Podcast appearances and mentions of Billy Stewart

On Conversations with A Bowl of Soul, we are celebrating June is Black Music Month with an interview with Beverly Lindsay Johnson. She is an Emmy Award winning filmmaker and documentarian of "Fatboy-The Billy Stewart Story". Billy Stewart was an R&B singer in the 1960's who had hits such as "Sitting in the Park, I Do Love You, which was done by the R&B band GQ and his crossover hit Summertime, which was a million selling single for him and so many other hits that are in his catalogue. We talk about his life and how much he has contributed to Rhythm and Blues. He was an innovator, multitalented and he was loved by his family and friends. I hope you enjoy this interview. I had fun doing it. #billystewart #beverlylindsayjohnson #fatboy #randb Get up to 2 months free podcasting service with our Libsyn code=ABOS. Sign up & bring your  podcast to life! Get on Apple & Spotify, get critical stats & all the support you need to sound your best and grow your show!! Sign up here: https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=ABOS You can listen to the A Bowl of Soul Radio Network on Live365.com giving you 24/7/365 days of Soul Music. Stop on by and listen:  A Bowl of Soul Radio Network on Live365 You can support A Bowl of Soul and Buy Me A Coffee. Just click: Buy A Bowl of Soul A Cup of Coffee Purchase your A Bowl of Soul T-Shirt and other merchandise. Just click: Get Your A Bowl of Soul Merch Follow me: @proftlove on Threads                   @proftlove on Instagram                   @abowlofsoul.bsky.social - Bluesky                                  @A Bowl of Soul A Mixed Stew of Soul Music on Facebook Promote your product or service on the podcast and the radio network. You can sponsor A Bowl of Soul by getting your product or service in front of listeners. Email us at: abowlofsoul@gmail.com  Thank you for your Support!!!

**Smiffy's A To Z Of Soul Music Replay On www.traxfm.org. This Week Smiffy Featured Boogie/Contemporary Soul,Rare 70's & 80's Grooves/Dance Classics From Inner Life, Earth Wind & Fire, Jungle, Kenny Thomas, Robb Scott, The Temptations, Billy Stewart, Fatback Band, Totured Soul, Benny Sings, Kool & The Gang & More. #originalpirates #boogie #contemporarysoul #70ssoul #80ssoul #danceclassics #raregrooves #disco Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: http://radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

For the last round of recent releases of the year, we bring you an engaging selection that ranges from the groovy and loungey, to the firey and fun!  The playlist features Copa Salvo; Les Hommes; Kresten Osgood [pictured]; The Fury, Mark Turner, Lage Lund, Matt Brewer, Tyshawn Sorey; M.T.B. Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner, Peter Bernstein, Larry Grenadier, Billy Stewart; AuB, Alex Hitchcock, Tom Barford feat. Maria Chiara Argirò. Detailed playlist at https://spinitron.com/RFB/pl/19986948/Mondo-Jazz (up to "Folk Devils"). Happy listening!

Keyboardist & Vocals: Gail NoblesStory by: Gail NoblesLet's take a little trip down memory lane, back to those golden days when AM radio filled the airwaves with sweet voices harmonizing in perfect unison. Oh, those were the times when harmony groups would make your heart sing and your soul sway!I learned about Billy Stewart. He was singing “Sitting in the Park” back in the '60s, bringing warmth and joy to everyone tuning in. Fast forward to 1980. We were treated to an updated version by G.Q., who gave us “I Do Love You,” also a Billy Stewart song, reminding us that the spirit of those harmony nights was alive and well!Don't forget Ray, Goodman & Brown and their soulful hit, “Special Lady,” a melodic gem that captivated the hearts of so many. The essence of harmony and rhythm-and-blues brought to mind the thrill of doo-wop—those legendary groups singing sweetly on street corners, just like I caught on TV with Sha-Na-Na. For those youngsters who may not have lived through that glorious era, let me tell you, there's nothing quite like the magic of vocal harmony. These groups didn't need fancy production or flashy instruments; their voices alone created the kind of music that could make you stop in your tracks and feel every note deep in your bones.So let's keep spinning those classics, and remember the rich tapestry of harmonies that defined a generation. Turning on that AM dial was like opening a treasure chest of sound, filled with love, heart, and the magic of the human voice!I'm Gail Nobles remembering harmony groups on Podcast AM.

"She would never say where she came fromYesterday don't matter if it's goneWhile the sun is brightOr in the darkest nightNo one knows, she comes and goesGoodbye, Ruby Tuesday"But say hello to Opal Saturday on Whole 'Nuther Thing on KXFM 104.7. Joining us are Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, The B52's, Oasis, Del Shannon, Dada, Paul Weller, Joe Walsh, Peter Paul & Mary, Grand Funk Railroad, Spencer Davis Group, Jackson Browne, Steppenwolf, Jefferson, Starship, Billy Stewart, The Beach Boys, Ray LaMontagne, The Mamas & The Papas, Buckinghams, Spanky & Our Gang, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and John Batdorf w James Lee Stanley

Our fifth criminally underrated black artist features Mr. Billy Stewart. A man known for his Calypso sounding style and releasing classics that people cover till this very day. Join Kevaun as he discusses the history of Billy and his favorite songs by him! Mr. Stewart, here are your flowers!

Aujourd'hui on se penche sur "Hitch-Hike" de Marvin Gaye et sur les débuts de l'un des artistes phares de la Motown. PLAYLIST Marvin Gaye The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp" Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache" Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy" Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA" Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie" Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year" Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry" Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide" The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman" Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues". The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For" The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789" Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I ?" Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike" Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"  

"Watching and waitingFor a friend to play withWhy have I been alone so longMole he is burrowing his way to the sunlightHe knows there's someone there so strong"Let's watch & wait together on the "Red Eye" edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing, joining us are Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, ELO, Beatles, Santana, Robin Trower, Roxy Music, Robin Thicke, Traffic, Dionne Warwick, Blood Sweat & Tears, Jimi Hendrix, Leon Russell, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Steve Miller Band, John Klemmer, Dire Straits, Phil Collins, Billy Stewart and Moody Blues...

"If you smile at me you know I will understandCause that is something everybody everywhere doesIn the same languageI can see by your coat my friend that you're from the other sideThere's just one thing I got to know,Can you tell me please who wonYou must try some of my purple berriesI been eating them for six or seven weeks now,Haven't got sick once, probably keep us both aliveWooden ships on the water very free and easy"Please join me on this wet Saturday afternoon in So Cal. Joining us are Savoy Brown, Paul Simon, Simple Minds, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Ray La Montagne, Quincy Jones, Janis Joplin, Ambrosia, Rolling Stones, REO Speedwagon, Phoebe Snow, Roy Orbison, Billy Stewart, Little River Band, Loggins & messina, Fleetwood Mac, Mark-Almond Band, The Wallflowers, Blood Sweat & Tears, Tom Petty & Heartbreakers and Jefferson Airplane...

In their third episode of “Street Legal,” seniors Tate Ledbetter and Tyler Valencia interview Billy Stewart who is the shop foreman at Longo Toyota of Prosper about his experience in the automotive industry. The journalists of Eagle Nation Online and the Prosper Auto Tech team plan to team up for more episodes and coverage of future events. Vincent Seymour leads the Auto Tech program. Lisa Roskens advises the journalists of ENO.

"A winter's day in a deep and dark December,  I am aloneGazing from my window to the streets belowOn a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snowI am a rock, I am an islandAnd a rock feels no painAnd an island never cries"Here in SoCal it doesn't feel like Winter and I'm not an Island or a Rock so we can all enjoy the music together. Joining us are Graham Parker, Lonnie Mack, Linda Ronstadt, Sandy Denny, Dave Mason, Dire Straits, Seals & Crofts, Frank Sinatra, Booker T & The MG's, Steve Miller Band, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, Jackson Browne w Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Billy Stewart, Billie Holiday, George Benson, The Four Tops, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, Chuck Berry, The McCoys, Joe Jackson, Herbie Mann, The Supremes, Everly Bothers and Simon & Garfunkel...

Singles Going Around- All Night LongYou ever want to play your records all night long? Me too. This podcast is about just that.The Yardbirds- "Train Kept A Rollin"Joe Tex- "She's Mine"Harold Allen & J.T. Watts- "I'm Setting You Free"Booker T & The M.G.s- "Mo Onions"Link Wray- "Run Boy Run"The Kinks- "Got Love If You Want It"The Blonde Bomber- "Strollie Bun"Eddie Bo- "Oh-Oh"Bo Diddley- "Quick Draw"Bill Sherrell- "Kool Kat"Link Wray- "Mashed Potato Party"Billy Stewart- "Summertime"The Yardbirds- "I'm A Man"Robert Parker- "All Nite Long Pt. 2"Booker T & The MG's- "Coming Home Baby"*All vinyl

Cuarta entrega dedicada a picotear en la colección “The Mod Jazz Series” (Ace Records).(Foto del podcast; Johnny Griffin)Playlist;(sintonía) FREDDIE McCOY “Collard greens”KING CURTIS “Memphis soul stew”MEL TORME “Right now”RAY CHARLES “Heartbreaker”JOHNNY GRIFFIN and MATTHEW GEE and THE SOUL GROOVERS “Twist City”KAREN HERNANDEZ “I heard it through the grapevine”BILLY STEWART “Secret love”TRINI LOPEZ “Unchain my heart”ANDY WILLIAMS “House of bamboo”GOOGIE RENÉ and ORCHESTRA “Caesar’s pad”TAMIKO JONES and HERBIE MANN “The sidewinder”JEAN DUSHON “Feeling good”EDDIE JEFFERSON “Psychedelic Sally”FRANK FROST “My back scratcher”LES MCCANN “Burnin’ coal”MOSE ALLISON “Wild man on the loose”DAVE PIKE “Jet set”LEE JONES and THE UNFORGOTTEN TWO “I got to see my baby (part 2)”JACKIE IVORY “Do it to death”Escuchar audio

'Birds and a white light' Brian Eno, Louis MacNeice, Kutiman, Chloé Lexia Worthington, Cleo Sol, Susan Orlean, Case, Lang & Veirs, Billy Stewart, La Chorale Des Enfants De L'Opera De Paris, Portishead, Rosinha De Valencia, The Roches

Two more action-packed hours of soul, R&B, and other 1960s dance tunes! You'll hear Gene Chandler, The Velvelettes, Lou Johnson, James Carr, J.J. Barnes, Tina Britt, Billy Stewart, Bobby Hebb, two by Chubby Checker, a silly thing about The Beatles, Northern Soul classics by The Valentines and Tony Clarke, plus one from somebody just called Tim? Originally broadcast September 17, 2023 Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatMitty Collier / Do It With ConfidenceThe Human Beinz / Nobody But MeOtis Redding / Don't Mess With CupidThe Velvelettes / These Things Will Keep Me Loving YouGene Chandler / A Song Called SoulThe Impressions / You've Been Cheatin'Smokey Johnson / I Can't Help It (Part 1)Lynn Martini & the Jolly Jax / NowThe Valentines / BreakawayTony Clarke / Landslide Louis Curry / I'll Try Again TomorrowLong John Baldry / Let Him Go (And Let Me Love You)Lou Johnson / If I Never Get To Love YouBilly Stewart / SummertimeErnie K-Doe / Mother In LawPaul Revere & The Raiders / Have Love, Will TravelChubby Checker / Back In The U.S.S.R.The Contours / Just a Little MisunderstandingThe Olympics / Do the Slauson ShuffleEdwin Starr / Agent Double-O-SoulJackie Wilson And Count Basie / Chain GangChubby Checker / (At the) DiscothequeJimmy George / It Was Fun While it LastedJ. J. Barnes / Real HumdingerRay Charles / If You Were MineJames Carr / That's What I Want To KnowThe Best Of Both Worlds / Moma Bakes BuiscuitsLittle Carl Carlton / Competition Ain't Nothin'Gerry and the Pacemakers / JambalayaMartha & The Vandellas / One Way OutTina Britt / LookThe Elgins / Heaven Must Have Sent YouThe Patty Cakes / I Understand Them (A Love Song to The Beatles)Bobby Hebb / Love, Love, LoveTim / I Need Your LoveDobie Gray / Out on the FloorLen Barry / 1-2-3 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

THE BILLY STEWART DISCOGRAPHYSingles:Chess 1625: "Billy's Blues" / "Billy's Blues"Argo 5256: "Billy's Blues" / "Billy's Blues"Okeh 4-7095: "Baby, You're My Only Love" / "Billy's Heartache" (1957 with Bo Diddley, backed by The "Marquees")Chess 1820: "Reap What You Sow" / "Fat Boy" (1962) – No. 18 R&B, No. 79 popChess 1835: "True Fine Lovin'" / "Wedding Bells" (1962)Chess 1852: "Scramble" / "Oh My, What Can the Matter Be" (1963)Chess 1868: "Strange Feeling" / "Sugar and Spice" (1963) – No. 25 R&B, No. 70 popChess 1888: "A Fat Boy Can Cry" / "Count Me Out" (1964)Chess 1905: "Tell It Like It Is" / "My Sweet Senorita" (1964)Chess 1922: "I Do Love You" / "Keep Loving" (1965) – No. 6 R&B, No. 26 popChess 1932: "Sitting in the Park" / "Once Again" (1965) – No. 4 R&B, No. 24 popChess 1941: "How Nice It Is" / "No Girl" (1965)Chess 1948: "Because I Love You" / "Mountain of Love" (1965)Chess 1960: "Love Me" / "Why Am I Lonely" (1966) – No. 38 R&BChess 1966: "Summertime" / "To Love, to Love" (1966) – No. 7 R&B, #10 popChess 1978: "Secret Love" / "Look Back and Smile" (1967) – No. 11 R&B, No. 29 popChess 1991: "Every Day I Have the Blues" / "Ol' Man River" (1967) – No. 41 R&B, No. 79 popChess 2002: "Cross My Heart" / "Why (Do I Love You So)?" (1968) – No. 34 R&B, No. 86 pop / No. 49 R&BChess 2053: "Tell Me the Truth" / "What Have I Done?" (1968) – No. 48 R&BChess 2063: "I'm In Love" / "Crazy 'Bout You, Baby" (1969)Chess 2080: "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" / "We'll Always Be Together" (1969)Albums:Chess 1496: I Do Love You (1965) (Billboard No. 97)Chess 1499: Unbelievable (1966) (Billboard No. 138)Chess 1513: Billy Stewart Teaches Old Standards New Tricks (1967)Chess 1540: Cross My Heart (1969)Chess 1547: Remembered (1970)Sugar Hill/Chess CH-8401: The Greatest Sides (1982)

It is that time of year again -- the beginning of summer and in the U.S., Independence Day. The July 4th holiday is celebrated in many ways, including in song, like the one that starts off this podcast, Billy Stewart's version of the George Gershwin and Edward Dubose Heyward classic “Summertime”. With over 25,000 versions recorded in its now almost 90 year history, it is the most recorded song in the world. What are your favorite songs for the summer and for the holiday? We talk about the abundance of summertime and July 4th soundtrack possibilities in this episode, as we go back in time to a conversation I had on public radio station WNCW on my old show What It Is, a music talk show that featured a rotating roster of guests -- writers, music artists, DJs from WNCW and elsewhere, and music professionals. What It Is aired from 2007 to 2012, and this episode is from 2010, with the late Jeff Eason, along with then-WNCW host Zak Sitter, and Carol Rifkin, who continues to host the old time music show This Old Porch on WNCW on Sunday afternoons. Fireworks! (photo: Jill Wellington) Songs heard in this episode:“Summertime” by Billy Stewart“Rock Steady” by Aretha Franklin, excerpt“The Star Spangled Banner” by Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, from Flight Of The Cosmic HippoThanks for dropping by, and we are even more grateful whenever you share this with someone. Sharing in person is tops, but please also follow us on your podcast platform of choice, and then it will only take a minute to give it a top rating and, where it is an option, a review. It makes a great impact! Great ratings, and reviews especially, will make Southern Songs and Stories and the artists it profiles more likely to find a home with more fans. This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available here. You can also hear new episodes of this podcast on Bluegrass Planet Radio here. Thanks to Corrie Askew for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. This is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it. — Joe Kendrick

Originally Broadcast April 9, 2023 James has been checking out the flip sides of a few of his records, and finding great stuff he didn't know was back there! Uwe brings a few great Louisville and Kentucky records. You'll hear tunes from the Flirtations, Freddie Scott, Christine Cooper, The Miracles, Lou Johnson, Billy Stewart, James Carr, Don Bryant, and the Osmonds?! Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatEdwin Starr / Agent Double-O-SoulJimmy Norman / I Don't Love You No More (I Don't Care About You)The Flirtations / How Can You Tell Me?The Miracles / You're So Fine and SweetGayle Haness / We Got A Thing Going BabyKevin McQuinn / Ev'ry Step Of The WayFreddie Scott / (You) Got What I NeedBig Fred & The Ovations / Kinda GrooveyThe Spectrum / Portobello RoadThe Temptashuns / Strawberry ManGene Chandler / Nothing Can Stop MeLittle Anthony and The Imperials / Hurt So BadLily Fields / A Boy In A Man's WorldThe Flaming Ember / Westbound #9Billy Stewart / Ol' Man RiverJimmy James & The Vagabonds / Hi-Diddley Dee Dum Dum (It's A Good Feelin')Don Bryant / Coming On StrongEmotions / Every ManThe Original Emotions / You're A Better Man Then IThe Fabulous Shades / Mr. PitifulRonnie Milsap / A Thousand Miles from NowhereJimmy Norman / This I Beg of YouThe Miracles / You Really Got A Hold On MeThe Temptations / Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)The Miracles / Happy LandingThe Osmonds / Yo-YoChristine Cooper / S. O. S. (Heart In Distress)Lou Johnson / UnsatisfiedJimmy Holiday / I've Been Done WrongCosmo / You Gotta DanceBilly Stewart / Every Day I Have the BluesJames Carr / That's What I Want To KnowRusell Evans & the Nite Hawks / Send Me Some CornbreadThe Original Playboys / Now That I'm SomebodyThe Exciters / Tell HimSoul, Inc. / 727 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Goalkeeper Billy Stewart only played two and a half games for Chesterfield but they were crackers, featuring in the famous 5-2 playoff game vs Mansfield and the Wembley final vs Bury. Billy also had a long association with Chester as a player and has also coached every age group of goalkeeper at Liverpool. He joined me to talk about his long career as a player, move into coaching, and washing Steve Ogrizovic's mammoth kit!

| So Many Ways  | Billy Griffin  | 1983 | The Mac  | West Love feat. King George  | 2022 | Lord Thank You  | Incomparable Reggie Boone  | 2013 | Miss Independent  | TK Soul feat. Willie Clayton  | 2023 | Feels Good To Feel Good (feat. Sheila Hutchinson)  | Garry Glenn  | 1987 | Love Don't Get No Better (feat. Brenda J. Nelson)  | Gavin Christopher  | 1988 | (I'm Not Ready To) Settle Down  | The Cheers  | 1967 | Come Around  | Chantay Savage  | 1999 | I'm Willing  | Chantay Savage  | 1996 | Don't Say No (feat. Brenda J. Nelson)  | The Manhattans  | 1985 | Love Is So Good When You're Stealing It  | Z.Z. Hill  | 1978 | This Time They Told The Truth  | Z.Z. Hill  | 1978 | This Love Is Forever  | Rebbie Jackson  | 1988 | Some Days Were Meant For Rain  | Tower Of Power  | 1988 | Guess I'll Never  | Ronnie Walker  | 2020 | Rain (feat. 5 Young Men)  | LV  | 2000 | What Have I Done?  | Billy Stewart  | 1968 | Is This True Love  | Howard Hewett  | 2007 | Soulful Love  | The Impressions  | 1969 | A Thousand Miles Away  | William Hart (of The Delfonics)  | 1982 | I Need To Know  | Ledisi  | 2023 | When The Love Is Gone  | Soul Collective  | 2023 | UBUBU  | WRLDFMS Tony Williams  | 2023 | Heart Full Of Love  | Aaron Frazer  | 2022 | Crazy  | Danny Boy  | 2023 | Slip & Slide  | Methrone  | 2023 | When Love Calls  | Methrone  | 2023 | Let Us  | The Edge Of Daybreak  | 1979 | Our Love  | The Edge Of Daybreak  | 1979

Oldies with Some Goodies is all about our Rock N Roll past, includes Frank Ballard, Elvis Presley, Lesley Gore, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, Frankie Valli, Billy Stewart, The Champs, Bobby Darin, Junior Walker & The Allstars, Brian Setzer & The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Simon & Garfunkel, Little Anthony & The Imperials, Martha & The Vandellas and Gary U.S. Bonds with Jeff Beck. (and if you like this go down and look for Oldies with Some Goodies 2022 - Rock N Roll)

W odcinku #31 Pick Please Podcast “wyjeżdżamy” do Chicago by opowiedzieć o jednej z najważniejszych wytwórni w historii muzyki - Chess Records. Czemu tak ważna? Bo śmiemy uważać, że rocka w Stanach Zjednoczonych, bez tej wytwórni (jej artystów i wizjonerów za sterami), by nie było

It's summertime . . . and the livin' is easy. So sit back with your beverage of choice and enjoy this special summer episode, as Deep Cuts: Lost and Found celebrates the sounds of summer and debuts Season 2 of their podcast. Featuring The Polyphonic Spree, The Meters, Billy Stewart, X, Krhruangbin, Buffalo Tom and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

hey Guys! so I have some exciting news for you. the first single off my second EP is coming out in October, so please do follow my artist page on Spotify so that way you can get notified when the song comes out. My artist name is Sam L. Williams. this week I dive into the history behind last week's artist and song which was Billy Stewart's Sitting In The Park. here I talk about the history behind the label this song was released on, plus the history behind the label's recording studio plus the musicians that played on their records. here's the link to last week's song just in case you wanted to listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g14VdGTDt64 don't forget to also follow me & reach out to me on Instagram And Tik Tok right here: https://www.instagram.com/iheartoldies/ https://www.tiktok.com/@iheartoldies?fromUrl=%2Fiheartoldies&lang=en Please do also check out the Last EP I put out last year as well. I love this EP so much, and you'll love the next one as well, but you will want to prepare yourself for the next one by listening to this one. if you like the songs on here, please email me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also follow me and reach out to me on Instagram @iheartoldies: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/samlwilliams/turquoise-apricot don't forget to also check out the official Spotify and YouTube playlists for this podcast. here you'll be able to find all of the songs that I have talked about on my show so far including some of the ones that I have mentioned in interview episodes of this podcast. if you enjoyed these playlists and you would like to suggest to me songs I should talk about next on my podcast that I haven't yet, please email me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also reach out to me on Instagram @iheartoldies: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/21f3uBS6kU4hUF6QAC5JMj https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g14VdGTDt64&list=PL66sgq_GAmRcXy8yKZJfVmAD14HUYj7Nf&index=136 please do also check out the two interviews I did last year with Honk Magazine and ShoutoutLA. would love it if you could read those and you could let me know your thoughts on them. I revealed a lot about myself in these interviews and I hope you found them educational about me and if you would like to meet me if you are based in LA, please feel free to reach out to me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also follow me and reach out to me on Instagram and Tik Tok @iheartoldies: https://honkmagazine.com/sam-l-williams-talks-about-his-career-path-influence-and-new-music/ https://shoutoutla.com/meet-sam-l-williams-musician-songwriter-podcast-host/ don't forge to also check out the official Redbubble Merch store for this podcast. if you enjoyed it and liked all of the merch items plus the prices of each item in the store, definitely email me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also follow me and reach out to me on instagram and Tik tok @iheartoldies: https://www.redbubble.com/people/60ssam95/works/36806158-keep-things-groovy?asc=u&ref=recent-owner also, don't forget to check out the premium subscription version of this podcast. you will hear all of the current interviews that I'm doing for it, and I just dropped my seventh premium interview (part two with Don Dannemann of the Cyrkle) and I will have one more coming out soon. here's the link to where you can sign up right here: https://themillennialthrowbackmachine.supercast.com don't forget to also check out my last music video. my next one is in the works. definitely let me know whatcha think of it. my email is samltwilli@icloud.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTbmSoW6RyY if you learned a lot about Billy Stewart and Chess Records from listening to this episode of this podcast and your a younger person, please email me at samltwilli@icloud.com and I'll see you next time.

Nos zambullimos en las valijas años 60 del legendario sello Chess de Chicago en busca de cartuchos de Rhythm n’ Soul y aderezando la sesión con jazz y otros sonidos de club. Playlist; ETTA JAMES “Mellow fellow” MITTY COLLIER “Get out” MARLENA SHAW “Let’s wade in the water” KOKO TAYLOR “Fire” KIP ANDERSON “A knife and a fork” BROTHER JACK McDUFF “Ain’t it” BOBBY MOORE AND THE RHYTHM ACES “Hey Mr DJ” LITTLE MILTON “Grits ain’t groceries” MUDDY WATERS “Messin’ with the man” BO DIDDLEY “Ooh baby” TOMMY TUCKER “Hi heel sneakers” JAMO THOMAS “Must I holler” RAMSEY LEWIS “Function and the junction” BILLY STEWART “Summertime” LOU DONALDSON “Musty rusty” SUGAR PIE DESANTO “I don’t wanna fuss” Escuchar audio

Hey Guys! so I have some exciting news for you. My next music video is getting worked on as we speak. the videographer is figuring out what additional footage needs to be shot for the longer version of the song we re recorded. other then that, no other music related news for me at the moment. if something comes up for me by next week I will be sure to let you all know about that. for now, as per usual fashion, I did something quite different this week for the podcast vs what I did last week. I dug into Chicago Soul again and reviewed quite a gem of a record. here's the link to that song just in case you wanted to listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g14VdGTDt64 Don't forget to follow me & reach out to me on Instagram @ Tik Tok as well right here: https://www.instagram.com/iheartoldies/ https://www.tiktok.com/@iheartoldies Please do check out the last EP I put out last year as well. i put a lot of hard work into this EP and I think you'll really enjoy it. here's the link and definitely let me know your thoughts on it at samltwilli@icloud.com: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/samlwilliams/turquoise-apricot don't forget to also check out the two interviews I did last year with Honk Magazine and ShoutoutLA. hopefully I'll do more interviews soon. I reveal a lot about myself in these interviews, and you will definitely learn a lot about me after reading them. hope you enjoy them, definitely let me know whatcha think of them at samltwilli@icloud.com: https://shoutoutla.com/meet-sam-l-williams-musician-songwriter-podcast-host/ https://honkmagazine.com/sam-l-williams-talks-about-his-career-path-influence-and-new-music/ don't forge to also check out the premium subscription version of this podcast. here you'll be able to find all of these super cool interviews that I"m doing, plus you'll get a sneak peak of my next EP. here's the link just in case you are interested in signing up for it. I have two cool interviews coming out soon. one with Terry Manning, the other with Don Dannemann: https://themillennialthrowbackmachine.supercast.com don't forget to also check out the official Spotify and Youtube playlists for this podcast. here you'll be able to find all of the songs I have talked about on my show so far including from some past interviews before they went premium. If you have any suggestions for songs I should talk about next on my podcast that I haven't yet, please send those ideas to me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also reach out to me with your song ideas I should cover on IG @iheartoldies: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/21f3uBS6kU4hUF6QAC5JMj https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS1sYR7xky8&list=PL66sgq_GAmRcXy8yKZJfVmAD14HUYj7Nf also please do check out the official Redbubble Merch Store for this podcast. here you'll be able to find all of the really cool and great looking online merch for this podcast. and if you like the logo and would like to let me know your thoughts on the logo and the prices of each item in the store, please do email me at samltwilli@icloud.com or you can also reach out to me on IG @iheartoldies: https://www.redbubble.com/people/60ssam95/works/36806158-keep-things-groovy?asc=u&ref=recent-owner please do also check out my last music video. trust me, the next one is on the way and it will come out soon. if you liked this music video, please email me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also reach out to me on Instagram and Tik Tok @iheartoldies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTbmSoW6RyY If you fell in love with this song and you have never heard it before and your a millennial/Gen Z person and you discovered this song through me, please do email me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also reach out to me on Instagram and Tik Tok @iheartoldies. more exciting music updates for you guys soon. things are happening.

Air Week: August 1-7, 2022 Early Billy Stewart & R&B Jail Songs Many 1960s soul legends had their start in 1950s R&B and this week, the “JukeIn The Back” takes a listen to Billy Stewart's early records for the Chess and Okeh labels. You can really hear Stewart's distinctive singing style develop on his early […]

Fuego en la Pista de Baile, los éxitos y las novedades mas underground en www.ipopfm.com, cada miércoles de 20 a 21 horas. Hoy te invitamos a un programa variado y cargado de ska y sus variedades, únete! Déjate seducir por el programa más underground de iPOPfm. Déjate seducir por Fuego En La Pista de Baile! Han sonado: 1. The Danleers – One Summer Night 2. Laika and The Cosmonauts - Floating 3. The Surfaris – I Want To Take a Trip to The Island 4. Joe Jones – California Sun 5. Billy Stewart – Summertime 6. Ray Baretto – Together 7. Sly and The Family Stone – Sing a Simple Song 8. Joe Cocker – Summer in The City 9. Larry & The Loafers – Let’s Go To The Beach 10. Siniestro Total – Rock en Samil 11. La Inquisición – Verano 12. The Clash – Safe European Home 13. Al Barry – Morning Sun 14. The Skaooters – Summer Ska 15. The Cabrians y Fermín Muguruza – Welcome To Turistan 16. The Last – Every Summer Day 17. The Speedways – Just Another Regular Summer 18. Carolina Durante – Moreno de Contrabando 19. Carolina Durante – En Verano, Ornitofilia 20. Superchunck – Endless Summer

| Saturday  | 03:56  | Norman Bradley | I Ain't Getting Over You  | 03:41  | Tilly And The Graces | Go Now  | 03:34  | Tilly And The Graces | Where Is Your Woman Tonight  | 04:45  | Johnnie Taylor | Tranquility  | 06:09  | Al Johnson | I'm In Love  | 02:50  | Len Woods | Together  | 02:50  | The Disciples Of Soul | So Good To Have You Home Again  | 02:56  | The Mystiques | Loving You The Best I Can  | 04:38  | Marlo Wells | If There's Anybody Here  | 04:15  | Jr Blu feat. Big Baby | You Don't Know How Much I Love You  | 04:02  | KB Soul | Go Back  | 03:36  | Anthony Lofties | Heavenly Body  | 04:27  | The Chi-Lites | I Wanna Love You (Hey Boy)  | 03:19  | Gwynn Michaels | I'll Answer You With Love  | 04:03  | Richie Merritt | Try Me  | 03:27  | Jali | Bless My Soul  | 03:16  | Skip Mahoney And The Casuals | Do It Again  | 03:58  | Norman Bradley | Whole Lotta Your Love  | 03:38  | Lee Hurst | This Kind Of Love  | 04:10  | TanQueray Hayward | Everybody Needs Somebody Sometime  | 03:50  | Vel Omarr | Check Me Out  | 03:26  | Smith Brothers | Fell In Love  | 03:56  | Levelle feat. Anthony Hamilton | You've Made Me So Very Happy  | 05:07  | Smokey Robinson & The Miracles | I'm Gonna Be Your Lover (Tonight)  | 05:12  | Meli'sa Morgan | Sitting In The Park  | 03:13  | Billy Stewart | Gotta Find Her  | 02:35  | Ambassadors Of Soul | Where Has All The Love Gone  | 05:38  | Lenny Reynolds Jr | I'm So Lonely  | 03:21  | The Barons | Find A New Lover  | 03:57  | Stanley Sugarman Brown

"Now the bricks lay on Grand Street Where the neon madmen climbThey all fall there so perfectly, it all seems so well timedAnd here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what priceYou have to pay to get out of going through all these things twiceOh, Mama, is this really the end..."No, its actually the beginning. Please join me for the Saturday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing, I'll be serving up tasty morsels from The Smiths, Foreigner, Neil Diamond, Genesis, The Rolling Stones, Sting, Stan Getz, Jackson Browne, Bill Withers, Dave Mason, Dusty Springfield, The Korgis, Joe Cocker, Steve Miller Band, Syndicate Of Sound, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Hall & Oates, Stevie Wonder, Yes, Foreigner, Billy Stewart and Bob Dylan.

Aah tätä vapauden tunnetta! Tuuli hulmuttaa partaa avoautossa ja tee kiehuu asuntovaunussa, kun Rock Around The Blog perehtyy hyvän mielen kesäbiiseihin. Oman elämänsä karavaanarihippeinä ja Crockett & Tubbsina studiossa kirmaavat Sami Ruokangas ja Pauli Kauppila. Kesäbiisien esittäjinä ovat tällä kertaa The Who, Cheap Trick, Grizfolk ja The Night Flight Orchestra. Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3iECpTLv8rXX3A4wOID2mO?si=e1b2804bf6404081 Mukava kesäyön taikaa nauttimassa ovat myös Reijo Taipale, Unto Mononen, Y&T, Billy Stewart, Sam Cooke, The Zombies, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, John Entwistle, Beatles, ELO, Steely Dan, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne, Robin Zander, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Bob Marley, Adam Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Toto, Doobie Brothers, Björn Strid, Fleetwood Mac, Loverboy, Blue Öyster Cult, Fandango, KISS, Genesis, Yes, Don Johnson, James ”Sonny” Crockett, Ricardo ”Rico” Tubbs, Sebastian Fritze ja Fredrik Eriksson.

"The autumn wind and the winter winds, they have come and goneAnd still the days, those lonely days, they go on and onAnd guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never endMy fickle friend, the summer windThe summer wind, warm summer wind"...Yes, on this longest day of the year, join me for some cool sounds on the Sunday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing as we celebrate Summer, Dads and more...I'll be serving up tasty morsels from Larry Coryell, Melanie, Buffalo Springfield, The Kinks, Richie Havens, Chewy Marble, Laura Nyro, Cat Stevens, John Klemmer, Warren Zevon, Foo Fighters, Paul Simon, Mama's & Papas, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Stewart, Billy Joel, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Coldplay, Eric Clapton, Bob Lind, Stan Getz with Astrud Gilberto, Marc Cohn, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch, Rufus Wainwright, Judy Collins, Aztec Two Step, Tim Hardin, Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra...

Uur 1 1. You belong to me – Jo Stafford 2. Veilig achterop – Paul van Vliet 3. The violins of hope – Sunshine Cleaners 4. Kanta helele – Izaline Calister 5. Sitting in the park – Billy Stewart 6. Als je overmorgen oud bent – Ricky Koole 7. Lonely places – Rose City Band 8. Back to the garden – Bertolf 9. Duncan – Paul Simon 10. Il ponte – Ornella Vanoni 11. Half april – Daniel Lohues 12. Intermission music – Beady Belle & Jamie Cullum 13. I’m checkin’ out goombye – Catherine Russell 14. La montagne – André Loppe Uur 2 1. You are here – David Olney 2. Vagabond shoes – Vic Damone 3. Te ressembler – Francis Cabrel 4. Huiselijk geluk – Kiki Schippers 5. Goodbye blue sky – Pink Floyd 6. Lule lule – Barcelona Gipsy Balkan Orchestra 7. Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing – Stevie Wonder 8. De tijd dringt – Kommil Foo 9. It never entered my mind – Marry Coughlan 10. It’s a grand night for singing – Pat Boone, Bobby Darin e.a. 11. Why worry – The BlueBirds feat. Leonie Meijer 12. Budapest – George Ezra 13. Yo no se – Alex Cuba 14. Genstertje – Bart Peeters

"BILLY STEWART DOCUMENTARY COMING TO PBS":https://bestclassicbands.com/billy-stewart-documentary-pbs-2-3-21/

Gershwin’s Summertime is the most recorded song in historySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gershwin's Summertime is the most recorded song in history See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hitch-Hike” by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown’s defining artists. 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 “Any Other Way” by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye’s later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye’s music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note — this week’s episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don’t think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you’re unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we’re going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We’re going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We’re going to look at “Hitch-Hike”, and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] One thing we’ve not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn’t fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn’t stay long in the Air Force either — he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he’d faked, with his honourable discharge stating “Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority”. Back in Washington DC, where he’d grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees — in later years, Gaye would state that he’d come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn’t heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead — Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley’s work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley’s band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, “Wyatt Earp”, be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley’s band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We’ve encountered Stewart briefly before — his first single, “Billy’s Blues”, was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for “Love is Strange”, and he played piano in Diddley’s band. With Diddley’s band and the Marquees he recorded “Billy’s Heartache”: [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Heartache”] However, the Marquees’ first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group’s members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley’s driver, and that was to lead to the group’s second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like “Diddley Daddy”: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group’s tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called “blow harmony”, getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, “whoo” sounds rather than the harder-edged “doo” sounds that most doo-wop groups used — Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them “gang groups”. He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well — David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, “Almost Grown” and “Back in the USA”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Back in the USA”] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note — being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well — like that he really didn’t enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn’t want to be on the stage at all — he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, “Mama Loochie”, had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loochie”] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was “Twelve Months of the Year”, an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments of Love”. On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Twelve Months of the Year”] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career — and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey — and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] Marvin had come with Harvey — he’d signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey’s label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn’t sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing “Mr. Sandman” at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent — he saw Fuqua as a father figure — but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy’s sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn’t see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss’ sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family — and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin’s career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat “King” Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como — he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that “I always felt like my personality and Perry’s had a lot in common”. They eventually compromised — Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”, had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn’t doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an “e” to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word “gay” was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin’s sexuality which he didn’t want to encourage. He did like to wear women’s clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn’t entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn’t want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women’s clothing, and tied in with Marvin’s wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the “e”, as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin’s first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio — he played on a record we’ve already looked at, “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues” by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues”] And on “That’s What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, “That’s What Girls are Made For”] And he both co-wrote and played drums on “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Beechwood 4-5789”] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson — everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin’s own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy’s encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  — if he hadn’t given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin’s attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school — a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a “basic jazz feeling”, and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles’ flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record — Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn’t cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”, the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”] This was a real concern for him. He would later say “Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give ’em the funk they wanted. It wasn’t my first choice, but there’s integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter.” He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star — specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder’s performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he’d get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] “Hitch-Hike” became Gaye’s first real crossover hit — it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he’d made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand’s audiences — we’re still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin’s version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording — this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you’ll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Hitch-Hike”] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover “Hitch-Hike”, they were far from the only ones — it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems — at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he’d bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn’t matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter — and the next time we look at him, it’ll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Hitch-Hike" by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown's defining artists. 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 "Any Other Way" by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye's later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye's music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note -- this week's episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don't think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you're unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we're going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We're going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We're going to look at "Hitch-Hike", and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] One thing we've not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn't fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn't stay long in the Air Force either -- he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he'd faked, with his honourable discharge stating "Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority". Back in Washington DC, where he'd grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees -- in later years, Gaye would state that he'd come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn't heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead -- Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley's work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley's band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, "Wyatt Earp", be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley's band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We've encountered Stewart briefly before -- his first single, "Billy's Blues", was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for "Love is Strange", and he played piano in Diddley's band. With Diddley's band and the Marquees he recorded "Billy's Heartache": [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache"] However, the Marquees' first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group's members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley's driver, and that was to lead to the group's second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like "Diddley Daddy": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] Harvey Fuqua, the group's leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group's tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called "blow harmony", getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, "whoo" sounds rather than the harder-edged "doo" sounds that most doo-wop groups used -- Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them "gang groups". He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well -- David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, "Almost Grown" and "Back in the USA": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA"] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note -- being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well -- like that he really didn't enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn't want to be on the stage at all -- he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, "Mama Loochie", had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie"] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was "Twelve Months of the Year", an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows' "Ten Commandments of Love". On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year"] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career -- and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey -- and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] Marvin had come with Harvey -- he'd signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey's label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn't sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing "Mr. Sandman" at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent -- he saw Fuqua as a father figure -- but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy's sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn't see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss' sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family -- and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin's career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat "King" Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como -- he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that "I always felt like my personality and Perry's had a lot in common". They eventually compromised -- Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide", had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide"] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn't doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an "e" to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word "gay" was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin's sexuality which he didn't want to encourage. He did like to wear women's clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn't entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn't want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women's clothing, and tied in with Marvin's wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the "e", as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin's first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio -- he played on a record we've already looked at, "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues" by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues"] And on "That's What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For"] And he both co-wrote and played drums on "Beechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789"] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson -- everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin's own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy's encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  -- if he hadn't given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin's attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school -- a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a "basic jazz feeling", and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles' flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record -- Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn't cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing "What Kind of Fool Am I?", the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I?"] This was a real concern for him. He would later say "Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give 'em the funk they wanted. It wasn't my first choice, but there's integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter." He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star -- specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder's performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he'd get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] "Hitch-Hike" became Gaye's first real crossover hit -- it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he'd made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand's audiences -- we're still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin's version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording -- this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you'll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover "Hitch-Hike", they were far from the only ones -- it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems -- at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he'd bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn't matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter -- and the next time we look at him, it'll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

De leukste zomerhits zijn nummers die helemaal geen zomerhit zijn, maar die wel That Summer Feeling oproepen. Liedjes die je op een zonnige dag in een cabrio meezingt, met je haren in de wind. Zoals You On My Mind van Swing Out Sister. Of Day Go By van Evan Johns. Verder géén Summertime van Billy Stewart,maar wel de versie van Charlie Parker. En wat is Hubert's Ultieme Zomerhit? Daarvoor zul je toch moeten luisteren...

Podcast Featuring Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Billy Stewart, Buju Banton, J Balvin, Fabiano Do Nascimento, Slide Hampton Octet, Eddie Kendricks, Red Prysock, Ahmad Jamal Trio, and Machine Gun Kelly! FIND US ON: ITUNES 

Today's program features tuneage from (not in order of appearance) Be Bop Deluxe, Savoy Brown, Tom Waits, Santana, Fleetwood Mac, Simon & Garfunkel, Stefan Grappelli w McCoy Tyner, John Mayalls Bluesbreakers, Cat Stevens, Billy Stewart, Yardbirds, Renaissance, Randy Newman, Led Zeppelin, Paul Simon, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Donovan, Ten Years After, Chewy Marble, Jethro Tull, Sounds Orchestral, Humble Pie, Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra.

EP40 - Bio-physics graduate, Tracy Ng, details her journey of pursuing fulfillment through her career and her spiritual journey. Music:"Hey Ma" by Bon Iver"Cross My Heart" by Billy Stewart"Get Away" by J.Cole"True Colors" by Justin Timberlake and Anna KendrickVerse of the week produced by Armando Catter

On this week's episode, DJ Dave is featuring music by Selena Gomez, Mario Lanza, Billy Stewart, France Gall, Ennio Morricone, Donna Summer, Jose Feliciano with the Les Paul Trio, Everclear, Hermans Hermits and Shelley Fabares, Joe Pass, The Guess Who, and Clairo! SUBSCRIBE: iTunes FACEBOOK: Music First Podcast INSTAGRAM: MusicFirstPodcast EMAIL: MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

Today's program features tuneage from John Lennon, Elton John, David Bowie, Queen, Bo Deans, Wallflowers, Cars, Randy Newman, Fever Tree, William Ackerman, Led Zeppelin, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Billy Stewart, Dionne Warwick, Ben E King, Jefferson Airplane,  Electric Light Orchestra, Coldplay, Genesis, Cream, Chicago Transit Authority, Doors, Santana & Earth Wind & Fire…

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "Ain't Nobody's Business" by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley's side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia's releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we're going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won't properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that's a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure -- a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we're looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, "If You See Mary Lee"] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, "Billy's Blues", featured both Diddley and Diddley's guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, "Billy's Blues"] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker's birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn't know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: "Blues After Hours"] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton's Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, "I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then." Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker's comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on "Need Your Love So Bad" by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, "Need Your Love So Bad"] That's some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we've talked about in previous episodes. That's him on guitar on "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean": [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] And "Shake, Rattle, and Roll": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] and "Money Honey" [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Money Honey"] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of "I Went to Your Wedding": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name "Little Sylvia" -- inspired by "Little Esther", who like her was making records for Savoy records -- and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like "I Went to Your Wedding" there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like "Drive, Daddy, Drive": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "Drive Daddy Drive"] That was the other side of the same single as "I Went to Your Wedding", and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she'd been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters -- nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia's manager. While Sylvia's career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson's idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one -- a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry -- at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success -- he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, "I'm So Glad". It's not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work -- just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, "Se De Boom Run Dun", while it's also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Se De Boom Run Dun"] Unsurprisingly, it didn't sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we've talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops -- usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers -- had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels -- their customers weren't interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren't shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn't buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his "Jump Man Jump": [Excerpt: Piano Red, "Jump Man Jump"] They hadn't had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic's sessions. Mickey and Sylvia's first single on Groove, "Walking in the Rain", had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Walking in the Rain"] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Just Walking in the Rain"] That's a totally different song, of course -- it's a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia's song tanked. They still didn't have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called "Love is Strange", and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley's band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he'd reused the licks he had used for "Billy's Blues" on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Love is Strange"] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play "Love is Strange" for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song's publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith's name made the credits, Williams' didn't, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn't surprise him that they'd missed Williams' name off. We'll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley's contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn't prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn't speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song -- Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley's demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker's lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange", spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, "Love is Strange" was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It's one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Love is Strange". All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Love is Strange"] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, "Love is Strange"] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, "probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world", and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Dearest"] But even though that wasn't a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly -- a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both "Love is Strange" and "Dearest" -- demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Dearest"] But "Dearest" was so obscure that when Holly's single came out, the song was titled "Umm Oh Yeah", and credited to "unknown" for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit... as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat "King" Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool -- who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn't been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record -- and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record -- Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken "Ike" vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren't the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia's recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn't want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: "South of France Blues"] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, "The Blues Suite". Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can't excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called "Mississippi Delta Dues", released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he'd looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It's an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues": [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Terraplane Blues"] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he's using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir's "Alabama Blues", rewritten as "Alabama March", which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Alabama March"] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included "Shame Shame Shame" for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, "Shame Shame Shame"] That's the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called "Footstompin'", into "Fame". Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called "Pillow Talk" that she'd written for Al Green, but which he'd turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, "Pillow Talk"] But I'm afraid we're going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia's biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband's gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock's cultural place.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.

FRIDAYS CRUCIAL CUTS 11AM-1PM EST 8AM-11AM PDT4PM-5PM BSTBombshell Radio​Earl Crown​ Crucial Cuts an award-winning, syndicated radio show that originates from Loyola University Radio in Baltimore. Earl Crown plays selections from his personal record collection, including the best of #soul, #garage, #reggae, #rocksteady, #punk, #classicrock, #glam, #funk, #Afrobeat, #jazz, and more. Repeats Saturdays 1am -3am EST 10pm-12pm PDT— with Earl Crown.FeaturingMF Doom, James Brown, Thundercat,The Moments, Brenda and the Tabulations, Aaron Neville, DelfonicsThe Radiants, Billy Stewart, Jan Bradley, Alton EllisBuzzcocks, Shannon Shaw, The Delmonas, Lee Hazlewood & Nancy SinatraThe Chants R & B , The Kinks, The Bad Roads, Frijid PinkBeach Boys, Ty Segall, Beastie Boys +++

The Saturday edition features tuneage (not in order of appearance) from Rare Earth, Billy Stewart, Donovan, Lighthouse, Beatles, Spanky & Our Gang, Small Faces, Lou Reed, Chicago, Genesis, Black Keys, Doors, Santana, Buckinghams, Jean Luc Ponty, The Who, Steely Dan, Love and much more...Plus my annual tribute to Baseball on this opening weekend of the 2019 Season.

Sam and Jay chat saké with Billy Stewart, co-owner of Denver's Colorado Sake Co. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Today's program features tuneage from Love, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, XTC, Hall & Oates, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, Return To Forever, Billy Joel, Blood Sweat & Tears, Beatles, Jose Feliciano, Mamas & Papas, Johnny Rivers, Glen Campbell, Spanky & Our Gang, Neil Diamond, Little Anthony, Billy Stewart, Leslie Gore, Circus Maximus, Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Dave Mason, Richie Havens, America, Batdorf & Rodney, Randy Newman, Tears For Fears, REM, The Band, Rolling Stones, John Lennon, The Smiths, Jethro Tull, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young & Derek & The Dominoes.

In de de aflevering van vandaag het ultieme zomergevoel in liedjes van Bobby Valentino, Georgie Fame en Billy Stewart. Maar ook obscure Northern én Spaanse soul plus de Sahara Blues van Tinariwen.

The first 3 hours of Today's program features our 13th Annual Sounds of Summer 4th Of July Holiday Special. Artists include The Jamies, Danleers, Ruby & The Romantics, Brian Hyland, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Robin Ward, The Shangri-Las, Gary "US" Bonds, Martha & The Vandellas, Jay & The Americans,The Sandals, Chantays, Surfaris, Hondells, Rip Chords, Ronnie & The Daytonas, Nelson Riddle, Mr Acker Bilk, Allan Sherman, Stan Getz w Astrud Gilberto, Drifters, Nat King Cole, Freddy Cannon, Bobby Rydell, Monkees, Grass Roots, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Standells, 5th Dimension, Young Rascals, War, Tommy James & The Shondells, The Association, Every Mothers Son, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, Manfred Mann, Jive Five, Syndicate Of Sound, Sonny & Cher, The Byrds, Rolling Stones, Troggs, Lovin' Spoonful, Dee Clark, Johnny Rivers, Billy Stewart, Christopher Cross, Critters and Cyrkle. Additional tuneage from Heart, Jefferson Starship, Tom Petty, David Bowie, Elton John, Love, The Beatles,The Who and Doors.

Today's program features our 11th annual trip back to "The Day The Music Died" February 3, 1959 and the music of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens & The Big Bopper. Additional tuneage from Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Billy Stewart, The Impressions, James Brown, Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell, Ben E King, Otis Redding, The Electric Flag, Rhinoceros, Janis Joplin, Blood Sweat & Tears, The Police, Pretenders, Rolling Stones, Faces, Humble Pie, Free, Grand Funk Railroad, Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, Jay & The Americans, The Shangri-Las, Angels, Essex, Exciters, Crystals, Tom Petty, Mr. Mister, Peter Gabriel, Tears For Fears, Joe Jackson, David Bowie, Elton John, Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake, Oasis and Bob Dylan.

Mark Wenner and his band The Nighthawks have been performing and recording for over 40 years. He did this with and along side an impressive list of blues and R & B note-worthies. Mark came up as a young man when rock & roll was perceived by older adults as the devil's music. It was a time, he notes, when when Elvis was in army, Jerry Lewis was banned, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead, Little Richard was immersed in church, Ray Charles was in jail, and Gene Vincent was crippled. It was at this time that Mark sensed a conspiracy of sorts, as radio began to market the likes of Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Older people hated rock & roll, and teachers would yell about its ills for an entire periods, Mark recalls. His response? He'd venture without the permission of his parents to DC's Howard Theater. Here he'd see The Motown Review, Otis Redding, James Brown and Marvin Gaye mentor Billy Stewart. It's no wonder that he fell in love with music, learned to play harp, and formed The Nighthawks in 1972. Read more... SHOW NOTES Nighthawks music on CD Baby Nighthawks music on iTunes Nighthawks.com Michael Streissguth Nighthawks on the Blue Highway documentary website Nighthawks on the Blue Highway DVD The Howard Theater EllerSoul Records

Mark Wenner and his band The Nighthawks have been performing and recording for over 40 years. He did this with and along side an impressive list of blues and R & B note-worthies. Mark came up as a young man when rock & roll was perceived by older adults as the devil's music. It was a time, he notes, when when Elvis was in army, Jerry Lewis was banned, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead, Little Richard was immersed in church, Ray Charles was in jail, and Gene Vincent was crippled. It was at this time that Mark sensed a conspiracy of sorts, as radio began to market the likes of Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Older people hated rock & roll, and teachers would yell about its ills for an entire periods, Mark recalls. His response? He'd venture without the permission of his parents to DC's Howard Theater. Here he'd see The Motown Review, Otis Redding, James Brown and Marvin Gaye mentor Billy Stewart. It's no wonder that he fell in love with music, learned to play harp, and formed The Nighthawks in 1972. Read more... SHOW NOTES Nighthawks music on CD Baby Nighthawks music on iTunes Nighthawks.com Michael Streissguth Nighthawks on the Blue Highway documentary website Nighthawks on the Blue Highway DVD The Howard Theater EllerSoul Records

Vic van de Reijt en Maarten Eilander hebben een speciale Summertime Special vandaag. Met als gast Mr Summertime himself Jimmy Tigges. Muziek van Billy Stewart, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, James Brown en Bert Heerink.

Episode 6 - Seven 7 inch Records Every Seven Days: 777 "Ghostface Soul" 1. Teddy Pendergrass - "Can't We Try" 2. The Sylvers - "Wish That I Could Talk To You" 3. Billy Stewart - "We'll Always Be Together" 4. Jackson 5 - "Maybe Tomorrow" 5. J Dilla - "Hi" 6. The Intruders - "Together" 7. Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savanah" Band - "Sunshower"

Today's program is an expanded edition and features the preeminent folk rock singer to emerge from the UK, Sandy Denny. Additional tuneage from Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, Blodwyn Pig, Jethro Tull, Blues Image, Foghat, Doobie Brothers, Ray Davies, Ian Hunter, Jayhawks, David Bowie, Ten Years After, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Shinedown, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Little Junior Parker, Willie Dixon, J. Geils Band, Little Walter, James Lee Stanley, Donovan, Richard Thompson, Richie Havens, Nilsson, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills & Nash, Eagles, Spirit, Chick Corea, Aretha Franklin, Billy Stewart, Circus Maximus, New Radicals, Danny & Dusty, Jan & Dean, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, John Prine, Buzzy Linhart, Michael Franks, Lizanne Knott, Ben Sidran, Paul Simon & Santana.

Chance the Rapper - “All We Got” Built to Spill - “Stop The Show” Oscar Sulley & The Uhuru Dance Band - “Bukom Mashie” Can - “Mushroom” Gregory Pepper & His Problems - “Drop The Plot” Souleymane Faye - “Teylulen” Odd Couple - “Nightcrawl” Pierre Kwenders - “Ani Kuni” Portugal. The Man - “Shade” Erykah Badu - “Bag Lady” Quilt - “Tired & Buttered” LA FONT - “Folgers Jingle” Cool Tara - “8 Out Of 10” Ramon Cordero - “Calzoncillo Largo” Japanese Breakfast - “The Woman Who Loves You” Imagination - “Just An Illusion” Owls - “Everyone Is My Friend” Otis Junior & Dr Dundiff - “Reaching” Billy Stewart - “Summertime” The Mugris - “II” Ahmed Malek - “La Silence Des Cendres” Ike Turner & The Kings Of Rhythm - “Getting Nasty” Nick Hakim - “Cold” Twin Drama - “Marie Lou” Islands - “Vapors” Frankie Cosmos - “Fool” James Brown - “Escape-Ism” Al Jolson - “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday On Saturday Night?”

"I don't care where the Cure is placed in the pantheon of rock. I don't care if we're perceived as relevant. We're never worried how we fit in. I don't even want to fit in." - Robert Smith, The CureTune in to this week's episode to hear one of the many great songs by The Cure! Also featuring Kings of Leon, Rich Homie Quan, Squarepusher, Fela Kuti, Ginger Baker, John Zorn, Edwin Starr, Post Malone, Spoon, Smokey Robinson, and Billy Stewart!SUBSCRIBE: iTunes TWITTER: @MusicFirstPcastFACEBOOK: Music First PodcastEMAIL: MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

Today Kelly reads her newest essay, "Note to Self," talks the nation down from thinking that this weekend is the end of summer, and then takes a few calls from you, the trusty listeners of WFAD. Music by Chris Trapper, John Elliott, and Billy Stewart.

Today's program is my 9th Annual Summer Music Special. Featured is music from the following artists The Sandals, Pyramids, Chantays, Surfaris, Rivieras, Hondells, Ronnie & The Daytonas, 4 Seasons, Alan Sherman, Stan Getz w Astrud Gilberto, Robin Ward, The Shangri-Las, Drifters, Del Shannon, Danleers, Ruby & The Romantics, Brian Hyland, Everly Brothers, Bobby Vee, Cleftones, Nat King Cole, Freddie Cannon, Bobby Rydell, Billy Stewart, The Jamies, Tymes, Ricky Nelson, Jay & The Americans, Dovells, War, The Rascals, Tommy James & The Shondells, Every Mothers Son, The Association, Buckinghams, Gerry Rafferty, Christopher Cross, Seals & Crofts, Leslie Gore, Los Bravos, Johnny Rivers, Kinks, Lovin' Spoonful, The Cyrkle, Critters, Parliaments, Hues Corporation, Andy Gibbs, Frankie Valli and Blue Cheer.

Podcast this week with Hank Mobley, Shirley Scott, Joe Loco, Tommy James, Bobby McFerrin, Laura Nyro, Todd Rungren, David Bowie, Billy Stewart, Dusty Springfield, Lisa Donnelly, and Justin Timberlaketunes: http://bit.ly/Hg2RdKFacebook: http://on.fb.me/IzhiJVEmail us at MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

"Freddie Freeloader" - Miles Davis "Killer Joe" - Quincy Jones "Shulie A Bop " - Sarah Vaughan "The In Crowd" - Ramsey Lewis "Sugar" - Louis Armstrong "Sweet Lorraine" - Nat "King" Cole "Walk On By" - Aretha Franklin "OGD (Road Song)" - Jimmy Smith & Wes Armstrong "Sookie Sookie" - Grant Green "My Baby Just Cares For Me" [Danny Krivit Re-Edit] - Nina Simone "It's Your Thang" - Lou Donaldson "Harlem River Drive" - Bobbi Humphreys "Grazin' In The Grass" - Hugh Masekela "Soulful Strut" - Young Holt Unlimited "Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So" - Ray Charles "Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea" - Ella Fitzgerald "Fever" - Little Willie John "Spreadin' Honey" - The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band "Mercy Mercy Mercy" - Cannonball Adderley "At Last" - Etta James "Hypnotized" - Linda Jones "Let's Stay Together" - Al Green "Sittin' In The Park" - Billy Stewart "Cowboys and Girls" - The Intruders "'Mo Onions" - Booker T & The M.G.'s "The Way You Do The Things You Do" = The Temptations "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" - Gladys Knight & The Pips "Fafafafafa (Sad Song)" - Otis Redding "634-5789" - Wilson Pickett "Please Mr. Postman" - The Marvellettes "Hold On, I'm Coming" - Sam & Dave "Knock On Wood" - Eddie Floyd "Baby, I Love You" - Aretha Franklin "Your Precious Love" - Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell "Express Yourself" - Charles Wright "Jimmy Mack" - Martha Reeves & The3 Vandellas "Shotgun" - Edwin Starr "Tighten Up" - Archie Bell & The Drells

This week we have tracks from Leon Hayward, Alton Ellis, Cat Stevens, Corinne Bailey Rae, Aretha Franklin, Medeski Martin & Wood, Peter Tosh, Three Dog Night, Smokey Robinson, Dave Cortez, Tito Puente, and Billy Stewart. As always you can find us a few places: Itunes: http://bit.ly/Hg2RdK Facebook: http://on.fb.me/IzhiJV