Podcasts about blue yodel

Eleanor Stanford is the author of four books of poetry, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her most recent, Blue Yodel, is forthcoming this fall. Eleanor's interest in birth- not just in a personal context but through a global lens, through the ways that people and other cultures experience it- brought her to Brazil, where she was a Fulbright fellow. Here, she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery in rural Bahia. She was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Cape Verde, an experience which also impacted her poetry and life trajectory.In today's conversation, recorded in-person together in Philadelphia, Kaitlin and Eleanor read poetry from Eleanor's recent works and discuss:Writing as a way to connect to other people and explore the worldHer experience as a Fulbright fellow in Brazil, in a community with an interesting convergence of both highly medicalized birth experiences with a strong tradition of midwifery How Eleanor approached writing and sharing the stories of local Brazilian midwives, given her status as an “outsider” to the Brazilian culture and community. The ways in which the lived bodily experience of motherhood and birth translates to her writingFind more of Eleanor's work here:Bartram's Garden The Book of SleepThe Imaginal MarriagePlease subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcastSubscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

On your knees with the queens in the poetry darkroom,  poetic pleasures await! Then we wipe off our kneecaps before hitting the Pride Parade.If you'd like to support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.NOTESTess Gallagher's "Stopping Place" is from her book Willingly.Donna Stonecipher's "Inlay 18 (Sei Shõnagun)" is from her book The Cosmopolitan. Read a bit about the book here. Sei Shōnagon's actual given name is not known. It was the custom among aristocrats in those days to call a court lady by a nickname taken from a court office belonging to her father or husband. Sei Shōnagon (c. 966–1017 or 1025) was a Japanese author, poet, and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000 during the middle Heian period. She is the author of The Pillow Book.The Dick Dock in Provincetown is so popular it has its own Facebook page. Or check out this Youtube video called "Provincetown's Dick Dock: Making Gay Sex Magic!"If you want to know more about the history of the Meat Rack on Fire Island, here's a good starting place. Read Ocean Vuong's poem "Theology"Marilyn Nelson's "For Mary, Fourth Month" is available in her The Fields of Praise: New and Selected. Jim Powell did indeed win a MacArthur in 1993. Read more poems by Powell here.Read Frank Stanford's "Blue Yodel of the Desperado"Read more about Osip MandelstamKevin Prufer's book of poems The Fears won the Rilke Prize. Read the judges' citation here. Visit Michelle Tea's website here. Or read an excerpt from her poem "I Used to Be Straight" here (scroll down).Read Franny Choi's "Unlove Poem" Read "Prayer/Oracion" by Francisco X. Alarcón, trans. Francisco Aragón Read "American Wedding" by Essex HemphillHere's June Jordan's fiery "Poem About My Rights" You can read torrin a. greathouse's "Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs" here. 

Radio broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, 1946-48, featuring Earl Scruggs, banjo; Lester Flatt, guitar and vocals; Chubby Wise, fiddle; Cedric Rainwater, bass; and Bill Monroe, mandolin and vocals.

Radio broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, 1946-48, featuring Earl Scruggs, banjo; Lester Flatt, guitar and vocals; Chubby Wise, fiddle; Cedric Rainwater, bass; and Bill Monroe, mandolin and vocals.

Ten Years After "Bad Scene"Big Joe Turner "Shake, Rattle And Roll"Eilen Jewell "Shakin' All Over"Dinosaur Jr. "Repulsion"Aretha Franklin "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone"Them "Mystic Eyes"Jessie Mae Hemphill "Married Man Blues"Johnny Cash "The Man Comes Around"Big Bill Broonzy "Terrible Operation Blues"Elvis Costello "Jimmie Standing In the Rain"Steve Earle "Tom Ames' Prayer"Joan Shelley "If the Storms Never Came"Fats Waller "Stay"Jimmie Rodgers "Blue Yodel #9"Nina Simone "Blues for Mama"The Black Keys "Sinister Kid"Gladys Bentley Quintet "Boogie'n My Woogie"The Light Crust Doughboys "Beer Drinkin' Mama"Superchunk "Shallow End"Cafeteria "Poloroids"Shannon McNally "Pale Moon"Justin Townes Earle "Yuma"The Black Crowes "P. 25 London"Drag The River "Bug Country"Valerie June "Shakedown"Lucinda Williams "Joy"Alvin Youngblood hart "Mama Don't Allow"Jimbo Mathus "Poor Lost Souls"The Cactus Blossoms "Everybody (feat. Jenny Lewis)"The Yardbirds "New York City Blues"The Mountain Goats "New Monster Avenue"Ed Young "Reg'lar, Reg'lar, Rolling Under"Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra/Adelaide Hall "Creole Love Call"Jim Weatherly "Midnight Plane To Houston"Hartman's Heartbreakers "Fetch It on Down to My House"Lil Green "My Mellow Man"Hank Williams & The Drifting Cowboys "Settin' the Woods on Fire"Rosalie Hill "Rolled and Tumbled"Billie Holiday "It's Like Reaching for the Moon"Tom Waits "Way Down In The Hole"Fred McDowell "Come and Found You Gone"Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos "Aurora En Pekin"The Lonesome Doves "When We Were Wild"Otis Redding "I've Got Dreams To Remember"James Booker "Feel So Bad"

In Episode 5 we heard part 1 of my Creative Recovery conversation with Dr. Sarah Jefferis @dr.jefferies.write.now, author, editor, coach and speaker. She recounted her story growing up with trauma and how writing served as a powerful vehicle for transforming her traumatic wounds into meaningful poems, novels, and essays. We explored what it means to rewrite a story of trauma, and Sarah shared a reflective journaling exercise that can facilitate this process. We also touched on how creativity, spirituality, and healing are inextricably linked. In Episode 6, part 2 of the conversation with Sarah, we discuss how to cultivate a healthy relationship to fear and the importance of staying present and embodied, especially while writing about trauma. Sarah also shares about her commitment to speaking out against injustice and the personal healing she has experienced raising two feminist girls. Dr. Sarah Jefferis is an author, editor, writing coach, and speaker. Through her business called Write.Now., she offers coaching, poetry readings, presentations on diversity, and interactive dialogues on using writing as a healing modality for sexual assault survivors. Jefferis holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. She has taught writing and literature at Cornell University for over twenty years. Her most recent poetry collection, What Enters the Mouth, was published in February 2017 by Standing Stone Books. It was praised by Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, who wrote, “these are fearless poems—a reckoning of the violence of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity.” Sarah has recently become a certified Yoga teacher. Her most important calling is to raise two powerful feminist girls who love themselves and who are willing to speak out against injustice. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the challenge of solo motherhood in a pandemic. Notes and Resources: The Guesthouse by Rumi Little Prayer by Danez Smith Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach www.sarahjefferis.com sarah@sarahjefferis.com Insta: @dr.jefferies.write.now This episode was edited and mixed by Chad Clarke

What is the relationship between creativity and healing? Listen to Dr. Sarah Jefferis @dr.jefferies.write.now, author, editor, coach and speaker as she recounts growing up with trauma and how writing served as a powerful vehicle for transforming her traumatic wounds into meaningful poems, novels, and essays. In part 1 of our conversation, we explore what it means to rewrite a story of trauma, and Sarah shares a reflective journaling exercise that can facilitate this process. We also touch on how creativity, spirituality, and healing are inextricably linked. Dr. Sarah Jefferis is an author, editor, writing coach, and speaker. Through her business called Write.Now., she offers coaching, poetry readings, presentations on diversity, and interactive dialogues on using writing as a healing modality for sexual assault survivors. Jefferis holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. She has taught writing and literature at Cornell University for over twenty years. Her most recent poetry collection, What Enters the Mouth, was published in February 2017 by Standing Stone Books. It was praised by Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, who wrote, “these are fearless poems—a reckoning of the violence of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity.” Sarah has recently become a certified Yoga teacher. Her most important calling is to raise two powerful feminist girls who love themselves and who are willing to speak out against injustice. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the challenge of solo motherhood in a pandemic. Notes and Resources: The Guesthouse by Rumi Little Prayer by Danez Smith Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach www.sarahjefferis.com sarah@sarahjefferis.com Insta: @dr.jefferies.write.now This episode was edited and mixed by Chad Clarke, @the.podcast.producer on IG

Wherein Deadhead girl and professional musician (and slide guitarist for our podcast theme music) Sally Van Meter tells the story of playing with Jerry Garcia shortly before he died. Grammy Award-winning slide guitarist Van Meter recorded "Blue Yodel #9 (Standing on the Corner)" with Jerry (in David Grisman's home studio) for the album The Songs of Jimmy Rodgers. Sally also talks about going to Dead shows at Winterland in the 1970s, the impact of Old and in the Way on the world of bluegrass, being a woman instrumentalist in a changing industry, and teaching music to young people. Credits: Host: https://twitter.com/DeadheadTalk (Stef Taras) Audio editor: Liam Kadel Music: "Deep Ellum Blues" performed by https://www.facebook.com/littlebirdy88 (K.C. Groves) (guitar), https://www.facebook.com/sally.vanmeter.5 (Sally Van Meter) (lap slide guitar), and http://www.abigailwashburn.com/ (Abigail Washburn) (vocals). Audio engineer: https://ericwiggs.com/ (Eric Wiggs). Show art: Lisa F'n Armstrong of http://www.ajuga.com/Ajuga/ (Ajuga, Inc.), and https://www.etsy.com/shop/SparklesKate?ref=shop_sugg (SparklesKate)

In the season one finale, Jack finds his way through the life and career of jazz legend Lil Hardin Armstrong, who performed on exactly one country record: the groundbreaking Blue Yodel #9 with Jimmie Rodgers and her husband Louis Armstrong. Songs: Trisha Yearwood - Xs and Os (an American Girl) Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World Fisk Jubilee Singers - Brethren Rise! WC Handy - St. Louis Blues Jelly Roll Morton - The Crave Alberta Hunter - He's Got a Punch Like Joe Lewis King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band - Dippermouth Blues Alberta Hunter - Everybody Loves My Baby Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - Yes, I'm in the Barrell Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - Gut Bucket Blues Louis Artmstrong - Dinah Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - Struttin with some Barbeque  Lil Hardin Armstrong and Her Swing Orchestra - Just for a Thrill Jimmie Rodgers - Blue Yodel #9 Lil Hardin Armstrong and Her Swing Orchestra - Brown Gal Lil Hardin Armstrong - Clip joint References: Albertson, C. (1971/2009) Lil, Louis, Lil, and the little gangster. Stomp Off: A blog of memories and opinions. http://stomp-off.blogspot.com/2009/09/louis-lil-and-little-gangster.html Armstrong, L. (2001). Louis Armstrong, in his own words: selected writings. Oxford University Press, USA. Armstrong, L. H. (2007). Satchmo and Me. American Music, 106-118. Bergreen, L. (2012). Louis Armstrong: an extravagant life. Crown. Dickerson, J. L. (2002). Just for a thrill: Lil Hardin Armstrong, first lady of jazz. Cooper Square Press. Ewing, K. T. (2017). Lillian" Lil" Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971). Gleason, H. (Ed.). (2017). Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives. University of Texas Press. Glenn-Nelson, K. (February 28, 2019), An American Girl: Alice Randall's Journey as a Black Female Country Songwriter. https://www.ascap.com/news-events/articles/2019/02/bhm-alice-randall-country Hardin, L. Interview clips retrieved from https://rwj-a.stanford.edu/bonus-content/lil-hardin-interview-clips Porterfield, N. (2007). Jimmie Rodgers: the life and times of America's blue yodeler. Univ. Press of Mississippi. Teachout, T. (2009). Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Support Women in Music Country Soul Songbook Area Code Network of Podcasts: https://www.areacodenetwork.com/ Connect with Jack: wildwoodflowerpod@gmail.com Instagram @wildwoodflowerpod Support Jack www.venmo.com/u/Jack-Peterson-110

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. Today we're going to look at one of the great one-hit wonders of all time -- a duo who made one fascinating single, made the top five with it, and then never managed to repeat their success. Today we're looking at "Mule Skinner Blues" by the Fendermen: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Mule Skinner Blues", guitar solo] The Fendermen were originally from Wisconsin though both of them later moved to Minnesota, and were both born on the same date, November the 26th 1937. Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey started out in their own bands, but after meeting up at university decided to perform together without any other musicians, both playing Fender guitars through the same amp, with Humphrey singing and Sundquist playing lead guitar. They both liked Jimmie Rodgers, and in particular they enjoyed his song "Muleskinner Blues", also known as "Blue Yodel #8": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Muleskinner Blues (Blue Yodel #8)"] They recorded their own version of the song, and took it to a tiny label called Cuca Records, who put out a pressing of three hundred copies: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Muleskinner Blues", Cuca version] That started to get some airplay, and people started wanting to buy the record, but Cuca Records weren't able to get any more copies pressed up for several weeks. So another label stepped in. Soma Records at first offered to lease the recording from Cuca, but when the two labels were unable to come to an agreement, Soma got the Fendermen in to rerecord their song, this time at a professional studio -- the same one that would later be used by the Trashmen to record "Surfin' Bird": [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Muleskinner Blues"] Soma released that with a different B-side from the one Cuca had used, an instrumental called "Torture", so that Soma could collect the publishing money: [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Torture"] Astonishingly, "Muleskinner Blues", a cover of an old country song, with falsetto leaps and only guitars for a backing, made number five on the pop charts, aided by an appearance on American Bandstand. They got a full backing band together, and started touring nationally. But then Cuca sued Soma. Eventually the two labels reached an out-of-court settlement, but the vast majority of the money from the hit ended up going to Cuca, rather than Soma. The next single featured the full band, rather than just the two guitarists, and was a cover version of Huey "Piano" Smith's "Don't You Just Know It": [Excerpt: The Fendermen, "Don't You Just Know It"] That didn't make the Hot One Hundred, and after one more single, and an album featuring all their recordings, the band broke up. Sundquist went back to Cuca Records, where as "Jimmy Sun and the Radiants" he put out a version of "Cocaine Blues", an old Western Swing song that had recently been revived by Johnny Cash as "Transfusion Blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Transfusion Blues"] Sundquist's version restored the original lyrics, but was otherwise modelled on Cash's version: [Excerpt: Jimmy Sun and the Radiants, "Cocaine Blues"] The Radiants also backed a singer called Dick Hiorns, on another record in the style of "Muleskinner Blues", a surfed-up version of the old Hank Snow country song "I'm Movin' On": [Excerpt: Dick Hiorns, "I'm Movin' On"] Despite that being a surprisingly good record, it was out of step with musical trends by 1961, and was unsuccessful. The Radiants then renamed themselves The Muleskinners, and released a novelty record in the "Monster Mash" style, called "The Wolfman": [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "The Wolfman"] Phil Humphrey, meanwhile, remained on Soma Records, as Phil Humphrey and the Fendermen, and released another version of "Don't You Just Know It", coupled with his own novelty record, "Popeye": [Excerpt: Phil Humphrey and the Fendermen, "Popeye"] Both men eventually ended up running their own versions of the Fendermen, touring into the 2000s. Sundquist's version put out a handful of recordings, and he also guested with the Minnesotan rockabilly revival band The Vibro Champs on their remake of a Fendermen B-side, "Beach Party", in 2000: [Excerpt: The Vibro Champs, "Beach Party"] Sundquist also had a side career making gospel music, in a duo with his wife Sharrie, but I've been unable to find any recordings of them, though apparently they wrote over a hundred Christian songs together. The Fendermen did reunite, briefly, in 2005 for two shows backed by the Vibro Champs, and had something of a cult following after the Cramps recorded their own version of "Muleskinner Blues", based on the Fendermen's version: [Excerpt: The Cramps, "Muleskinner Blues"] They never had another hit, and left behind a tiny number of recordings, but the Fendermen are now regarded as one of the most important precursors to the surf and garage rock sounds of the sixties, and their few recordings are regularly repackaged. Sundquist died in 2013, and Humphrey in 2016.

Dans cet épisode, Gérald et Serge cherchent à définir les divers modes de relations qui s'établissent entre la musique et notre identité, qu'elle soit individuelle ou collective.Liste de lectureClaude Champagne (1891-1965), Danse villageoise (1930)  [11:29]The Orioles, «Crying in the Chapel» (1953) [16:47]Chuck Berry (1926-2017), «Maybellene» [20:35]Tanya Tagaq (née en 1975), «Uja», Animism (2014) [25:50]Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), «Blue Yodel #11» (1929) [32:34]Genesis, «Firth of Fifth», Selling England by the Pound (1973) [39:58]Moody Blues, «Nights in White Satin», Days of Future Passed (1967) [42:00]Sénoufo - Parle-répond  (2016) [47:56]Remixer le Québec (2017) [51:42]Imawan Balawan, «Bangkyan Ngegol» (29 décembre 2015) [55:46]

The Songs Of jimmie Rodgers - A Tribute : –Bono “Dreaming With Tears In My Eyes” –Alison Krauss And Union Station* “Any Old Time” –Dickey Betts “Waiting For A Train” –Mary Chapin Carpenter “Somewhere Down Below The Mason Dixie Line” –David Ball “Miss The Mississippi And You” –Bob Dylan “My Blue Eyed Jane” –Willie Nelson “Peach Pickin' Time Down In Georgia” –Steve Earle & The V-Roys “In The Jailhouse Now” –Jerry Garcia, David Grisman & John Kahn “Blue Yodel # 9 (Standin' On The Corner)” –Iris DeMent “Hobo Bill's Last Ride” –John Mellencamp* “Gambling Bar Room Blues” –Van Morrison “Mule Skinner Blues” –Aaron Neville “Why Should I Be Lonely” –Dwight Yoakam “T For Texas” Escuchar audio

In which we compare midcentury Bakersfield to Paris in the 1920s, discuss how to build a music scene, and hear a song sung by a truck. See everyrecordeverrecorded.com for more Bakersfield Sound resources! + George Rich, "Drivin' Away My Blues" + Nathan Judd, "The Answer to the Greenback Dollar" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Get Along Home, Cindy" + Captain Sacto theme song + Cousin Herb Henson, "You'all Come" + Patsy Cline, "Crazy" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Act Naturally" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Love's Gonna Live Here" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "My Heart Skips a Beat" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Together Again" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I Don't Care (Just As Long As You Love Me)" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + "Before You Go" + "Only You (Can Break My Heart)" + "Buckaroo" + "Waitin' In Your Welfare Line" + "Think of Me" + "Open Up Your Heart" + "Where Does the Good Times Go" + "Sam's Place" + "Your Tender Loving Care" + "It Takes People Like You (To Make People Like Me)" + "How Long Will My Baby Be Gone" + "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + The Carter Family, "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" + William McEwan, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Silver Leaf Quartette, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Carter Family, "Little Darlin' Pal of Mine" + The Carter Family, "Sad and Lonesome Day" + Lesley Riddle, "One Kind Favor" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Ain't It Amazing, Gracie" + The Ventures, "Walk, Don't Run" + The Lemon Pipers, "Green Tambourine" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "George's Playhouse" + "The Nightingale Song" + "I'll Make Sweet Love to You" + "Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown" + "New Step It Up and Go" + "Philadelphia Lawyer" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Sugar Moon" + Bud Hobbs, "Louisiana Swing" + Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, "Takin' Off" + Lefty Frizzell, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time" + Bill Woods and His Orange Blossom Playboys, "Have I Got a Chance With You?" + Jean Shepherd and Ferlin Husky, "A Dear John Letter" + Ferlin Husky, "Gone" + Merle Haggard, "Sing a Sad Song" + Merle Haggard, "Swinging Doors" + Bonnie Owens, "Lie a Little" + Merle Haggard, "Today I Started Loving You Again" + Mamie Smith "Crazy Blues" + Saul Ho'opi'i Trio, "Lehua" + Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #9" + DeFord Bailey, "John Henry" + Ruth Brown, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Rose Maddox, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Hank Penny, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Patsy Cline, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Ray Charles, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Antonio Aguilar, "El Ojo de Vidrio" + Woody Guthrie, "Billy the Kid" + Linda Ronstadt, "Palomita de Ojos Negros" + Ernest Tubb, "Thanks a Lot" + Jose Alfredo Jimenez, "El Rey" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Shimmy Shakin' Daddy" + Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, "Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age" + Luis Perez Meza, "Cuando Salgo a Los Campos" + Tommy Collins, "You Better Not Do That" + Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know" + Wanda Jackson, "Honey Bop" + Billy Mize, "Who Will Buy the Wine" + Red Simpson, "I'm a Truck" + The Derailers, "The Right Place" + Dale Watson, "I Lie When I Drink" + Dave Alvin, "Black Rose of Texas" + The Mavericks, "All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down" + The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Sin City" + JT Kanehira, "Country Music Makes Me So Happy" + Sturgill Simpson, "Life of Sin" + Albion Country Band, "Hanged I Shall Be" + A.L. Lloyd, "The Oxford Tragedy" + Shirley and Dolly Collins, "The Oxford Girl" + Phoebe Smith "Wexport Girl" + Harry Cox, "Ekefield Town" + Marybird McAllister, "The Bloody Miller" + Fields Ward, "The Lexington Murder" + Arthur and Gid Tanner, "The Knoxville Girl" + Fred Ross, "The Waco Girl" + The Outlaws, "Knoxville Girl" + Merle Haggard, "Kern River"

Two folky tunes from Burl Ives start us off. A jolly orchestrated(Percy Faith) version of Oh! Dear! She's wonderful beautiful and the more pared down Bonnie Wee Lassie. Ives spent the 1930s travelling the USA as an Itinerant musician and developed his singing career via the radio. He was also a well known actor, his most famous acting role was probably as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Old favourites Carroll Gibbons, Len Fillis Roberto Murolo, Archie Lewis, Ted Heath, Bob and Alf Pearson and Harry Roy return. Edna Kaye does vocals for Gibbons. A new Italian singer joins us though, Carlo Butti.  We have Miss Lee Wiley, whose jazz singing career was at its peak from the 1930s to 50s. She had a short tempestuous marriage to Jess Stacy, the jazz pianist. Great voice. Big Bill Campbell was a Canadian born purveyor of Cowboy music here in Britain- I'm Rocking to the Rockies is jolly and cheesy. Nowt wrong with that. Ted Wallace and his Campus boys provide some lovely 30s music and vocals. Wallace was Wallace T Kirkeby, manager of the highly prolific Californian Ramblers. Must play them again. Penultimate record is Jimmie Rodgers, Blue Yodel from 1927. So bluesy, great lyrics. Just to prove we like a good mix of music on Forgotten Songs we go out with The Jacques String Orchestra and Berinice by Handel.  How Highfalutin is that!  

Welcome to the third in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about "Blue Yodel #9" by Jimmie Rodgers, but it's really about two great women who shaped twentieth century popular music without much credit -- Lil Hardin and Elsie McWilliams   Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: ----more---- Welcome to the latest episode of the Patreon-only bonus podcasts. For this episode, we're going to do something different from what we've normally done. In the main series, I've been going strictly chronologically -- each episode covers a fairly long period of time, but each song I've dealt with has come chronologically after the song before. This time, we're going to go right back in time, to the beginnings of country music. I'll be doing that kind of thing a lot more on these Patreon episodes, because the short length gives me the freedom to look at any time period I want, and to jump back and forth in the story. Today, we're going to talk about two great women who don't get as much credit as they deserve for the work of the great men they were behind. Lil Hardin was the piano player for King Oliver's jazz band in the 1920s, when he hired a new second cornet player, a young musician called Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was a promising musician, with a lot of ability, but he was also a bit of a hick -- badly-dressed, with a bad haircut, and with no understanding of how to present himself on stage. He also had no ambition – he just wanted to play with his hero. Lil Hardin saw something in him, though, and tidied him up, showed him how to act on stage, how to dress and how to do his hair. She persuaded him that while he loved just playing in the same band as King Oliver, he could become a star himself. The two of them both divorced their respective spouses and married, and when the time came for Louis Armstrong, who had been only second cornet when he'd met Lil, to become the leader of his own band, the Hot Five, Lil Hardin Armstrong was its piano player. The recordings by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five were the records that built Louis' reputation as a musician, and which still to this day are regarded as the peak of New Orleans jazz. And Lil Hardin is all over them. [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, "Muskrat Ramble"] Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Jimmie Rodgers had had to retire from his job on the railway due to tuberculosis, and was trying to make a living as a singer. I've mentioned Jimmie Rodgers a few times, and if I'd decided to start the narrative in the 1920s rather than in 1938 he would almost certainly have had a full episode devoted to him. He was probably the first big superstar of country music, but he influenced people in all sorts of other fields as well -- for example Howlin' Wolf developed his vocal style by attempting to imitate Rodgers' trademark yodel. In 1927 he began his recording career with records like "Sleep Baby Sleep": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Sleep Baby Sleep"] Rodgers is the credited songwriter on most of his work, but many of his songs were written or co-written by his sister in law, Elsie McWilliams, who had played piano in his band and who he asked to help him whip his ideas into shape when he got a recording contract. McWilliams wanted to make sure her sick brother-in-law and his family would have money, so she only got credited on about half the songs she wrote or co-wrote, giving Rodgers the credit on the rest. And when she did get credited, she often gave Rodgers the actual money anyway. Much later she said, “I didn’t want a penny for those songs, you understand, if there was any money coming, I wanted him to have it. He was sick and broke and I loved ‘em both so very much. He kept after me to sign a contract, but I wouldn’t, I didn’t want any of his money. But he kept after me anyway, so I finally agreed to accept 1/25th of a percent… I nearly fainted when I got my first royalty check, it was for $256.56. I signed it right over to the church.” No-one knows for sure exactly which songs McWilliams co-wrote, but she's generally credited with having worked on roughly a third of Rodgers' songs. This means I can't know for sure if she worked on the song we're looking at today, but whether she did or not, it's entirely possible that Rodgers would not have been in any position to even be recording without McWilliams' contributions. Rodgers' greatest successes were a series of recordings called the Blue Yodels, which started shortly after Rodgers started collaborating with McWilliams, with "Blue Yodel #1", a record we've repeatedly mentioned in the main podcast: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #1"] For the ninth Blue Yodel, though, Rodgers was inspired by a record that had come out four years earlier, "The Bridwell Blues", by Nolan Welsh, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet: [Excerpt: Nolan Welsh, "The Bridwell Blues"] So in what was for the time an extraordinary fusion of musical styles, and an extraordinary collaboration between black and white musicians, he got Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin to add their jazz instruments to his "Blue Yodel #9": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #9"] Within a year of that recording, Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong would split up for good. Armstrong went on to become the biggest star in jazz music history, while Hardin never managed much greater success than being billed as "Mrs Louis Armstrong". And within three years, Jimmie Rodgers would be dead -- the tuberculosis finally took him in 1933. At the time of his death, Rodgers was selling ten percent of all the records on his label, RCA, and while he's now largely forgotten except to fans of country music's history, he was so famous at the time that seventeen years later an ethnomusicologist studying the music of the Kipsigis people of Kenya recorded this: [Excerpt: Kipsigis people, "Chemirocha"] That's someone singing "Chemirocha" -- Jimmie Rodgers.

Welcome to the third in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers, but it’s really about two great women who shaped twentieth century popular music without much credit — Lil Hardin and Elsie McWilliams Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Welcome to the third in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers, but it’s really about two great women who shaped twentieth century popular music without much credit — Lil Hardin and Elsie McWilliams   Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: —-more—- Welcome to the latest episode of the Patreon-only bonus podcasts. For this episode, we’re going to do something different from what we’ve normally done. In the main series, I’ve been going strictly chronologically — each episode covers a fairly long period of time, but each song I’ve dealt with has come chronologically after the song before. This time, we’re going to go right back in time, to the beginnings of country music. I’ll be doing that kind of thing a lot more on these Patreon episodes, because the short length gives me the freedom to look at any time period I want, and to jump back and forth in the story. Today, we’re going to talk about two great women who don’t get as much credit as they deserve for the work of the great men they were behind. Lil Hardin was the piano player for King Oliver’s jazz band in the 1920s, when he hired a new second cornet player, a young musician called Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was a promising musician, with a lot of ability, but he was also a bit of a hick — badly-dressed, with a bad haircut, and with no understanding of how to present himself on stage. He also had no ambition – he just wanted to play with his hero. Lil Hardin saw something in him, though, and tidied him up, showed him how to act on stage, how to dress and how to do his hair. She persuaded him that while he loved just playing in the same band as King Oliver, he could become a star himself. The two of them both divorced their respective spouses and married, and when the time came for Louis Armstrong, who had been only second cornet when he’d met Lil, to become the leader of his own band, the Hot Five, Lil Hardin Armstrong was its piano player. The recordings by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five were the records that built Louis’ reputation as a musician, and which still to this day are regarded as the peak of New Orleans jazz. And Lil Hardin is all over them. [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, “Muskrat Ramble”] Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Jimmie Rodgers had had to retire from his job on the railway due to tuberculosis, and was trying to make a living as a singer. I’ve mentioned Jimmie Rodgers a few times, and if I’d decided to start the narrative in the 1920s rather than in 1938 he would almost certainly have had a full episode devoted to him. He was probably the first big superstar of country music, but he influenced people in all sorts of other fields as well — for example Howlin’ Wolf developed his vocal style by attempting to imitate Rodgers’ trademark yodel. In 1927 he began his recording career with records like “Sleep Baby Sleep”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Sleep Baby Sleep”] Rodgers is the credited songwriter on most of his work, but many of his songs were written or co-written by his sister in law, Elsie McWilliams, who had played piano in his band and who he asked to help him whip his ideas into shape when he got a recording contract. McWilliams wanted to make sure her sick brother-in-law and his family would have money, so she only got credited on about half the songs she wrote or co-wrote, giving Rodgers the credit on the rest. And when she did get credited, she often gave Rodgers the actual money anyway. Much later she said, “I didn’t want a penny for those songs, you understand, if there was any money coming, I wanted him to have it. He was sick and broke and I loved ‘em both so very much. He kept after me to sign a contract, but I wouldn’t, I didn’t want any of his money. But he kept after me anyway, so I finally agreed to accept 1/25th of a percent… I nearly fainted when I got my first royalty check, it was for $256.56. I signed it right over to the church.” No-one knows for sure exactly which songs McWilliams co-wrote, but she’s generally credited with having worked on roughly a third of Rodgers’ songs. This means I can’t know for sure if she worked on the song we’re looking at today, but whether she did or not, it’s entirely possible that Rodgers would not have been in any position to even be recording without McWilliams’ contributions. Rodgers’ greatest successes were a series of recordings called the Blue Yodels, which started shortly after Rodgers started collaborating with McWilliams, with “Blue Yodel #1”, a record we’ve repeatedly mentioned in the main podcast: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”] For the ninth Blue Yodel, though, Rodgers was inspired by a record that had come out four years earlier, “The Bridwell Blues”, by Nolan Welsh, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet: [Excerpt: Nolan Welsh, “The Bridwell Blues”] So in what was for the time an extraordinary fusion of musical styles, and an extraordinary collaboration between black and white musicians, he got Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin to add their jazz instruments to his “Blue Yodel #9”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #9”] Within a year of that recording, Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong would split up for good. Armstrong went on to become the biggest star in jazz music history, while Hardin never managed much greater success than being billed as “Mrs Louis Armstrong”. And within three years, Jimmie Rodgers would be dead — the tuberculosis finally took him in 1933. At the time of his death, Rodgers was selling ten percent of all the records on his label, RCA, and while he’s now largely forgotten except to fans of country music’s history, he was so famous at the time that seventeen years later an ethnomusicologist studying the music of the Kipsigis people of Kenya recorded this: [Excerpt: Kipsigis people, “Chemirocha”] That’s someone singing “Chemirocha” — Jimmie Rodgers.

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Gotta Know” by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 “Bacon Fat” by Andre Williams.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on “Okie From Muskogee”. Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too — the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda’s records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work. Errata I say Jackson’s career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson’s career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn’t cover anything prior to 1948. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we’ve dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she’s a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don’t have the space to explain in this podcast — if you’re interested in it, I’d recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on “Okie From Muskogee”, which I’ll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as “Okies”. But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass — and as we’ve seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie’s “Oakie Boogie”, for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The “Western” in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers’ hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn’t afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley’s records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won’t play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “George’s Playhouse Boogie”] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who’d moved to California, though in their case they’d travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They’re another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we’ve often discussed that’s a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence — the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be “a girl singer”, as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They’d sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda’s mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was “Chime Bells” by Elton Britt, “Country Music’s Yodelling Cowboy Crooner”: [Excerpt: Elton Britt, “Chime Bells”] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #6” for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #6”] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson’s music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson’s music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like “The Wild Side of Life”: [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, “The Wild Side of Life”] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she’d have to ask her mother, he laughed at first — he hadn’t realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist — there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson’s show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn’t very good when she guested with Thompson’s band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn’t take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he’d invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she’d not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson’s band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson’s band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn’t have a problem with the song itself, but she didn’t want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, “You Can’t Have My Love”] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn’t go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene — at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl — and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn’t going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda’s father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, “You’ve got to come see this”. The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis’ performance, saying “That boy’s got to get his show in order… He’s all over the stage messin’ around. And he’s got to stop slurrin’ his words, too.” Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured — on a bill which also included Bob Neal’s other big act of the time, Johnny Cash — he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging — she hadn’t had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called “Without Your Love”, which she’d written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, “Without Your Love”] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord’s only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn’t having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn’t know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called “I Gotta Know”, which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he’d liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field — Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But “I Gotta Know” was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] Now, I’m indebted to the website “Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave”, which I’ll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”, female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz”: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she’s doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons’ style parodying the old persons’ music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn’t quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line “I gotta know, I gotta know”, she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn’t fail, however, and “I Gotta Know” became Jackson’s biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts — rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn’t cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn’t realised what milk does to a singer’s throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn’t get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn’t the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!”] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she’d picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called “Don’a Wanna”, which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn’t have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson’s suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Don’a Wanna”] Much better was “Cool Love”, which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon’s daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Cool Love”] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis’ recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it’s fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since “I Wanna Know”, “Cool Love” did nothing on the charts — and indeed it wouldn’t be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she’d made years earlier, during the time period we’re talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true — even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that’s a story for a few weeks’ time…

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Gotta Know” by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 “Bacon Fat” by Andre Williams.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on “Okie From Muskogee”. Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too — the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda’s records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work. Errata I say Jackson’s career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson’s career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn’t cover anything prior to 1948. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we’ve dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she’s a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don’t have the space to explain in this podcast — if you’re interested in it, I’d recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on “Okie From Muskogee”, which I’ll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as “Okies”. But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass — and as we’ve seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie’s “Oakie Boogie”, for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The “Western” in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers’ hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn’t afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley’s records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won’t play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “George’s Playhouse Boogie”] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who’d moved to California, though in their case they’d travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They’re another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we’ve often discussed that’s a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence — the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be “a girl singer”, as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They’d sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda’s mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was “Chime Bells” by Elton Britt, “Country Music’s Yodelling Cowboy Crooner”: [Excerpt: Elton Britt, “Chime Bells”] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #6” for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #6”] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson’s music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson’s music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like “The Wild Side of Life”: [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, “The Wild Side of Life”] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she’d have to ask her mother, he laughed at first — he hadn’t realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist — there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson’s show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn’t very good when she guested with Thompson’s band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn’t take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he’d invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she’d not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson’s band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson’s band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn’t have a problem with the song itself, but she didn’t want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, “You Can’t Have My Love”] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn’t go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene — at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl — and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn’t going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda’s father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, “You’ve got to come see this”. The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis’ performance, saying “That boy’s got to get his show in order… He’s all over the stage messin’ around. And he’s got to stop slurrin’ his words, too.” Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured — on a bill which also included Bob Neal’s other big act of the time, Johnny Cash — he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging — she hadn’t had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called “Without Your Love”, which she’d written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, “Without Your Love”] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord’s only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn’t having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn’t know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called “I Gotta Know”, which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he’d liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field — Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But “I Gotta Know” was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] Now, I’m indebted to the website “Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave”, which I’ll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”, female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz”: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she’s doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons’ style parodying the old persons’ music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn’t quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line “I gotta know, I gotta know”, she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn’t fail, however, and “I Gotta Know” became Jackson’s biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts — rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn’t cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn’t realised what milk does to a singer’s throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn’t get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn’t the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!”] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she’d picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called “Don’a Wanna”, which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn’t have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson’s suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Don’a Wanna”] Much better was “Cool Love”, which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon’s daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Cool Love”] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis’ recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it’s fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since “I Wanna Know”, “Cool Love” did nothing on the charts — and indeed it wouldn’t be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she’d made years earlier, during the time period we’re talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true — even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that’s a story for a few weeks’ time…

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Gotta Know" by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 "Bacon Fat" by Andre Williams.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson's autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll's First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on "Okie From Muskogee". Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too -- the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda's records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson's important early work. Errata I say Jackson's career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson's career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn't cover anything prior to 1948. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we've dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she's a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don't have the space to explain in this podcast -- if you're interested in it, I'd recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on "Okie From Muskogee", which I'll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as "Okies". But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass -- and as we've seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie's "Oakie Boogie", for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The "Western" in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers' hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn't afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley's records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won't play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "George's Playhouse Boogie"] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who'd moved to California, though in their case they'd travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They're another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we've often discussed that's a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence -- the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be "a girl singer", as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They'd sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda's mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was "Chime Bells" by Elton Britt, "Country Music's Yodelling Cowboy Crooner": [Excerpt: Elton Britt, "Chime Bells"] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel #6" for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #6"] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson's music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson's music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like "The Wild Side of Life": [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, "The Wild Side of Life"] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she'd have to ask her mother, he laughed at first -- he hadn't realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist -- there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson's show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn't very good when she guested with Thompson's band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn't take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he'd invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she'd not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson's band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson's band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn't have a problem with the song itself, but she didn't want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, "You Can't Have My Love"] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn't go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene -- at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl -- and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn't going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda's father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, "You've got to come see this". The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis' performance, saying "That boy's got to get his show in order... He's all over the stage messin' around. And he's got to stop slurrin' his words, too." Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured -- on a bill which also included Bob Neal's other big act of the time, Johnny Cash -- he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging -- she hadn't had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called "Without Your Love", which she'd written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, "Without Your Love"] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord's only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn't having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn't know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called "I Gotta Know", which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he'd liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field -- Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But "I Gotta Know" was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know"] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know"] Now, I'm indebted to the website "Women in Rock & Roll's First Wave", which I'll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como's version of "Ko Ko Mo", female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr's "Rock and Roll Waltz": [Excerpt: Kay Starr, "Rock and Roll Waltz"] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she's doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons' style parodying the old persons' music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn't quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line "I gotta know, I gotta know", she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn't fail, however, and "I Gotta Know" became Jackson's biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts -- rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn't cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!" had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn't realised what milk does to a singer's throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn't get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn't the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!"] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she'd picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called "Don'a Wanna", which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn't have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson's suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Don'a Wanna"] Much better was "Cool Love", which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon's daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Cool Love"] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis' recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it's fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since "I Wanna Know", "Cool Love" did nothing on the charts -- and indeed it wouldn't be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she'd made years earlier, during the time period we're talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true -- even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that's a story for a few weeks' time...

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we’re looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we’re going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than “Mercy”, and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to “You Are My Sunshine”, and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”] It wasn’t so much that Frizzell was a great performer — though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison’s vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, “Indian Love Call”] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller — on New Year’s Eve 1954. The band started playing “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they’d started far too soon. That version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called “Ooby Dooby” which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings’ TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn’t much better either — Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying “Tell Johnny Cash he doesn’t run Sun Records, I do” and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was “Ooby Dooby”; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they’d almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like “Ooby Dooby”, enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, “Ooby Dooby”] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record “Ooby Dooby” again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King’s version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play “Ooby Dooby” for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn’t yet twenty-one, and so the contract he’d signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single — only a few hundred ever got released — and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison’s relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else’s. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He’d given them the shot that no-one else would, and he’d moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they’d had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he’d made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison’s performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked — he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of “Ooby Dooby” was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison’s later career, it wasn’t primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously — if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band’s drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Go Go Go”] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn’t credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry — it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and “Ooby Dooby” went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn’t an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, “Rockhouse”. [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Rockhouse”] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn’t get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins’ demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called “Little Woolly Booger”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Little Woolly Booger”] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly “You’re My Baby” for Orbison’s version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “You’re My Baby”] “Rockhouse” didn’t do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn’t care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated — the people he’d come up with as a teenager, the people he’d thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He’d been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they’d decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips’ son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson.” For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was “at home”. But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn’t put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they — and the other people on the bill — had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people’s other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn’t want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn’t have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out “Go Go Go” as the B-side to his big hit “Breathless”, and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy’s “So Long, I’m Gone”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “So Long, I’m Gone”]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since “Ooby Dooby” a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Claudette”] We’ll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison’s songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison’s songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn’t want to record for Sun any more anyway — they weren’t releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn’t having any hits, and they didn’t have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men — and he wasn’t wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he’d already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn’t realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he’d already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn’t properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition.” As soon as the Everlys’ version of “Claudette” came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. “How’s the record doing?” “Oh, it sold half a million already.” “Have I made any money?” “Why, yes you have”. Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis’ big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Seems to Me”] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren’t the ballads that he wanted to be singing — they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn’t know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from “Claudette” ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn’t get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he’d hoped he wouldn’t, as a musician who’d had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that’s a story for a future episode.

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we’re looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we’re going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than “Mercy”, and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to “You Are My Sunshine”, and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”] It wasn’t so much that Frizzell was a great performer — though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison’s vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, “Indian Love Call”] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller — on New Year’s Eve 1954. The band started playing “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they’d started far too soon. That version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called “Ooby Dooby” which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings’ TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn’t much better either — Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying “Tell Johnny Cash he doesn’t run Sun Records, I do” and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was “Ooby Dooby”; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they’d almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like “Ooby Dooby”, enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, “Ooby Dooby”] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record “Ooby Dooby” again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King’s version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play “Ooby Dooby” for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn’t yet twenty-one, and so the contract he’d signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single — only a few hundred ever got released — and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison’s relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else’s. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He’d given them the shot that no-one else would, and he’d moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they’d had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he’d made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison’s performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked — he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of “Ooby Dooby” was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison’s later career, it wasn’t primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously — if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band’s drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Go Go Go”] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn’t credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry — it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and “Ooby Dooby” went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn’t an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, “Rockhouse”. [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Rockhouse”] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn’t get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins’ demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called “Little Woolly Booger”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Little Woolly Booger”] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly “You’re My Baby” for Orbison’s version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “You’re My Baby”] “Rockhouse” didn’t do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn’t care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated — the people he’d come up with as a teenager, the people he’d thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He’d been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they’d decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips’ son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson.” For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was “at home”. But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn’t put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they — and the other people on the bill — had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people’s other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn’t want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn’t have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out “Go Go Go” as the B-side to his big hit “Breathless”, and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy’s “So Long, I’m Gone”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “So Long, I’m Gone”]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since “Ooby Dooby” a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Claudette”] We’ll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison’s songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison’s songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn’t want to record for Sun any more anyway — they weren’t releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn’t having any hits, and they didn’t have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men — and he wasn’t wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he’d already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn’t realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he’d already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn’t properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition.” As soon as the Everlys’ version of “Claudette” came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. “How’s the record doing?” “Oh, it sold half a million already.” “Have I made any money?” “Why, yes you have”. Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis’ big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Seems to Me”] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren’t the ballads that he wanted to be singing — they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn’t know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from “Claudette” ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn’t get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he’d hoped he wouldn’t, as a musician who’d had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that’s a story for a future episode.

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Ooby Dooby" by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 "Blue Yodel #9" by Jimmie Rodgers. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison's children. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison's work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we're looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we're going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than "Mercy", and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to "You Are My Sunshine", and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time"] It wasn't so much that Frizzell was a great performer -- though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison's vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, "Indian Love Call"] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller -- on New Year's Eve 1954. The band started playing "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they'd started far too soon. That version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called "Ooby Dooby" which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings' TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn't much better either -- Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying "Tell Johnny Cash he doesn't run Sun Records, I do" and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was "Ooby Dooby"; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, "Hey, Miss Fannie": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Miss Fannie"] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they'd almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like "Ooby Dooby", enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, "Ooby Dooby"] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record "Ooby Dooby" again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King's version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play "Ooby Dooby" for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn't yet twenty-one, and so the contract he'd signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single -- only a few hundred ever got released -- and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison's relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else's. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He'd given them the shot that no-one else would, and he'd moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they'd had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he'd made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison's performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked -- he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of "Ooby Dooby" was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison's later career, it wasn't primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously -- if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band's drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Go Go Go"] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn't credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry -- it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and "Ooby Dooby" went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn't an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, "Rockhouse". [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Rockhouse"] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn't get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins' demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called "Little Woolly Booger": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Little Woolly Booger"] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly "You're My Baby" for Orbison's version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "You're My Baby"] "Rockhouse" didn't do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn't care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated -- the people he'd come up with as a teenager, the people he'd thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He'd been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they'd decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips' son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson." For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was "at home". But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn't put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they -- and the other people on the bill -- had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people's other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn't want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn't have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out "Go Go Go" as the B-side to his big hit "Breathless", and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy's "So Long, I'm Gone": [Excerpt: Warren Smith, "So Long, I'm Gone"]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since "Ooby Dooby" a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Claudette"] We'll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison's songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison's songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn't want to record for Sun any more anyway -- they weren't releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn't having any hits, and they didn't have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men -- and he wasn't wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he'd already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn't realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he'd already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn't properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition." As soon as the Everlys' version of "Claudette" came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. "How's the record doing?" "Oh, it sold half a million already." "Have I made any money?" "Why, yes you have". Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis' big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Seems to Me"] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren't the ballads that he wanted to be singing -- they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn't know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from "Claudette" ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn't get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he'd hoped he wouldn't, as a musician who'd had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that's a story for a future episode.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Walk The Line" by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Don't Be Angry" by Nappy Brown.  ----more---- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn't think were worth going back and redoing -- I pronounce "Belshazzar" incorrectly (it's pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to "Get Rhythm" contains the phrase "if you get the blues", when of course it's "when you get the blues". Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash's work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we're going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we're going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week's episode, on "Blue Suede Shoes", because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash's birth name was actually J.R. Cash -- initials rather than a full name -- and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son's name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn't allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he'd been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he'd been the radio operator who'd intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn't know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash's brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn't matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash's voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called "Belshazzar", based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: "Belshazzar"] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they'd heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "This Little Light of Mine"] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that "something more" took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "That's All Right Mama"] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun's phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label's records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He'd never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes -- "Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom" -- he couldn't get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, "You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren't all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash's bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn't need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they'd been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn't tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn't particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There's an urban legend that Phillips said "go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell", though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he'd had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, "Hey Porter", was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash's trademark: [Excerpt, "Hey Porter": Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn't have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash's recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called "Folsom Prison Blues", and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called "Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison", and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he'd put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called "Crescent City Blues", which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): "Crescent City Blues"] If you've not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash's work, you're probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins' song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled "Crescent City Blues", by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, "Crescent City Blues"] The second musical inspiration for Cash's prison song was a song by Cash's idol, Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #1", also known as "T For Texas": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #1"] The line "I'm gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall" hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to "Crescent City Blues" that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result "Folsom Prison Blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues"] 9) Sam Phillips didn't think that was suitable as the B-side to "Hey Porter", and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled "Cry Cry Cry," but "Folsom Prison Blues" was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn't want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and "Folsom Prison Blues" became Cash's second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It's around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn't going to bother promoting Cash's records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years -- he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun's downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he'd done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That's not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends -- though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl's wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, "All Mama's Children", which became the B-side to Perkins' "Boppin' the Blues": [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, "All Mama's Children"] It's not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis' first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash's career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn't listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he'd written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in "Sixteen Tons", the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash's mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. "I Walk the Line" was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other's argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn't so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that "Hey Porter", "Cry Cry Cry" and "Folsom Prison Blues" had all been performed in -- a rock and roll tempo, for Cash's rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn't need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went "Get rhythm if you get the blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: "Get Rhythm"] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn't see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn't be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn't so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "I Walk The Line"] "I Walk The Line" has a very, very, unusual structure. There's a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it's back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it's back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they're playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically -- the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started -- and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics -- the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each -- the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they're not arranged in the standard order that you'd have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it's the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse -- though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that's structured like a normal country and western song, and it's quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It's an expression of one man's very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It's an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn't be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we'll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we'll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown.  —-more—- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn’t think were worth going back and redoing — I pronounce “Belshazzar” incorrectly (it’s pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to “Get Rhythm” contains the phrase “if you get the blues”, when of course it’s “when you get the blues”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we’re going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we’re going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week’s episode, on “Blue Suede Shoes”, because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash’s birth name was actually J.R. Cash — initials rather than a full name — and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son’s name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn’t allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he’d been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he’d been the radio operator who’d intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn’t know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash’s brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn’t matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash’s voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called “Belshazzar”, based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: “Belshazzar”] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they’d heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that “something more” took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right Mama”] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun’s phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label’s records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He’d never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes — “Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom” — he couldn’t get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren’t all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash’s bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn’t need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they’d been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn’t tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn’t particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There’s an urban legend that Phillips said “go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell”, though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he’d had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, “Hey Porter”, was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash’s trademark: [Excerpt, “Hey Porter”: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn’t have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash’s recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called “Folsom Prison Blues”, and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison”, and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he’d put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called “Crescent City Blues”, which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): “Crescent City Blues”] If you’ve not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash’s work, you’re probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins’ song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled “Crescent City Blues”, by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, “Crescent City Blues”] The second musical inspiration for Cash’s prison song was a song by Cash’s idol, Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”, also known as “T For Texas”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”] The line “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall” hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to “Crescent City Blues” that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result “Folsom Prison Blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”] 9) Sam Phillips didn’t think that was suitable as the B-side to “Hey Porter”, and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled “Cry Cry Cry,” but “Folsom Prison Blues” was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn’t want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and “Folsom Prison Blues” became Cash’s second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It’s around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn’t going to bother promoting Cash’s records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years — he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun’s downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he’d done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That’s not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends — though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl’s wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”, which became the B-side to Perkins’ “Boppin’ the Blues”: [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”] It’s not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis’ first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash’s career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn’t listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he’d written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in “Sixteen Tons”, the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash’s mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. “I Walk the Line” was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other’s argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn’t so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that “Hey Porter”, “Cry Cry Cry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” had all been performed in — a rock and roll tempo, for Cash’s rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn’t need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went “Get rhythm if you get the blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: “Get Rhythm”] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn’t see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn’t be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn’t so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “I Walk The Line”] “I Walk The Line” has a very, very, unusual structure. There’s a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it’s back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it’s back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they’re playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically — the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started — and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics — the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each — the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they’re not arranged in the standard order that you’d have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it’s the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse — though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that’s structured like a normal country and western song, and it’s quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It’s an expression of one man’s very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It’s an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn’t be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we’ll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we’ll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown.  —-more—- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn’t think were worth going back and redoing — I pronounce “Belshazzar” incorrectly (it’s pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to “Get Rhythm” contains the phrase “if you get the blues”, when of course it’s “when you get the blues”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we’re going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we’re going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week’s episode, on “Blue Suede Shoes”, because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash’s birth name was actually J.R. Cash — initials rather than a full name — and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son’s name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn’t allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he’d been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he’d been the radio operator who’d intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn’t know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash’s brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn’t matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash’s voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called “Belshazzar”, based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: “Belshazzar”] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they’d heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that “something more” took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right Mama”] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun’s phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label’s records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He’d never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes — “Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom” — he couldn’t get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren’t all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash’s bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn’t need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they’d been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn’t tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn’t particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There’s an urban legend that Phillips said “go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell”, though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he’d had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, “Hey Porter”, was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash’s trademark: [Excerpt, “Hey Porter”: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn’t have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash’s recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called “Folsom Prison Blues”, and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison”, and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he’d put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called “Crescent City Blues”, which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): “Crescent City Blues”] If you’ve not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash’s work, you’re probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins’ song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled “Crescent City Blues”, by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, “Crescent City Blues”] The second musical inspiration for Cash’s prison song was a song by Cash’s idol, Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”, also known as “T For Texas”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”] The line “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall” hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to “Crescent City Blues” that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result “Folsom Prison Blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”] 9) Sam Phillips didn’t think that was suitable as the B-side to “Hey Porter”, and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled “Cry Cry Cry,” but “Folsom Prison Blues” was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn’t want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and “Folsom Prison Blues” became Cash’s second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It’s around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn’t going to bother promoting Cash’s records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years — he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun’s downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he’d done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That’s not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends — though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl’s wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”, which became the B-side to Perkins’ “Boppin’ the Blues”: [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”] It’s not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis’ first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash’s career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn’t listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he’d written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in “Sixteen Tons”, the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash’s mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. “I Walk the Line” was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other’s argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn’t so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that “Hey Porter”, “Cry Cry Cry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” had all been performed in — a rock and roll tempo, for Cash’s rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn’t need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went “Get rhythm if you get the blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: “Get Rhythm”] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn’t see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn’t be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn’t so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “I Walk The Line”] “I Walk The Line” has a very, very, unusual structure. There’s a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it’s back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it’s back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they’re playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically — the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started — and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics — the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each — the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they’re not arranged in the standard order that you’d have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it’s the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse — though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that’s structured like a normal country and western song, and it’s quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It’s an expression of one man’s very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It’s an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn’t be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we’ll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we’ll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

Blue Yodel Number Nine. It’s a band name that catches the echoes of older forms of traditional music. The group plays at the Black Dog in Saint Paul Friday April 19 from 8-11. In a conversation with Phil Nusbaum, founding member of Blue Yodel #9 John Whitehead talked about where the name comes from.

We celebrate Country Music Month with songs from the 1920s through the 1940s. Music includes: She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain, Blue Yodel #4, I Don't Care If I Lose, Wildwood Flower, Pistol Packing Mama, South of the Border and Chuckwagon Swing. Performers include: The Skillet Lickers, Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, The Carter Family, The Swift Jewel Cowboys, The Sons of the Pioneers and Charlie Poole.

Celebrating Country Music Month with classic records from the 1920s through the 1940s. Songs include: Alabama Jubilee, I Am Thinking Tonight Of My Blue eyes, Blue Yodel #3, South of the Border, Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms, Jole Blon, Milk Cow Blues and Little Liza  Jane.  Performers include: Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, The Monroe Brothers, Darby and Tarlton, The Maddox Brothers and Rose, Bob Wills and Moon Mullican.

Yodeling in early 20th Century pop music.  Songs include: Yodeling Jive, The Harlem Yodel, Blue Yodel #5, I Miss My Swiss and The Yodeling Polka.  Artists include: Jimmie Rodgers, The Andrews Sisters, Bessie Smith, Bill Monroe, Gene Krupa and The Dandridge Sisters.

Songs with blue in the title, including Blue Moon, Little Girl Blue, Blue Yodel #3, Blue Tango and Once In a Blue Moon.  Performers include: Margaret Whiting, Bing Crosby, Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers and the Duke Ellington Orchestra.