Podcasts about The Boswell Sisters

'I can stand the heat'Generationals, Nikki Giovanni, Mathilda Santing, Joy Crookes, Isoa Tomita, Sean O'Hagan, Wings, Riziero Ortolani, Gabriels, Roy Orbison, Ennio Morricone, Stuart Moxham, The Stylistics, Yoko Kanno, The Boswell Sisters

Same Time, Same Station 02/23/2025 Bing Crosby Sound-alikes Part 1. “Bing Crosby Entertains” 09/18/1934 Boswell Sisters. First song, Love In Bloom. “Russ Columbo Program” 07/15/1934 first-song-rolling-in-love. “Avalon Time” 09/27/1939 Ep039 With Red Skelton. Meeting The In-Laws, Dick Todd’s first appearance. “Carnation Contented Hour” 09/xx/1949 50th Anniversary. Dinah Shore, Buddy Clark. If you would like to request shows, please call (714) 449-1958 E-mail: Larry Gassman: LarryGassman1@gmail.com John Gassman: John1Gassman@gmail.com

Same Time, Same Station 02/23/2025 Bing Crosby Sound-alikes Part 1. “Bing Crosby Entertains” 09/18/1934 Boswell Sisters. First song, Love In Bloom. “Russ Columbo Program” 07/15/1934 first-song-rolling-in-love. “Avalon Time” 09/27/1939 Ep039 With Red Skelton. Meeting The In-Laws, Dick Todd’s first appearance. “Carnation Contented Hour” 09/xx/1949 50th Anniversary. Dinah Shore, Buddy Clark. If you would like to request shows, please call (714) 449-1958 E-mail: Larry Gassman: LarryGassman1@gmail.com John Gassman: John1Gassman@gmail.com

durée : 00:30:26 - Jazz Collection - par : Alex Dutilh - Les voix buissonnières, ce sont des voix hors des sentiers battus, à l'écart des clichés attendus des chanteuses ou des chanteurs de jazz. Dans cet épisode : Les Double Six, Manhattan Transfer, The Boswell Sisters, The Andrew Sisters, Les Blue Stars, Lambert, Hendrikcs & Ross, Duchess... - réalisé par : Pierre Willer

Features vintage recordings by The Boswell Sisters, The Dorsey Brothers and Ina Ray Hutton.  We also listen to a catchy little jingle from "Patti Cake Cookies". Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * The music featured in this podcast is considered Public Domain.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

In folk and country music, it's the brother duets that usually get lots of attention. Think the Everly Brothers and the Delmore Brothers, for example. We'll give the sister musicians their due this week, and hear from Roni and Donna Stoneman, Lily May and Rosie Ledford, the Quebe Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, and lots of others. Sisters, sisters … this week on the Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysMatt Brown / “Taylor Girls” / My Native Home / 5-StringDonna & Roni Stoneman / “May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister” / The Legend Continues / PatuxentCassie and Maggie / “Hangman” / The Willow Collection / Self-producedThe Roches / “Hammond Song” / Maggie Roche: Where Do I Come From / StorysoundAlaisdair Fraser & Natalie Haas w/ Brittany Haas / “The Pinacree Ferryman” / Highlander's Farewell / CulburnieThe Henry Girls / “Reason to Believe” / Louder than Words / Beste UnterhaltungThe Boswell Sisters / “Rock and Roll” / That's How Rhythm Was Born / Columbia LegacyMatt Brown w/ Brittany Haas / “Carroll County Blues” / My Native Home / 5-StringLily May & Rosie Ledford / “White Oak Mountain” / Legends of Old-Time Music / CountyThe Vogts Sisters / “Prove Me Wrong” / Broken Ties / Self-producedMike, Peggy & Penny Seeger / “Old Ground Hog” / Animal Folk Songs for Children / RounderThe Quebe Sisters / “Bluegrass in the Backwoods” / The Quebe Sisters / Self-producedShirley & Dolly Collins / “Spencer the Rover” / The Sweet Primroses / TopicKate & Anna McGarrigle / “Talk to Me of Mendocino” / Kate & Anna McGarrigle / HannibalSharon Shannon w/ Mary Shannon / “The Ivory and the Quill” / Each Little Thing / Green LinnetPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Con The Puppini Sisters ft. The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, Postmodern Jukebox, Boswell Sisters, Wendell Hall, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Carlos Gardel, Joan Baez, Elis y Tom, "Drume negrita", una canción viajera, Eddie Hazel, Willowbay, the Beach Boys, Ferran Savall, Maestro Espada y La Casa Azul ft. Soleá Morente.

Connie (later Connee) Boswell was the central member of the Boswell Sisters trio in the 1920's and 30's although she had a series of solo recordings at the same time - here we will hear a few things from the 30's and early 40's (with Ben Pollack, John Scott Trotter and Frank Sigorelli) as well as the results of two Design lps in the middle 1950's featuring her with a large band doing Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin tunes as well as jazz album from the same period where she is backed by the Original Memphis Five (Billy Butterfield, Miff Mole, Jimmy Lytell, Signorelli, Gene Ramey and Tony Spargo). --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Josephine Baker was only 20 years old when she recorded the song “Dinah” at her first studio session 98 years ago this fall. That was just a year after the provocative dancer/singer arrived in Paris, immediately setting the town on fire with her risqué shows at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.And a West Virginian was right there to help her light those blazes.Ada “ Bricktop” Smith, a young Alderson, WV, native, was in Paris several years ahead of Baker, entertaining at composer Cole Porter's famous parties, often teaching his guests the latest dance crazes, such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Josephine Baker always acknowledged she was one Ada Smith's protégés in those heady early days of The Jazz Age.“I didn't get my first break on Broadway,” Baker told London's Guardian a half century later. No, she was just a nameless hoofer in the chorus line in those New York shows, she said, but “I became famous first in France in the Twenties.”“Oh yes,” she added, “Bricktop was there. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvelous time. Of course, everyone who was anyone knew Bricky. And they got to know Miss Baker as well."Ada Smith became one of 1920s' best known American singers/dancers, owning the famed “Chez Bricktop” in Paris from 1924 to 1961. She even got a shout-out in Woody Allen's hit film, Midnight in Paris, in 2011 when the character of Zelda Fitzgerald proposes an evening's escapade:In the next scene, Cole Porter, the Fitzgeralds and their fabulous friends pile into a period open car and tear down Parisian streetd into the night.Ending up at Chez Bricktop, they watch Josephine Baker dance (and the Fitzgeralds drink…)Back to the Song“Dinah,” considered an anthem of the Roarin' Twenties, was not quite two years old when Josephine Baker recorded it that autumn day in 1926 in Paris.It was back in The States that she learned the hot number when she sang it at New York's Plantation Club on Broadway as the understudy to Ethel Waters.Obviously, the song was still much on Baker's mind when she strolled into the Odeon studio for her first recording session. The band recruited to accompany her on the date is thought to be members of a group called “Olivier's Jazz Boys.”“Dinah” by then had been introduced to the world by Waters within a year of its composition in 1925. After it was recorded by Waters for Columbia in 1926, the song went on to be waxxed by everyone from Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.And, as noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, the tune was famously among the favorites of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who perform it in most of his numerous live shows and his radio appearances for decades after initially recording it in 1930.Our Take on the TuneWhenever the guys haven't seen each other for a couple of weeks, there's always a special joy when they all get back together again. That was certainly the case at last week's rehearsal. Add to that the fact that Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin dropped by to sit in. That always cranks up the energy level in the room. And you can just hear in this first tune of the evening. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Con Mocedades, Conexion, Los Ángeles, Fred Astaire, Boswell Sisters, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Taco, Junior, Tony Bennett ft Lady Gaga, los Fulanos y Miguelito Superstar, Sr. Chinarro, Crudo Pimiento, the Walking Beard, Amancio Prada, Lorena Álvarez y sus Rondadores y L-R.

Cab Calloway's immortal MINNIE THE MOOCHER was one of the first million selling black jazz records and spawned several sequels! Here we play homage to the tune and it's origins - from Cab to the Boswell Sisters, Roland Smith's Rascals and more!

With its ever-changing course, its flowing waters and historical significance, the Mississippi River serves as a powerful metaphor for the American story. The river is a lifeblood nourishing the land while also serving as a path to freedom itself, symbolizing the pursuit of freedom and progress from the North to the Gulf of Mexico. Additional to all of this are its routes of trade and commerce that highlight both the American spirit and prosperity. This week's Deeper Roots show celebrates the river that got its name after the northern Minnesota people, the Ojibway, and their name for ‘big river' as well as songs of the namesake state and delta as well. Performances include mid-century recordings from country favorites the Delmore Brothers and Jimmie Skinner, blues from Charlie Musselwhite and the Rufus Thomas, as well as classic recordings of Bob Dylan, Charley Pride, Pops Staples and the Boswell Sisters. Tune into West County radio each Friday morning at 9 Pacific.

'Review everything we do'Electronic, Richard Rorty, Ludovico Einaudi, Rob Auton, Eliza Doolittle, Rufus Hound, Vince.Guaraldi, The Gravity Drive, Fryars, The Teen Teens, Roddy Doyle, Robert Franks, The Secret Sisters, Mathilde Santing, Saint Etienne, Rita Dove, Philip Glass, Daniel Dennett, Debbie Reynolds, Malcolm McLaren, The Boswell Sisters, Lucinda Williams, Gregory Isaacs, David Byrne, Sheldon Allman, Sarah Jones.

Features vintage recordings by Mal Hallett, George Olsen and The Boswell Sisters.  We also listen to a Soundie by Larry Clinton and Ronnaldo answers Listener Mail. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * The music featured in this podcast is considered Public Domain.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

In folk and country music much attention is given to brother duets, like the Everlys and the Delmores, but less mention is made of sister sibling harmony. In counterpoint, this week on the Magazine we'll present Musical Sisters. We'll hear from Roni and Donna Stoneman, Lily May and Rosie Ledford, The Quebe Sisters, The Boswell Sisters, Shirley & Dolly Collins and many more. Sweet sisters singing … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysMatt Brown / “Taylor Girls” / My Native Home / 5-StringDonna & Roni Stoneman / “May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister” / The Legend Continues / PatuxentCassie and Maggie / “Hangman” / The Willow Collection / Self-producedThe Roches / “Hammond Song” / Maggie Roche: Where Do I Come From / StorysoundAlaisdair Fraser & Natalie Haas w/ Brittany Haas / “The Pinacree Ferryman” / Highlander's Farewell / CulburnieThe Henry Girls / “Reason to Believe” / Louder than Words / Beste UnterhaltungThe Boswell Sisters / “Rock and Roll” / That's How Rhythm Was Born / Columbia LegacyMatt Brown w/ Brittany Haas / “Carroll County Blues” / My Native Home / 5-StringLily May & Rosie Ledford / “White Oak Mountain” / Legends of Old-Time Music / CountyThe Vogts Sisters / “Prove Me Wrong” / Broken Ties / Self-producedMike, Peggy & Penny Seeger / “Old Ground Hog” / Animal Folk Songs for Children / RounderThe Quebe Sisters / “Bluegrass in the Backwoods” / The Quebe Sisters / Self-producedShirley & Dolly Collins / “Spencer the Rover” / The Sweet Primroses / TopicKate & Anna McGarrigle / “Talk to Me of Mendocino” / Kate & Anna McGarrigle / HannibalSharon Shannon w/ Mary Shannon / “The Ivory and the Quill” / Each Little Thing / Green LinnetPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Episodio 6.05 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar, en el cual rompemos los huevos de Pascua junto a la música de The Waitresses, Death Valley Girls, Wall of Voodoo, Wild Billy Childish & CTMF, A. C. Newman, Socrates Drank The Conium, Pappo’s Blues, The Boswell Sisters, Suárez, Tuxedomoon, Einstürzende Neubauten, Auto!Automatic!, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Son Rompe Pera. Y, obviamente, todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/saurio Programa emitido originalmente el 31 de marzo de 2024 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Repite el 1 de abril de 2024 en Radio Asamblea FM 94.1, CABA, y el 2 y 7 de abril de 2024 en Radio de la Calle, FM 87.9, Bahía Blanca

Episodio 5.38 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar, en el cual nos angustiamos con la incertidumbre electoral junto a The Muffs, Suburban Lawns, Wall of Voodoo, They Might Be Giants, Sparks, Slapp Happy, The Specials, The Boswell Sisters, Andrea Prodan, The Proclaimers, Spin Doctors, The Residents, Zahara y Chumbawamba. Y, obviamente, todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/saurio Programa subido originalmente el 19 de noviembre de 2023 a ivoox. Repite el 20 de noviembre de 2023 en Radio Asamblea FM 94.1, CABA, y el 21 y 25 de noviembre de 2023 en Radio de la Calle, FM 87.9, Bahía Blanca

Episodio 5.15 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar, en el cual tiritamos el cambio climático invernal junto a Reel Big Fish, The Primitives, Randy Newman, The Bonecollectors, Morzelpronk, Puerto Muerto, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Marianne Faithfull, The Boswell Sisters, Tronco, Suárez, Liquid Liquid, Zahara, Let’s Eat Grandma y MEUTE Y, obviamente, todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/saurio Programa emitido originalmente el 11 de junio de 2023 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Repite el 14 de junio de 2023 en Radio Asamblea FM 94.1, CABA, y el 13 y 17 de junio de 2023 en Radio de la Calle, FM 87.9, Bahía Blanca

Episodio 5.09 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar, en el cual combatimos a la alergia otoñal junto a Django Reinhardt, The Andrew Sisters, The Boswell Sisters, The Jubalaires, Cab Calloway, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Fats Waller, Spike Jones, Max Raabe und Palast Orchestre, MEUTE y Caravan Palace. Y, obviamente, todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/saurio Programa emitido originalmente el 30 de abril de 2023 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Repite el 3 de mayo de 2023 en Radio Asamblea FM 94.1, CABA, y el 2 y 6 de mayo de 2023 en Radio de la Calle, FM 87.9, Bahía Blanca

In this episode of Listening with Leckrone, Mike showcases the unique style and talents of The Boswell Sisters, a highly influential vocal group that helped popularize swing for a larger audience.

After almost a decade of planning and putting it off, the boys finally face their greatest fear:  group jazz singing.  What happens when three or four hipsters harmonize?  Is it safe to even try to find out?  Mike's not sure about that, but we tried anyway, and came up with this insight: you can't keep a good Boswell down.   In pop matters, Pat brags about having seen all three incarnations of the Bad Plus live, so stay tuned for that.  Royal Bopsters- ANNIVERSARY EDITION; Boswell Sisters – A SAMPLER; Mel Torme and the Mel Tones – BACK IN TOWN; Lambert Hendricks & Ross- SING A SONG OF BASIE.

Host Nate Wilcox asks Bob about the beginnings of the music industry in the first half of the 20th Century.Buy the book and support the show.Download this episode.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

In folk and country music much attention is given to brother duets such as the Everlys and the Delmores, but less mention is made of sister sibling harmony. On the next episode we'll present a program called Musical Sisters. We'll hear from Roni and Donna Stoneman, Lily May and Rosie Ledford, The Quebe Sisters, The Boswell Sisters, Shirley & Dolly Collins and lots of others. Sisters singing … this week on the Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysMatt Brown / “Taylor Girls” / My Native Home / 5-StringDonna & Roni Stoneman / “May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister” / The Legend Continues / PatuxentCassie and Maggie / “Hangman” / The Willow Collection / Self ProducedThe Roches / “Hammond Song” / Maggie Roche: Where Do I Come From / StorysoundAlaisdair Fraser & Natalie Haas w/ Brittany Haas / “The Pinacree Ferryman” / Highlander's Farewell / CulburnieThe Henry Girls / “Reason to Believe” / Louder than Words / Beste UnterhaltungThe Boswell Sisters / “Rock and Roll” / That's How Rhythm Was Born / Columbia LegacyMatt Brown w/ Brittany Haas / “Carroll County Blues” / My Native Home / 5-StringLily May & Rosie Ledford / “White Oak Mountain” / Legends of Old-Time Music / CountyThe Vogts Sisters / “Prove Me Wrong” / Broken Ties / Self ProducedMike, Peggy & Penny Seeger / “Old Ground Hog” / Animal Folk Songs for Children / RounderThe Quebe Ssters / “Bluegrass in the Backwoods” / The Quebe Sisters / Self ProducedShirley & Dolly Collins / “Spencer the Rover” / The Sweet Primroses / TopicKate & Anna McGarrigle / “Talk to Me of Mendocino” / Kate & Anna McGarrigle / HannibalSharon Shannon w/ Mary Shannon / “The Ivory and the Quill” / Each Little Thing / Green LinnetPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Good News: A 205-room hotel built from timber has just opened in Sweden, Link HERE. The Good Word: Another really brilliant quote from C.S. Lewis! Good To Know: Some impressive facts about C.S. Lewis and his education. Good News: The Greek island of Tilos has replaced its landfill with recycling plant that now reduces waste […]

Locuras que no habrán de faltar en sus Melodías Pizarras caseras, como tampoco faltarán titanes como los Prairie Ramblers, Nettles Brothers String Band, Tito Rodríguez y sus Lobos del Mambo, The Boswell Sisters, The Caresser, Nat Shilkret and the Victor Orchestra... A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

Una auténtica salvajada la que van a vivir esta calurosa noche con la La rubia explosiva del ritmo, el Profesor Longhair, Innocentay, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, Augie Goupil, The Boswell Sisters, Cootie Williams, Cortijo y su Combo, Jed Davenport, Hank Penny... A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3.Una auténtica salvajada la que van a vivir esta calurosa noche con la La rubia explosiva del ritmo, el Profesor Longhair, Innocentay, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, Augie Goupil, The Boswell Sisters, Cootie Williams, Cortijo y su Combo, Jed Davenport, Hank Penny... A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

Part one of a series of American Grooves Radio Hours dedicated to the memory of Rich Conaty - long time host of New Yorks' longest running radio program dedicated to the jazz, and pop music if the 1920s-mid-1930s - Each episode will play the type of 78s that Conaty cherished ( and played) on his program - From ealry Bing, Boswell Sisters, Paul Whiteman, Cab Calloway, Annette Hanshaw, Fletcher Henderson, Mills Brothers, Baby Rosemarie, Bennie Moten, Gus Arnheim, The Rhythm Boys and so many more! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/american-grooves-hour/support

Features vintage music by Glenn Miller, The Boswell Sisters, Tony Pastor and Count Basie.  We also listen to old radio ads from the most popular cigarette companies of the 1940's. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

While I'm still on hiatus, I invited questions from listeners. This is an hour-long podcast answering some of them. (Another hour-long Q&A for Patreon backers only will go up next week). Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ There is a Mixcloud of the music excerpted here which can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-qa-edition/ Click below for a transcript: Hello and welcome to the Q&A  episode I'm doing while I'm working on creating a backlog. I'm making good progress on that, and still hoping and expecting to have episode 151 up some time in early August, though I don't have an exact date yet. I was quite surprised by the response to my request for questions, both at the amount of it and at where it came from. I initially expected to get a fair few comments on the main podcast, and a handful on the Patreon, and then I could do a reasonable-length Q&A podcast from the former and a shorter one from the latter. Instead, I only got a couple of questions on the main episode, but so many on the Patreon that I had to stop people asking only a day or so after posting the request for questions. So instead of doing one reasonable length podcast and one shorter one, I'm actually doing two longer ones. What I'm going to do is do all the questions asked publicly, plus all the questions that have been asked multiple times, in this one, then next week I'm going to put up the more niche questions just for Patreon backers. However, I'm not going to answer *all* of the questions. I got so many questions so quickly that there's not space to answer them all, and several of them were along the lines of "is artist X going to get an episode?" which is a question I generally don't answer -- though I will answer a couple of those if there's something interesting to say about them. But also, there are some I've not answered for another reason. As you may have noticed, I have a somewhat odd worldview, and look at the world from a different angle from most people sometimes. Now there were several questions where someone asked something that seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but contains a whole lot of hidden assumptions that that person hadn't even considered -- about music history, or about the process of writing and researching, or something else. Now, to answer that kind of question at all often means unpacking those hidden assumptions, which can sometimes make for an interesting answer -- after all, a lot of the podcast so far has been me telling people that what they thought they knew about music history was wrong -- but when it's a question being asked by an individual and you answer that way, it can sometimes, frankly, make you look like a horribly unpleasant person, or even a bully. "Don't you even know the most basic things about historical research? I do! You fool! Hey everyone else listening, this person thinks you do research in *this* way, but everyone knows you do it *that* way!" Now, that is never how I would intend such answers to come across -- nobody can be blamed for not knowing what they don't know -- but there are some questions where no matter how I phrased the answer, it came across sounding like that. I'll try to hold those over for future Q&A episodes if I can think of ways of unpicking the answers in such a way that I'm not being unconscionably rude to people who were asking perfectly reasonable questions. Some of the answers that follow might still sound a bit like that to be honest, but if you asked a question and my answer sounds like that to you, please know that it wasn't meant to. There's a lot to get through, so let's begin: Steve from Canada asks: “Which influential artist or group has been the most challenging to get information on in the last 50 podcasts? We know there has been a lot written about the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown as an entity, the Monkees and the Rolling Stones, but you mentioned in a tweet that there's very little about some bands like the Turtles, who are an interesting story. I had never heard of Dino Valenti before this broadcast – but he appeared a lot in the last batch – so it got me curious. [Excerpt: The Move, “Useless Information”] In the last fifty episodes there's not been a single one that's made it to the podcast where it was at all difficult to get information. The problem with many of them is that there's *too much* information out there, rather than there not being enough. No matter how many books one reads on the Beatles, one can never read more than a fraction of them, and there's huge amounts of writing on the Rolling Stones, on Hendrix, on the Doors, on the Byrds... and when you're writing about those people, you *know* that you're going to miss out something or get something wrong, because there's one more book out there you haven't read which proves that one of the stories you're telling is false. This is one of the reasons the episodes have got so much longer, and taken so much more time. That wasn't the case in the first hundred episodes -- there were a lot of artists I covered there, like Gene and Eunice, or the Chords, or Jesse Belvin, or Vince Taylor who there's very little information about. And there are some coming up who there's far less information about than people in the last fifty episodes. But every episode since the Beatles has had a surfeit of information. There is one exception -- I wanted to do a full episode on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass, because it would be an interesting lens through which to look at how Chess coped with the change in Black musical styles in the sixties. But there was so little information available about her I ended up relegating it to a Patreon bonus episode, because she makes those earlier artists look well-documented. Which leads nicely into the next question. Nora Tillman asks "Forgive this question if you've answered it before: is there literally a list somewhere with 500 songs you've chosen? Has the list changed since you first composed it? Also, when did you first conceive of this list?" [Excerpt: John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, "As Someday it May Happen"] Many people have asked this question, or variations upon it. The answer is yes and no. I made a list when I started that had roughly two hundred songs I knew needed to be on there, plus about the same number again of artists who needed to be covered but whose precise songs I hadn't decided on. To make the initial list I pulled a list out of my own head, and then I also checked a couple of other five-hundred-song lists -- the ones put out by Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- not because I wanted to use their lists; I have very little time for rock critical orthodoxy, as most of my listeners will likely have realised by now, but because I wanted to double-check that I hadn't missed anything obvious out, and that if I was missing something off their lists, I knew *why* I was missing it. To take a ludicrous example, I wouldn't want to get to the end of the 1960s and have someone say "Wait a minute, what about the Beatles?" and think "I *knew* I'd forgotten something!" Then, at the start of each fifty-episode season, I put together a more rigorous list of the fifty songs coming up, in order. Those lists *can* still change with the research -- for example, very early on in the research for the podcast, I discovered that even though I was completely unfamiliar with "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice, it was a hugely important and influential record at the time, and so I swapped that in for another song. Or more recently, I initially intended to have the Doors only have one episode, but when I realised how much I was having to include in that episode I decided to give them a second one. And sometimes things happen the other way -- I planned to do full episodes on Jackie Shane and Fontella Bass, but for both of them I couldn't find enough information to get a decent episode done, so they ended up being moved to Patreon episodes. But generally speaking that fifty-song list for a year's episodes is going to remain largely unchanged. I know where I'm going, I know what most of the major beats of the story are, but I'm giving myself enough flexibility to deviate if I find something I need to include. Connected with this, Rob Johnson asks how I can be confident I'll get back to some stories in later episodes. Well, like I say, I have a pretty much absolute idea of what I'm going to do in the next year, and there are a lot of individual episodes where I know the structure of the episode long before we get to it. As an example here... I don't want to give too much away, and I'm generally not going to be answering questions about "will artist X be appearing?", but Rob also asked about one artist. I can tell you that that artist is one who will not be getting a full episode -- and I already said in the Patreon episode about that artist that they won't -- but as I also said in that episode they *will* get a significant amount of time in another episode, which I now know is going to be 180, which will also deal with another artist from the same state with the same forename, even though it's actually about two English bands. I've had the structure of that episode planned out since literally before I started writing episode one. On the other hand, episode 190 is a song that wasn't originally going to be included at all. I was going to do a 1967 song by the same artist, but then found out that a fact I'd been going to use was disputed, which meant that track didn't need to be covered, but the artist still did, to finish off a story I'd started in a previous episode. Patrick asks:"I am currently in the middle of reading 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth and I'm aware that Apple TV have produced a documentary on how music changed that year as well and I was wondering what your opinion on that subject matter? I imagine you will be going into some detail on future podcasts, but until recently I never knew people considered 1971 as a year that brought about those changes." [Excerpt: Rod Stewart, "Angel"] I've not yet read Hepworth's book, but that it's named after an album which came out in 1972 (which is the album that track we just heard came from) says something about how the idea that any one year can in itself be a turning point for music is a little overstated -- and the Apple documentary is based on Hepworth's book, so it's not really multiple people making that argument. Now, as it happens, 1971 is one of the break points for the podcast -- episodes 200 and 201 are both records from July 1971, and both records that one could argue were in their own way signifiers of turning points in rock music history. And as with 1967 it's going to have more than its fair share of records, as it bridges the gap of two seasons. But I think one could make similar arguments for many, many years, and 1971 is  not one of the most compelling cases. I can't say more before I read Hepworth's book, which won't be for a few months yet. I'm instinctively dubious of these "this year was the big year that changed everything" narratives, but Hepworth's a knowledgeable enough writer that I wouldn't want to dismiss his thesis without even reading the book. Roger Pannell asks I'm a fairly recent joiner-in too so you may have answered this before. What is the theme tune to the podcast please. [Excerpt: The Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The theme song to the podcast is "Rock and Roll" by the Boswell Sisters. The version I use is not actually the version that was released as a single, but a very similar performance that was used in the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round in 1931. I chose it in part because it may well be the first ever record to contain the phrase "rock and roll" (though as I've said many times there's no first anything, and there are certainly many records which talk about rocking and/or rolling -- just none I know of with that phrase) so it evokes rock and roll history, partly because the recording is out of copyright, and partly just because I like the Boswell Sisters. Several people asked questions along the lines of this one from Christopher Burnett "Just curious if there's any future episodes planned on any non-UK or non-North American songs? The bonus episodes on the Mops and Kyu Sakamoto were fascinating." [Excerpt: Kyu Sakamoto, "Sukiyaki"] Sadly, there won't be as many episodes on musicians from outside the UK and North America as I'd like. The focus of the podcast is going to be firmly on British, American, Irish, and Canadian musicians, with a handful from other Anglophone countries like Australia and Jamaica. There *are* going to be a small number of episodes on non-Anglophone musicians, but very few. Sadly, any work of history which engages with injustices still replicates some of those injustices, and one of the big injustices in rock history is that most rock musicians have been very insular, and there has been very little influence from outside the Anglophone world, which means that I can't talk much about influential records made by musicians from elsewhere.  Also, in a lot of cases most of the writing about them is in other languages, and I'm shamefully monolingual (I have enough schoolboy French not to embarrass myself, but not enough to read a biography without a dictionary to hand, and that's it). There *will* be quite a few bonus episodes on musicians from non-Anglophone countries though, because this *is* something that I'm very aware of as a flaw, and if I can find ways of bringing the wider story into the podcast I will definitely do so, even if it means changing my plans somewhat, but I'm afraid they'll largely be confined to Patreon bonuses rather than mainline episodes. Ed Cunard asks "Is there a particular set of songs you're not looking forward to because you don't care for them, but intend to dive into due to their importance?" [Excerpt: Jackie Shane, "Don't Play That Song"] There are several, and there already have been some, but I'm not going to say what they are as part of anything to do with the podcast (sometimes I might talk about how much I hate a particular record on my personal Twitter account or something, but I try not to on the podcast's account, and I'm certainly not going to in an episode of the podcast itself). One of the things I try to do with the podcast is to put the case forward as to why records were important, why people liked them at the time, what they got out of them. I can't do that if I make it about my own personal tastes. I know for a fact that there are people who have come away from episodes on records I utterly despise saying "Wow! I never liked that record before, but I do now!" and that to me shows that I have succeeded -- I've widened people's appreciation for music they couldn't appreciate before. Of course, it's impossible to keep my own tastes from showing through totally, but even there people tend to notice much more my like or dislike for certain people rather than for their music, and I don't feel anything like as bad for showing that. So I have a policy generally of just never saying which records in the list I actually like and which I hate. You'll often be able to tell from things I talk about elsewhere, but I don't want anyone to listen to an episode and be prejudiced not only against the artist but against the episode  by knowing going in that I dislike them, and I also don't want anyone to feel like their favourite band is being given short shrift. There are several records coming up that I dislike myself but where I know people are excited about hearing the episode, and the last thing I want to do is have those people who are currently excited go in disappointed before they even hear it. Matt Murch asks: "Do you anticipate tackling the shift in rock toward harder, more seriously conceptual moves in 1969 into 1970, with acts like Led Zeppelin, The Who (again), Bowie, etc. or lighter soul/pop artists such as Donna Summer, Carly Simon or the Carpenters? Also, without giving too much away, is there anything surprising you've found in your research that you're excited to cover? [Excerpt: Robert Plant, "If I Were a Carpenter"] OK, for the first question... I don't want to say exactly who will and won't be covered in future episodes, because when I say "yes, X will be covered" or "no, Y will not be covered", it invites a lot of follow-up discussion along the lines of "why is X in there and not Y?" and I end up having to explain my working, when the episodes themselves are basically me explaining my working. What I will say is this... the attitude I'm taking towards who gets included and who gets excluded is, at least in part, influenced by an idea in cognitive linguistics called prototype theory. According to this theory, categories aren't strictly bounded like in Aristotelian thought -- things don't have strict essences that mean they definitely are or aren't members of categories. But rather, categories have fuzzy boundaries, and there are things at the centre that are the most typical examples of the category, and things at the border that are less typical. For example, a robin is a very "birdy" bird -- it's very near the centre of the category of bird, it has a lot of birdness -- while an ostrich is still a bird, but much less birdy, it's sort of in the fuzzy boundary area. When you ask people to name a bird, they're more likely to name a robin than an ostrich, and if you ask them “is an ostrich a bird?” they take longer to answer than they do when asked about robins. In the same way, a sofa is nearer the centre of the category of "furniture" than a wardrobe is. Now, I am using an exceptionally wide definition of what counts as rock music, but at the same time, in order for it to be a history of rock music, I do have to spend more time in the centre of the concept than around the periphery. My definition would encompass all the artists you name, but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that the first three artists you name are much closer to the centre of the concept of "rock music" than the last three. That's not to say anyone on either list is definitely getting covered or is definitely *not* getting covered -- while I have to spend more time in the centre than the periphery, I do have to spend some time on the periphery, and my hope is to cover as many subgenres and styles as I can -- but that should give an idea of how I'm approaching this. As for the second question -- there's relatively little that's surprising that I've uncovered in my research so far, but that's to be expected. The period from about 1965 through about 1975 is the most over-covered period of rock music history, and so the basic facts for almost every act are very, very well known to people with even a casual interest. For the stuff I'm doing in the next year or so, like the songs I've covered for the last year, it's unlikely that anything exciting will come up until very late in the research process, the times when I'm pulling everything together and notice one little detail that's out of place and pull on that thread and find the whole story unravelling. Which may well mean, of course, that there *are* no such surprising things. That's always a possibility in periods where we're looking at things that have been dealt with a million times before, and this next year may largely be me telling stories that have already been told. Which is still of value, because I'm putting them into a larger context of the already-released episodes, but we'll see if anything truly surprising happens. I certainly hope it does. James Kosmicki asks "Google Podcasts doesn't seem to have any of the first 100 episodes - are they listed under a different name perhaps?" [Excerpt: REM, "Disappear"] I get a number of questions like this, about various podcast apps and sites, and I'm afraid my answer is always the same -- there's nothing I can do about this, and it's something you'd have to take up with the site in question. Google Podcasts picks up episodes from the RSS feed I provide, the same as every other site or app. It's using the right feed, that feed has every episode in it, and other sites and apps are working OK with it. In general, I suggest that rather than streaming sites like Google Podcasts or Stitcher or Spotify, where the site acts as a middleman and they serve the podcast to you from their servers, people should use a dedicated podcast app like RadioPublic or Pocketcasts or gPodder, where rather than going from a library of podcast episodes that some third party has stored, you're downloading the files direct from the original server, but I understand that sometimes those apps are more difficult to use, especially for less tech-savvy people. But generally, if an episode is in some way faulty or missing on the 500songs.com webpage, that's something I can do something about. If it's showing up wrong on Spotify or Google Podcasts or Stitcher or whatever, that's a problem at their end. Sorry. Darren Johnson asks "were there any songs that surprised you? Which one made the biggest change between what you thought you knew and what you learned researching it?" [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Goodbye Surprise"] Well, there have been a few, in different ways. The most surprising thing for me actually was in the most recent episode when I discovered the true story behind the "bigger than Jesus" controversy during my reading. That was a story I'd known one way for my entire life -- literally I think I first read about that story when I was six or seven -- and it turned out that not one thing I'd read on the subject had explained what had really happened. But then there are other things like the story of "Ko Ko Mo", which was a record I wasn't even planning on covering at first, but which turned out to be one of the most important records of the fifties. But I actually get surprised relatively little by big-picture things. I'll often discover fun details or new connections between things I hadn't noticed before, but the basic outlines of the story never change that much -- I've been reading about music history literally since I learned how to read, and while I do a deep dive for each episode, it's very rare that I discover anything that totally changes my perspective. There is always a process of reevaluation going on, and a change in the emphases in my thought, so for example when I started the project I knew Johnny Otis would come up a fair bit in the early years, and knew he was a major figure, but was still not giving him the full credit he deserved in my head. The same goes for Jesse Belvin, and as far as background figures go Lester Sill and Milt Gabler. But all of these were people I already knew were important, i just hadn't connected all the dots in my head. I've also come to appreciate some musicians more than I did previously. But there are very few really major surprises, which is probably to be expected -- I got into this already knowing a *LOT*, because otherwise I wouldn't have thought this was a project I could take on. Tracey Germa -- and I'm sorry, I don't know if that's pronounced with a hard or soft G, so my apologies if I mispronounced it -- asks: "Hi Andrew. We love everything about the podcast, but are especially impressed with the way you couch your trigger warnings and how you embed social commentary into your analysis of the music. You have such a kind approach to understanding human experiences and at the same time you don't balk at saying the hard things some folks don't want to hear about their music heroes. So, the question is - where does your social justice/equity/inclusion/suffer no fools side come from? Your family? Your own experiences? School/training?” [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "Little Triggers"] Well, firstly, I have to say that people do say  this kind of thing to me quite a lot, and I'm grateful when they say it, but I never really feel comfortable with it, because frankly I think I do very close to the absolute minimum, and I get by because of the horribly low expectations our society has for allocishet white men, which means that making even the tiniest effort possible to be a decent human being looks far more impressive by comparison than it actually is. I genuinely think I don't do a very good job of this at all, although I do try, and that's not false modesty there. But to accept the premise of the question for a moment, there are a couple of answers. My parents are both fairly progressive both politically and culturally,  for the time and place where they raised me. They both had strong political convictions, and while they didn't have access to much culture other than what was on TV or in charting records or what have you -- there was no bookshop or record shop in our town, and obviously no Internet back then -- they liked the stuff out of that mix that was forward-thinking, and so was anti-racist, accepting of queerness, and so on. From a very early age, I was listening to things like "Glad to be Gay" by the Tom Robinson Band. So from before I really even understood what those concepts were, I knew that the people I admired thought that homophobia and racism were bad things. I was also bullied a lot at school, because I was autistic and fat and wore glasses and a bunch of other reasons. So I hated bullying and never wanted to be a bully. I get very, very, *very* angry at cruelty and at abuses of power -- as almost all autistic people do, actually. And then, in my twenties and thirties, for a variety of reasons I ended up having a social circle that was predominantly queer and/or disabled and/or people with mental health difficulties. And when you're around people like that, and you don't want to be a bully, you learn to at least try to take their feelings into consideration, though I slipped up a great deal for a long time, and still don't get everything right. So that's the "social justice" side of things. The other side, the "understanding human experiences" side... well, everyone has done awful things at times, and I would hope that none of us would be judged by our worst behaviours. "Use every man to his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" and all that. But that doesn't mean those worst behaviours aren't bad, and that they don't hurt people, and denying that only compounds the injustice. People are complicated, societies are complicated, and everyone is capable of great good and great evil. In general I tend to avoid a lot of the worst things the musicians I talk about did, because the podcast *is* about the music, but when their behaviour affects the music, or when I would otherwise be in danger of giving a truly inaccurate picture of someone, I have to talk about those things. You can't talk about Jerry Lee Lewis without talking about how his third marriage derailed his career, you can't talk about Sam Cooke without talking about his death, and to treat those subjects honestly you have to talk about the reprehensible sides of their character. Of course, in the case of someone like Lewis, there seems to be little *but* a reprehensible side, while someone like Cooke could be a horrible, horrible person, but even the people he hurt the most also loved him dearly because of his admirable qualities. You *have* to cover both aspects of someone like him if you want to be honest, and if you're not going to be honest why bother trying to do history at all? Lester Dragstedt says (and I apologise if I mispronounced that): "I absolutely love this podcast and the perspective you bring. My only niggle is that the sound samples are mixed so low. When listening to your commentary about a song at voice level my fingers are always at the volume knob to turn up when the song comes in." [Excerpt: Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet"] This is something that gets raised a lot, but it's not something that's ever going to change. When I started the podcast, I had the music levels higher, and got complaints about that, so I started mixing them lower. I then got complaints about *that*, so I did a poll of my Patreon backers to see what they thought, and by about a sixty-forty margin they wanted the levels to be lower, as they are now, rather than higher as they were earlier. Basically, there seem to be two groups of listeners. One group mostly listens with headphones, and doesn't like it when the music gets louder, because it hurts their ears. The other group mostly listens in their cars, and the music gets lost in the engine noise. That's a gross oversimplification, and there are headphone listeners who want the music louder and car listeners who want the music quieter, but the listenership does seem to split roughly that way, and there are slightly more headphone listeners. Now, it's literally *impossible* for me to please everyone, so I've given up trying with this, and it's *not* going to change. Partly because the majority of my backers voted one way, partly because it's just easier to leave things the way they are rather than mess with them given that no matter what I do someone will be unhappy, and partly because both Tilt when he edits the podcast and I when I listen back and tweak his edit are using headphones, and *we* don't want to hurt our ears either. Eric Peterson asks "if we are basically in 1967 that is when we start seeing Country artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings - the Man who Survived the Day the Music Died - start to bring more rock songs into their recordings and start to set the ground work in many ways for Country Rock ... how do you envision bringing the role they play in the History of Rock and Roll into the podcast?" [Excerpt: The Del McCoury Band, "Nashville Cats"] I will of course be dealing with country rock as one of the subgenres I discuss -- though there's only one real country-rock track coming up in the next fifty, but there'll be more as I get into the seventies, and there are several artists coming up with at least some country influence. But I won't be looking at straight country musicians like Jennings or Cash except through the lens of rock musicians they inspired -- things like me talking about Johnny Cash briefly in the intro to the "Hey Joe" episode. I think Cocaine and Rhinestones is already doing a better job of covering country music than I ever could, and so those people will only touch the story tangentially. Nili Marcia says: "If one asks a person what's in that room it would not occur to one in 100 to mention the air that fills it. Something so ubiquitous as riff--I don't know what a riff actually is! Will you please define riff, preferably with examples." Now this is something I actually thought I'd explained way back in episode one, and I have a distinct memory of doing so, but I must have cut that part out -- maybe I recorded it so badly that part couldn't be salvaged, which happened sometimes in the early days -- because I just checked and there's no explanation there. I would have come back to this at some point if I hadn't been thinking all along that I'd covered it right at the start, because you're right, it is a term that needs definition. A riff is, simply, a repeated, prominent, instrumental figure. The term started out in jazz, and there it was a term for a phrase that would be passed back and forth between different instruments -- a trumpet might play a phrase, then a saxophone copy it, then back to the trumpet, then back to the saxophone. But quickly it became a term for a repeated figure that becomes the main accompaniment part of a song, over which an instrumentalist might solo or a singer might sing, but which you remember in its own right. A few examples of well-known riffs might include "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"] "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] "Last Train to Clarksville" by the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The bass part in “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie: [Excerpt: Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure”] Or the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie": [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Basically, if you can think of a very short, prominent, instrumental idea that gets repeated over and over, that's a riff. Erik Pedersen says "I love the long episodes and I suspect you do too -- thoroughness. of this kind is something few get the opportunity to do -- but have you ever, after having written a long one, decided to cut them significantly? Are there audio outtakes you might string together one day?" [Excerpt: Bing Crosby and Les Paul, "It's Been a Long, Long Time"] I do like *having* done the long episodes, and sometimes I enjoy doing them, but other times I find it frustrating that an episode takes so long, because there are other stories I want to move on to. I'm trying for more of a balance over the next year, and we'll see how that works out. I want to tell the story in the depth it deserves, and the longer episodes allow me to do that, and to experiment with narrative styles and so on, but I also want to get the podcast finished before I die of old age. Almost every episode has stuff that gets cut, but it's usually in the writing or recording stage -- I'll realise a bit of the episode is boring and just skip it while I'm recording, or I'll cut out an anecdote or something because it looks like it's going to be a flabby episode and I want to tighten it up, or sometimes I'll realise that because of my mild speech impediments a sentence is literally unspeakable, and I'll rework it. It's very, very rare that I'll cut anything once it's been recorded, and if I do it's generally because when I listen back after it's been edited I'll realise I'm repeating myself or I made a mistake and need to cut a sentence because I said the wrong name, that sort of thing. I delete all the audio outtakes, but even if I didn't there would be nothing worth releasing. A few odd, out of context sentences, the occasional paragraph just repeating something I'd already said, a handful of actual incorrect facts, and a lot of me burping, or trying to say a difficult name three times in a row, or swearing when the phone rings in the middle of a long section. Lucy Hewitt says "Something that interests me, and that I'm sure you will cover is how listeners consume music and if that has an impact. In my lifetime we've moved from a record player which is fixed in one room to having a music collection with you wherever you go, and from hoping that the song you want to hear might be played on the radio to calling it up whenever you want. Add in the rise of music videos, and MTV, and the way in which people access music has changed a lot over the decades. But has that affected the music itself?" [Excerpt: Bow Wow Wow "C30 C60 C90 Go!"] It absolutely has affected the music itself in all sorts of ways, some of which I've touched on already and some of which I will deal with as we go through the story, though the story I'm telling will end around the time of Napster and so won't involve streaming services and so forth. But every technology change leads to a change in the sound of music in both obvious and non-obvious ways. When AM radio was the most dominant form of broadcasting, there was no point releasing singles in stereo, because at that time there were no stereo AM stations. The records also had to be very compressed, so the sound would cut through the noise and interference. Those records would often be very bass-heavy and have a very full, packed, sound. In the seventies, with the rise of eight-track players, you'd often end up with soft-rock and what would later get termed yacht rock having huge success. That music, which is very ethereal and full of high frequencies, is affected less negatively by some of the problems that came with eight-track players, like the tape stretching slightly. Then post-1974 and the OPEC oil crisis, vinyl became more expensive, which meant that records started being made much thinner, which meant you couldn't cut grooves as deeply, which meant you lost bass response, which again changed the sound of records – and also explains why when CDs came out, people started thinking they sounded better than records, because they *did* sound better than the stuff that was being pressed in the late seventies and early eighties, which was so thin it was almost transparent, even though they sounded nowhere near as good as the heavy vinyl pressings of the fifties and sixties. And then the amount of music one could pack into a CD encouraged longer tracks... A lot of eighties Hi-NRG and dance-pop music, like the records made by Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, has almost no bass but lots of skittering high-end percussion sounds -- tons of synthesised sleighbells and hi-hats and so on -- because a lot of disco equipment had frequency-activated lights, and the more high-end stuff was going on, the more the disco lights flashed... We'll look at a lot of these changes as we go along, but every single new format, every new way of playing an old format, every change in music technology, changes what music gets made quite dramatically. Lucas Hubert asks: “Black Sabbath being around the corner, how do you plan on dealing with Heavy Metal? I feel like for now, what is popular and what has had a big impact in Rock history coincide. But that kind of change with metal, no? (Plus, prog and metal are more based on albums than singles, I think.)” [Excerpt: Black Sabbath, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”] I plan on dealing with metal the same way I've been dealing with every other subgenre. We are, yes, getting into a period where influence and commercial success don't correlate quite as firmly as they did in the early years -- though really we've already been there for quite some time. I've done two episodes so far on the Byrds, a group who only had three top-twenty singles in the US and two in the UK, but only did a bonus episode on Herman's Hermits, who had fourteen in the US and seventeen in the UK. I covered Little Richard but didn't cover Pat Boone, even though Boone had the bigger hits with Richard's songs. In every subgenre there are going to be massive influences who had no hits, and people who had lots of hits but didn't really make much of a wider impact on music, and I'll be dealing with the former more than the latter. But also, I'll be dealing most with people who were influential *and* had lots of hits -- if nothing else because while influence and chart success aren't a one-to-one correlation, they're still somewhat correlated. So it's unlikely you'll see me cover your favourite Scandinavian Black Metal band who only released one album of which every copy was burned in a mysterious fire two days after release, but you can expect most of the huge names in metal to be covered. Though even there, simply because of the number of subgenres I'm going to cover, I'm going to miss some big ones. Related to the question about albums, Svennie asks “This might be a bit of a long winded question so just stick with me here. As the music you cover becomes more elaborate, and the albums become bigger in scale, how do you choose a song which you build the story around while also telling the story of that album? I ask this specifically with the White Album in mind, where you've essentially got four albums in one. To that end, what song would you feel defines the White Album?” [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Revolution #9”] Well, you'll see how I cover the White Album in episode one hundred and seventy-two -- we're actually going to have quite a long stretch with no Beatles songs covered because I'm going to backfill a lot of 1967 and then we're getting to the Beatles again towards the end of 1968, but it'll be another big one when we get there. But in the general case... the majority of albums to come still had singles released off them, and a lot of what I'm going to be looking at in the next year or two is still hit singles, even if the singles are by people known as album bands. Other times, a song wasn't a single, but maybe it was covered by someone else -- if I know I'm going to cover a rock band and I also know that one of the soul artists who would do rock covers as album tracks did a version of one of their songs, and I'm going to cover that soul artist, say, then if I do the song that artist covered I can mention it in the episode on the soul singer and tie the two episodes together a bit. In other cases there's a story behind a particular track that's more interesting than other tracks, or the track is itself a cover version of someone else's record, which lets me cover both artists in a single episode, or it's the title track of the album. A lot of people have asked me this question about how I'd deal with albums as we get to the late sixties and early seventies, but looking at the list of the next fifty episodes, there's actually only two where I had to think seriously about which song I chose from an album -- in one case, I chose the title track, in the other case I just chose the first song on the album (though in that case I may end up choosing another song from the same album if I end up finding a way to make that a more interesting episode). The other forty-eight were all very, very obvious choices. Gary Lucy asks “Do you keep up with contemporary music at all? If so, what have you been enjoying in 2022 so far…and if not, what was the most recent “new” album you really got into?” [Excerpt: Stew and the Negro Problem, "On the Stage of a Blank White Page"] I'm afraid I don't. Since I started doing the podcast, pretty much all of my listening time has been spent on going back to much older music, and even before that, when I was listening to then-new music it was generally stuff that was very much inspired by older music, bands like the Lemon Twigs, who probably count as the last new band I really got into with their album Do Hollywood, which came out in 2016 but which I think I heard in 2018. I'm also now of that age where 2018 seems like basically yesterday, and when I keep thinking "what relatively recent albums have I liked?" I think of things like The Reluctant Graveyard by Jeremy Messersmith, which is from 2010, or Ys by Joanna Newsom, which came out in 2006. Not because I haven't bought records released since then, but because my sense of time is so skewed that summer 1994 and summer 1995 feel like epochs apart, hugely different times in every way, but every time from about 2005 to 2020 is just "er... a couple of years ago? Maybe?" So without going through every record I've bought in the last twenty years and looking at the release date I couldn't tell you what still counts as contemporary and what's old enough to vote. I have recently listened a couple of times to an album by a band called Wet Leg, who are fairly new, but other than that I can't say. But probably the most recent albums to become part of my regular listening rotation are two albums which came out simultaneously in 2018 by Stew and the Negro Problem, Notes of a Native Song, which is a song cycle about James Baldwin and race in America, and The Total Bent, which is actually the soundtrack to a stage musical, and which I think many listeners to the podcast might find interesting, and which is what that last song excerpt was taken from. It's basically a riff on the idea of The Jazz Singer, but set in the Civil Rights era, and about a young politically-radical Black Gospel songwriter who writes songs for his conservative preacher father to sing, but who gets persuaded to become a rock and roll performer by a white British record producer who fetishises Black music. It has a *lot* to say about religion, race, and politics in America -- a couple of the song titles, to give you some idea, are "Jesus Ain't Sitting in the Back of the Bus" and "That's Why He's Jesus and You're Not, Whitey". It's a remarkable album, and it deals with enough of the same subjects I've covered here that I think any listeners will find it interesting. Unfortunately, it was released through the CDBaby store, which closed down a few months later, and unlike most albums released through there it doesn't seem to have made its way onto any of the streaming platforms or digital stores other than Apple Music, which rather limits its availability. I hope it comes out again soon. Alec Dann says “I haven't made it to the Sixties yet so pardon if you have covered this: what was the relationship between Sun and Stax in their heyday? Did musicians work in both studios?” [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] I've covered this briefly in a couple of the episodes on Stax, but the short version is that Sun was declining just as Stax was picking up. Jim Stewart, who founded Stax, was inspired in part by Sam Phillips, and there was a certain amount of cross-fertilisation, but not that much. Obviously Rufus Thomas recorded for both labels, and there were a few other connections -- Billy Lee Riley, for example, who I did an episode on for his Sun work, also recorded at the Stax studio before going on to be a studio musician in LA, and it was actually at a Billy Lee Riley session that went badly that Booker T and the MGs recorded "Green Onions". Also, Sun had a disc-cutting machine and Stax didn't, so when they wanted to get an acetate cut to play for DJs they'd take it to Sun -- it was actually Scotty Moore, who was working for Sun as a general engineer and producer as well as playing RCA Elvis sessions by 1962, who cut the first acetate copy of "Green Onions". But in general the musicians playing at Stax were largely the next generation of musicians -- people who'd grown up listening to the records Sam Phillips had put out in the very early fifties by Black musicians, and with very little overlap. Roger Stevenson asks "This project is going to take the best part of 7 years to complete. Do you have contingency plans in case of major problems? And please look after yourself - this project is gong to be your legacy." [Excerpt: Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, "Button Up Your Overcoat"] I'm afraid there's not much I can do if major problems come up -- by major problems I'm talking about things that prevent me from making the podcast altogether, like being unable to think or write or talk. By its nature, the podcast is my writing and my research and my voice, and if I can't do those things... well, I can't do them. I *am* trying to build in some slack again -- that's why this month off has happened -- so I can deal with delays and short-term illnesses and other disruptions, but if it becomes impossible to do it becomes impossible to do, and there's nothing more I can do about it. Mark Lipson asks "I'd like to know which episodes you've released have been the most & least popular? And going forward, which episodes do you expect to be the most popular? Just curious to know what music most of your listeners listen to and are interested in." [Excerpt: Sly and the Family Stone, "Somebody's Watching You"] I'm afraid I honestly don't know. Most podcasters have extensive statistical tools available to them, which tell them which episodes are most popular, what demographics are listening to the podcast, where they are in the world, and all that kind of thing. They use that information to sell advertising spots, which is how they make most of their money. You can say "my podcast is mostly listened to by seventy-five year-olds who google for back pain relief -- the perfect demographic for your orthopedic mattresses" or "seven thousand people who downloaded my latest episode also fell for at least one email claiming to be from the wallet inspector last year, so my podcast is listened to by the ideal demographic for cryptocurrency investment". Now, I'm lucky enough to be making enough money from my Patreon supporters' generosity that I don't have to sell advertising, and I hope I never do have to. I said at the very start of the process that I would if it became necessary, but that I hoped to keep it ad-free, and people have frankly been so astonishingly generous I should never have to do ads -- though I do still reserve the right to change my mind if the support drops off. Now, my old podcast host gave me access to that data as standard. But when I had to quickly change providers, I decided that I wasn't going to install any stats packages to keep track of people. I can see a small amount of information about who actually visits the website, because wordpress.com gives you that information – not your identities but just how many people come from which countries, and what sites linked them. But if you're downloading the podcast through a podcast app, or listening through Spotify or Stitcher or wherever, I've deliberately chosen not to access that data. I don't need to know who my audience is, or which episodes they like the most -- and if I did, I have a horrible feeling I'd start trying to tailor the podcast to be more like what the existing listeners like, and by doing so lose the very things that make it unique. Once or twice a month I'll look at the major podcast charts, I check the Patreon every so often to see if there's been a massive change in subscriber numbers, but other than that I decided I'm just not going to spy on my listeners (though pretty much every other link in the chain does, I'm afraid, because these days the entire Internet is based on spying on people). So the only information I have is the auto-generated "most popular episodes" thing that comes up on the front page, which everyone can see, and which shows the episodes people who actually visit the site are listening to most in the last few days, but which doesn't count anything from more than a few days ago, and which doesn't count listens from any other source, and which I put there basically so new listeners can see which ones are popular. At the moment that's showing that the most listened episodes recently are the two most recent full episodes -- "Respect" and "All You Need is Love" -- the most recent of the Pledge Week episodes, episodes one and two, so people are starting at the beginning, and right now there's also the episodes on "Ooby Dooby", "Needles and Pins", "God Only Knows", "She Loves You" and "Hey Joe". But in a couple of days' time those last five will be totally different. And again, that's just the information from people actually visiting the podcast website. I've deliberately chosen not to know what people listening in any other way are doing -- so if you've decided to just stream that bit of the Four Tops episode where I do a bad Bob Dylan impression five thousand times in a row, you can rest assured I have no idea you're doing it and your secret is totally safe. Anyway, that's all I have time for in this episode. In a week or so I'll post a similar-length episode for Patreon backers only, and then a week or two after that the regular podcast will resume, with a story involving folk singers, jazz harmony, angelic visitations and the ghost of James Dean. See you then.

Jacob Miller is a touring singer/songwriter and a featured contestant on NBC's The Voice. While in town to perform at Pickled Fish, he stopped by the studio to play a few songs and talk about his artistic process and his upcoming West Coast tour. Jacob is the first musical guest we have heard on Ramble by the River and he set a precedent that will be hard to top. Between songs we talk about his writing process, his personal philosophies, and his experiences in the music business (including his time on The Voice). Some topics you'll hear: Televised singing competitions (The Voice, American Idol, etc.) Singing at church, challenges of faith, personal truth. Song-writing strategies and styles Teaching music to kids at Avenues World School in New York. Jacob's time at an artist residency on Orcas Island. Relationship with the inner-self-critic. Jacob is a great guy. He is a fantastic musician and I am so honored to have him as a guest. I hope you enjoy the show! If you enjoy this podcast, please help us to keep making it. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ramble-by-the-river/id1549558167 (Leave a review on Apple Podcasts) Link to the video from the introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6GgaJWcbww (Saudi Arabia's Controversial Megacity Project) Keywords: Orcas Island; San Juan Islands; singer/songwriter; folk music;  Portland Oregon; Wisconsin; The Boswell Sisters; jazz; ragtime; blues; Roger Waters; Louis Armstrong; Pickled Fish; Simon and Garfunkel; Paul Simon; Graceland; Lady Smith Black Mambazo; The Voice; American Idol; Love Island UK; Nick Jonas; Disney; The Jonas Brothers; James Taylor; Blake Shelton; Kelly Clarkson; Covid-19; Dobe Fest; tattoos; marijuana; Humboldt County; Arcata, Ca; alcoholism; yoga; meditation; Education; Religion; Bible stories; evangelicalism; generational trauma; Sisters, Oregon; Subtle Lake; Subtle Lake Lodge. Ramble by the River Links: https://www.RamblebytheRiver.com (RamblebytheRiver.com) https://my.captivate.fm/Patreon.com/ramblebytheriver (Patreon) https://www.facebook.com/jeff.nesbitt.9619/ (Facebook) Instagram https://twitter.com/rambleriverpod (Twitter) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNiZ9OBYRxF3fJ4XcsDxLeg (YouTube) https://www.ramblebytheriver.captivate.fm (Episode Archive) https://www.jacobmillermusic.net/home3 (Jacob Miller) Links: https://www.jacobmillermusic.net/tour (Tour Dates/Tickets) https://www.facebook.com/jacobmillermusic (Facebook) https://www.instagram.com/jacobmiller/ (Instagram) https://open.spotify.com/artist/5ETV1D5HBcoygYbYGEAln6?si=FtXBq8mcQUOschIbIAb-nA (Spotify) Music Credits: Midnight Disco, Cushy. Cramp Blues, John Runefeldt. Still Fly, Revel Day. Leave, Jacob Miller. Around My Head, Jacob Miller. "The New Song", Jacob Miller. Tricks, Jacob Miller. 2022 Copyright Ramble by the River LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Born in New York City in the waning years of the 19th century, Harry Akst started out as a vaudeville pianist, backing Nora Bayes as she belted out tunes like “Shine On, Harvest Moon.”In 1916 Harry enlisted in the army, and while at Camp Upton in Yaphank, NY, on Long Island, he befriended another young composer, Irving Berlin. At the end of World War I, Akst and Berlin collaborated on the No. 2 recording of 1921, "Home Again Blues.”Then in 1925, Akst teamed up with lyricists Sam Lewis and Joe Young, to write “Dinah,” one of the most recorded songs from the Roarin' Twenties. As noted in last week's podcast, "Dinah" was introduced by Ethel Waters at the Plantation Club on Broadway within a year of its composition. It went on to be recorded by everyone from Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Enter “Am I Blue?”So our Harry already was a well-established songsmith when four years later he wrote “Am I Blue?” Right off the bat, it was another hit for Ethel Waters, this time in 1929's “On With the Show,” the first all-talking, all-color feature length movie in history.“Am I Blue?" was Waters' biggest hit (No. 1 for two weeks) and became her signature tune. Her Columbia recording, waxxed with a studio orchestra on May 14, 1929, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007.Over the past 90+ years, Hollywood has fallen madly in love with “Am I Blue?” To date, the song has appeared in more than 40 movies, four in the year 1929 alone.Our particular favorite is Hoagy Carmichael's saucy 1944 performance of the tune for Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks' “To Have and Have Not.” More recently, the song has been used in “Funny Lady” (1975 ), “The Cotton Club” (1984 ) and this year's “Downton Abbey: A New Era.”It probably was the celluloid success of “Am I Blue?” that prompted Harry Akst's decision to leave his native New York City for the West Coast, settling in Hollywood in the late '20s to work on dozens of movie scores over the next three decades.Harry even got a little screen time himself. You can catch glimpses of him as “Jerry” — rehearsal pianist, show pit orchestra conductor and concertmaster — in 1933's “42nd Street.” (Some of the same footage also was used later in “Gold Diggers of 1937.”)Multiple GenresA wide variety of styles have been applied to “Am I Blue?” over the years.Jazz artists from Billie Holiday to Grant Green covered it. Proto-rockers Eddie Cochran and Rick Nelson both recorded renditions in 1957. Rhythm and blues versions were done by Ray Charles in 1959 and Fat Domino in 1961. Many women song stylists -- Linda Ronstadt, Cher, Brenda Lee, Bette Midler, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Rita Coolidge — have covered the song. George Strait even had a No. 1 country hit with it.Our Take on the TuneA lot of those renditions presented the tune slowly and deliberately, but that's not our style. Anyone who knows us knows The Flood is not really dirge-friendly. In fact, years ago, our beloved co-founder Dave Peyton said that if The Flood had a spirit animal, it probably would be Leon Redbone. So, our take on “Am I Blue?” is how we imagine Brother Redbone would do it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In the genesis of American popular music, few moments are as important as one that occurred exactly 100 years ago tonight.Louis Armstrong was just 20 years old — nervous and apprehensive — when he stepped off a train from his New Orleans hometown into Chicago's Illinois Central Station just before midnight on July 8, 1922. “Anybody watching me closely could have easily seen that I was a country boy,” Armstrong wrote in his first memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). “I thought to myself: ‘Huh. I don't think I am going to like this old town.'” But that old town certainly would like him.Louis might never have gotten on that train in the first place — after all, he already had seen so many talented musicians come back to New Orleans broke and licking their wounds — but he had been called to the windy northern city to play second cornet with his long-time idol, the legendary Joe “King” Oliver in his Creole Jazz Band.We're all so lucky the wide-eyed young man made that trek. It was the first step in Louis Armstrong's birth as America's first music superstar. In Chicago, Armstrong would steadily outshine the rest of King Oliver's band. Before long he created his own Hot Five and Hot Seven bands. Their records throughout the 1920s and ‘30s document jazz's rapid early evolution, and they fill hundreds of pages in The Great American Songbook.What Song to Feature?So many great songs! It was hard for us to choose just one we to play to celebrate this momentous centennial.After all, many tunes in The Flood's repertoire are ones that we first heard on an Louis Armstrong recording, ranging from “St. Louis Blues,” “Ain't Misbehavin'” and “Sunny Side of the Street” to “All of Me,” “Basin Street Blues” and “Wonderful World.” We finally settled on one of the Louis's own favorites.“Dinah,” the biggest hit for Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Akst, was just five years old when Louis Armstrong recorded it for Okeh in 1930. The trumpeter's love the tune is apparent in the fact that for the next 40 years, he would perform it in most of his numerous live shows and on his radio appearances.The ultimate anthem to the sweetheart of the Roarin' 20s, “Dinah” was introduced by singer Ethel Waters at the Plantation Club on Broadway within a year of its composition in 1925. It then went on to be recorded by everyone from Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Curious FootnoteIncidentally, one singer — Fanny Rose Shore — became so identified with the song in the late 1930s that when radio DJ Martin Block could not remember Shore's name one night, he called her “that Dinah girl.” The label stuck and became her stage name; she would be “Dinah Shore” for the next 50 years.Our Take on the TuneOn this track, as we're sitting with “Dinah,” we bet you can hearing the grins going around the room!Listen to all the musical bantering, from Veezy playfully comping behind the vocals to Danny's happy passing chords under the solos. As Louis himself might say, joy comes in many forms — and some of them you can hum! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Jazz, Big Band, and Swing Sunday - Let's Dance 1. 00:00:00 Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli Tea For Two 2. 00:03:17 The Ink Spots Java Jive 3. 00:06:23 Benny Goodman Sugar Foot Stomp 4. 00:09:12 Fats Waller & His Rhythm My Very Good Friend The Milkman 5. 00:12:46 Jan Savitt & His Top Hatters Jersey Bounce 6. 00:15:55 Paul Whiteman Happy Feet 7. 00:18:58 Artie Shaw Begin the Beguine (Foxtrot) (Foxtrot) 8. 00:22:15 The Boswell Sisters & Dorsey Brothers Orchestra When I Take My Sugar To Tea 9. 00:25:28 Jimmie Lunceford For Dancers Only 10. 00:28:13 Billie Holiday & Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra Sugar 11. 00:31:04 Lionel Hampton Flying Home 12. 00:34:02 Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Lang Singin' The Blues 13. 00:37:05 Annette Hanshaw Lovable And Sweet 14. 00:39:59 The Mills Brothers Sweeter Than Sugar 15. 00:41:58 Glenn Miller (I've Got A Gal In) Kalamazoo 16. 00:45:15 Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli The Lambeth Walk 17. 00:48:02 Benny Goodman Trio China Boy 18. 00:50:37 Fred Astaire Let's Face The Music And Dance 19. 00:53:08 Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) 20. 00:56:13 Hutch Moonlight Cocktail 21. 00:59:29 Helen Ward & Benny Goodman & His Orchestra Sing Me A Swing Song 22. 01:01:55 Hoagy Carmichael Rockin' Chair 23. 01:05:23 Fats Waller & His Rhythm Shortnin' Bread 24. 01:08:08 Jack Teagarden & Benny Goodman & His Orchestra Texas Tea Party 25. 01:11:30 Bud Freeman Trio Three Little Words 26. 01:14:35 Sam Costa & Peter Yorke & His Orchestra A Nice Cup Of Tea --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/waldina/message

Roger Ashby does a deep dive into the artists that shaped the future of music. Listen to the Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.

Lucy wants to perform with Ricky in a women's club benefit, and Ricky doesn't want to share the spotlight... so Lucy has to teach him a lesson. Discussions this week include the Boswell Sisters and many fun Clark Gable stories. Apologies to our headphone listeners for the loud laughter around the 22 minute mark... we got really giddy this week. Further apologies for Breanna starting to lose her voice around halfway through the episode. "Shine On, Harvest Moon" performed by the Boswell Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdNcKoQmDHQ&t=4s

"The Boswell Sisters Song" O Sister!: Nobody Cares (Blue Asteroid Records, 2020) Paula Padilla, Helena Amado, Marcos Padilla, Matías Comino, Camilo Bosso, Pablo Cabra. El tema es una composición de Matías Comino y Paula Padilla con letra de Cynthia C. Lucas.  © Pachi Tapiz, 2021 Fabulosa la letra de Cynthia C. Lucas revisando la carrera de The Boswell Sisters... y magnífica la interpretación de O Sister! ¡Bravo por el homenaje a Martha, Connee y Vet Boswell! En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA... https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=21389 Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

Trigésima quinta emisión de la Fase 3 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar con temas de Put a Raccoon, Lautremont, Fred Fredburguer, Public Image Ltd, Suburban Lawns, Charly García, Boswell Sisters, Queen, Roger Taylor, Forest For The Trees, Komputer y Crystal Fighters. Además de todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Y si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/lascosasquehay Programa emitido originalmente el 31 de octubre de 2021 por FM La Tribu, 88.7, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Repite el 3 de noviembre en Radio Asamblea FM 94.1 y el 6 de noviembre en Radio de la Calle, FM 87.9 (Bahía Blanca)

What's on the menu? Hearty, home-cooked meals and desserts, of course. Bring your appetite but not a lot of cash. Diners are the true American eating place. Join Tom Shaker for an exploration of all-things diner, and discover how Walter Scott's late night, walkup lunch cart in Providence in the 1870s inspired a nationwide craze. Dr. Tom Shaker is a college professor, a radio DJ, a documentary filmmaker, and an expert on Rhode Island jazz. His radio show The Soul Serenade, featuring classic soul music from the 1960s and 1970s, airs on WICN on Mondays at 7 p.m. His award-winning film with Norm Grant Do It, Man! The Story of The Celebrity Club tells the story of the legendary Celebrity Club, the integrated 1950s nightclub in Providence's Randall Square neighborhood. His book with Dennis Pratt A Treasury of Rhode Island Jazz & Swing Musicians is a biographical collection of jazz and swing musicians who have played in Rhode Island and a sequel to Who's Who in Rhode Island Jazz: c. 1925-1988 by Rhode Island musicians and historians Lloyd Kaplan and Robert Petteruti. His book with Lloyd Kaplan In Harmony: Early Vocal Groups Remembered & Celebrated looks at over twenty trailblazing vocal groups, including The Mills Brothers, The Golden Gate Quartet, The Boswell Sisters, and The Delta Rhythm Boys. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rhodyradio/message

'This paradigm isn't going to shift itself'Club Des Belugas feat. Brenda Boykin, Blindboy Boatclub, George Saunders, Tom Zé, Roddy Frame, Lisa O'Neil, The Ethiopians, Thomas Lux, Milder PS, The Boswell Sisters, Ken Robinson, Cornelius, Bill Withers, Philomena Begley, Piero Umiliani, Joe Slattery, David Byrne, Ian Robertson, Sylvie Simmons, Stewart Lee, Piero Piccione

'This paradigm isn't going to shift itself' Club Des Belugas feat. Brenda Boykin, Blindboy Boatclub, George Saunders, Tom Zé, Roddy Frame, Lisa O'Neil, The Ethiopians, Thomas Lux, Milder PS, The Boswell Sisters, Ken Robinson, Cornelius, Bill Withers, Philomena Begley, Piero Umiliani, Joe Slattery, David Byrne, Ian Robertson, Sylvie Simmons, Stewart Lee, Piero Piccione

Join Lloyd Kaplan and Tom Shaker for an inside look at four trailblazing vocal groups featured in Lloyd and Tom's new book In Harmony: Early Vocal Groups Remembered & Celebrated. Explore the careers of The Mills Brothers, The Golden Gate Quartet, The Boswell Sisters, and The Delta Rhythm Boys, and hear remarkable performances with breathtaking vocal fireworks. Lloyd Kaplan is a music educator who served as Chair of the CCRI music department from 1974-1980 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 1995. He teaches at URI and Coastal Carolina University through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He is also a musician who has played clarinet and saxophone for the U.S. Army Band, the Tony Abbott Orchestra, and The Aristocats. He was inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame in 2018. Dr. Tom Shaker is a college professor, a radio DJ, a documentary filmmaker, and an expert on Rhode Island jazz. His radio show The Soul Serenade, featuring classic soul music from the 1960s and 1970s, airs on WICN on Mondays at 7 p.m. His award-winning film with Norm Grant Do It, Man! The Story of The Celebrity Club tells the story of the legendary Celebrity Club, the integrated 1950s nightclub in Providence’s Randall Square neighborhood. His book with Dennis Pratt A Treasury of Rhode Island Jazz & Swing Musicians is a biographical collection of jazz and swing musicians who have played in Rhode Island and a sequel to Who's Who in Rhode Island Jazz: c. 1925-1988 by Rhode Island musicians and historians Lloyd Kaplan and Robert Petteruti. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rhodyradio/message

Episode 52 features songs from The Boswell Sisters, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway and more.  Ronnaldo thanks the newest Hepcats for their support. ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

Food for thought + Footnotes: - Jean Paul Sartre; existentialism - Simone de Beauvoir - Contingency - Reification - Albertine - Tristan & Isolde - "Everybody Loves My Baby", also known as "Everybody Loves My Baby, but My Baby Don't Love Nobody but Me", is a famous jazz song composed by Spencer Williams in 1924. Lyrics were written by Jack Palmer. - The version we site in this episode was performed by The Boswell Sisters 1932. Hosted by Jeanne Proust Produced & Scored by Johnny Nicholson Visuals by Pedro Gomes

In folk and country music much attention is give to brother duets such as the Everlys and the Delmores, but less mention is made of sister sibling harmony. This week on the program, we’ll focus on those musical sisters. We’ll hear from Roni and Donna Stoneman, Lily May and Rosie Ledford, The Quebe Sisters, The Boswell Sisters, Shirley & Dolly Collins and many more. It’s sisterly harmonies … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Episode #20-51: Musical Sisters Host: Tom Druckenmiller Artist/”Song”/CD/Label Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways Matt Brown / “Taylor Girls” / My Native Home / 5-String Donna & Roni Stoneman / “May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister” / The Legend Continues / Patuxent Cassie and Maggie / “Hangman” / The Willow Collection / Self Produced The Roches / “Hammond Song” / Maggie Roche: Where Do I Come From / Storysound Alaisdair Fraser & Natalie Haas w/ Brittany Haas / “The Pinacree Ferryman” / Highlander's Farewell / Culburnie The Henry Girls / “Reason to Believe” / Louder than Words / Beste Unterhaltung The Boswell Sisters / “Rock and Roll” / That's How Rhythm Was Born / Columbia Legacy Matt Brown w/ Brittany Haas / “Carroll County Blues” / My Native Home / 5-String Lily May & Rosie Ledford / “White Oak Mountain” / Legends of Old-Time Music / County The Vogts Sisters / “Prove Me Wrong” / Broken Ties / Self Produced Mike, Peggy & Penny Seeger / “Old Ground Hog” / Animal Folk Songs for Children / Rounder The Quebe Sisters / “Bluegrass in the Backwoods” / The Quebe Sisters / Self Produced Shirley & Dolly Collins / “Spencer the Rover” / The Sweet Primroses / Topic Kate & Anna McGarrigle / “Talk to Me of Mendocino” / Kate & Anna McGarrigle / Hannibal Sharon Shannon w/ Mary Shannon / “The Ivory and the Quill” / Each Little Thing / Green Linnet Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Songs about being thankful.  Songs include: Thanks a Million, Crazy Bout My Baby, Count Your Blessings, I've Got Plenty to be Thankful For, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella. Musicians include: Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, The Boswell Sisters, Vaughn Monroe, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Thomas "Fats" Waller and Freddy Martin.

From the Crystal Studio of the Make Believe Ballroom some great reminiscences, history and stories wrapped around the classic music of Glenn Miller, Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Ray Anthony Kay Kyser, Ish Kabble, Jo Stafford, Bunny Berrigan, Ted Heath, Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, the Boswell Sisters and a whole lot more! Listen for a great interview as Ray Anthony explains his love-hate relationship with Glenn Miller.

Episode 10 features songs from Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Thornhill and the Boswell Sisters. We also listen to a Les Brown performance from The Hollywood Palladium recorded in September of 1945. This episode will leave you feeling clean and fresh scented. ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

Louise is a vocalist originally from Adelaide, Australia, who is now based in London. Influenced by singers like Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and the Boswell Sisters, Louise is a true entertainer, who loves to connect with her audiences. A singer with 20 years experience, in 2016 Louise started swing dancing - she loves to sing for dancers as well as jazz lovers, and you can usually see her on stage totally unable to stand still. Louise and I caught up in April at her place in London, soon after she returned from performing her sell-out show Ella at Zardi's at the International Adelaide Fringe Festival.https://www.louisemessenger.com/https://www.facebook.com/LouiseMessengerMusichttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCON5t0hdofzohzb9l2DEoEwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHOIsPBO_c Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/womeninjazz)

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group 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 “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group 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 “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Lee" by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group 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 "Little Bitty Pretty One", by Thurston Harris.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg's page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes' material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it's not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we've seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s -- we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there's one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we're about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on "Please Please Me", three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups -- two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals -- occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it's quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we're going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, "Mister Lee"] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we're talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women -- the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called "modern harmony" -- they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we're talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup -- you'd have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing "ooh" vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective -- with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who'd started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers -- Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma's sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We've talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it's been a while, so to refresh your memories -- at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day -- a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like "Do You Wanna Jump Children": [Excerpt: The Ospreys, "Do You Wanna Jump Children?"] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change -- the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura's sister had just had a baby, who she'd named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one -- essentially a playground chant -- that they'd been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe -- the girls gave different accounts over the years -- the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him "four-eyed" and said he was "the ugliest teacher you ever did see". Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn't want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls' melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about "the handsomest sweetie you ever did see": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in "Girl Groups, Girl Culture", claims that the saxophone solo on "Mr. Lee" was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It's possible -- and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on "Dynamite at Midnight", a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Dynamite at Midnight"] With the solo on "Mr Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] I think it more likely that the credit I've seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, "Fools Fall in Love" by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] If that's correct -- and my ears tell me it is -- then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for "Mister Lee" was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists -- so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. "Mr. Lee" became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others -- the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. "Mr. Lee" also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental "Walking with Mr. Lee" by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, "Walking With Mr. Lee"] The song also came to the notice of their teacher -- who seemed to have already known about the girls' song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He'd recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, "ecstatic" that the song had been made into a record -- which suggests that whatever the girls' intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn't stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin' circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear -- something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls' dresses himself -- which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With "Mr. Lee" a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same -- catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, "Speedy", was very much in the "Mr. Lee" style, but was also a more generic song, without "Mr. Lee"'s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Speedy"] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We'll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa's studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. "Mr. Lee", in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Mr. Lee"] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, "Music Street"] But while "Mr Lee" was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of "Mr. Lee", but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the "Mr. Lee" soundalikes weren't actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists -- they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I've read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can't find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes' time on Atlantic, but I think "You'll Be There" is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on -- it's one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes' records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can't identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it's them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, "You'll Be There"] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing "Love Power" for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, "Love Power"] And for his later minor novelty hit, "Santa Claus is a Black Man": [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, "Santa Claus is a Black Man"] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, "I Shot Mr. Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original "Mr. Lee", reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like "I Shot Mr. Lee", answer records, though answers to other people's records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos' "Have Mercy Baby", with "I Don't Like It Like That", an answer to Chris Kenner's "I Like It Like That", and finally with "Dance With Me Georgie", a reworking of "The Wallflower" that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Dance With Me Georgie"] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit -- she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn't like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn't have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on "Loop De Loop": [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, "Loop De Loop"] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, "Love That Bomb"] Reather and Emma, the group's two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, "It's All In Your Mind"] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they'd decided that twenty years on from "Mister Lee", their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name -- the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, "Check it Out"] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn't do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, "Love Rhythm": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Love Rhythm"] But then, tragedy struck -- Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with "Mr. Lee". They never did, and they never recorded again -- although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as "Mr. Lee" was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher...

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

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

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

Euskadi Hoy Magazine ha reunido a cuatro de los componentes de la banda sevillana O Sister! que recalan en Euskadi para compartir escenario con los bilbaínos Dr. Maha's Miracle Tonic. El sexteto sevillano comenzó su andadura versionando temas de las norteamericanas The Boswell Sisters. A finales de 2012, de hecho, decidieron afrontar uno de los retos "más gratificantes" de su carrera: dar vida a una composición inacabada y nunca antes grabada de estas pioneras en el jazz vocal de los años 20 y 30; You-dle-ee-oo-de-oo. Aquel hito les permitió, unos años después, ser la única banda europea en el festival-homenaje a las Boswell Sisters organizado en Nueva Orleans. A la cuna del swing esperan volver, más pronto que tarde. Entretanto, ya ha empezado a dar forma a nuevas canciones. Tras el veranos, el estudio les espera para dar vida a composiciones propias que amplien el universo O Sister!

Euskadi Hoy Magazine ha reunido a cuatro de los componentes de la banda sevillana O Sister! que recalan en Euskadi para compartir escenario con los bilbaínos Dr. Maha's Miracle Tonic. El sexteto sevillano comenzó su andadura versionando temas de las norteamericanas The Boswell Sisters. A finales de 2012, de hecho, decidieron afrontar uno de los retos "más gratificantes" de su carrera: dar vida a una composición inacabada y nunca antes grabada de estas pioneras en el jazz vocal de los años 20 y 30; You-dle-ee-oo-de-oo. Aquel hito les permitió, unos años después, ser la única banda europea en el festival-homenaje a las Boswell Sisters organizado en Nueva Orleans. A la cuna del swing esperan volver, más pronto que tarde. Entretanto, ya ha empezado a dar forma a nuevas canciones. Tras el veranos, el estudio les espera para dar vida a composiciones propias que amplien el universo O Sister!

To put Louis Armstrong into context, Mike leads Pat kicking and screaming through recordings by five of Louis' contemporaries. Who can redeem the period's vocalizin'? Boswell Sisters to the rescue. Henry “Red” Allen – CHRONOLOGICA L CLASSICS 1929-1933; King Oliver - KING OLIVER AND HIS ORCHESTRA 1929-1930; Oscar “Papa” Celestin/Sam Morgan – THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS; Bunny Berigan – COMPLETE BRUNSWICK, PARLOPHONE & VOCALIN BUNNY BERIGAN SESSIONS (DISC ONE)

"The Godfather of Electro Swing" - Nick Hollywood presents everything fruity from Freshly Squeezed Music; sweltering hot Rock and Blues to the next generation of Electronic Jazz.February 2018 already and this months show is packed with fresh sounds. Hot off the press are 2 tracks from the brand new Long Legs EP by Swing Republic. We have world exclusive previews of forthcoming releases from Jazzotron, the Swingrowers 3rd album OUTSIDEIN and former Gentleman Caller of L.A., Atom Smith. Plus a funky new jazz compilation from Greece’s Timewarp and a remix EP from Breakbeat Paradise Recordings. If you enjoy this show, don’t forget to subscribe, like, retweet, comment and generally share the love.----------------Swingrowers - No Strings Attached (Freshly Squeezed)Juke Baritone - Broke (Bandcamp)Jazzotron - Be My Love (Freshly Squeezed)Minimatic - 13 Women (Minimatic Remix) (Soundcloud)Swing Republic - Ooble-Ee-Bop (Freshly Squeezed)Swingrowers - Selfie Face (Freshly Squeezed)Sampleheadz - Afrosoul (Timewarp)Atom Smith - Flashin' Like Gatsby (Freshly Squeezed)Jack Lemmon ft The Kurnel MC - Joan Jett (Funkanizer Remix) (Breakbeat Paradise Recordings)Jazz Profilactika - Samboppa (Timewarp)Extra Medium ft China Bowls & Cab Canaveral - Get Down (White Label)Swing Republic - Let Yourself Go (ft The Boswell Sisters) (Freshly Squeezed)Pep's Show Boys ft Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog (White Label)Head over to Freshly Squeezed Music for more news...

Louis Armstrong is on Don’s playlist for this week’s Radio Munson, along with the Boswell Sisters, Jimmy Rushing, stride pianist Jeff Barnhart, Harry James, Jane Monheit, Erroll Garner and more.

James Kerrigan Fenian Raids Fenian Brotherhood Clan na Gael Opening Theme: Knockin’ a Jug by Louis Armstrong Outro Song: Mama Don’t Allow It by The Boswell Sisters

We continue our song-by-song exploration of our newly-released album, Laughing at Life, with this episode's chat about the Everybody Loves My Baby. We talk about the Boswell Sisters version, our own original lyrics, and special guest Anat Cohen on clarine

Songs include: Stop the Sun, Stop the Moon, The Music Stopped, Nonstop Flight, Stop That Thing, Hey, Stop Kissing My Sister and I Can't Stop Loving You. Performers include: Frank Sinatra, Thomas "Fats" Waller, the Boswell Sisters, Una Mae Carlisle, Ella Fitzgerald and Wingy Manone.

Songs include: I Found a Million Dollar Baby, My Last Dollar, I've Got Five Dollars, Give Me 20 Nickels For a Dollar, I Wish I Had a Dollar and Dollar Bill Blues. Performers include: Blanche Calloway, Lee Wiley, The Boswell Sisters, Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Laurence Welk, Joe Turner and Charley Jordan.

Entrevista con el diputado socialista Eduardo Madina. Ahora que da comienzo una nueva legislatura en nuestro país gracias a la abstención del PSOE para favorecer el gobierno de Mariano Rajoy. De cómo será la labor de oposición en el Congreso, de las voces discordantes en su partido y de quién será el nuevo líder del PSOE tras la gestora que actualmente dirige al grupo socialista, hablamos en Carne Cruda con Eduardo Madina. El programa además cuenta con la Sección Femenina de Barbijaputa. Nueva ración de feminismo con nuestra sección que da golpes directos al machirulado dominante. Para que os quedéis satisfechos os traemos el directo del grupo O Sister! es una banda de swing que recrea la edad de oro del jazz vocal, la música popular de los años 20 y 30 en Norteamérica. O Sister! es un homenaje a los grupos femeninos de aquella época, como The Boswell Sisters, pioneras del swing vocal cuya influencia sería más tarde reconocida por artistas de la talla de Ella Fitzgerald. __ Carne Cruda, el programa de radio que tú haces posible. La República Independiente de la Radio. Existimos gracias a las aportaciones de los oyentes. Difunde nuestros contenidos y si puedes: hazte productora o productor de Carne Cruda. Aquí tienes más información: http://carnecruda.es/hazte_productor/

Entrevista con el diputado socialista Eduardo Madina. Ahora que da comienzo una nueva legislatura en nuestro país gracias a la abstención del PSOE para favorecer el gobierno de Mariano Rajoy. De cómo será la labor de oposición en el Congreso, de las voces discordantes en su partido y de quién será el nuevo líder del PSOE tras la gestora que actualmente dirige al grupo socialista, hablamos en Carne Cruda con Eduardo Madina. El programa además cuenta con la Sección Femenina de Barbijaputa. Nueva ración de feminismo con nuestra sección que da golpes directos al machirulado dominante. Para que os quedéis satisfechos os traemos el directo del grupo O Sister! es una banda de swing que recrea la edad de oro del jazz vocal, la música popular de los años 20 y 30 en Norteamérica. O Sister! es un homenaje a los grupos femeninos de aquella época, como The Boswell Sisters, pioneras del swing vocal cuya influencia sería más tarde reconocida por artistas de la talla de Ella Fitzgerald. __ Carne Cruda, el programa de radio que tú haces posible. La República Independiente de la Radio. Existimos gracias a las aportaciones de los oyentes. Difunde nuestros contenidos y si puedes: hazte productora o productor de Carne Cruda. Aquí tienes más información: http://carnecruda.es/hazte_productor/

World Footprints returned to New Orleans for our 7th annual French Quarter Festival 2-hour broadcast. This year we set up at Tableau Restaurant, Dickie Brennan's newest culinary gem in Jackson Square. The first hour of World Footprints showcase New Orleans international outreach, the arts and history. We introduce a hidden gem, The New Orleans Historic Collection. The Historic Collection is a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to the study and preservation of the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf South region. This year they are showcasing homegrown stars, The Boswell Sisters, and we are joined by the exhibit's curator Mark Cave. We are pleased to introduce the granddaughter of Vet Boswell, Kyla Titus, who joins us to share treasured memories, her new book and her work to keep the memory of The Boswell Sisters alive. We also talk about a special event that the world is sharing this year--the 70th anniversary of the landing at Normandy. The National World War II Museum's Alan Raphael joins us to talk about how the museum is commemorating this anniversary and the special role that New Orleans played in WWII. We promise you'll enjoy this first hour and we invite you back to listen to the 2nd hour broadcast where we talk about the history of Voodoo and spotlight the contributions of Africans in New Orleans.

Songs include: I Love You, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, Somebody Loves Me, Watching the Clouds Roll By and My Fate Is In Your Hands. Performers include: Frank Sinatra, Josephine Baker, Cliff Edwards, The Boswell Sisters, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford, Anita O'Day, Bing Crosby, Teddy Wilson and Ruth Etting.

Songs include: Stardust, Hebbie Jeebies, Born to Swing, The Yam, A Sailboat In the Moonlight and Songs of Native Birds. Performers include: James Reese Europe, The Boswell Sisters, David Rose, Charles Kellogg, Billie Holiday, Earl Hines, Geroge Van Eps and the Mills Brothers.

Sister singing groups from the 1920s through the 1950s. Groups include: the Brox Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, the Andrews Sisters, the Fontane Sisters, the King Sisters, the DeMarco Sisters and the De Castro Sisters. Songs include: Oh Johnny Oh, Please Don't Talk About Me, Teach Me Tonight, Red Hot Mama, Hop, Skip and Jump, My Happiness and Alexander's Ragtime Band.

World Footprints returned to New Orleans for our 7th annual French Quarter Festival 2-hour broadcast.  This year we set up at Tableau Restaurant, Dickie Brennan's newest culinary gem in Jackson Square.   The first hour of World Footprints showcase New Orleans international outreach, the arts and history.  We introduce a hidden gem, The New Orleans Historic Collection.  The Historic Collection  is a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to the study and preservation of the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf South region.  New Orleans' homegrown stars, The Boswell Sisters, are featured and the exhibit's curator Mark Cave and the granddaughter of Vet Boswell, Kyla Titus, joins us for a lively discussion. We also talk about a special event that the world is sharing this year--the 70th anniversary of the landing at Normandy.  The National World War II Museum's Alan Raphael joins us to talk about how the museum is commemorating this anniversary and the special role that New Orleans played in WWII. We promise you'll enjoy this first hour and we invite you back to listen to the 2nd hour broadcast where we talk about the history of Voodoo and spotlight the contributions of Africans in New Orleans.

World Footprints returned to New Orleans for our 7th annual French Quarter Festival 2-hour broadcast.  This year we set up at Tableau Restaurant, Dickie Brennan's newest culinary gem in Jackson Square.   The first hour of World Footprints showcase New Orleans international outreach, the arts and history.  We introduce a hidden gem, The New Orleans Historic Collection.  The Historic Collection  is a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to the study and preservation of the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf South region.  This year they are showcasing homegrown stars, The Boswell Sisters, and we are joined by the exhibit's curator Mark Cave.  We are pleased to introduce the granddaughter of Vet Boswell, Kyla Titus, who joins us to share treasured memories, her new book and her work to keep the memory of The Boswell Sisters alive. We also talk about a special event that the world is sharing this year--the 70th anniversary of the landing at Normandy.  The National World War II Museum's Alan Raphael joins us to talk about how the museum is commemorating this anniversary and the special role that New Orleans played in WWII. We promise you'll enjoy this first hour and we invite you back to listen to the 2nd hour broadcast where we talk about the history of Voodoo and spotlight the contributions of Africans in New Orleans.

Love songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, The Boswell Sisters, Jo Stafford, Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers.  Songs include: Stairway to the Stars, I Only Have Eyes For You, Sweetheart Waltz, Thing Are Looking Up and Sweet Sue.

Songs about being thankful, including: Thanks For the Memory, I Want To Thank You Folks, Thanks a Million, Thank Your Father and Thank You Mr. Moon.  Performers include: Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, The Boswell Sisters, Louis Armstrong, Perry Como and Helen Kane.

Songs include: Stop Pretending, I Can't Stop Loving You, Stop, The Red Light's On, You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming & Nonstop Flight.  Performers include: Artie Shaw, The Boswell Sisters, Frank Sinatra, King Oliver, Una May Carlisle, Thomas Waller and Sleepy John Estes.

HERE COMES THE SUN Nina Simone | Here Comes The Sun [RCA/1971] Billie Holiday | On The Sunny Side Of The Street [Fontana/1964]  The Boswell Sisters | We’ve Got To Put That Sun Back In The Sky [Biograph Records/1932] Donald Byrd | House Of The Rising Sun [Verve/1964] Koushik | Lying In The Sun [Stones Throw/2008] Stevie Wonder | A Place in the Sun [Tamla Motown/1967] Noonday Underground |That Noonday Sun [Setanta/2002] Sons and Daughters Of Lite |  Let The Sun Shine In [Sunlite/1978] Roy Ayers Ubiquity | This Side Of Sunshine [Polydor/1977] John Talabot | Sunshine [Hivern/2009] Moodymann | Sunshine [Peacefrog Records/1998] Blackbird Blackbird | Sunspray [Self-released/2010] Chromatics | Circled Sun [Italians Do It Better/2010] The xx  | Sunset [Young Turks/2012] Paul McCartney | Sunshine Sometime [Not On Label/2011] Tindersticks | Feel The Sun [Beggars Banquet/2008]*Intro jingle by Giganta

Sept. 8, 1985 "A Sampler" features: A quick review of about 20 songs to re-introduce the show to a new group of students at the university. Artists include the Gus Arnheim Orchestra, Helen Kane, the Boswell Sisters, Cliff Edwards, Al Jolson and Bing Crosby. Songs include "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By," "I Wanna Be Bad," "Love is Just Around the Corner," "Singing in the Bathtub" and "Flirtation Walk." oldtimeradiodvd.com

"The Boswell Sisters" features: A survey of the tight harmonies and lively syncopation that made this trio a hit, beginning with their rare 1925 first record, "Nights When I'm Lonely," and including "Highway to Heaven," "That's Love," "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries," "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" and solo hits by Connie Boswell.oldtimeradiodvd.com

The Radio Show is from 9/6/1949. The King's Men quartet was comprised of Ken Darby, arranger & bass; Rad Robinson baritone; Jon Dodson, lead tenor; Bud Linn, top tenor. Formed in Hollywood in 1929, they took their name from a radio sponsor named King. Their first engagement was as a singing foursome in the Paramount film "Sweetie." This led to other films and radio contracts. When the Boswell Sisters left Los Angeles station KFWB in 1932, the King's Men replaced them for two years. For fifteen years the King's Men were regulars on the "Fibber McGee and Molly" broadcasts.

Music about America's favorite morning beverage. Songs include: Java Jive, I'd Like to Dunk You In My Coffee, Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee, Coffee Grindin Blues and You're the Cream In My Coffee. Performers include: Una Mae Carlisle, the Ink Spots, Ted Weems, the Boswell Sisters, Wingy Manone and Mike Douglas.

Featuring a special report from the swamps of Neptune by Rocket Radio weather girl, Sheila Star, more fabulous 1920s-50s music and radio nostalgia including The Boswell Sisters, Max Miller, Lester Young and Tampa Red, and another chance to hear the wonderful chap-hop music of Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer.

Songs include: One Sweet Letter From You, Love Letters In The Sand, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write My Self a Letter and Red Kiss On a Blue Letter. Performers incude:Dorris Day, Jimmie Rodgers, Sophie Tucker, Charlie Poole, Lee Morse and the Boswell Sisters.