Podcasts about Big Maybelle

driving acast continental lovegood tams edwin starr ronnie milsap marvelettes showmen big maybelle

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2023 175:49

The Black Crowes "Midnight From The Inside Out"Big Maybelle "Baby Won't You Please Come Home"Jimmy Reed "Honest I Do"Lucero "I Can't Stand to Leave You"Red Foley "Pin Ball Boogie"The Deslondes "Ways & Means"Billie & DeDe Pierce "I Ain't Good Looking"Loretta Lynn "Portland Oregon"Tampa Red "Mercy Mama"Valerie June "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home"Otha Turner and The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band "Shimmy She Wobble"Albert King "The Sky Is Crying"Eilen Jewell "I'm a Little Mixed Up"Amos Milburn "Milk and Water"Hank Williams "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"Sidney Bechet "In a Café On the Road to Calais"Precious Bryant "Don't Jump My Pony"Dr. John "Croker Courtbullion"The Black Keys "Sinister Kid"Flora Molton "Never Drive a Stranger from Your Door"Aretha Franklin "Groovin'"Otis Rush "Groaning the Blues"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Bring It on Down to My House"The Big Three Trio "Cigareets, Whuskey. And Wild Women"Merle Haggard "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"Superchunk "Makeout Bench"R.L. Burnside "Miss Maybelle"Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers "Bustin' Loose"Willie Nelson "Don't Get Around Much Anymore"Howlin' Wolf "Dog Me Around"Emmylou Harris "Sweet Old World"Skeets McDonald "Heartbreaking Mama"Louis Armstrong "Star Dust"Ian Noe "Irene (Ravin' Bomb)"Billie Holiday "More Than You Know"Gillian Welch "Barroom Girls"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Mama Says I'm Crazy"Ten Years After "Good Morning Little School Girl"Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses) "Pocket Full of Rain"Tom Waits "Jersey Girl"Ruth Brown & Her Rhythmakers "The Tears Keep Tumbling Down"Lucero "Raining for Weeks"Alex Moore "Lillie Mae Boogie"The Yardbirds "Lost Woman"Joan Shelley "The Fading"Soltero "The Factory"The Spinners "Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You"

„Rock Chicks“ – von Rosetta Tharpe über Suzi Quatro bis zu Kristin Hersh

hr-iNFO Kultur

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2023 24:50

Was, wenn die Könige des Rock & Roll in Wirklichkeit Königinnen wären? Wenn Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle oder Sister Rosetta Tharpe Vorbilder gewesen wären für Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis oder Chuck Berry? So war es tatsächlich. Aber die rockenden Frauen der frühen 50er Jahre wurden erfolgreich aus dem kollektiven Gedächtnis verdrängt. Höchste Zeit also für die wahre Geschichte, befand die Regisseurin Marita Stocker und widmete den „Rock Chicks“ ihren neuen Dokumentarfilm. Sie folgt darin ihren Spuren in der Geschichte der Rockmusik, besucht die letzten E-Gitarrenheldinnen des Rockabilly und ihre Nachfolgerinnen und erzählt vom Kampf der Musikerinnen für die eigenen Träume - gegen Widerstände aller Art.

That Driving Beat - Episode 254

That Driving Beat

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2023 116:56

Originally Broadcast March 19, 2023We spin 2 more hours of great northern soul, rhythm & blues, girl groups, and other classic dancers from the likes of The Continental 4, Big Maybelle, The Tams, The Marvelettes, Ronnie Milsap, Benny Spellman, The Showmen, Edwin Starr, Gerri Diamond, and more.Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatPatti Austin / Got To Check You OutThelma Jones / The House That Jack BuiltRicky Allen / You'd Better Be SureThe Seminoles / It Takes A LotRonnie Milsap / Total DisasterTrade Martin / We'll Be Dancin' On The MoonThe Continental 4 / The Way I love YouThe Spectacles / The Devil Made Me Do ItThe Spotlights / Batman And RobinJackie Lee / Cause I Love HimTroy Keyes / Love ExplosionJimmy James & The Vagabonds / Ain't Love Good, Ain't Love ProudGiles Strange / Watch The People DanceCasinos / How Long Has It BeenIke Turner & His Orchestra / The Big QuestionBenny Spellman / Walk On Don't CryBig Maybelle / Same Old StoryBen E. King / I'm Standing ByThe Jewels / OpportunityAl Perkins / Step It UpThe Showmen / Take It BabyEdwin Starr / Stop Her On Sight (S. O. S.)Chubby Checker / The SlopThe Artistics / I'm Gonna Miss YouEddie King / I Talk Too MuchNancy Wilson / The End of Our LoveSmall Faces / UnderstandingThe Barbarians / Susie QMickey Dolenz / Don't Do ItThe Tams / Hey Girl Don't Bother MeJoe Tex / You Got What It TakesThe Marvelettes / Too Many Fish In The SeaGerri Diamond / Give Up On LoveChuck Jackson / Hand It OverThe Fasinations / Yoou Gonna Be SorryRoscoe Robinson / That's EnoughTommy Wills / Night Train Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 241

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2023 177:30

Doc Watson "Down In the Valley to Pray"Neko Case "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)"Steve Earle "Taneytown"Big Bill Broonzy "(In the Evening) When the Sun Goes Down"Big Maybelle "96 Tears"Mattiel "Looking down the Barrel of a Gun"Ry Cooder "Jesus On the Mainline"Ry Cooder "It's All Over Now"Glossary "The Natural State"Jimi Hendrix "Once I Had a Woman"Howlin' Wolf "Killing Floor"Valerie June "Heart On a String"Bob Dylan "Like a Rolling Stone"Sam Cooke "Bring It On Home To Me"George Jones "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)"Wanda Jackson "Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On"Wayne Shorter "Speak No Evil"Linda Lyndell "What A Man"D'Angelo "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"Drive-By Truckers "Sea Island Lonely"Humble Pie "30 Days In the Hole"Mike Watt &The Black Gang "30 Days in the Hole"Reverend Gary Davis "Samson and Delilah"Grateful Dead "Brown-Eyed Woman"Widespread Panic "All Time Low"The Dixie Cups "Iko Iko"Willie Nelson "Stella Blue"The Valentinos "It's All Over Now"Lucero "Nothing's Alright"Pavement "We Dance"Aimee Mann "Suicide is Murder"Waxahatchee "Lips and Limbs"Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers "Those Who Sit And Wait"Cat Clyde "Papa Took My Totems"Wilco "Red-Eyed and Blue"Clem Snide "I Love the Unknown"Albert King "Don't Burn Down The Bridge"John Hammond "Down In the Bottom"Craig Finn "Rescue Blues"

Music to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Echoes of Indiana Avenue

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2023

This week on Echoes of Indiana Avenue, we'll observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, by listening to songs of peace, protest and remembrance from the Avenue. We'll also hear memories from Claudia Polley, she heard Dr. King speak at Indiana Avenue's Fall Creek YMCA in 1959. Tune in for an hour of music featuring David Baker, Phil Ranelin, Mari Evans, Amnesty, Big Maybelle, Killer Ray Appleton and more.

music celebrate martin luther king jr echoes avenue amnesty david baker big maybelle indiana avenue phil ranelin

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 227

Juke In The Back » Podcast Feed

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2022 178:51

Cat Power and Dirty Delta Blues "Amazing Grace"John Lee Hooker "Boom Boom"Jerry Garcia "Let It Rock"Levon Helm "Lucrecia"Fiona Apple "Shameika"Norah Jones "Come Away With Me"Peter Buck "Southerner"Songs: Ohia "Farewell Transmission"Nina Simone "Do I Move You?"Lillie Mae "You've Got Other Girls for That"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "Make Worry for Me"Thelonious Monk Quintet "Jackie-ing"John Mayall "Lil' Boogie In the Afternoon"Buddy Guy & Junior Wells "Everyday I Have The Blues"Grateful Dead "Easy Wind"The Clash "Spanish Bombs"Red Hot Chili Peppers "Carry Me Home"Drivin' N' Cryin' "Honeysuckle Blue"The Replacements "Kiss Me on the Bus"The Hold Steady "Heavy Covenant"Big Maybelle "So Long"John R. Miller "Lookin' Over My Shoulder"Plains "Problem With It"The Devil Makes Three "For Good Again (Live)"Chris Knight "Down the River"Cory Branan "When In Rome, When In Memphis"Jason Isbell "If It Takes a Lifetime"Bob Dylan & The Band "Goin' to Acapulco"Valerie June "Call Me A Fool"Gram Parsons "We'll Sweep Out the Ashes In the Morning"Sierra Ferrell "In Dreams"Cedric Burnside Project "Hard Times"Green On Red "Whispering Wind"R.E.M. "Beat a Drum"Langhorne Slim "Colette"Richard Swift "The Ballad of Old What's His Name"Mavis Staples "Have a Little Faith"D'Angelo "Sugah Daddy"Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis "Sugaree"Candi Staton "The Best Thing You Ever Had"Centro-Matic "Quality Strange"Willy Tea Taylor "The Very Best"

Episode #652 – Big Maybelle

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2022 59:00

Air Week: October 31-November 6, 2022 Big Maybelle Big MaybelleThe “Juke In The Back” highlights the often ignored early career of Big Maybelle, one of the great female blues shouters. She was born Mabel Louise Smith in 1929 and cut her first record with Christine Chatman's Orchestra for Decca in 1944. Mabel Smith made her […]

orchestras decca big maybelle

Matt Fiveash and Gaylord Fields guest host from Jul 29, 2022

Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine | WFMU

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2022

Chuck Edwards - "Downtown Soulville" Oscar Mack - "Don't Be Afraid Of Love" - 7" The Ikettes - "Don't Feel Sorry For Me" - 7" Chris Clark - "Love's Gone Bad" - 7" Billy Butler and the Chanters - "Can't Work No Longer" - 7" Big Maybelle - "96 Tears" - 7" Clark Terry & Chico O'Farrill - "Spanish Rice" - 7" Clifford Curry - "Soul Festival" - 7" Music behind DJ: Lou Donaldson - "Who's Makin' Love" - Hot Dog The Diablos Featuring Nolan Strong - "The Way You Dog Me Around" - 7" The Miracles - "Way Over There" - 7" The Miracles - "I Gotta Dance to Keep From Crying" - 7" Joe Matthews - "You Better Mend Your Ways" - 7" The Miracles - "Land of 1,000 Dances" - The Miracles Doin' Mickey's Monkey The Miracles - "In Case You Need Love" - Going to a Go-Go Marvin Gaye - "One More Heartache" - 7" Marvin Gaye - "When I Had Your Love" - 7" The Contours - "That Day When She Needed Me" - 7" The Miracles - "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" - 7" Music behind DJ: Lou Donaldson - "It's Your Thing" - Hot Dog https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/118191

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Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 215

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2022 177:48

The Cave Singers "Gifts and the Raft"The Cave Singers "Black Leaf"Bob Dylan "Tangled Up In Blue"Eilen Jewell "Down the Road"Tyler Childers "Long Violent History"Patti Smith "People Have the Power"R.E.M. "Oh My Heart"Candi Staton "Wanted: Lover"Spirit Family Reunion "Time to Go Back Home"Mavis Staples "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"The Rollers "Knocking on the Wrong Door"Professor Longhair "Everyday I Have The Blues"Professor Longhair "Tipitina"Arlo McKinley "Back Home"Frank Williams & the Rocketeers "Show Me What You Got"Swamp Dogg "Total Destruction to Your Mind"Sleater-Kinney "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun"Kitty Wells "You're No Angel Yourself"The Low Anthem "This God Damn House"Buddy Emmons "Bottle Baby Boogie"Lou Donaldson "Blues Walk"D'Angelo "Devil's Pie"Big Maybelle "Way Back Home"Micah Schnabel "Blame It On Geography"Delbert McClinton "The Jealous Kind"Little Milton "Monologue 1 / That's How Strong My Love Is"Earth, Wind & Fire "Keep Your Head to the Sky"Lucero "Sometimes"Dolly Parton "Heartbreak Express"The Devil Makes Three "For Good Again"Billy Joe Shaver "Honky Tonk Heroes"Wilco "Impossible Germany"Turnpike Troubadours "Easton & Main"Eddie Vedder "Long Way"The Hold Steady "Southtown Girls"S.G. Goodman "Teeth Marks"Roky Erickson "Don't Shake Me Lucifer"Steve Earle & The Dukes "Angry Young Man"Valerie June "Use Me"Eddie Hinton "Everybody Needs Love"Willie Nelson "Time of the Preacher"

time power earth fire devil gifts wind preachers bob dylan book club dolly parton goodman knocking pie willie nelson ajax long way diner dukes back home monologue your mind patti smith wilco eddie vedder raft lucero steve earle mavis staples rollers sleater kinney hold steady keep your head tyler childers way back home candi staton frank williams valerie june roky erickson delbert mcclinton use me turnpike troubadours billy joe shaver professor longhair swamp dogg lou donaldson devil makes three kitty wells tipitina angry young man eilen jewell total destruction tangled up in blue little milton rocketeers people have big maybelle arlo mckinley low anthem show me what you got buddy emmons honky tonk heroes micah schnabel spirit family reunion blues walk

PLEDGE WEEK: “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis

blues jazz birthdays ron carter paul anthony maynard ferguson ambrose akinmusire shirley horn big maybelle

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript Today we're going to take a look at someone who had two big hits, one of which has entered into American pop culture to a ludicrous extent -- long before I ever heard the song I was familiar with references to it in everything from the Simpsons to Stephen King books -- and the other of which is known all over the world, but about whom there's almost no available information, outside the liner notes to one CD. We're going to look at Shirley Ellis, and at "The Name Game": [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "The Name Game"] When I say there's almost no available information about Shirley Ellis, I mean it. Normally, with someone who had a couple of major hits in the mid-sixties, there's at least a couple of fan pages out there, but other than a more-perfunctory-than-usual page on Spectropop, there's basically nothing about Shirley Ellis, possibly because unlike most of her contemporaries, even though she lived until 2005 she never hit the nostalgia circuit. The information that is out there is contradictory as well. Some sources have her being born in 1941, while others place her birth much further back, in 1929. I suspect the latter date is more accurate, and that she trimmed a few years off her age when she became a star. Pretty much all the information I'm using here comes from the liner notes of the one CD currently in print from a legitimate source of Ellis' work, and that CD also has a problem which will affect this episode. Ellis released two albums, "In Action" and "The Name Game", which had nine tracks in common. On "In Action", they were overdubbed with crowd noises, more or less at random, to make them sound like they were live recordings, while "The Name Game" had the unadorned studio recordings. Unfortunately, the CD I'm using, for some unfathomable reason, chose to use the fake-live versions, and so that's what I've been forced to excerpt. Ellis grew up in the Bronx, in a family with roots in the West Indies, and started out as many young singers did, winning the talent contest at the Harlem Apollo. But her initial success came as a songwriter, when she wrote a couple of songs for the Sh-Booms -- the group who had formerly been known as the Chords before legal problems led them to rename themselves after their biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Sh-Booms -- "Pretty Wild"] She also wrote "One Two, I Love You" for the Heartbreakers, which pointed the way to the kind of novelty song based around counting and clapping rhymes with which she would have her biggest hits: [Excerpt: The Heartbreakers, "One Two, I Love You"] But while she'd had these minor successes as a songwriter, it wasn't until she teamed up with a more successful writer that she started to make the records for which she was remembered. Ellis was introduced by her husband's cousin to Lincoln Chase, who became her manager, record producer, and writing partner. Chase had already written a number of hits on his own, including "Such a Night" for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Such a Night"] which had also been a hit for Johnnie Ray, and "Jim Dandy" for LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "Jim Dandy"] As well as songs for Big Maybelle, Ruth Brown and others. Chase and Ellis spent a couple of years releasing unsuccessful singles under Ellis' full married name, Shirley Elliston, before releasing "The Real Nitty Gritty". Both song and artist soon had their names shortened, and "The Nitty Gritty" by Shirley Ellis went to number eight on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "The Nitty Gritty"] A couple of follow-ups, starting with "That's What the Nitty-Gritty Is" were unsuccessful, and then Shirley got very unlucky. She recorded a version of Chase's "Such a Night", which had been a hit twice before: [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "Such a Night"] That started rising up the charts -- and then RCA released Elvis' recording from four years earlier, which had just been an album track, as a single, and that went top twenty, and stopped Ellis' single getting any traction: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Such a Night"] But Ellis came back with "The Name Game", which she co-wrote with Chase, based on a game she used to play as a child: [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "The Name Game"] That made number three on the charts, and became an ongoing reference point for a whole generation of Americans. The follow-up, credited to Chase alone, was based on another children's game, and made the US top ten, and also made the top ten in the UK: [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "The Clapping Song"] For a while in early 1965, Ellis was a big star, big enough that her songs were getting novelty cover versions by people like Soupy Sales: [Excerpt: Soupy Sales, "The Name Game"] But unfortunately, her next couple of singles flopped, and people seemed to only want one kind of record from Shirley Ellis. She and Chase came up with some unsuccessful experiments, like "You Better Be Good World", an attempt at getting on the protest song bandwagon by singing about nuclear war, while also recording a Christmas song -- the two didn't really mix: [Excerpt: Shirley Ellis, "You Better Be Good World"] After that, more attempts at songs along the lines of her hits followed, like "The Puzzle Song", and "Ever See a Diver Kiss His Wife While The Bubbles Bounce About Above the Water?", but there were no more hits, and Ellis retired in 1968. Chase went on to record a solo album under his own name, which has sadly never been reissued on CD, but I found a vinyl rip on a dodgy MP3 site a while back, and it's fascinating stuff, somewhere between Frank Zappa and George Clinton at points, and quite politically pointed: [Excerpt: Lincoln Chase, "Amos X, Andy Lumumba, and Aunt Jemima No More"] Chase would die in the early eighties, but he and Ellis would go on to get credit for a hit song written almost twenty years after his death. In 1981, the disco artist Stacy Lattislaw would record "Attack of the Name Game", which was inspired by Ellis' hit, and so Chase and Ellis got co-writing credit for it: [Excerpt: Stacy Lattislaw, "Attack of the Name Game"] That wasn't a hit, but in 1999 Mariah Carey and Jay-Z built the number one hit "Heartbreaker" around a sample of that record, meaning that Ellis and Chase got credit for that, too: [Excerpt: Mariah Carey, Heartbreaker] That's not the only influence Ellis had in more recent times -- several people have pointed out the similarity in style between some of Amy Winehouse's records, like "Rehab", and Ellis' big hits. Shirley Ellis, unlike many of her contemporaries, never came out of retirement, and she died in 2005, probably aged seventy-six.

Jazz Birthdays for the Month of May

JAZZ UNLIMITED

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2022 59:00

I was looking through the roster of jazz birthdays for the month of May and decided to commemorate some of the folks listed both living and dead on this week's edition of Jazz Unlimited with Paul Anthony. We'll listen to music by those born in the first week of May including Maynard Ferguson, Shirley Horn, Ira Sullivan, Richard Groove Holmes, Blues and R & B singer Big Maybelle and those still with us…..40 year old trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and a special tribute to soon to be 85 year old prolific bassist Ron Carter. Join me for Part 1 of May Birthdays on Jazz Unlimited with Paul Anthony.

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 194

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2022 177:42

Willie Nelson "Bloody Mary Morning"Gillian Welch "Silver Dagger"Mamie Perry And The Gus Jenkins Orchestra "Lament"Golden Smog "Looking Forward to Seeing You"Bill Callahan & Bonnie Prince Billy "OD'd in Denver"Baby Huey & The Baby Sitters "Hard Times"Alberta Hunter "I've Got A Mind To Ramble"Cedric Burnside "Give It To You"Cedric Burnside "The World Can Be So Cold"Cedric Burnside & Lightnin' Malcolm "Stay Here In Your Arms"R.L. Burnside "Snake Drive"Martha & the Vandellas "Nowhere To Run"The B-52's "Rock Lobster"Nina Simone "Be My Husband"Syl Johnson "That's Just My Luck"Johnny "Guitar" Watson "Those Lonely Lonely Nights"The White Stripes "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself"Bruce Springsteen "Because the Night"The Clash "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A."The Hold Steady "Stay Positive"The Replacements "Alex Chilton"Victoria Spivey "Dope Head Blues"Etta James "All I Could Do Was Cry"Lucinda Williams "Lake Charles"R.E.M. "At My Most Beautiful"The Beach Boys "In My Room"Eilen Jewell "Down the Road"Memphis Minnie "I Got to Make a Change Blues"Aimee Mann "Give Me Fifteen"Big Maybelle "Please Stay Away from My Sam"George Jones "Imitation Of Love"Laura Lee "Dirty Old Man"Koko Taylor "Tease Your Man"Alejandro Escovedo "Try, Try, Try"Chuck Berry "No Particular Place To Go"Muddy Waters "Long distance Call"Wilco "Walken"Bob Dylan "Honest With Me"Cat Power "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"My Morning Jacket "I'm Amazed"The Glands "When I Laugh"Marah "Sooner or Later"Arlo McKinley "Gone for Good"James Cotton "Cut You Loose"Buddy Guy & Junior Wells "Catfish Blues"

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 189

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 3, 2022 135:04

Frank Turner & Jon Snodgrass "Happy New Year"The Hold Steady "Stuck Between Stations"The Mountain Goats "This Year"Little Richard "Lucille"Gillian Welch & David Rawlings "Señor"Johnny Cash "I See a Darkness"Neil Young "Only Love Can Break Your Heart"Wanda Jackson "Let's Have a Party"Dave Bartholomew "That's How You Got Killed Before"Langhorne Slim & The Law "Past Lives"Two Cow Garage "Let the Boys Be Girls"Precious Bryant "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing"Charles Sheffield "It´s Your Voodoo Working"Drive-By Truckers "Aftermath USA"THE BLACK CROWES "Under a Mountain"James Brown "Give It Up Turn It Loose"The Allman Brothers Band "Whipping Post"The B-52's "Love Shack"Big Star "When My Baby's Beside Me"Deee-Lite "Groove Is In The Heart"Pretenders "Brass In Pocket"Fiona Apple "Paper Bag"Blue Lu Barker "Trombone Man Blues"Bob Dylan "With God On Our Side"Lucero "Coming Home"South Memphis String Band "Wildwood Boys"Shotgun Jazz Band "I Believe I Can Make It By Myself"Otis Redding "Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa(Sad Song)"John Moreland "Avalon"Aretha Franklin "Do Right Woman Do Right Man"Power Struggle "Falling from the Sky"The Black Keys "Sinister Kid"Professor Longhair & His Blues Scholars "Tipitina"Lightnin' Hopkins "Happy New Year"Lucero "Hold Me Close"Hank Williams "At the First Fall of Snow"Drag the River "Here's to the Losers"Chris Knight "Little Victories"James McMurtry "What's the Matter"Howlin' Wolf "Hidden Charms"Nina Simone "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"Waxahatchee "Witches"Bobby Charles "Save Me Jesus"Big Maybelle "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"

happy new year law darkness witches mountain wolf snow falling losers drag bob dylan book club good thing coming home hopkins aretha franklin johnny cash neil young james brown past lives ajax diner avalon pretenders nina simone little richard power struggles mess up black keys fiona apple lucero otis redding hank williams mountain goats black crowes howlin big star frank turner allman brothers band hold steady love shack drive by truckers waxahatchee gillian welch lightnin wanda jackson chris knight paper bag deee lite little victories john moreland professor longhair david rawlings james mcmurtry langhorne slim tipitina bobby charles whipping post big maybelle dave bartholomew groove is in the heart brass in pocket only love can break your heart two cow garage charles sheffield beside me with god on our side stuck between stations one monkey don

Episode 466: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #466, DECEMBER 22, 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 23, 2021 58:59

Roadhouse 876

christmas road house jools holland samantha fish christone kingfish ingram big maybelle buffalo nichols

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2021 58:50

Three-quarters of the way through the holiday season for 2021, and I think the mood could be described as festive. Buffalo Nichols, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, Samantha Fish, Jools Holland, and Big Maybelle help provide the soundtrack for our holiday festival. It doesn't really matter whether it's an intimate holiday gathering or a raucous Christmas party - it's all another hour of the finest blues you've never heard.

Roadhouse 876

christmas road house jools holland samantha fish christone kingfish ingram big maybelle buffalo nichols

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2021 58:50

Three-quarters of the way through the holiday season for 2021, and I think the mood could be described as festive. Buffalo Nichols, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, Samantha Fish, Jools Holland, and Big Maybelle help provide the soundtrack for our holiday festival. It doesn't really matter whether it's an intimate holiday gathering or a raucous Christmas party - it's all another hour of the finest blues you've never heard.

Blues Barrelhouse 25/10/2021

Blues Barrelhouse – Ripollet Ràdio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2021 56:31

Dilluns, Blues Barrelhouse!!!! Avui, Ladies SING THE BLUES. Sempre és un plaer sentir les veus d’aquestes meravelloses dones, obres d’art que formen part de la cultura del Blues, artistes d’alçada com Diana Krall, Aretha Franklin, Big Maybelle i d’altres, que no són poques. Avui farem un repàs d’aquestes dones imprescindibles. The post Blues Barrelhouse 25/10/2021 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.

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Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 176

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2021 178:15

Beastie Boys "Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun"Betty Harris "There's A Break In The Road"The Black Keys "Sinister Kid"A Tribe Called Quest "Excursions"AC/DC "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"Lucinda Williams "Honey Bee"Bessie Smith "Muddy Water"Adia Victoria "Stuck In The South"Otis Rush "Double Trouble"She & Him "Stars Fell On Alabama"Tom Waits "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)"Gillian Welch "Look at Miss Ohio"The Beatles "Mr. Moonlight"Elvis Presley "Blue Moon"Elvis Presley "Tomorrow Night"Marty Robbins "Singing the Blues"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Drink Till I See Double feat. Paula Nelson,Elizabeth Cook"Valerie June "Keep the Bar Open"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Drunkard's Blues"Hank Ballard "Sunday Morning Coming Down"Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five "I'm Not Rough"Billy Bragg "From a Vauxhall Velox"Neko Case "The Train From Kansas City"Superchunk "Driveway to Driveway (Acoustic Version)"R.E.M. "Radio Free Europe"Ted Leo "Six Months in a Leaky Boat"Sierra Ferrell "Far Away Across The Sea"Big Maybelle "New Kind of Mambo"Eilen Jewell "Mess Around"Bob Dylan "When The Deal Goes Down"Pixies "Here Comes Your Man"Pixies "Here Comes Your Man"Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns "Little Liza Jane"Bessie Smith "St. Louis Blues"Leon Redbone "I Hate a Man Like You"Dr. John "Black John the Conqueror"Bruce Springsteen "Racing In the Streets"Nina Nastasia "Cry, Cry, Baby"Songs: Ohia "Steve Albini's Blues"Blind Willie McTell "Wee Midnight Hours"Albert King "Blues Power"Funkadelic "Can You Get to That"Memphis Minnie "Night Watchman Blues"Ruth Brown "Lucky Lips"Fats Domino "Before I Grow Too Old"

babies guns blues beatles singing streets clowns piano bob dylan book club bruce springsteen elvis presley cry ac dc moonlight ajax beastie boys diner conqueror tom waits new kind louis armstrong six months pixies blue moon tribe called quest louis blues double trouble huey muddy waters black keys mambo driveways excursions steve albini billy bragg lucinda williams funkadelic fats domino tomorrow night bessie smith neko case drunkards radio free europe albert king superchunk gillian welch mess around valerie june marty robbins bob wills ted leo ruth brown elizabeth cook memphis minnie ray wylie hubbard otis rush leon redbone blind willie mctell miss ohio eilen jewell adia victoria songs ohia sunday morning coming down big maybelle dirty deeds done dirt cheap blues power here comes your man betty harris

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 172

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2021 179:31

The Highwomen "Redesigning Women"Yola "Starlight"Julien Baker "Sprained Ankle"R.E.M. "I'm Gonna DJ"Sleater-Kinney "Bury Our Friends"Sleater-Kinney "Complex Female Characters"Jenny Lewis "The Next Messiah"Songs: Ohia "Farewell Transmission"Precious Bryant "Don't Let the Devil Ride"Sugar Pie De Santo "Going Back Where I Belong"Neko Case "Twist the Knife"James McMurtry "The Horses and the Hounds"Bobbie Gentry "Fancy"The Rolling Stones "Stray Cat Blues"The Rolling Stones "Love In Vain"Mavis Staples "This Little Light"Lilly Hiatt "Records"Sierra Ferrell "At The End Of The Rainbow"Big Maybelle "Goin' Home Baby"Eilen Jewell "Nowhere In No Time"Bob Dylan "Workingman's Blues #2"Aimee Mann "Freeway"John R. Miller "Lookin' Over My Shoulder"Margo Price "About to Find Out"Tyler Childers "Whitehouse Road"Dolly Parton "Kentucky Gambler"Nina Simone "Gin House Blues"Cedric Burnside "Get Down"Lucinda Williams "Pineola"Will Johnson "The Watchman"Gillian Welch "Tear My Stillhouse Down"Waxahatchee "Bonfire"Centro-Matic "Remind Us Alive"Wanda Jackson "Kansas City"Marie/Lepanto "Clean Gift"Aretha Franklin "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"Aretha Franklin "What A Friend We Have In Jesus"Emmylou Harris "Two More Bottles Of Wine"Alex Chilton/Hi Rhythm Section "Lucille (Live)"Carla Thomas "What the World Needs Now (LP Version)"Loudon Wainwright III "Down Drinking at the Bar (Album Version)"Elizabeth Cotten "Freight Train"

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 169

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2021 177:59

Howlin' Wolf "Killing Floor"Charles Bradley "The World (Is Going Up In Flames)"Morgan Wade "Wilder Days"Jolie Holland "Sascha"Koko Taylor "I'd Rather Go Blind"Gillian Welch "Hello In There"Townes Van Zandt "Tecumseh Valley"The Beatles "Good Day Sunshine"Glossary "Chase Me out of the Dark"Shirley Ann Lee "There's A Light"Charlie Musselwhite "Hello Stranger"Son Volt "Arkey Blue"The Flying Burrito Brothers "Christine's Tune"Calvin Cook "Walk With Me"Tom Russell "Isaac Lewis"Big Maybelle "Say It Isn't' So"The Meters "Down By The River"Cedric Burnside "Step In"Candi Staton "The Best Thing You Ever Had"Jason Isbell "Chicago Promenade"Jeff Tweedy "Opaline"Wilco "Walken"Jeannie C. Riley "Games People Play"Grateful Dead "Brown-Eyed Women"Marie/Lepanto "Features / Fights"Will Johnson "Just to Know What You've Been Dreaming"Precious Bryant "Peepin' Out My Window"Guy Clark "Old Friends"Swamp Dogg "Sam Stone"Wanda Jackson "Two Shots"Aimee Mann "Suicide is Murder"Waxahatchee "Lilacs"Eilen Jewell "Rich Man's World"Bobbie Gentry "Okolona River Bottom Band"Bob Dylan "Drifter's Escape"Two Cow Garage "Continental Distance"Todd Snider "Turn Me Loose (I'll Never Be the Same)"Mississippi John Hurt "Candy Man Blues"James McMurtry "Out Here In the Middle"James Carr "I'm Going For Myself"Junior Kimbrough "Crawling King Snake"Baby Huey & The Baby Sitters "Hard Times"Allen Toussaint "Southern Nights"

world murder suicide escape dark wolf beatles bob dylan book club hard times old friends grateful dead babysitters rich man ajax diner wilco meters drifter jason isbell glossary lilacs howlin walken aimee mann games people play jeff tweedy townes van zandt will johnson waxahatchee charles bradley killing floor down by the river gillian welch candi staton guy clark allen toussaint wanda jackson walk with me morgan wade flying burrito brothers hello stranger know what you bobbie gentry todd snider koko taylor charlie musselwhite mississippi john hurt never be son volt two shots tom russell swamp dogg james mcmurtry sam stone baby huey james carr cedric burnside jolie holland eilen jewell good day sunshine southern nights junior kimbrough rather go blind jeannie c riley big maybelle chase me two cow garage brown eyed women out my window

Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 163

On this day in Blues history

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2021 179:33

B.B. King/Tracey Chapman "The Thrill Is Gone"The Black Keys "Crawling Kingsnake"Amanda Shires "Bees In the Shed"Old 97's "St. Ignatius"Son Volt "Diamonds and Cigarettes"Cat Clyde, Jeremie Albino "What Am I Living For"Billy Joe Shaver/Willie Nelson "Hard to Be an Outlaw"Blondie "In The Flesh"The Hold Steady "We Can Get Together"Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers "Walls (Circus)"Precious Bryant "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing"Curtis Harding "Keep On Shining"Lizzo "Jerome"Digable Planets "Pacifics (Sdtrk "N.Y. Is Red Hot")"Charles Mingus "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"The Meters "Out In the Country"Prince & The Revolution "Let's Go Crazy"A Tribe Called Quest "Excursions"Big Momma Thornton "Hound Dog"Cedric Burnside "Pretty Flowers"Eddie Floyd "Knock on Wood"Taj Mahal "Sweet Home Chicago"Raphael Saadiq "Heart Attack"Big Maybelle "How It Lies"Mississippi John Hurt "Louis Collins"Durand Jones & The Indications "Now I'm Gone"John Coltrane Quartet "All or Nothing At All"R.E.M. "Find The River"James Booker "One for the Highway"Bobby Bare Jr. "Your Adorable Beast"Waxahatchee "Lilacs"Krista Shows "Ain't Your Fault"Charlie Parr "Everyday Opus"Valerie June "Call Me A Fool"Big Mama Thornton "Early One Morning Blues"James Luther Dickinson "White Silver Sands"Otis Redding "Try a Little Tenderness"The Marvelettes "Too Many Fish In The Sea"R.L. Burnside "Miss Maybelle"Lucero "Coffin Nails"Dolly Parton "Don't Let It Trouble Your Mind"John Moreland "High on Tulsa Heat"Connie Smith "I Don't Want to Be with Me"Norma Jean "Po Folks"

On this day in Blues history for May 14th

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2021 2:00

Today’s show features music performed by Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Howlin’ Wolf, and Big Maybelle

howlin wolf big maybelle blues history

I Can't Control Myself

In The Past: Garage Rock Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2021 130:44

Episode 31 contemplates the conundrum expressed in The Troggs' 1966 hit, "I Can't Control Myself." Reg Presley and the boys find some flakes of the same fairy dust they sprinkled over their former hit, "Wild Thing" and, like all discussion of the band, our talk drifts towards the topics of minimalism and negative space in their work (2:00). Big Maybelle had a fling with the song the next year, and both her vocals and Bob Gallo's arrangement are bold, brash, and brassy, with a funky drum break the cratediggers of hip hop have somehow missed, until we pointed it out (55:58). The Teenbeats are the final contenders, and we comment on the romantic and sexual implications of their fast & furious rendition, which was a hit with Montreal modsters in 1980 (1:25:58).

montreal wild thing troggs big maybelle bob gallo

Episode 056 - Candy

Same Difference: 2 Jazz Fans, 1 Jazz Standard

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2021 58:30

It's the feel-good standard "Candy" under the microscope on this episode of Same Difference. Join us as we dissect versions by Nat King Cole, Big Maybelle, John Pizzarelli, Joe Williams, Dr. John, and New Artist Corner feature The Blue Moon Big Band (and DANG these guys are good!).

music history comedy jazz dang nat king cole joe williams same difference john pizzarelli big maybelle

Abby Girl is Making a Scene

Making a Scene Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2021 40:35

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Abby Harris Maharaj of Abby Girl and the Real DealShe has a silky voice that has the local and international roots music community buzzing. Her broad range allows her to croon in a high soprano one a song then belt like LaVern Baker and moan down low like Big Maybelle.Abby Girl & The Real Deal,Burnt Toast Black Coffee,Calling Me HomeAbby Girl & The Real Deal,Puppet On A String,Calling Me Homemakingascene,Abby Girl and the Real Deals,Abby Girl & The Real Deal,Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right,Calling Me HomeAbby Girl & The Real Deal,Let's Kiss And Make Up,Calling Me Home

interview girl blues roots blues rock roots rock making a scene lavern baker kiss and make up big maybelle calling me home two wrongs don

Danielle Nicole & Brandon Miller on Blues Radio International

Blues Radio International With Jesse Finkelstein & Audrey Michelle

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 19, 2020 60:42

We went to the home studio of Danielle Nicole & Brandon Miller for a very uplifting stop on the Viral Anti Viral Word Tour in Kansas City, MO. Danielle & Brandon always make beautiful music together and this time we get to talk about the status of touring, finding new meaning in music, finding inspiration & appreciating each other. A big thank you to Danielle & Brandon who generously set up many cameras to make this session extra special. We can't thank you enough for sharing with the world.To catch up with Danielle and Brandon check out:Daniellenicolemusic.comYou can find us on Instagram @bluesradiointernationalTwitter: @bluesBRIVisit us on Facebook for more news, talk & interviews: facebook.com/bluesradiointernationalMore live music and interviews on our website: www.bluesradiointernational.netVideo production & stream engineering by: Audrey Michelle & Brandon Miller

kansas city brandon miller acoustic guitar blues music danielle nicole radio international big maybelle blues radio jesse finkelstein

Un très bon amour : Big Maybelle, Antoine Berjeaut, Portico Quartet, Lee Morgan and more

Le jazz sur France Musique

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2020 59:45

durée : 00:59:45 - Un très bon amour - par : Nathalie Piolé - La playlist jazz de Nathalie Piolé. - réalisé par : Fabien Fleurat

antoine bon amour quartets portico lee morgan portico quartet big maybelle antoine berjeaut fabien fleurat

Sateli 3 - Mambo, Cha-Cha-Cha & Calypso Vol.1-Girls Session (1954-63) - 04/06/20

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2020 58:15

Sintonía: ""Let´s Mambo" - Betty Reilly with Denny Farnon´s Music Publicada en el 2019 en vinilo (que te regala el CD!) por Juke Box y compilada por El Vidocq, aquí tienes la Banda Sonora para un guateque tan exótico como glamuroso... Buen provecho !!! "Christine" - Miss X; "Night and Day" - Francis Faye; "Daddy, Daddy" - Ella Mae Morse; "He Cha Cha´d in" - Kay Starr; "It´s so Fine" - Lavern Baker; "Hollywood Calypso" - Josephine Premice; "Mambo Baby" - Georgia Gibbs; "Hot Tamale Blues" - Ruby Dandridge; "Love Charms" - Diane Maxwell; "Anything Can Happen - Mambo" - Dolores Hawkins; "My Mama Likes You" - Dolores Gray; "Calypso Parakeet" - Patti Brandon; "New Kind of Mambo" - Big Maybelle; "Calypso Joe" - Anna Valentino; "Otra vez (Pepito)" - Elena Madera Bonus Tracks: "Too Experienced", "You Call My Name", "I´ve Got To Get Back" y "Do You Wanna Dance", extraídas del álbum "Reggae with Soul", del cantante Owen Gray (Trojan Records, 1969) Bonus track 05: "Reggae is Tight" (Booker T & The M.G.´s) - Lloyd Charmers Escuchar audio

Alan Freed's Camel Rock And Roll Dance Party - Sept. 4, 1956

Heirloom Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2020 25:05

Alan Freed welcomes guests: Jimmy Cavello and the House Rockers, Big Maybelle, and The Moonglows. Sam the Man Taylor leads the Orchestra. Big Al Sears plays lead sax. Playlist: Sam the Man Taylor: Push It. Jimmy Cavello and the House Rockers: Rock Everybody and The Groovy Thing. Big Maybelle: Ring Dang Dilly and Candy (A blues cover of the old Johnny Mercer hit). Sam the Man Taylor with Big Al Sears on Sax: I Don't Need Much Money. The Moonglows: Like a Jigsaw and It Only Happens When I'm With You. More Alan Freed's Camel Rock and Roll Dance Party to be found in the "Alan Freed" Playlist.

rock and roll playlist orchestras jigsaw dance party johnny mercer moonglow alan freed big maybelle

MusicTrails 330

MusicTrails (40UP Radio)

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2020 57:54

Vanavond om 22.00 uur bij 40UP Radio een nieuwe aflevering van Music Trails van Marc Stakenburg en Joost Verbunt. Wederom met veel muziek vanuit het zuiden van de VS, je hoort onder andere Bettye Lavette, Larkin Poe, Big Maybelle en Jason Isbell. Het album van de week is Thorbjorn Risager - Come on in.

jason isbell wederom vanavond larkin poe bettye lavette big maybelle 40up radio marc stakenburg

MusicTrails 329

MusicTrails (40UP Radio)

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2020 57:55

Vanavond om 22.00 uur bij 40UP Radio een nieuwe aflevering van Music Trails van Marc Stakenburg en Joost Verbunt. Wederom met veel muziek vanuit het zuiden van de VS, je hoort onder andere Bettye Lavette, Larkin Poe, Big Maybelle en Jason Isbell. Het album van de week is Thorbjorn Risager - Come on in.

jason isbell wederom vanavond larkin poe bettye lavette big maybelle 40up radio marc stakenburg

Dab of Soul with Chris Anderton

The Face Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2020 105:07

Tonight I will be playing records by such artists as Bobby Thurston, Gloria Walker, Big Maybelle, Bridge and Jean Shy.New broadcasts of Dab Of Soul every Tuesday from 6 - 8 PM EST / 11 PM - 1 AM GMT (Wednesday).For a complete track listing, visit: https://thefaceradio.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/175475195837958/Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/dabofsoul/Email: dabofsoul@thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

soul bridge mixcloud anderton big maybelle bobby thurston

Episode 59: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2019 36:54

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 "So Long I'm Gone" by Warren Smith. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn't have time to cover his career up to that point -- even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He's someone who just dominates other people's stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we've got to the point where he's about to have his first hit, but we haven't really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we're going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On"] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams -- and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye": [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye"] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he'd been gone so long, and he said he'd picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin' Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant -- other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics -- he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He'd started playing music when he was four years old. He'd been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He'd almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of "Silent Night", and his parents -- who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother -- realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn't have electricity in the house -- until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema -- a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family -- and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his "double first cousin" -- Swaggart's father was Lewis' father's nephew, while Swaggart's mother was Lewis' mother's sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his "Waiting For a Train": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting For a Train"] His favourite song to play, though, was "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee", the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] But he had two bigger influences -- two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything -- Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music -- into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, "Piano Breakdown"] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis' hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it's spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: "You Are My Sunshine"] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner -- who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn "My God is Real" with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis' life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He'd been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they'd won the machine in a contest. He'd already got married twice, and hadn't actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he'd also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He'd been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There's only one recording available of Lewis' mentor Mr. Paul -- his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, "Right Now", by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, "Right Now"] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He'd already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on -- they'd told him he needed to play a guitar. He'd blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened -- he'd been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, "Down Yonder"] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as "The Great I AM". Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they'd ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee's father's henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn't afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course -- but they couldn't afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar -- except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed -- they needed to get this man in. Lewis' first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of "Crazy Arms" a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there's more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams' hits, including "Cold Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can't even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I'm going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney's frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn't a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, "Crazy Arms"] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn't sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don't have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I'll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price's version of "Crazy Arms" was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it's unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he'd also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn't a massive hit -- that didn't bother him, he knew he'd have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be -- but because his father didn't seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he'd given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he'd been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn't, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn't hugely impressed by Jerry Lee's first record was just that -- that seeing his son achieve an ambition he'd given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee's next record, though, didn't disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn't recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he'd cut a few more songs as himself. He'd play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush", which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] Two people both claimed to have written the song -- a black singer called Dave "Curlee" Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song's writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym "Sunny David"). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it "We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an' they even keepin' time on a ding-dong." That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams -- something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him -- as soon as the song became a hit, Hall's ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song's royalties. Neither Big Maybelle's version of the song, nor Roy Hall's, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of "Whole Lotta Shakin'" that was very different from either version that had already come out -- they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he'd tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that's when you've got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, "You're a bit late, aren't you?" "No," Jerry Lee had replied, "I'm right on time". That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie", a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn't feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn't feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit... and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis -- there wasn't room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he'd had, and how he'd like to come back as a turd in his ex's toilet bowl, so she'd look down and see him in there winking up at her. He'd taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into "It'll Be Me": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "It'll Be Me", single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they'd let Jerry Lee cut this "Shakin'" thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" -- Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they'd recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic -- they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts -- the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he'd not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips' new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they'd not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America -- at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys", and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips' brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee -- in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show -- the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen's manager and the head of talent for NBC -- they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring -- no photos, no records, nothing -- and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn't capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud "I'll give you five hundred dollars if you don't show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him." So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month's time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I'll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn't capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed "shake", he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who'd made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who'd mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent's lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you're someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we'll find out about Jerry Lee's fall in a few weeks' time.

tv new york amazon history texas chicago bible real books dj devil north america south kentucky nbc sun wolf superman louisiana buffalo elvis rock and roll phillips cocaine cds frank sinatra craigslist johnny cash perkins silent night goin my god elmo pentecostal clement cajun niagara falls mixcloud whitehead jud faulkner mooney coney island rock music grand ole opry jerry lee lewis hank williams little john shakin howlin ed sullivan steve allen everly brothers rhinestones great i am be me fats domino decca rca records carl perkins sam phillips boogie woogie chet atkins sun records gene autry al jolson wanda jackson warren smith western swing charles brown jerry lee waiting for waxahachie jimmie rodgers million dollar quartet ray price gene vincent jimmy swaggart big joe turner mickey gilley jordanaires rick bragg jolson johnny burnette peter guralnick swaggart big maybelle so lonesome i could cry cowboy jack clement jack clement moon mullican

Episode 59: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2019

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith. (more…)

history johnny cash goin quincy jones rock music grand ole opry jerry lee lewis rockabilly shakin steve allen carl perkins sam phillips sun records wanda jackson warren smith jimmy swaggart country and western big maybelle jack clement moon mullican

Episode 59: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2019

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

tv new york amazon history texas chicago bible real books dj devil north america south train kentucky nbc sun wolf superman louisiana buffalo elvis rock and roll phillips cocaine cds frank sinatra craigslist johnny cash perkins silent night goin my god elmo pentecostal clement cajun niagara falls mixcloud whitehead jud faulkner mooney coney island rock music grand ole opry jerry lee lewis hank williams little john shakin howlin ed sullivan steve allen everly brothers rhinestones great i am be me fats domino decca rca records carl perkins sam phillips boogie woogie chet atkins sun records gene autry al jolson wanda jackson warren smith western swing charles brown jerry lee waiting for waxahachie jimmie rodgers million dollar quartet ray price gene vincent jimmy swaggart you are my sunshine big joe turner mickey gilley jordanaires rick bragg jolson johnny burnette peter guralnick swaggart big maybelle so lonesome i could cry cowboy jack clement jack clement moon mullican

Episode 59: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2019

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

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They Liked My Phras'n: The Life & Music of Rose McCoy, Part I

Arts and Letters

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2019 52:10

Discover one of America's most prolific songwriters. On this episode of Arts & Letters, we speak with biographer Arlene Corsano about the life and music of Arkansan songwriter and singer Rose Marie McCoy. Through personal stories and rare interview recordings with McCoy, Corsona tells the in-depth and behind-the-scenes story of a complicated singer and songwriter who broke barrier after barrier as a black woman in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s in the music business. Corsano's book T hought We Were Singing the Blues But They Called It Rock 'N' Roll chronicles McCoy's storied life and turbulent times from her beginnings in Oneida, Arkansas to her partnership with songwriter Charlie Singleton in New York and her office in the famed Brill Building. During her lifetime, McCoy published over 850 songs that were recorded by the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Nappy Brown, Big Maybelle, Little Esther Phillips, Elvis Presley, Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Duke

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Roadhouse 755

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2019 59:48

This hour is filled with interesting features, including a track-heavy female lineup and a set of blues from the 1950s. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, Janiva Magness & Taj Mahal, Dawn Tyler Watson, Big Maybelle, and Vaneese Thomas help provide yet another shade in the seemingly infinite hues of blues. It's just ahead - another hour of the finest blues you've never heard, the 755th Roadhouse.

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Roadhouse 755

Rockabilly & Blues Radio Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2019 59:48

This hour is filled with interesting features, including a track-heavy female lineup and a set of blues from the 1950s. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, Janiva Magness & Taj Mahal, Dawn Tyler Watson, Big Maybelle, and Vaneese Thomas help provide yet another shade in the seemingly infinite hues of blues. It's just ahead - another hour of the finest blues you've never heard, the 755th Roadhouse.

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Laura Palmer Screamin' Rebel Angels co-host/ Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 05-20-19

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2019 57:03

Laura Palmer from Screamin' Rebel Angels is my co-host on this Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour. She hand-picked all the songs except for 2 tracks from their latest album, Heel Grinder, that I wanted to know more about. We spin tunes from Nikki Hill, Mickey Lee Lane, Gary U.S. Bonds, Stray Cats, Little Richard, The Go-Getters, Marie Knight, Bunker Hill, The Delta Bombers, Nick Curran, Boz Boorer, Roy Head and Big Maybelle! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues" Nikki Hill- "Get Down, Crawl" Gary U.S. Bonds- "New Orleans" Little Richard- "The Girl Can't Help It" Screamin' Rebel Angels- "Oh! My Soul" Bunker Hill- "The Girl Can't Dance" The Delta Bombers- "Good Disguise" Stray Cats- "How Long You Wanna Live, Anyway?" Nick Curran & The Lowlifes- "Kill My Baby" Roy Head- "Treat Her Right" The Go-Getters- "Slow Down" Boz Boorer- "Bad Hangover" Marie Knight- "I Thought I Told You Not To Tell Them" Screamin' Rebel Angels- "Sweet Petunia" Big Maybelle- "That's A Pretty Good Love" Mickey Lee Lane- "Hey-Sah-Lo-Ney" Outro Music Bed: Link Wray- "The Wild One"

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First Ladies of Soul

The DMZ

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2019 59:30

A spectacular showcase featuring the music of Big Maybelle, Tina Turner, Lyn Collins, Ruth Brown and more! 1. Ike & Tina Turner - Bold Soul Sister 2. Joyce Williams - The First Thing I Do In The Morning 3. Velma Perkins - Yes, My Goodness Yes 4. Big Maybelle - 96 Tears 5. Ms. Tyree "Sugar" Jones - If You Feel It 6. Myra Barnes - The Message From The Soul Sisters 7. Patti Drew - Hard To Handle 8. Betty Harris - There's A Break In The Road 9. Mary Jane Hooper - I've Got Reasons 10. Irma Thomas - Wish Someone Would Care 11. Lyn Collins - Take Me Just As I Am 12. Ruth Brown - I Don't Know 13. Essence - Fever 14. Helene Smith - True Love Don't Grow On Trees 15. Wendy Rene - After Laughter (Comes Tears) 16. Erma Franklin - Baby What You Want Me To Do 17. Little Denise - Check Me Out The DMZ can be heard live Tuesday's @ 5:00p ET only on radiofreebrooklyn.com

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Episode 22: "The Wallflower" by Etta James

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2019 33:15

Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "The Wallflower" by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I'm halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast, most of which I've mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James' early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* "The Wallflower". "The Wallflower", though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we've already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning -- there's some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I'd mention it. If you're worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We've talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about "Hound Dog" and "Bear Cat", but we didn't really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" is an answer song to Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man", partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But "I'm A Man" was, in itself, a response to Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man". And, the "Bear Cat" debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric -- you'd do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. "Bear Cat" might have gone to number three, but "Hound Dog" went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons -- this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band's members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn't become the lead singer straight away -- Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton's old backing vocal parts -- but he slowly became more important to the band's sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways -- particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn't sound like anyone else's before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard -- most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes -- but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out -- a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band's manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear... [excerpt The Royals "Every Beat of My Heart"] That's a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there's nothing about that track that really stands out -- it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with "Get It" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Get It"] "Get It" was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it's the band's second hit that we're most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit "Sixty Minute Man", which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. "Get It" had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to "Sixty Minute Man", and so he came up with a song that he initially titled "Sock It To Me, Mary". Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer's wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called "Work With Me Annie" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Work With Me Annie"] That's certainly suggestive, but it wouldn't set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. "Give me all my meat?" That's... well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct -- "Sexy Ways" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Sexy Ways"] That, too, went right up the charts. But "Work With Me Annie" had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups -- "Annie Had A Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fanny". And they weren't the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them -- even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how "Annie's been working on the midnight shift". But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of "Annie" herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn't singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn't want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her -- so long as she got her parents' permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn't know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call -- "calling her mother" while keeping a finger on the phone's button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis' former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they'd ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine". Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative -- this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song "Jailhouse Rock" -- with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You've undoubtedly heard it before if you've heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters' "Mannish Boy" [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man", which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] The Robins' record came out in May 1954. So it's likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem -- Bobby Nunn, the Robins' bass singer, simply couldn't get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed -- he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn't do that scary growl. Or at least, that's the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said "We didn't understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn't do it." But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they'd recorded a single called "She Wants to Rock", which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller's work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. "Riot in Cell Block #9" became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry's life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that "Riot in Cell Block #9" did was cement Berry's reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else's record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for "Work With Me Annie", and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of "Work With Me Annie", but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: "The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)"] The record was called "The Wallflower", but everyone knew it as "Roll With Me Henry". The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible -- Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It's also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn't go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. "The Wallflower" went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn't become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we're looking at a white person copying a black person's record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs' version is one of those ones which we can't possibly justify as being a creative response. It's closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley -- it's a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from "Roll With Me Henry" to the much less interesting "Dance With Me Henry". [excerpt Georgia Gibbs "Dance With Me Henry"] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations -- the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James' version -- "The Wallflower" may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women's sexuality, and most especially *black* women's sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn't the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman's record -- her cover version of LaVern Baker's "Tweedle Dee" also outsold Baker's original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn't write her record. And again, this is something we've talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more -- it's people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we'll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of "That's All Right, Mama", or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle's original "Whole Lotta Shakin'" but it's an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren't just white people cashing in on black musicians' talent, they're part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians -- a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person's. You can't say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn't an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one -- at least no-one who isn't so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase "roll with me" -- listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren't. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James "Dance With Me Henry"] If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I suppose. After all, "Dance With Me Henry" was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs' version, not Etta James' – when they recorded "Henry's Got Flat Feet, Can't Dance No More" [excerpt "Henry's Got Flat Feet", The Midnighters] And "Dance With Me Henry" got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello's last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we're going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn't properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and "Dance With Me Henry" was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians -- though there wouldn't be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons -- but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times - - and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons' love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single -- Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing "Unchained Melody", which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt "Unchained Melody" by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn't see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of "Unchained Melody" wouldn't allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren't released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin's old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to "Unchained Melody". And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was... well... this... [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan "Dance With Me Henry"] Whether that's a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs', I'll let you decide... Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of "Dance With Me Henry" would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn't record for two years, but "Louie Louie" didn't seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] We'll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years' time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to "the Wallflower", "Hey Henry", but that wasn't a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, "Hey Henry"] But her third single, "Good Rockin' Daddy", was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn't happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, "Spoonful"] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we're unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on -- her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis -- she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

history uk man rock british modern detroit blues mama britain atlantic daddy cd midnight kickstarter rock and roll rhythm waters atlanta falcons riot paul mccartney royals elvis presley hawkins abbott monty python excerpt gibbs ballard costello robins mixcloud goon rock music buddy holly muddy waters rpm jerry lee lewis gladys knight dominoes wallflower etta james nunn goons pips peter sellers george martin les paul bo diddley all right cell block stoller chubby checker hound dog bill haley jackie wilson gene autry jailhouse rock louie louie leiber unchained melody willie dixon spike milligan moonglow chess records tweedledee richard berry goon show midnighters flairs lavern baker king records mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis big maybelle diddley clyde mcphatter georgia gibbs she wants little esther hoochie coochie man sock it to me arthur crudup george lipsitz

Episode 22: “The Wallflower” by Etta James

sam cooke drifters soul funk big maybelle

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “The Wallflower” by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast, most of which I’ve mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James’ early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* “The Wallflower”. “The Wallflower”, though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we’ve already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning — there’s some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I’d mention it. If you’re worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We’ve talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about “Hound Dog” and “Bear Cat”, but we didn’t really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” is an answer song to Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man”, partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But “I’m A Man” was, in itself, a response to Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”. And, the “Bear Cat” debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric — you’d do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. “Bear Cat” might have gone to number three, but “Hound Dog” went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons — this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band’s members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn’t become the lead singer straight away — Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton’s old backing vocal parts — but he slowly became more important to the band’s sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways — particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn’t sound like anyone else’s before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard — most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes — but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out — a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band’s manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear… [excerpt The Royals “Every Beat of My Heart”] That’s a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there’s nothing about that track that really stands out — it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with “Get It” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Get It”] “Get It” was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it’s the band’s second hit that we’re most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit “Sixty Minute Man”, which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. “Get It” had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to “Sixty Minute Man”, and so he came up with a song that he initially titled “Sock It To Me, Mary”. Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer’s wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called “Work With Me Annie” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Work With Me Annie”] That’s certainly suggestive, but it wouldn’t set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. “Give me all my meat?” That’s… well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct — “Sexy Ways” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Sexy Ways”] That, too, went right up the charts. But “Work With Me Annie” had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups — “Annie Had A Baby” and “Annie’s Aunt Fanny”. And they weren’t the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them — even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how “Annie’s been working on the midnight shift”. But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of “Annie” herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn’t singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn’t want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her — so long as she got her parents’ permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn’t know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call — “calling her mother” while keeping a finger on the phone’s button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis’ former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they’d ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”. Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative — this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song “Jailhouse Rock” — with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You’ve undoubtedly heard it before if you’ve heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters’ “Mannish Boy” [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] The Robins’ record came out in May 1954. So it’s likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem — Bobby Nunn, the Robins’ bass singer, simply couldn’t get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed — he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn’t do that scary growl. Or at least, that’s the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said “We didn’t understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn’t do it.” But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they’d recorded a single called “She Wants to Rock”, which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller’s work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. “Riot in Cell Block #9” became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry’s life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that “Riot in Cell Block #9” did was cement Berry’s reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else’s record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for “Work With Me Annie”, and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of “Work With Me Annie”, but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: “The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)”] The record was called “The Wallflower”, but everyone knew it as “Roll With Me Henry”. The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible — Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It’s also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn’t go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. “The Wallflower” went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn’t become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we’re looking at a white person copying a black person’s record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs’ version is one of those ones which we can’t possibly justify as being a creative response. It’s closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley — it’s a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from “Roll With Me Henry” to the much less interesting “Dance With Me Henry”. [excerpt Georgia Gibbs “Dance With Me Henry”] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations — the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James’ version — “The Wallflower” may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women’s sexuality, and most especially *black* women’s sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn’t the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman’s record — her cover version of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” also outsold Baker’s original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn’t write her record. And again, this is something we’ve talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more — it’s people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we’ll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of “That’s All Right, Mama”, or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle’s original “Whole Lotta Shakin'” but it’s an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren’t just white people cashing in on black musicians’ talent, they’re part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians — a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person’s. You can’t say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn’t an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one — at least no-one who isn’t so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase “roll with me” — listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren’t. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James “Dance With Me Henry”] If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I suppose. After all, “Dance With Me Henry” was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs’ version, not Etta James’ – when they recorded “Henry’s Got Flat Feet, Can’t Dance No More” [excerpt “Henry’s Got Flat Feet”, The Midnighters] And “Dance With Me Henry” got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello’s last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we’re going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn’t properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and “Dance With Me Henry” was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians — though there wouldn’t be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons — but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times – – and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons’ love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single — Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing “Unchained Melody”, which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt “Unchained Melody” by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn’t see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of “Unchained Melody” wouldn’t allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren’t released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin’s old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to “Unchained Melody”. And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was… well… this… [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan “Dance With Me Henry”] Whether that’s a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs’, I’ll let you decide… Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of “Dance With Me Henry” would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn’t record for two years, but “Louie Louie” didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] We’ll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years’ time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to “the Wallflower”, “Hey Henry”, but that wasn’t a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, “Hey Henry”] But her third single, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”, was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn’t happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we’re unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on — her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis — she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

history uk man rock british modern detroit blues mama britain atlantic daddy cd midnight kickstarter rock and roll rhythm waters atlanta falcons riot paul mccartney royals elvis presley hawkins abbott monty python excerpt gibbs ballard costello robins mixcloud my heart goon rock music buddy holly muddy waters rpm jerry lee lewis gladys knight dominoes spoonful wallflower etta james nunn goons pips peter sellers george martin les paul bo diddley all right cell block stoller chubby checker hound dog bill haley jackie wilson gene autry jailhouse rock louie louie leiber unchained melody willie dixon spike milligan moonglow chess records tweedledee honkers richard berry goon show midnighters flairs lavern baker king records mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis big maybelle diddley clyde mcphatter georgia gibbs she wants little esther every beat hoochie coochie man sock it to me arthur crudup george lipsitz

The DSC Show - ep24

Umbrella Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2019 25:47

John's back playing the Soul & Funk gems with tracks from The Drifters, Sam Cooke, Big Maybelle and more.

Arlene Corsano talks about Brill Building songwriter Rose Marie McCoy. (1/10/19)

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 10, 2019 56:22

On today’s “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Leonard talks biographer Arlene Corsano about Rose Marie McCoy, one of the only African-American women to be part of the legendary Brill Building songwriting scene. Tune into to hear about this songwriter who composed hits for legendary artists like Big Maybelle, James Brown, Ruth Brown, Nat King Cole, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Mathis, Bette Midler, Elvis Presley and Ike and Tina Turner.

african americans large songwriter elvis presley aretha franklin tina turner james brown ike bette midler nat king cole johnny mathis wbai ruth brown brill building big maybelle leonard lopate rose marie mccoy

Sweet Melodies 012 @timknol

Sweet Melodies (40UP Radio)

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2018 60:23

Vandaag fijne muziek van Ola Belle Reed, Big Maybelle, Tony Molina, Townes van Zandt, Andre Williams en Allen Toussaint.

vandaag melodies townes allen toussaint zandt andre williams tony molina big maybelle ola belle reed

Receta Campesina 16/11/2018

Receta Campesina

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2018 60:00

En esta receta nos mostramos avezados adalides de la variedad y proponemos como siempre nuestra particular degustación de tonadas. Suenan Terrier, Piedad os lo ruego, Staya Staya, The Glentemen's Agreement, Swingin' Neckbreakers, La Trinidad, The Royal Roosters, The The Woolly Bushmen, The Hi-Risers, Grosgoroth, The Max Meser Group, JD McPherson, Airbag, La Granja y Big Maybelle.

agreement receta airbags swingin piedad la granja campesina jd mcpherson big maybelle

Just Bee Radio 089 @beatricevdpoel

Just Bee Radio (40UP Radio)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2018 60:01

Weer een heerlijk uur muziek van Big Maybelle, Etta James, Anne Soldaat, Norah Jones en Jools Holland, Amy Winehouse & Paul Weller

weer norah jones etta james jools holland big maybelle

What's Love Got To Do With...Adonis?

Breakdown 2 Lowdown

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2018 105:36

On this week's episode of B2L, Anthony is away and Nicky gets help from her guest co-host, Andy. They tackle thought-provoking subjects like religion and leaving your mark on the industry. The picks range from PJ Morton to Tiwa Savage and even Big Maybelle. On the Lowdown segment topics like Tekashi 69 vs. Chief Keef, The Story of Adidon, the new Kanye West album, etc., are all tackled. Be nice, as it is Andy's first time doing anything of the sort. Host Nicky Jean has a new single out, check it out here -> https://soundcloud.com/nickymusique/shackles SONGS USED: Recent/Discovery Tracks- River Tiber - Barcelona Eric Bellinger - Meditate PJ Morton - Religion Tiwa Savage - Tiwa's Vibe Oldie but Goodie Tracks: Big Maybelle - Candy LL Cool J ft. Ralph Tresvant and Ricky Bell - Candy

story kanye west lowdown tekashi what's love got chief keef tiwa savage pj morton adidon ralph tresvant big maybelle b2l

2017-10-15 Big Maybelle, Anders Osborne, Gov't Mule, Sons Of The Delta

Historias del Blues

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2017 54:40

En este programa: Big Maybelle - The Complete King, Okeh & Savoy Releases, Anders Osborne - Flower Box, Gov’t Mule - The Tel-Star Sessions, Sons Of The Delta - Red Hot At Peppers

sons delta gov govt anders osborne gov't mule big maybelle

Henry Threadgill: Dirt, and More Dirt

Meet the Composer

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2017 41:39

1967, Fort Riley, Kansas. Henry Threadgill is 23 years old. Knowing he’s going to be drafted into the military, he joins the Army Concert Band, hoping to focus on his passion: writing music. As he surrounds himself with new ideas, he works his influences into the music that he's arranging. Then one day, the band plays one of his arrangements of a patriotic song for an inauguration of big-wigs, and from the calm of a quietly confused crowd comes a cry from a cardinal in attendance: “Blasphemy!” One day later, he’s told to gather his things. Thirty days later, he’s on his way to Vietnam. Fifty years later, he wins the Pulitzer Prize for music composition. This is only the beginning of the story of how the energy, hunger and curiosity of Henry Threadgill have influenced and changed the people around him. In spite of the failure and rejection he’s faced, Threadgill is perpetually driven toward new ideas, new challenges and new opportunities to pursue and grow stronger in his improvisational creative vision. His music is the product of the community he builds in the moment. This is the story of Henry Threadgill, told by the people whose lives he has touched. Heard a piece of music that you loved? Discover it here! 1:32—Samuel Ward: America the Beautiful | Listen 1:47—Cecil Taylor: Air Above Mountains | Listen 1:51—Igor Stravinsky: Rite of Spring | Listen 1:57—Thelonious Monk: Solo Monk | Listen 2:58—The Star-Spangled Banner, re-imagined by Meet the Composer3:29—Henry Threadgill: Someplace | Buy 3:47—Henry Threadgill: Higher Places | Buy 5:24—Henry Threadgill: Little Pocket-Sized Demons | Buy 6:00—Nico Muhly: Mothertongue: I. Archive | Listen 6:20—Henry Threadgill: The Devil is on the Loose and Dancing with a Monkey | Listen 6:58—Henry Threadgill: Try Some Ammonia | Listen 9:00—Edward Ciuksza: Basia | Listen 9:07—Demiran Cerimovic: Laca's Proud Cocek | Listen 9:17—Sallie Martin Singers: Jesus | Listen 9:28—Howlin' Wolf: Back Door Man | Listen 10:20—Ernest Tubb & Red Foley: Hillbilly Fever | Listen 10:33—Dmitri Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, op. 107 | Listen 10:39—Big Maybelle: Do Lord | Listen 10:52—Meade Lux Lewis: Honky Tonk Train Blues | Listen 12:17—Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life | Listen 13:11—Bishop Samuel Kelsey & Others: Tell Me How Long Has The Train Been Gone | Listen 14:19—Henry Threadgill: Where's Your Cup | Listen 16:10—Muhal Richard Abrams: Wise in Time | Listen 18:02—Muhal Richard Abrams: Marching With Honor | Listen 18:09—George Lewis: Voyager Duo 4 | Listen 18:16—Amina Claudine Myers: African Blues | Listen 18:24—Roscoe Mitchell: A Game of Catch | Listen 18:30—Wadada Leo Smith: Lake Michigan | Listen 18:31—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen 28:03—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen 29:15—Henry Threadgill: Subject to Change: This | Buy 34:08—Henry Threadgill: In for a Penny, Out for a Pound | Listen 37:27—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen

Roadhouse 595

rides road house big mama thornton jimmy rogers big maybelle

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2016 61:50

What lies ahead in this hour of The Roadhouse? I've got a couple of sets of classic blues artists - one that nearly spans the country from west to east, and one that's dedicated to some of the great female voices in the blues. The Rides, Jimmy Rogers, Big Maybelle, Big Mama Thornton, and Charley Crocker. We're about to go for a ride across geography and time. And, since you've probably heard some of the classic tracks that lie ahead, I'll just say that ride fills up another hour of the finest blues - the 595th Roadhouse.

You’ve Got To See Mamma Every Night (Lost in Paradise)

Angel Baby spins the platters that matter!

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2015 51:22

Angel Baby shoots out of the gate on her second Women's History Month tribute with a trio of hot rockin' femmes, segueing into two-timed r&b belters and, after a refreshing dunk in the briny, spinning boy crazy teen tunes before finishing up with sultry sassy mamas and ginchy gals diggin' their real gone guys. All girl and all good! Do This Do That – Barbara Joy – Tar-Get / Louisiana Twist – ‘June Bug’ Bailey – Jo-Records / Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes – Dawn Owens and the Rhythm Kings – Star / Shake-A-Fin – Baby Terry Hall – Philips / Up Above My Head (I Hear Music In The Air) - Sister Rosetta Tharpe & Marie Knight – Decca / Why Young Men Go Wild – Miss LaVell – Duke / I Can’t Believe What You Say (For Seeing What You Do) – Ike And Tina Turner – Kent / Breaking Point – Etta James – Argo / Whispering Sea – Loretta Lynn – Zero / Down By The Sea – Margo White with The Cup Cakes – Khoury’s / Ocean Of Tears – Big Maybelle – The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story 1949-1957 (Previously Unissued) / I’ve Just Discovered Boys – Sherry Crane – Trumpet / Go Away, Don’t Bother Me – The Collins Kids – Columbia / Buzzin’ – Kathy Zee – Laurie / Keep ‘Em For A Hobby – Carolyn Chipman and The Beachcombers backed by The Jordanaires – Bett-Coe / Get Your Enjoys – Eunice Davis – De Luxe / You’ve Got To See Mamma Every Night – Kari Lynn – Auburn / Real Gone Okie – Renie Hicks with The Aztecs – Aztec / Slip Away – Millie Rodgers – Ultima / I’m Just Drifting – Betty Amos – Mercury / Bye Bye Baby – Betty Renne – New Art

2 Nicks, 2 Everlys and a lot more!

Rockabilly & Blues Radio Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2015 59:49

2 Nicks (Nick Waterhouse and Nick Curran), 2 Everlys (Don & Phil), Blasters, Coasters, Paladins, a blues blast of Big Maybelle, Mud Morganfield with Kim Wilson, an early rockabilly entry from a later country legend and so much more fill the playlist on this week's Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour! Ricky Nelson- "My Babe" Paladins- "Tore Up" Nick Curran- "Ain't No Good" Nick Waterhouse- "If You Want Trouble" Elvis Presley- "Power Of My Love" Tweed & The Sugardaddies- "Real Gone Jerk" The Coasters- "Three Cool Cats" The Blasters- "Real Rock Drive" Big Maybelle- "That's A Pretty Good Love" Mud Morganfield/Kim Wilson- "I Don't Know Why" George "Thumper" Jones- "Who Shot Sam?" Everly Brothers- "Claudette" Junior Brown- "Highway Patrol" Barry Ryan- "Rockabilly Jamboree" Jack Scott- "Baby She's Gone" Chris Isaak- "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" Ray Campi- "Caterpillar" Jinx Jones- "You Can't Kill Me 'Cause I'm Already Dead" Shakedown Combo- "Honey Hush"

elvis nicks rockabilly paladins coasters isaak blasters kim wilson nick curran big maybelle mud morganfield everlys

JEFF OLIVER AND THE VOOLA - NEW YEARS R&B SPINOUT!

TRUCKERS SHUCKERS FREAKS & GEEKS

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2014 78:08

A Super Bonus New Years Show this week, A Very Special guest Comedian Jeff Oliver joint me at the Radio Tower as we Spin some Killer R&B & New Breed tunes & to talk about Comedy, Portland, New York, Voodoo Donuts & various hijinks on this, the last show of 2013 In between the banter you'll hear some top spins from Screaming Jay Hawkins, Esquerita, James Holloway, Charles Sheffield, Big Maybelle & So much more I Should add a few links if you wish to follow or catch mr Jeff on the road next year..The man himself can be found at: twitter@jeff_oliver, facebook.com/ThatJeffOliver 0r That Jeff Oliver.com Happy New Year then! G-MINUS & JEFF-O

new york soul comedy portland blues new years rhythm new breed very special jeff o spinout jeff oliver voodoo donuts radio tower big maybelle screaming jay hawkins charles sheffield

Roadhouse 450