that enough to make the money RCA had paid for Elvis worth it? When Elvis went into the studio on January 10 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, the pressure was on him to record something very special indeed. Before going into the studio, Elvis had been sent ten demos of songs to consider for this first session. The song he ended up choosing as the main one for the session, though, was a song by someone he already knew -- and for which he had a third of the songwriting credit. Mae Axton was an odd figure. She was an English teacher who had a sideline as a freelance journalist. One day she was asked by a magazine she was freelancing for to write a story about hillbilly music, a subject about which she knew nothing. She went to Nashville to interview the singer Minnie Pearl, and while she was working on her story, Pearl introduced her to Fred Rose, the co-owner of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the biggest publishing company in country music. And Pearl, for some reason, told Rose that Mae, who had never written a song in her life, was a songwriter. Rose said that he needed a new novelty song for a recording session for the singer Dub Dickerson that afternoon, and asked Mae to write him one. And so, all of a sudden, Mae Axton was a songwriter, and she eventually wrote over two hundred songs, starting with her early collaborations with Dub Dickerson: [Excerpt: Dub Dickerson, "Shotgun Wedding"] She was still also a freelance journalist, though, and it was easy for her to make a sidestep into publicity for hillbilly acts. For a time she was Hank Snow's personal publicist, and she would often work with Colonel Parker on promoting shows when they came through Florida, where she lived. She'd interviewed Elvis when he came to Florida, and had immediately been struck by him. He'd talked to her about how amazed he was by how big the ocean was, and how he'd give anything to have enough money to bring his parents down to Florida to live there. She said later, "That just went through my heart. 'Cause I looked down there, and there were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy." She promised she'd write him a song, and by the end of the year, she had one for him. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] "Heartbreak Hotel" was, initially, the work of Tommy Durden, a country singer and songwriter. As Durden used to tell it, he was inspired by a newspaper story of a man who'd died by suicide, who had been found with no identification on him and a note that simply read "I walk a lonely street". Later research has suggested that rather than a suicide, the story Durden had read was probably about an armed robber, Alvin Krolik, who had been shot dead in the course of committing a robbery. Krolik had, a few years earlier, after confessing to a string of other robberies, made the news with a partial autobiography he'd written containing the lines “If you stand on a corner with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle and have nothing to do in life, I suggest you sit down and think. This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street. I hope this will help someone in the future.” Whatever the actual story, it inspired Durden, who had a few lines of the song, and he played what he had to Mae Axton. She thought a lot about the phrase, and eventually came to the conclusion that what you'd find at the end of a lonely street was a heartbreak hotel. The two of them finished the song off, with the help of Glenn Reeves, a rockabilly singer who refused to take credit for his work on the song, because he thought it was ridiculous. Reeves did, though, record the demo for them. They'd already decided that the song should be pitched to Elvis, and so Reeves impersonated Presley: [Excerpt: Glenn Reeves, "Heartbreak Hotel"] A lot of people have claimed that Elvis copied that recording exactly, phrasing and all. Comparing the two recordings, though, shows that that's not the case. Elvis definitely found it easier to record a song when he'd heard someone else doing it in an approximation of his style, and in the sixties he often *would* just copy the phrasing on demos. But in the case of "Heartbreak Hotel", Elvis is not copying Reeves' phrasing at all. The two are similar, but that's just because Reeves is imitating Elvis in the first place. There are dozens of tiny choices Elvis makes throughout the song which differ from those made by Reeves, and it's clear that Elvis was thinking hard about the choices he was making. When Mae played him the song, insisting to him that it would be his first million seller, his reaction on hearing it was "Hot dog, Mae! Play it again!" He instantly fell in love with the song, which reminded the young blues-lover of Roy Brown's "Hard Luck Blues": [Excerpt: Roy Brown, "Hard Luck Blues"] Elvis got a third of the songwriting credit for the song, which most people have said was insisted on by the Colonel – and certainly other songs Elvis recorded around that time gave him a credit for that reason. But to her dying day Mae Axton always said that she'd cut him in on the song so he might be able to get that money to buy his parents a house in Florida. The session to record "Heartbreak Hotel" started with the engineers trying -- and failing -- to get a replica of Sam Phillips' slapback echo sound, which was a sound whose secret nobody but Phillips knew. Instead they set up a speaker at one end of the room and fed in the sound from the mics at the other end, creating a makeshift echo chamber which satisfied Chet Atkins but threw the musicians, who weren't used to hearing the echo live rather than added after the fact. Atkins isn't the credited producer for "Heartbreak Hotel" -- that's Steve Sholes, the A&R man at RCA Records who had signed Presley -- but by all accounts Atkins was nominally in charge of actually running the session. And certainly there would be no other reason for having Atkins there -- he played guitar on the record, but only adding another acoustic rhythm guitar to the sound, which was frankly a waste of the talents of probably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. That said, Atkins didn't do that much production either -- according to Scotty Moore, his only suggestion was that they just keep doing what they'd been doing. To start the session off, they recorded a quick version of "I Got A Woman", the Ray Charles song, which had been a staple of Elvis' live act since it had been released: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "I Got A Woman"] After that, the remainder of the first session was devoted to "Heartbreak Hotel", a record that has a sense of thought that's been put into the arrangement that's entirely absent from the Sun Records arrangements, which mostly consist of start the song, play the song through with a single solo, and end the song. The whole point of those records was to capture a kind of spontaneity, and you can't do much to play with the dynamics of an arrangement when there are only three instruments there. But now there were six -- Scotty Moore and Bill Black were there as always, as was D.J. Fontana, who had joined the band on drums in 1955 and was recording for the first time, along with Atkins and piano player Floyd Cramer, who played on many of the biggest hits to come out of Nashville in the fifties and sixties. Atkins and Cramer are two of the principal architects of what became known as "the Nashville Sound" or "Countrypolitan" -- there are distinctions between these two styles for those who are interested in the fine details of country music, but for our purposes they're the same, a style of country music that pulled the music away from its roots and towards a sound that was almost a continuation of the pre-rock pop sound, all vocal groups and strings with little in the way of traditional country instrumentation like fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and steel guitars. And there's an element of that with their work with Presley, too -- the rough edges being smoothed off, everything getting a little bit more mannered. But at this point it seems still to be working in the record's favour. After recording "Heartbreak Hotel", they took a break before spending another three-hour session recording another R&B cover that was a staple of Elvis' stage show, "Money Honey". Along with the addition of Atkins and Cramer, there were also backing vocalists for the very first time. Now this is something that often gets treated as a problem by people coming to Elvis' music fresh today. Backing vocals in general have been deprecated in rock and roll music for much of the last fifty years, and people think of them as spoiling Elvis' artistry. There have even been releases of some of Elvis' recordings remixed to get rid of the backing vocals altogether (though that's thankfully not possible with these 1956 records, which were recorded directly to mono). But the backing vocals weren't an irritating addition to Elvis' artistry. Rather, they were the essence of it, and if you're going to listen to Elvis at all, and have any understanding of what he was trying to do, you need to understand that before anything else. Elvis' first ambition -- the aspiration he had right at the beginning of his career -- was to be a member of a gospel quartet. Elvis wanted to have his voice be part of a group, and he loved to sing harmony more than anything else. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet before he ever met Sam Phillips, and as his career went on he only increased the number of backing vocalists he worked with -- by the end of his career he would have J.D. Sumner and the Stamps (a Southern Gospel group), *and* the Sweet Inspirations (the girl group who had backed Aretha Franklin), *and* Kathy Westmoreland, a classically-trained soprano, all providing backing vocals. However, the backing vocalists on this initial session weren't yet the Jordanaires, the group who would back Elvis throughout the fifties and sixties. One of the Jordanaires *was* there -- Gordon Stoker -- but the rest of them weren't hired for the January sessions, as Steve Sholes wanted to use members of a group who were signed with RCA in their own right -- the Speer Family. So Ben and Brock Speer joined Elvis and Stoker to make an unbalanced gospel quartet, with too many tenors and no baritone. When Elvis found out at a later session that this had happened as a cost-cutting measure, he insisted that all the Jordanaires be employed at his future sessions. The next day, to end the sessions, they regrouped and cut a couple of ballads. "I'm Counting On You" was rather mediocre, but "I Was The One" ended up being Elvis' personal favourite track from the sessions: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "I Was The One"] At the end of the sessions, Steve Sholes was very unsure if he'd made the right choice signing Elvis. He only had five tracks to show for three sessions in two days, when the normal thing was to record four songs per session -- Elvis and his group were so slow partly because they were used to the laid-back feel of the Sun studios, with Sam Phillips never clock-watching, and partly because Elvis was a perfectionist. Several times they'd recorded a take that Sholes had felt would be good enough to release, but Elvis had insisted he could do it better. He'd been right -- the later versions were an improvement -- but they had remarkably few tracks that they could use. Many of those who'd loved Elvis' earlier work were astonished at how bad "Heartbreak Hotel" sounded to them. The reverb, sounding so different from the restrained use of slapback on the Sun records, sounded to many ears, not least Sam Phillips', like a bad joke -- Phillips called the result "a morbid mess". [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Yet it became a smash hit. It went to number one on the pop charts, number one in country, and made the top five in R&B. This was the moment when Elvis went from being a minor country singer on a minor label to being Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, the King of Rock & Roll. After the sessions that produced "Heartbreak Hotel", Elvis went back into the studio twice more and recorded a set of songs -- mostly R&B and rockabilly covers -- for his first album. Almost all of these were Elvis' own choice of material, and so while his versions of "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Tutti Frutti" didn't match the quality of the originals, they were fine performances and perfect for album tracks. While the "Heartbreak Hotel" session had been in Nashville -- a natural choice, since it was both relatively close to Elvis' home town of Memphis, and the capital of country music, and Elvis was still supposedly a country artist -- the next couple of sessions were in New York, timed to coincide with Elvis' appearances on TV. Starting with the low-rated Stage Show, a programme that was presented by the swing bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Elvis quickly moved up the ladder of TV shows, appearing first with Milton Berle, then with Steve Allen, and then finally on the Ed Sullivan show. On his first appearances, you can see the Elvis that people who knew him talked about – even as he's working the audience with what looks like the utmost confidence, you can see his fingers twitching wildly in a way he's not properly conscious of, and you can tell that under the mask of the sex symbol is the quiet country boy who would never meet anyone's eye. Each show caused more controversy than the last, as first Elvis' hip gyrations got him branded a moral menace, then he was forced to sing while standing still, and then only filmed from the waist up. Those shows helped propel "Heartbreak Hotel" to the top of the charts, but the Colonel decided that Elvis probably shouldn't do too much more TV – if people could see him without paying, why would they pay to see him? No, Elvis was going to be in films instead. But all that work meant that Elvis' fourth set of sessions for RCA was fairly disastrous, and ended up with nothing that was usable. Elvis had been so busy promoting "Heartbreak Hotel" that he hadn't had any chance to prepare material, and so he just went with Steve Sholes' suggestion of "I Want You I Need You I Love You". But the session went terribly, because Elvis had no feel for the song at all. Normally, Elvis would learn a song straight away, after a single listen, but he just couldn't get the song in his head. They spent the whole session working on that single track, and didn't manage to get a usable take recorded at all. Steve Sholes eventually had to cobble together a take using bits of two different performances, and no-one was happy with it, but it reached number one on the country chart and number three on the pop charts. It was hardly "Heartbreak Hotel" levels of success, but it was OK. It was the B-side of that single that was really worth listening to. A leftover from the album sessions, it was, like Elvis' first single, a cover version of an Arthur Crudup song. And this one also gave D.J. Fontana his first chance to shine. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "My Baby Left Me"] By this point, it was very clear that if Elvis was given control of the studio and singing material he connected with, he would produce great things. And if he was doing what someone else thought he should be doing, he would be much less successful. A couple of months later Elvis and the group were back in the studio cutting what would become their biggest double-sided hit, both songs definitely chosen by Elvis. These days their cover version of Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" is the better-known of the two sides they cut that day, but while that's an excellent track -- and one that bears almost no relation to Thornton's original -- the A-side, and the song that finally convinced several detractors, including Sam Phillips, that Elvis might be able to make decent records away from Sun, was "Don't Be Cruel", a song written by Otis Blackwell, but credited to Blackwell and Presley, as the Colonel insisted that his boy get a cut for making it a hit. Otis Blackwell is another person who we'll be hearing from a lot over the course of the series, as he wrote a string of hits, including several for Elvis, who he never met -- the one time he did have a chance to meet him, he declined, as he'd developed a superstition about meeting the man who'd given him his biggest hits. At this time, Blackwell had just written the song "Fever" for Little Willie John: [Excerpt: "Fever", Little Willie John] That song had become a big hit for Peggy Lee, in a version with different lyrics, and Blackwell was at the start of an impressive career. We don't have Blackwell's demo of "Don't Be Cruel", but he recorded a version in the 1970s which might give some idea of what Elvis heard in 1956: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Don't Be Cruel"] Elvis' version showed a lightness of touch that had been absent on his earlier RCA records. He was finally in control of the sound he wanted in the studio. "Don't Be Cruel" took twenty-eight takes, and "Hound Dog" thirty-one, but you'd never believe it from the light, frothy, sound that "Don't Be Cruel" has in its finished version, where Elvis sounds as playful as if he was improvising the song on the spot: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Don't Be Cruel"] Both sides of the record went to number one – first “Don't Be Cruel” went to number one and “Hound Dog” to number two, and then they swapped over. Between them they spent eleven weeks at the top of the charts. But even as Elvis was starting to take complete control in the studio, that control was starting to be taken away from him by events. His next session after the one that produced "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel" was one he had not been expecting. When he'd signed to make his first film, a Western called "The Reno Brothers", he'd expected it to be a straight acting role with no songs -- he wanted to follow the path of people like Frank Sinatra, who had parallel careers in the cinema and in music, and he also hoped that he could emulate his acting idols, Marlon Brando and James Dean. But by the time he came to make the film, several songs had been added -- and he found out, to his annoyance, that he wasn't allowed to use Scotty, Bill, and DJ on the soundtrack, because the film company didn't think they could sound hillbilly enough. They were replaced with Hollywood session musicians, who could do a better job of sounding hillbilly than those country musicians could. Elvis didn't have any say over the material either, although he did like the main ballad that was going to be used in the film -- the other three songs were among the most mediocre he'd do in the fifties. By the time "The Reno Brothers" was finished, it had been renamed "Love Me Tender", and we'll be picking up on Elvis' film career in a future episode...

NB This is a new version — I accidentally uploaded the wrong file previously Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. 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 “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman.  Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. This 3-CD box set (expensive on CD, but relatively cheap as MP3s) contains every surviving recording by Elvis from 1956, including outtakes. This more reasonably priced ten-CD box contains every official release he put out from 1954 through 62, but without the outtakes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before, a couple of times, about Elvis Presley and his early recordings. Those Sun records are the ones on which his artistic reputation now largely rests, but they weren’t the ones that made him famous. He didn’t become the Elvis we all know until he started recording for RCA. So today we’re going to look at the first single he put out on a major label, and the way it turned him from a minor regional country star into the King of Rock and Roll, a cultural phenomenon that would eclipse all music prior to him, and lead John Lennon to say “Before Elvis there was nothing”. As you might remember from the last episode on Elvis, a few weeks ago, Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had managed to get Elvis signed to RCA Records for a sum of money far greater than anything anyone had paid for a singer before, after Sam Phillips made what seemed like a ludicrous demand just to get Parker out of his hair. And this was a big deal. Sun Records, as we’ve seen, was a tiny regional operation. It was able to generate massive hits for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash after Elvis left, but that’s only because of the cash the label was able to make from the Elvis deal. It’s safe to say that the whole genre of rockabilly was funded by that one deal. RCA, on the other hand, was one of the biggest labels in the world. The first thing RCA did was to reissue his last Sun single, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, backed with “Mystery Train”. With RCA’s backing, the single did far better than it had on Sun, hitting number one on the country charts at the beginning of 1956. But was that enough to make the money RCA had paid for Elvis worth it? When Elvis went into the studio on January 10 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, the pressure was on him to record something very special indeed. Before going into the studio, Elvis had been sent ten demos of songs to consider for this first session. The song he ended up choosing as the main one for the session, though, was a song by someone he already knew — and for which he had a third of the songwriting credit. Mae Axton was an odd figure. She was an English teacher who had a sideline as a freelance journalist. One day she was asked by a magazine she was freelancing for to write a story about hillbilly music, a subject about which she knew nothing. She went to Nashville to interview the singer Minnie Pearl, and while she was working on her story, Pearl introduced her to Fred Rose, the co-owner of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the biggest publishing company in country music. And Pearl, for some reason, told Rose that Mae, who had never written a song in her life, was a songwriter. Rose said that he needed a new novelty song for a recording session for the singer Dub Dickerson that afternoon, and asked Mae to write him one. And so, all of a sudden, Mae Axton was a songwriter, and she eventually wrote over two hundred songs, starting with her early collaborations with Dub Dickerson: [Excerpt: Dub Dickerson, “Shotgun Wedding”] She was still also a freelance journalist, though, and it was easy for her to make a sidestep into publicity for hillbilly acts. For a time she was Hank Snow’s personal publicist, and she would often work with Colonel Parker on promoting shows when they came through Florida, where she lived. She’d interviewed Elvis when he came to Florida, and had immediately been struck by him. He’d talked to her about how amazed he was by how big the ocean was, and how he’d give anything to have enough money to bring his parents down to Florida to live there. She said later, “That just went through my heart. ‘Cause I looked down there, and there were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy.” She promised she’d write him a song, and by the end of the year, she had one for him. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] “Heartbreak Hotel” was, initially, the work of Tommy Durden, a country singer and songwriter. As Durden used to tell it, he was inspired by a newspaper story of a man who’d died by suicide, who had been found with no identification on him and a note that simply read “I walk a lonely street”. Later research has suggested that rather than a suicide, the story Durden had read was probably about an armed robber, Alvin Krolik, who had been shot dead in the course of committing a robbery. Krolik had, a few years earlier, after confessing to a string of other robberies, made the news with a partial autobiography he’d written containing the lines “If you stand on a corner with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle and have nothing to do in life, I suggest you sit down and think. This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street. I hope this will help someone in the future.” Whatever the actual story, it inspired Durden, who had a few lines of the song, and he played what he had to Mae Axton. She thought a lot about the phrase, and eventually came to the conclusion that what you’d find at the end of a lonely street was a heartbreak hotel. The two of them finished the song off, with the help of Glenn Reeves, a rockabilly singer who refused to take credit for his work on the song, because he thought it was ridiculous. Reeves did, though, record the demo for them. They’d already decided that the song should be pitched to Elvis, and so Reeves impersonated Presley: [Excerpt: Glenn Reeves, “Heartbreak Hotel”] A lot of people have claimed that Elvis copied that recording exactly, phrasing and all. Comparing the two recordings, though, shows that that’s not the case. Elvis definitely found it easier to record a song when he’d heard someone else doing it in an approximation of his style, and in the sixties he often *would* just copy the phrasing on demos. But in the case of “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis is not copying Reeves’ phrasing at all. The two are similar, but that’s just because Reeves is imitating Elvis in the first place. There are dozens of tiny choices Elvis makes throughout the song which differ from those made by Reeves, and it’s clear that Elvis was thinking hard about the choices he was making. When Mae played him the song, insisting to him that it would be his first million seller, his reaction on hearing it was “Hot dog, Mae! Play it again!” He instantly fell in love with the song, which reminded the young blues-lover of Roy Brown’s “Hard Luck Blues”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown, “Hard Luck Blues”] Elvis got a third of the songwriting credit for the song, which most people have said was insisted on by the Colonel – and certainly other songs Elvis recorded around that time gave him a credit for that reason. But to her dying day Mae Axton always said that she’d cut him in on the song so he might be able to get that money to buy his parents a house in Florida. The session to record “Heartbreak Hotel” started with the engineers trying — and failing — to get a replica of Sam Phillips’ slapback echo sound, which was a sound whose secret nobody but Phillips knew. Instead they set up a speaker at one end of the room and fed in the sound from the mics at the other end, creating a makeshift echo chamber which satisfied Chet Atkins but threw the musicians, who weren’t used to hearing the echo live rather than added after the fact. Atkins isn’t the credited producer for “Heartbreak Hotel” — that’s Steve Sholes, the A&R man at RCA Records who had signed Presley — but by all accounts Atkins was nominally in charge of actually running the session. And certainly there would be no other reason for having Atkins there — he played guitar on the record, but only adding another acoustic rhythm guitar to the sound, which was frankly a waste of the talents of probably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. That said, Atkins didn’t do that much production either — according to Scotty Moore, his only suggestion was that they just keep doing what they’d been doing. To start the session off, they recorded a quick version of “I Got A Woman”, the Ray Charles song, which had been a staple of Elvis’ live act since it had been released: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Got A Woman”] After that, the remainder of the first session was devoted to “Heartbreak Hotel”, a record that has a sense of thought that’s been put into the arrangement that’s entirely absent from the Sun Records arrangements, which mostly consist of start the song, play the song through with a single solo, and end the song. The whole point of those records was to capture a kind of spontaneity, and you can’t do much to play with the dynamics of an arrangement when there are only three instruments there. But now there were six — Scotty Moore and Bill Black were there as always, as was D.J. Fontana, who had joined the band on drums in 1955 and was recording for the first time, along with Atkins and piano player Floyd Cramer, who played on many of the biggest hits to come out of Nashville in the fifties and sixties. Atkins and Cramer are two of the principal architects of what became known as “the Nashville Sound” or “Countrypolitan” — there are distinctions between these two styles for those who are interested in the fine details of country music, but for our purposes they’re the same, a style of country music that pulled the music away from its roots and towards a sound that was almost a continuation of the pre-rock pop sound, all vocal groups and strings with little in the way of traditional country instrumentation like fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and steel guitars. And there’s an element of that with their work with Presley, too — the rough edges being smoothed off, everything getting a little bit more mannered. But at this point it seems still to be working in the record’s favour. After recording “Heartbreak Hotel”, they took a break before spending another three-hour session recording another R&B cover that was a staple of Elvis’ stage show, “Money Honey”. Along with the addition of Atkins and Cramer, there were also backing vocalists for the very first time. Now this is something that often gets treated as a problem by people coming to Elvis’ music fresh today. Backing vocals in general have been deprecated in rock and roll music for much of the last fifty years, and people think of them as spoiling Elvis’ artistry. There have even been releases of some of Elvis’ recordings remixed to get rid of the backing vocals altogether (though that’s thankfully not possible with these 1956 records, which were recorded directly to mono). But the backing vocals weren’t an irritating addition to Elvis’ artistry. Rather, they were the essence of it, and if you’re going to listen to Elvis at all, and have any understanding of what he was trying to do, you need to understand that before anything else. Elvis’ first ambition — the aspiration he had right at the beginning of his career — was to be a member of a gospel quartet. Elvis wanted to have his voice be part of a group, and he loved to sing harmony more than anything else. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet before he ever met Sam Phillips, and as his career went on he only increased the number of backing vocalists he worked with — by the end of his career he would have J.D. Sumner and the Stamps (a Southern Gospel group), *and* the Sweet Inspirations (the girl group who had backed Aretha Franklin), *and* Kathy Westmoreland, a classically-trained soprano, all providing backing vocals. However, the backing vocalists on this initial session weren’t yet the Jordanaires, the group who would back Elvis throughout the fifties and sixties. One of the Jordanaires *was* there — Gordon Stoker — but the rest of them weren’t hired for the January sessions, as Steve Sholes wanted to use members of a group who were signed with RCA in their own right — the Speer Family. So Ben and Brock Speer joined Elvis and Stoker to make an unbalanced gospel quartet, with too many tenors and no baritone. When Elvis found out at a later session that this had happened as a cost-cutting measure, he insisted that all the Jordanaires be employed at his future sessions. The next day, to end the sessions, they regrouped and cut a couple of ballads. “I’m Counting On You” was rather mediocre, but “I Was The One” ended up being Elvis’ personal favourite track from the sessions: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Was The One”] At the end of the sessions, Steve Sholes was very unsure if he’d made the right choice signing Elvis. He only had five tracks to show for three sessions in two days, when the normal thing was to record four songs per session — Elvis and his group were so slow partly because they were used to the laid-back feel of the Sun studios, with Sam Phillips never clock-watching, and partly because Elvis was a perfectionist. Several times they’d recorded a take that Sholes had felt would be good enough to release, but Elvis had insisted he could do it better. He’d been right — the later versions were an improvement — but they had remarkably few tracks that they could use. Many of those who’d loved Elvis’ earlier work were astonished at how bad “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded to them. The reverb, sounding so different from the restrained use of slapback on the Sun records, sounded to many ears, not least Sam Phillips’, like a bad joke — Phillips called the result “a morbid mess”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Yet it became a smash hit. It went to number one on the pop charts, number one in country, and made the top five in R&B. This was the moment when Elvis went from being a minor country singer on a minor label to being Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, the King of Rock & Roll. After the sessions that produced “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis went back into the studio twice more and recorded a set of songs — mostly R&B and rockabilly covers — for his first album. Almost all of these were Elvis’ own choice of material, and so while his versions of “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Tutti Frutti” didn’t match the quality of the originals, they were fine performances and perfect for album tracks. While the “Heartbreak Hotel” session had been in Nashville — a natural choice, since it was both relatively close to Elvis’ home town of Memphis, and the capital of country music, and Elvis was still supposedly a country artist — the next couple of sessions were in New York, timed to coincide with Elvis’ appearances on TV. Starting with the low-rated Stage Show, a programme that was presented by the swing bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Elvis quickly moved up the ladder of TV shows, appearing first with Milton Berle, then with Steve Allen, and then finally on the Ed Sullivan show. On his first appearances, you can see the Elvis that people who knew him talked about – even as he’s working the audience with what looks like the utmost confidence, you can see his fingers twitching wildly in a way he’s not properly conscious of, and you can tell that under the mask of the sex symbol is the quiet country boy who would never meet anyone’s eye. Each show caused more controversy than the last, as first Elvis’ hip gyrations got him branded a moral menace, then he was forced to sing while standing still, and then only filmed from the waist up. Those shows helped propel “Heartbreak Hotel” to the top of the charts, but the Colonel decided that Elvis probably shouldn’t do too much more TV – if people could see him without paying, why would they pay to see him? No, Elvis was going to be in films instead. But all that work meant that Elvis’ fourth set of sessions for RCA was fairly disastrous, and ended up with nothing that was usable. Elvis had been so busy promoting “Heartbreak Hotel” that he hadn’t had any chance to prepare material, and so he just went with Steve Sholes’ suggestion of “I Want You I Need You I Love You”. But the session went terribly, because Elvis had no feel for the song at all. Normally, Elvis would learn a song straight away, after a single listen, but he just couldn’t get the song in his head. They spent the whole session working on that single track, and didn’t manage to get a usable take recorded at all. Steve Sholes eventually had to cobble together a take using bits of two different performances, and no-one was happy with it, but it reached number one on the country chart and number three on the pop charts. It was hardly “Heartbreak Hotel” levels of success, but it was OK. It was the B-side of that single that was really worth listening to. A leftover from the album sessions, it was, like Elvis’ first single, a cover version of an Arthur Crudup song. And this one also gave D.J. Fontana his first chance to shine. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “My Baby Left Me”] By this point, it was very clear that if Elvis was given control of the studio and singing material he connected with, he would produce great things. And if he was doing what someone else thought he should be doing, he would be much less successful. A couple of months later Elvis and the group were back in the studio cutting what would become their biggest double-sided hit, both songs definitely chosen by Elvis. These days their cover version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is the better-known of the two sides they cut that day, but while that’s an excellent track — and one that bears almost no relation to Thornton’s original — the A-side, and the song that finally convinced several detractors, including Sam Phillips, that Elvis might be able to make decent records away from Sun, was “Don’t Be Cruel”, a song written by Otis Blackwell, but credited to Blackwell and Presley, as the Colonel insisted that his boy get a cut for making it a hit. Otis Blackwell is another person who we’ll be hearing from a lot over the course of the series, as he wrote a string of hits, including several for Elvis, who he never met — the one time he did have a chance to meet him, he declined, as he’d developed a superstition about meeting the man who’d given him his biggest hits. At this time, Blackwell had just written the song “Fever” for Little Willie John: [Excerpt: “Fever”, Little Willie John] That song had become a big hit for Peggy Lee, in a version with different lyrics, and Blackwell was at the start of an impressive career. We don’t have Blackwell’s demo of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but he recorded a version in the 1970s which might give some idea of what Elvis heard in 1956: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Elvis’ version showed a lightness of touch that had been absent on his earlier RCA records. He was finally in control of the sound he wanted in the studio. “Don’t Be Cruel” took twenty-eight takes, and “Hound Dog” thirty-one, but you’d never believe it from the light, frothy, sound that “Don’t Be Cruel” has in its finished version, where Elvis sounds as playful as if he was improvising the song on the spot: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Both sides of the record went to number one – first “Don’t Be Cruel” went to number one and “Hound Dog” to number two, and then they swapped over. Between them they spent eleven weeks at the top of the charts. But even as Elvis was starting to take complete control in the studio, that control was starting to be taken away from him by events. His next session after the one that produced “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” was one he had not been expecting. When he’d signed to make his first film, a Western called “The Reno Brothers”, he’d expected it to be a straight acting role with no songs — he wanted to follow the path of people like Frank Sinatra, who had parallel careers in the cinema and in music, and he also hoped that he could emulate his acting idols, Marlon Brando and James Dean. But by the time he came to make the film, several songs had been added — and he found out, to his annoyance, that he wasn’t allowed to use Scotty, Bill, and DJ on the soundtrack, because the film company didn’t think they could sound hillbilly enough. They were replaced with Hollywood session musicians, who could do a better job of sounding hillbilly than those country musicians could. Elvis didn’t have any say over the material either, although he did like the main ballad that was going to be used in the film — the other three songs were among the most mediocre he’d do in the fifties. By the time “The Reno Brothers” was finished, it had been renamed “Love Me Tender”, and we’ll be picking up on Elvis’ film career in a future episode…

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here -- last week's, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn't recommend that book, however -- while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon's material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It's the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we're going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we're going to talk about something a lot more recent. We're going to talk about "Old Town Road," by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don't follow the charts and the music news in general, "Old Town Road" is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it's a country song: [Excerpt: "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X] That's a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It's clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint -- if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you're doing isn't racist, it's probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the "race music" charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, "rock and roll" became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there's one they haven't yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that -- nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that's the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we'll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don't want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he'd played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of "Route 66" among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he'd moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums -- until New Year's Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn't play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year's Eve -- every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: "Oh Maria", Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren't interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We've talked about Waters before, but only in passing -- but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin' Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn't, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he'd written called "The Wee Wee Hours": [excerpt: Chuck Berry, "The Wee Wee Hours"] That was too generic for Chess -- and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could -- he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat "King" Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he'd also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song "Ida Red" in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on "Ida Red", which I'll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it's an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot -- he eventually changed the title to "Ida May", for a start -- and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem -- he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on "Maybellene", after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. "Ida Red" wasn't the only influence on "Maybellene" though, there was another song called "Oh Red", a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: "Oh Red", the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in "Before Elvis", suggests that this was the *only* influence on "Maybellene", and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have "Red" in the titles. I disagree -- I think it's fairly clear that "Maybellene" is inspired both by "Ida Red"s structure and patter-lyric verse and by "Oh Red"s chorus melody. And it wasn't just Bob Wills' version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There's a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn't a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bumble Bee Slim] And there's another influence as well. Berry's lyrics were about a car chase -- to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend -- and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They -- and the car-horn sound of the guitar -- seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called "Hot Rod Racer" by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: "Hot Rod Racer", Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Maybellene"] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases -- this is closer to the style of Elvis' Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out -- and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio -- Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums -- augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we'll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer -- he'd been Joe Louis' sparring partner -- before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, "The Five Breezes": [Excerpt: "Sweet Louise", the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon's music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner -- right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess' flaws was one fatal one -- he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people's judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn't licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James... to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s -- white boys with guitars from England -- it was Willie Dixon's songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include "Little Red Rooster" for Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] "Bring it on Home" for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Bring it on Home"] "You Need Love" for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] You get the idea. In any other session he played on -- in any other room he ever entered -- Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as "Maybellene" would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn't the only credited songwriter -- and, separately, he may not have been the song's only writer. But these two things aren't linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say "Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office". Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn't work on Berry, who didn't drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to "Maybellene" over to people who had nothing to do with writing it -- Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met -- Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records' offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It's been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry's royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it's at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We'll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry's melody lines would be based on Johnson's piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here's a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny's Boogie”] It's impossible to say with certainty who did what -- Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don't have any clear guides as to what Berry's music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry's money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people's work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry's guitar licks -- Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you're a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you'd probably choose to write in E or A if you're playing the blues, D if you're doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you're doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist's fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you're playing the blues. And they're keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player -- alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you're a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you're most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson's band. Once you know that it seems obvious what's happened -- Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry's songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson's contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”'s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians' material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they'd expected the performer of "Maybellene" to be a white man and he wasn't allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit -- he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that "Maybellene" would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins' version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Maybellene"] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry's recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success -- in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest -- but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. "Maybellene" did so well that even "Wee Wee Hours", released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry's next single was a "Maybellene" soundalike -- "Thirty Days" [Excerpt: "Thirty Days", Chuck Berry] It's a great track, but it didn't do quite so well on the charts -- it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn't hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, "No Money Down", did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry] You don't need anything more, do you? That's the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don't even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, "Roll Over Beethoven". It's worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: "Roll Over Beethoven", Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre's history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it's talking about *recorded* music specifically -- Berry isn't wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he's explicitly making a link between his music -- "these rhythm and blues" -- and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis -- "don't step on my blue suede shoes". And Berry's music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there's a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with "Roll Over Beethoven". And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. "Roll Over Beethoven" was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We'll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks' time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "That's All Right Mama" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more----     Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis' 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis' five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as "Bear Cat" and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I've relied on three books here more than any others. The first is "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. which I've recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books -- they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips' ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I'm sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I'm coming from, but I'm aware that this will be some people's first episode. There's a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh'Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people's music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show... The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music -- and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn't have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He'd hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of "My Kind of Carrying On" by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn't sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say "Cause You're Always On My Mind" by Wiley Barkdull, or "Twice the Loving" by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up -- the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he'd started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he'd initially realised, he'd decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he'd have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as "Rocket 88", the record he'd leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin' Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he'd ever recorded. Howlin' Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam's studio before he'd started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he'd recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he'd been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties -- if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We've already seen this with "Good Rockin' Tonight", where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like "Caldonia". And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to "Hound Dog". There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin' Tonight” -- "Mr Hound Dog's in Town" [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog's In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase "hound dog", you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips' view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips' telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and "wrote" "Bear Cat". Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of "Hound Dog", and there's not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips' experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips' new record label, Sun. [excerpt of "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became -- "Bear Cat" eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else's song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he'd had a solid hit with "Bear Cat", and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn't buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that -- if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people's music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they'd start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys -- Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been -- he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro -- and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips' intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips' assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who'd come in to the studio, she thought she'd found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that's how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music's history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who "discovered" Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker's side. However, even there, it's hard to see from Elvis' original recording -- versions of "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that's what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn't have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn't know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He'd hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they'd all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn't really part of the group. He'd thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things -- he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn't cause any fires when he worked on people's wiring. He didn't have many friends -- and no close friends at all -- and many of those he did have didn't even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source -- the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He'd go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King -- young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky's on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn't someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either -- rather, he was someone who didn't fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn't own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He'd hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing -- and specifically what is known euphemistically as "Southern Gospel", but which really means "white Gospel". And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That's a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it -- and it's also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that's the gospel music we're talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there's another gospel music as well -- "Southern Gospel" or "quartet gospel". That music is -- or at least was at the time we're talking about -- almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren't attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it's performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", the Blackwood Brothers] That's the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that's a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson's version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley's favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them -- but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He'd take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn't have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself -- Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he'd been working with. In their cases it was because they'd been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips' case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else's. He didn't know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips' book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn't try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty's. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn't impressed... or at least, he *thought* he wasn't impressed. But at the same time... there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn't quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on "That's All Right Mama", a song originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over -- he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song "That's All Right Mama" was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "Black Snake Moan": [excerpt: "Black Snake Moan", Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in "If I Get Lucky". He then came up with the melody for what became "That's All Right", but recorded it with different lyrics as "Mean Ol' Frisco Blues": [excerpt: "Mean Old Frisco Blues", Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to "That's All Right", and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: "Dirt Road Blues", Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded "That's All Right Mama" itself: [excerpt "That's All Right Mama", Arthur Crudup] Crudup's records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That's All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn't follow that template. Elvis' version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music -- it's taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black's slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup's version. It still doesn't, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for "a white man who could sing like a black one", he hadn't found it. Listening now, it's definitely a "rock and roll" record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a "hillbilly" record. [excerpt “That's All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley's singing which is different from most of the country music at the time -- there's a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it's what's needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre -- Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky": [excerpt: Bill Monroe "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they'd reworked "That's All Right Mama". There's nothing to these tracks but Elvis' strummed acoustic, Black's clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore's rudimentary electric guitar fills -- and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips' echo. Phillips had a simple system he'd rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he'd done it. The room he was recording in didn't have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn't use just one tape recorder -- though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember -- he used two. He didn't do multitracking like Les Paul -- rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe's bluegrass music -- a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn't be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis' mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn't tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis' race – most people had assumed, since Phillips' show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands -- at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I've seen claims, though I don't know how true they are, that Crudup's total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band's first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley's stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we've mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed -- he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic -- and even when he wasn't, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn't keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it's hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we'll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “That’s All Right Mama” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—-     Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis’ 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis’ five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as “Bear Cat” and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I’ve relied on three books here more than any others. The first is “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. which I’ve recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick — Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books — they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips’ ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I’m sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I’m coming from, but I’m aware that this will be some people’s first episode. There’s a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh’Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people’s music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show… The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music — and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn’t have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He’d hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of “My Kind of Carrying On” by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn’t sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say “Cause You’re Always On My Mind” by Wiley Barkdull, or “Twice the Loving” by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up — the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he’d started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he’d initially realised, he’d decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he’d have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as “Rocket 88”, the record he’d leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin’ Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he’d ever recorded. Howlin’ Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam’s studio before he’d started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he’d recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he’d been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties — if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We’ve already seen this with “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like “Caldonia”. And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to “Hound Dog”. There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin’ Tonight” — “Mr Hound Dog’s in Town” [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog’s In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase “hound dog”, you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips’ view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips’ telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and “wrote” “Bear Cat”. Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of “Hound Dog”, and there’s not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips’ experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips’ new record label, Sun. [excerpt of “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became — “Bear Cat” eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else’s song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he’d had a solid hit with “Bear Cat”, and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn’t buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that — if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people’s music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they’d start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys — Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been — he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro — and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips’ intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips’ assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who’d come in to the studio, she thought she’d found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that’s how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music’s history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who “discovered” Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker’s side. However, even there, it’s hard to see from Elvis’ original recording — versions of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that’s what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn’t have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn’t know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He’d hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they’d all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn’t really part of the group. He’d thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things — he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn’t cause any fires when he worked on people’s wiring. He didn’t have many friends — and no close friends at all — and many of those he did have didn’t even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source — the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He’d go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King — young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky’s on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn’t someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either — rather, he was someone who didn’t fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn’t own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He’d hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing — and specifically what is known euphemistically as “Southern Gospel”, but which really means “white Gospel”. And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That’s a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it — and it’s also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that’s the gospel music we’re talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there’s another gospel music as well — “Southern Gospel” or “quartet gospel”. That music is — or at least was at the time we’re talking about — almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren’t attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it’s performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, the Blackwood Brothers] That’s the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that’s a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson’s version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley’s favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them — but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He’d take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn’t have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself — Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he’d been working with. In their cases it was because they’d been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips’ case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else’s. He didn’t know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin’ Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips’ book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn’t try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty’s. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn’t impressed… or at least, he *thought* he wasn’t impressed. But at the same time… there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn’t quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on “That’s All Right Mama”, a song originally recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over — he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song “That’s All Right Mama” was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson’s classic “Black Snake Moan”: [excerpt: “Black Snake Moan”, Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in “If I Get Lucky”. He then came up with the melody for what became “That’s All Right”, but recorded it with different lyrics as “Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues”: [excerpt: “Mean Old Frisco Blues”, Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to “That’s All Right”, and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: “Dirt Road Blues”, Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded “That’s All Right Mama” itself: [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama”, Arthur Crudup] Crudup’s records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That’s All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn’t follow that template. Elvis’ version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music — it’s taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black’s slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup’s version. It still doesn’t, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for “a white man who could sing like a black one”, he hadn’t found it. Listening now, it’s definitely a “rock and roll” record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a “hillbilly” record. [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley’s singing which is different from most of the country music at the time — there’s a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it’s what’s needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre — Bill Monroe’s bluegrass song “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: [excerpt: Bill Monroe “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they’d reworked “That’s All Right Mama”. There’s nothing to these tracks but Elvis’ strummed acoustic, Black’s clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore’s rudimentary electric guitar fills — and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips’ echo. Phillips had a simple system he’d rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he’d done it. The room he was recording in didn’t have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn’t use just one tape recorder — though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember — he used two. He didn’t do multitracking like Les Paul — rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on “Blue Moon of Kentucky” it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music — a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn’t be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis’ mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn’t tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis’ race – most people had assumed, since Phillips’ show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands — at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I’ve seen claims, though I don’t know how true they are, that Crudup’s total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band’s first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley’s stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we’ve mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed — he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic — and even when he wasn’t, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn’t keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it’s hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we’ll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

Before Elvis was Elvis, Radio DJ Eddie Fadal befriended the entertainer. Elvis was stationed at Fort Hood in the late 50s. He traveled up to Waco almost every weekend to spend time with Fadal and his family. Eddie's daughter Janice talks to us about growing up with Elvis. We talk about where he went, what he did, his favorite foods and more! Interested in where The King spent his nights in Waco? Stay there when you visit! The Elvis House is listed on AirBnB, so support our guest and stay where Elvis stayed. More info at https://www.theelvishouse.com. Book via AirBnB here: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/20571659 Learn more about the Waco History Podcast at wacohistorypodcast.com. Learn more about Waco's history at wacohistory.org. Like the show? Support us here: https://anchor.fm/waco-history-podcast/support --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/waco-history-podcast/support

Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing “Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2”, my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn’t as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of — Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins — and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I’ll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I’ll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won’t be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they’d be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon.   Transcript There’s a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called “phonomancers”. These are people who aren’t musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic.   I think “phonomancers” is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don’t themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made — records which are their creative work — by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they’re record producers, sometimes they’re managers, sometimes they’re DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who’ve shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell… I’m sure you can add more to the list yourself. People — almost always men, to be honest — who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song.   And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band.   Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians — Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own.   But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn’t play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks “wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!” And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser — the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten — never played an instrument, didn’t write songs, didn’t sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that — people who didn’t have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them.    Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world.   Because a good bandleader’s talent wasn’t in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we’ve talked about a couple of times already in passing.   Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure — one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on.   (I think it’s more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with).   He didn’t play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He’d worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots’ backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway’s band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown — who we’ll talk about later — later on.   He’d started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit — the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time.   Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder’s band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to “Savoy” from 1943: [Excerpt: “Savoy” by Lucky Millinder]   In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one — one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris.   Harris was already known as “Mr. Blues” when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan.   Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?”   [excerpt “Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?”]   You’ll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we’re now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more.   That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn’t released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn’t released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder’s band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit.   Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away,   This belief was made stronger when “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well” was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own.   (In case you hadn’t realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn’t win him many friends in his personal life).   Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels.   His first record as a solo artist was “Around the Clock Blues”, one of the most influential records ever made:   [Excerpt “Around the Clock Blues” by Wynonie Harris]   If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered:   [excerpt of “So Glad You’re Mine” by Arthur Crudup, showing it’s more or less identical]   Or maybe you know “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry…   [excerpt of “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry, showing it’s also more or less identical]   And of course there was another song with “Around the Clock” in the title, and we’ll get to that pretty soon…   The band on “Around the Clock”, incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis.   That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it’s not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s.   Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we’ll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we’ll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, “Dig this Boogie”:   [excerpt “Dig This Boogie”, Wynonie Harris]   I played that just because of the pianist on that record — Herman “Sonny” Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn’t have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could.   Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was “The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other ‘jail bait’. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook”.   And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they’d both arrive at the venue and he’d pick which one he was riding home in that night.   Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let’s pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as “a black singer who sounds white”, which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown’s main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music.    However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris — and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him.   And Harris wasn’t interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he’d been performing — there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move —  Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn’t up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be.    Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, “I Wonder”, which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but while Gant’s A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown’s song — like this one, the B-side to “I Wonder”   [excerpt “Cecil Boogie” by Cecil Gant]   But Gant wasn’t the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant’s records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he’d just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn’t really in the market for other people’s songs.   But he was so impressed by Brown’s singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant “give him fifty dollars and don’t let him out of your sight!”   And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it:   [excerpt “Good Rocking Tonight” by Roy Brown]   When you listen back to that, now, it doesn’t sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who’d appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time — we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” and Louis Jordan.   It might also sound odd to anyone who’s familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis’ version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing “I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can”. Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown’s original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus — the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you’d think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it’s something altogether different.   This is something that you need to realise — the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that’s all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” is absolutely in the Diddley corner.   But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market.   And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he’d made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did — cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown’s song:   [excerpt from “Good Rocking Tonight” by Wynonie Harris]   There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those “hoy hoy” vocals we just heard, which weren’t part of Roy Brown’s original. That’s a line which comes from “The Honeydripper”, another massively important R&B record.  Harris also included a different instrumental introduction — playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown’s song.    Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it’s for that reason that Wynonie Harris’ version of the song, not Roy Brown’s original, is the one that people call “the first rock and roll record”.    Other than those changes, Harris’ version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown’s version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who’d just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song.   And “Good Rocking Tonight”, in Harris’ version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown’s version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris’ was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market.   Harris’ version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”. Harris himself recorded a sequel, “All She Wants to Do is Rock”, but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title.  There was Roy Brown’s own sequel, “Rockin’ at Midnight”:   [Excerpt “Rockin’ at Midnight” by Roy Brown]   There was Cecil Gant’s “We’re Gonna Rock”   [Excerpt]   There was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston   [Excerpt]   From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn’t escape this new rock craze. Record after record with “rock” in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll.    This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We’re still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we’re still three years away even from the canonical “first rock and roll record”, Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music.   Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that’s based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn’t be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But… we’ve talked before and will talk again about how there’s no real “first rock and roll record”, but if you insist on looking for one then “Good Rocking Tonight” is as good a candidate as any.   Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians’ union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him — in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract — and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door — with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981.   Wynonie Harris wasn’t even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn’t play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death.   The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we’re now finally into the rock era. We’ll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more “first rock and roll songs” as well as at some music that still doesn’t quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you’ve ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.

Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Wynonie Harris and "Good Rockin' Tonight" ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing "Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2", my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn't as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of -- Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins -- and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I'll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I'll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won't be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they'd be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon.   Transcript There's a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called "phonomancers". These are people who aren't musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic.   I think "phonomancers" is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don't themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made -- records which are their creative work -- by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they're record producers, sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who've shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell... I'm sure you can add more to the list yourself. People -- almost always men, to be honest -- who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song.   And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band.   Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians -- Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own.   But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn't play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks "wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!" And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser -- the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten -- never played an instrument, didn't write songs, didn't sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that -- people who didn't have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them.    Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world.   Because a good bandleader's talent wasn't in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we've talked about a couple of times already in passing.   Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure -- one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on.   (I think it's more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with).   He didn't play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He'd worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots' backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway's band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown -- who we'll talk about later -- later on.   He'd started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit -- the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time.   Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder's band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to "Savoy" from 1943: [Excerpt: "Savoy" by Lucky Millinder]   In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one -- one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris.   Harris was already known as "Mr. Blues" when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan.   Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?"   [excerpt "Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?"]   You'll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we're now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more.   That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn't released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn't released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder's band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit.   Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away,   This belief was made stronger when "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well" was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own.   (In case you hadn't realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn't win him many friends in his personal life).   Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels.   His first record as a solo artist was "Around the Clock Blues", one of the most influential records ever made:   [Excerpt "Around the Clock Blues" by Wynonie Harris]   If that sounds familiar, maybe it's because you've heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered:   [excerpt of "So Glad You're Mine" by Arthur Crudup, showing it's more or less identical]   Or maybe you know "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry...   [excerpt of "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry, showing it's also more or less identical]   And of course there was another song with "Around the Clock" in the title, and we'll get to that pretty soon...   The band on "Around the Clock", incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis.   That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it's not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s.   Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we'll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we'll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, "Dig this Boogie":   [excerpt "Dig This Boogie", Wynonie Harris]   I played that just because of the pianist on that record -- Herman "Sonny" Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn't have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could.   Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was "The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other 'jail bait'. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook".   And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they'd both arrive at the venue and he'd pick which one he was riding home in that night.   Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let's pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as "a black singer who sounds white", which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown's main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music.    However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called "Good Rockin' Tonight", he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris -- and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him.   And Harris wasn't interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he'd been performing -- there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move --  Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn't up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be.    Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, "I Wonder", which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record "Good Rockin' Tonight", but while Gant's A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown's song -- like this one, the B-side to "I Wonder"   [excerpt "Cecil Boogie" by Cecil Gant]   But Gant wasn't the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant's records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he'd just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn't really in the market for other people's songs.   But he was so impressed by Brown's singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant "give him fifty dollars and don't let him out of your sight!"   And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it:   [excerpt "Good Rocking Tonight" by Roy Brown]   When you listen back to that, now, it doesn't sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who'd appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time -- we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and Louis Jordan.   It might also sound odd to anyone who's familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis' version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing "I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can". Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown's original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus -- the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you'd think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it's something altogether different.   This is something that you need to realise -- the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that's all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, "Good Rockin' Tonight" is absolutely in the Diddley corner.   But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market.   And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he'd made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did -- cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown's song:   [excerpt from "Good Rocking Tonight" by Wynonie Harris]   There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those "hoy hoy" vocals we just heard, which weren't part of Roy Brown's original. That's a line which comes from "The Honeydripper", another massively important R&B record.  Harris also included a different instrumental introduction -- playing "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown's song.    Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it's for that reason that Wynonie Harris' version of the song, not Roy Brown's original, is the one that people call "the first rock and roll record".    Other than those changes, Harris' version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown's version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who'd just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song.   And "Good Rocking Tonight", in Harris' version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown's version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris' was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market.   Harris' version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of "Good Rockin' Tonight". Harris himself recorded a sequel, "All She Wants to Do is Rock", but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title.  There was Roy Brown's own sequel, "Rockin' at Midnight":   [Excerpt "Rockin' at Midnight" by Roy Brown]   There was Cecil Gant's "We're Gonna Rock"   [Excerpt]   There was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston   [Excerpt]   From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn't escape this new rock craze. Record after record with "rock" in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll.    This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We're still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we're still three years away even from the canonical "first rock and roll record", Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88", 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music.   Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that's based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn't be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But... we've talked before and will talk again about how there's no real "first rock and roll record", but if you insist on looking for one then "Good Rocking Tonight" is as good a candidate as any.   Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians' union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him -- in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract -- and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door -- with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981.   Wynonie Harris wasn't even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn't play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death.   The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we're now finally into the rock era. We'll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more "first rock and roll songs" as well as at some music that still doesn't quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you've ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.

  Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at the Ink Spots and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one — Mixcloud doesn’t allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn’t set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don’t apply). I apologise for that, but it’s rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots’ music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg’s website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca  is a wonderful resource for detail about the band’s career. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I’m covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that’s useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records. I’m using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson’s autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It’s credited there as by “Shirlita Bolton”, but that’s actually the name of Deke’s widow, who owns the rights to the book — it’s definitely Deke’s autobiography. It’s very short, only seventy-three pages, and it’s full of inaccuracies, but it’s still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it’s very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about “top and bottom”, I say “they first did it in the studio”. I don’t mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they’d already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended… Transcript OK, so we’ve covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now — we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we’ve stayed around there.   Now, we’re still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we’re moving away from those shows, and we’re going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time.   We’ve talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll — the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We’ve seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll.   There’s one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we’ve not covered yet, and that’s the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started.   And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups.   Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using… well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you’d play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you’d play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn’t sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in — though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies “all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived”.   Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough.    The Ink Spots formed out of people who’d started their careers in these groups — Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo “Charlie and Jerry”, while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves “King, Jack, and Jester” or sometimes “King, Jack, and Jesters”.   In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most.   The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups — they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this:   [Mills Brothers: “It Don’t Mean a Thing”]   There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They’re imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they’d listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something  that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers.   The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby’s radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall — they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia.    Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with “Paper Moon” when they got back — their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties — and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day.    But they’d lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they’d lost it to people who’d been imitating them — to the band we last heard of performing as “King, Jack, and Jesters”.   By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes.   In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name — there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent’s office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I’ll read the next bit from Watson’s book directly:   “To me, it seemed like inspiration. ‘That’s it!’ I shouted. ‘How about calling us the Ink Spots?’   The boys really yelled this time. ‘There you go again Deek!’ Charlie exclaimed. ‘That’s right!’ agreed Hoppy, ‘always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he’ll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes’   They all talked at once. ‘Man, you know ain’t nobody wants to be no Ink Spot’.”   Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing “Your Feet’s Too Big”, which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name “four-dice Rastus”, and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It’s entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race.   That said, I’m not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I’m not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people “should” have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes.   Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers.   But there was a problem — Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band’s performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn’t continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music.    In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots’ manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club’s manager, knew his boss’ band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots’ records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it’s Kenny’s voice you think of. Or at least, it’s Kenny and Hoppy Jones.   Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots’ music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called “top and bottom”.   (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I’m happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny).   Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller — they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed:   [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing “Your Feet’s Too Big”]   When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while — still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of “Swing High, Swing Low”.    [excerpt of “Swing High Swing Low”]   Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it.   He refined the idea of Hoppy’s spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit “If I Didn’t Care”, but the one we’re going to look at is their 1941 record “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure — this one:   [excerpt of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”]   We’d then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals:   [excerpt of him singing]   Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice   [excerpt of that]   And finally there’d be a final line with Kenny singing lead again.   When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They’d found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here’s the intro to “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)”   [intro to that song]   Now here’s the intro to “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”   [intro to that song]   And here’s the intro to “To Each His Own”   [intro to that song]   And to “Whispering Grass”   [intro to that song]   I could go on… if you don’t believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on.    This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it:   [excerpt: “Juke Box Saturday Night”]   But the thing is — all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked.    And when I say “number one” or “top ten”, I don’t mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly — and when they did, they didn’t have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them.   That may sound like I’m being dismissive of the Ink Spots’ music. I’m not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not?    The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak — roughly from 1939, when they started making “top and bottom” records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder’s band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder’s band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder’s band, was easily available.   But Gale  was taking the majority of the money — Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you’ve got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn’t have to share it.   The Ink Spots’ period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart.   Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well — Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who’d put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them — he’d worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace.   But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own “Ink Spots”. Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month — but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died.    After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn’t let him.   The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band — unlike Watson he hadn’t quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits.   In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called “the Ink Spots” which didn’t have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone’s manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name — although I’ve seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn’t allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he’d founded.   Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile,  had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on “a completely new idea”.    This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called “the Brown Dots”.   The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential — “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”, written by two of their members.    [excerpt of “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”]   That’s been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat “King” Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson.   Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as “the Ink Spots”. Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves “The Ink Spots” and Fuqua would tour as “Charlie Fuqua’s New Ink Spots”.   Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as “the Ink Spots” — he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while.    There’s one recording of that version of the band — Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson — live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again:   [excerpt of “Wish You Were Here”]   As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy’s bass vocal:   [excerpt of “I Don’t Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You”]   So there was one version of “the Ink Spots” touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who’d sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots.   That wasn’t a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again — and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots.   Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted.   You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren’t a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.    And they did. Every surviving member of the band — not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you — went out on tour as “the Ink Spots”. At one point there were up to forty different “Ink Spots” groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who’d been in a proper version of the Ink Spots — and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as “Ink Spots”, in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they’d just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point.   The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I’ve been able to find details for took place in 2013.   But the Ink Spots’ career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn’t the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we’ll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music.   And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots’ final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, as one of the two tracks he would record.   But we’ll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes’ time…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at the Ink Spots and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one -- Mixcloud doesn't allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn't set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don't apply). I apologise for that, but it's rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots' music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg's website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca  is a wonderful resource for detail about the band's career. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I'm covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that's useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records. I'm using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson's autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It's credited there as by "Shirlita Bolton", but that's actually the name of Deke's widow, who owns the rights to the book -- it's definitely Deke's autobiography. It's very short, only seventy-three pages, and it's full of inaccuracies, but it's still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it's very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about "top and bottom", I say "they first did it in the studio". I don't mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they'd already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended... Transcript OK, so we've covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now -- we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we've stayed around there.   Now, we're still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we're moving away from those shows, and we're going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time.   We've talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll -- the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We've seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll.   There's one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we've not covered yet, and that's the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started.   And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups.   Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using... well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you'd play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you'd play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn't sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in -- though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies "all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived".   Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough.    The Ink Spots formed out of people who'd started their careers in these groups -- Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo "Charlie and Jerry", while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves "King, Jack, and Jester" or sometimes "King, Jack, and Jesters".   In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most.   The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups -- they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this:   [Mills Brothers: "It Don't Mean a Thing"]   There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They're imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they'd listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something  that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers.   The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby's radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall -- they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia.    Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with "Paper Moon" when they got back -- their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties -- and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day.    But they'd lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they'd lost it to people who'd been imitating them -- to the band we last heard of performing as "King, Jack, and Jesters".   By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes.   In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name -- there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent's office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I'll read the next bit from Watson's book directly:   "To me, it seemed like inspiration. 'That's it!' I shouted. 'How about calling us the Ink Spots?'   The boys really yelled this time. 'There you go again Deek!' Charlie exclaimed. 'That's right!' agreed Hoppy, 'always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he'll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes'   They all talked at once. 'Man, you know ain't nobody wants to be no Ink Spot'."   Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing "Your Feet's Too Big", which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name "four-dice Rastus", and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It's entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race.   That said, I'm not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I'm not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people "should" have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes.   Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers.   But there was a problem -- Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band's performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn't continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music.    In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots' manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club's manager, knew his boss' band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots' records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it's Kenny's voice you think of. Or at least, it's Kenny and Hoppy Jones.   Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots' music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called "top and bottom".   (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I'm happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny).   Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller -- they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed:   [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing "Your Feet's Too Big"]   When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while -- still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of "Swing High, Swing Low".    [excerpt of "Swing High Swing Low"]   Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it.   He refined the idea of Hoppy's spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit "If I Didn't Care", but the one we're going to look at is their 1941 record "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure -- this one:   [excerpt of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin"]   We'd then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals:   [excerpt of him singing]   Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice   [excerpt of that]   And finally there'd be a final line with Kenny singing lead again.   When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They'd found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here's the intro to "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"   [intro to that song]   Now here's the intro to "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire"   [intro to that song]   And here's the intro to "To Each His Own"   [intro to that song]   And to "Whispering Grass"   [intro to that song]   I could go on... if you don't believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on.    This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it:   [excerpt: "Juke Box Saturday Night"]   But the thing is -- all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked.    And when I say "number one" or "top ten", I don't mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly -- and when they did, they didn't have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them.   That may sound like I'm being dismissive of the Ink Spots' music. I'm not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not?    The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak -- roughly from 1939, when they started making "top and bottom" records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder's band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder's band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder's band, was easily available.   But Gale  was taking the majority of the money -- Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you've got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn't have to share it.   The Ink Spots' period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart.   Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well -- Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who'd put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them -- he'd worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace.   But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own "Ink Spots". Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month -- but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died.    After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn't let him.   The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band -- unlike Watson he hadn't quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits.   In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called "the Ink Spots" which didn't have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone's manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name -- although I've seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn't allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he'd founded.   Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile,  had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on "a completely new idea".    This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called "the Brown Dots".   The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential -- "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", written by two of their members.    [excerpt of "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons"]   That's been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat "King" Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson.   Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as "the Ink Spots". Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves "The Ink Spots" and Fuqua would tour as "Charlie Fuqua's New Ink Spots".   Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as "the Ink Spots" -- he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while.    There's one recording of that version of the band -- Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson -- live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again:   [excerpt of "Wish You Were Here"]   As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy's bass vocal:   [excerpt of "I Don't Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You"]   So there was one version of "the Ink Spots" touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who'd sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots.   That wasn't a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again -- and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots.   Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted.   You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren't a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.    And they did. Every surviving member of the band -- not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you -- went out on tour as "the Ink Spots". At one point there were up to forty different "Ink Spots" groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who'd been in a proper version of the Ink Spots -- and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as "Ink Spots", in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they'd just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point.   The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I've been able to find details for took place in 2013.   But the Ink Spots' career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn't the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we'll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music.   And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots' final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", as one of the two tracks he would record.   But we'll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes' time...   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?