Podcast appearances and mentions of dewey phillips

From December 2018: Wink Martindale talks to Ed about why game shows remain a popular form of entertainment on television; the importance of matching the right host with the right game format; how Wink happened to be at radio station WHBQ in Memphis, TN on the night of July 8, 1954, when deejay Dewey Phillips played an Elvis Presley record ("That's All Right, Mama") on the radio for the very first time; and how Wink also met Elvis for the first time that night when the King was summoned to the station, starting a friendship that continued until Presley's death in 1977. Wink Martindale passed away on Tuesday, Apr. 15, 2025 at age ninety-one.

In 1954, twelve-year-old Jerry Schilling wandered into a Memphis touch football game, only to discover that his team was quarterbacked by nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley. Elvis was still an unknown, but his first record, "That's All Right," had just debuted on Dewey Phillips' popular WHBQ radio show "Red, Hot & Blue." That chance encounter with the future King of Rock ‘n' Roll began an adventure for Schilling that continues to this day. In this episode, Schilling, who later became a successful talent manager, shares stories of how Elvis's friendship has been an inspiration his life and career. Then, Alicia Dean, from Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc. joins to provide a behind-the-scenes look at Graceland and Elvis Week today. Jerry Schilling's book, “Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley,” is available on Amazon.com. This episode is sponsored by the Hatchie River Conservancy.

Gurdip & Justin ring in 2024 by looking at one of the earliest posthumous albums from 1978, "A Canadian Tribute," created to celebrate Elvis' 1957 tour of Canada and the songs Elvis recorded that have Canadian connections. Gurdip, as our resident Canadian, had this one in his youth so the guys decided to see if it holds up as well as it did back in the day.  The guys also discuss the announcement of Lisa Marie's new book, coming this October completed by Riley Keough, additional information on the Elvis Evolution experience scheduled to premiere this November, and the announcement that EPE has acquired what is claimed to be the original 1954 acetate of "That's All Right" played on the air by Dewey Phillips, the authenticity of which has been called into question in numerous fan groups and most prominently by our friends at EAP Society (please check out their video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDKGo5lpx40) Gurdip grills Justin on a different type of Elvis trivia, and for Song of the Week, he takes on "Are You Sincere" from the 1973 "Raised on Rock" album, while Justin ponders "What Now, What Next, Where To?" - a solid 1963 cut that undeservedly languished as a bonus track on the soundtrack for "Double Trouble." If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.

Kicking off Season 3 of Deep Tracks we explore the birth of the King of Rock 'n' Roll himself, Alan Greenspan! Okay, just kidding, we're gonna be FINALLY diving into the life of Elvis Presley! But, in order to lay some groundwork for the launch of his career, we also have to talk about the people who helped make that happen. So, this episode will also feature "minisodes" about Dewey Phillips and Sam Phillips. Then we look at the birth of Elvis, his childhood in Tupelo, leaving off when his family is just about to make the move that would change their lives forever, to Memphis, Tennessee...

"rock and roll early style of rock music rock and roll, also called rock 'n' roll or rock & roll, style of popular music that originated in the United States in the mid-1950s and that evolved by the mid-1960s into the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also " "--START AD- #TheMummichogblogOfMalta Amazon Top and Flash Deals(Affiliate Link - You will support our translations if you purchase through the following link) - https://amzn.to/3CqsdJH Compare all the top travel sites in just one search to find the best hotel deals at HotelsCombined - awarded world's best hotel price comparison site. (Affiliate Link - You will support our translations if you purchase through the following link) - https://www.hotelscombined.com/?a_aid=20558 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."""" #Jesus #Catholic. Smooth Radio Malta is Malta's number one digital radio station, playing Your Relaxing Favourites - Smooth provides a ‘clutter free' mix, appealing to a core 35-59 audience offering soft adult contemporary classics. We operate a playlist of popular tracks which is updated on a regular basis. https://smooth.com.mt/listen/ Follow on Telegram: https://t.me/themummichogblogdotcom END AD---" "continued to be known as rock and roll. Rock and roll has been described as a merger of country music and rhythm and blues, but, if it were that simple, it would have existed long before it burst into the national consciousness. The seeds of the music had been in place for decades, but they flowered in the mid-1950s when nourished by a volatile mix of Black culture and white spending power. Black vocal groups such as the Dominoes and the Spaniels began combining gospel-style harmonies and call-and-response singing with earthy subject matter and more aggressive rhythm-and-blues rhythms. Heralding this new sound were disc jockeys such as Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, Dewey Phillips of Memphis, Tennessee, and William (“Hoss”) Allen of WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee—who created rock-and-roll radio by playing hard-driving rhythm-and-blues and raunchy blues records that introduced white suburban teenagers to a culture that sounded more exotic, thrilling, and illicit than anything they had ever known. In 1954 that sound coalesced around an image: that of a handsome white singer, Elvis Presley, who sounded like a Black man. Dancers performing the jitterbug at a juke joint outside Clarksdale, Miss., 1939. BRITANNICA QUIZ Rock and Roll Call What musician invented the jitterbug? With what record label are the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations associated? Turn the volume up in this study of famous musicians. Presley's nondenominational taste in music incorporated everything from hillbilly rave-ups and blues wails to pop-crooner ballads. Yet his early recordings with producer Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black for in Memphis were less about any one style than about a feeling. For decades African Americans had used the term rock and roll as a euphemism for sex, and Presley's music oozed sexuality. Presley was hardly the only artist who embodied this attitude, but he was clearly a catalyst in the merger of Black and white culture into something far bigger and more complex than both. In Presley's wake, the music of Black singers such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley, who might have been considered rhythm-and-blues artists only years before, fit alongside the rockabilly-flavoured tunes of white performers such as Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Jerry Lee Lewis, in part because they were all now addressing the same audience: teenagers. For young white America, this new music was a soundtrack for rebellion, however mild. When Bill Haley and His Comets kicked off the 1955 motion picture Blackboard Jungle with “Rock Around the Clock,” teens in movie houses throughout the United States stomped on the

That's the voice of Dewey Phillips hosting his radio show called “Red, Hot & Blue,” on WHBQ, a Memphis station. In the 1950s, more than 100,000 people listened to his primetime slot every day.If you couldn't make out what Dewey was saying, don't feel bad. I had to listen to it a few times myself. But for Memphians of that era, Dewey's frantic and crazed cadence was just part of the experience.-Visit us online at: Itshometownhistory.com-Find us on all podcasting platforms: https://link.chtbl.com/hometownhistory-Support our podcast by becoming a patron at: Patreon.com/itshometownhistory-Check out our other podcasts: itsarclightmedia.com

HOCKADOO! Lauren does a deep dive of the Tony Award winning musical, Memphis! Find out what Hockadoo means and join us as we discuss the real life Dewey Phillips and the important moment in history this show captures. We want to hear your thoughts! Follow us at @downstageleftpc on all the socials or check out our website at downstageleftpodcast.com

Radio legend, Dewey Phillips, dies at 42

Resumimos en esta edición una serie de nueve sesiones dedicadas al dj de radio blanco.

Welcome to the fifth in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, a classic of both novelty music and New Orleans R&B. Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: —-more—- This episode is almost a request one — Daniel Helton asked during the question and answer sessions last week if I’d thought about covering this song in an episode, and I said then that I’d do it as a Patreon bonus. I may do other songs suggested by backers in future bonus episodes, we’ll see, but this one is a song that genuinely deserves at least a brief look: [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home”] Clarence “Frogman” Henry is from New Orleans, as you can immediately hear from the record. It’s yet another of those classic records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, but Henry was young enough that he grew up listening to those earlier records — as a teenager, he was a fan of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. He started playing in bars in his teens, with various local bands, and he soon developed a unique vocal technique. At the time Shirley and Lee were one of the biggest acts in New Orleans, and everyone wanted to hear their material: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Let the Good Times Roll”] But Henry was the only singer with the bands he was in, and so he would sing both Shirley’s vocal part and Lee’s, and he developed ways to make his voice sound more feminine. He would also play around with his voice and try other unusual voices, including one that sounded like a bullfrog — he used to imitate frogs and alligators in school to scare the girls. And then one night, performing in a club at two o’clock in the morning, far past when he wanted to go to bed, he started wondering if the audience had no homes to go to, and improvised a song around that theme, “Ain’t Got No Home”, using his different voices. [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home”] The song was very loosely based on one he’d already written called “Lonely Tramp”, but sped up and turned into a showcase for his vocal tricks. The song became a regular in his sets, and he eventually came to the attention of Paul Gayten, a musician in New Orleans who also worked as an A&R man for Chess Records. Gayten signed Henry to Chess’ new subsidiary Argo, and they went into Cosimo Matassa’s studio to record a single. “Ain’t Got No Home” was intended for the B-side — the A-side was a Fats Domino style song called “Troubles, Troubles”: [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Troubles, Troubles”] Leonard Chess initially didn’t want to release the single at all, but then the New Orleans DJ known as “Poppa Stoppa” played an acetate of it. “Poppa Stoppa” was one of several white men who performed under that name, playing a character initially created by a black man and pretending to *be* black, and he was to New Orleans what Alan Freed was to Cleveland, Huggy Boy to LA, and Dewey Phillips to Memphis — the white DJ who could make or break black music in the mass market. “Poppa Stoppa” played both sides of the record, but it was the B-side that made listeners sit up and take note — they kept calling in to hear “the song by the frog man”. Poppa Stoppa turned to Henry, who was in the studio with him, and said “from now on you’re Frogman”. The record went out with “Ain’t Got No Home” on the A-side, and it became a big hit, going to number three on the R&B charts and hitting the top twenty in the pop charts. However, the follow-up, “Lonely Tramp”, didn’t chart: [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Lonely Tramp”] After a couple more failed attempts at follow-ups, Henry went back to just being a live performer, and didn’t make a record for three years. But then in 1961 he teamed up with the songwriter Bobby Charles. Charles was a white Cajun songwriter who had been as influenced by Fats Domino as Henry was. He’d written hits for Domino, but was best known for his song “Later Alligator”, which as “See You Later Alligator” had been a big hit for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Charles and Gayten wrote a ballad called “I Don’t Know Why (But I Do)” which they gave to Henry to sing. Allen Toussaint produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result was absolutely nothing like his first hit, but a catchy pop ballad that became a perennial classic: [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “But I Do”] “But I Do” became a worldwide hit, reaching number four in the pop charts and number three in the UK. Several follow-ups also charted, though less well. Many listeners believed Henry to be white — something that Chess encouraged by putting a stock photo of a white man with his head in his hands on the cover of his first album. This was a common technique in the early sixties when a black artist had crossover appeal. Clarence “Frogman” Henry was no longer a one-hit wonder who’d had a hit with a novelty record, but a serious artist who’d had multiple big hits. While he would never again reach the heights of “But I Do”, that was enough to ensure him a career which continues to this day. For decades Henry had a residency in a club on Bourbon Street, New Orleans, but he also spent lengthy periods in Britain, where he had a big following. His most famous British fans were the Beatles, who invited him to perform as their opening act on their first US tour. He’d first met them on a UK tour a little earlier, and they had occasionally played “But I Do” in their set when that had been in the charts. But he had other UK fans as well, and would occasionally perform with them, as this record from 1983 shows: [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry with Chas and Dave, “That Old Piano”] That’s Frogman with Chas and Dave, remaking one of their songs, released on Chas & Dave’s “Rockney” record label. He also toured with Cannon & Ball around that time. Clarence “Frogman” Henry is still alive, aged eighty-two, and was still performing at least as recently as May 2017, the most recent gig I’ve been able to find for him, still playing his classic hits. Here’s hoping he carries on for many more years.

Welcome to the fifth in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about "Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence "Frogman" Henry, a classic of both novelty music and New Orleans R&B. Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: ----more---- This episode is almost a request one -- Daniel Helton asked during the question and answer sessions last week if I'd thought about covering this song in an episode, and I said then that I'd do it as a Patreon bonus. I may do other songs suggested by backers in future bonus episodes, we'll see, but this one is a song that genuinely deserves at least a brief look: [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry, "Ain't Got No Home"] Clarence "Frogman" Henry is from New Orleans, as you can immediately hear from the record. It's yet another of those classic records made in Cosimo Matassa's studio, but Henry was young enough that he grew up listening to those earlier records -- as a teenager, he was a fan of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. He started playing in bars in his teens, with various local bands, and he soon developed a unique vocal technique. At the time Shirley and Lee were one of the biggest acts in New Orleans, and everyone wanted to hear their material: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Let the Good Times Roll"] But Henry was the only singer with the bands he was in, and so he would sing both Shirley's vocal part and Lee's, and he developed ways to make his voice sound more feminine. He would also play around with his voice and try other unusual voices, including one that sounded like a bullfrog -- he used to imitate frogs and alligators in school to scare the girls. And then one night, performing in a club at two o'clock in the morning, far past when he wanted to go to bed, he started wondering if the audience had no homes to go to, and improvised a song around that theme, "Ain't Got No Home", using his different voices. [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry, "Ain't Got No Home"] The song was very loosely based on one he'd already written called "Lonely Tramp", but sped up and turned into a showcase for his vocal tricks. The song became a regular in his sets, and he eventually came to the attention of Paul Gayten, a musician in New Orleans who also worked as an A&R man for Chess Records. Gayten signed Henry to Chess' new subsidiary Argo, and they went into Cosimo Matassa's studio to record a single. "Ain't Got No Home" was intended for the B-side -- the A-side was a Fats Domino style song called "Troubles, Troubles": [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry, "Troubles, Troubles"] Leonard Chess initially didn't want to release the single at all, but then the New Orleans DJ known as "Poppa Stoppa" played an acetate of it. "Poppa Stoppa" was one of several white men who performed under that name, playing a character initially created by a black man and pretending to *be* black, and he was to New Orleans what Alan Freed was to Cleveland, Huggy Boy to LA, and Dewey Phillips to Memphis -- the white DJ who could make or break black music in the mass market. "Poppa Stoppa" played both sides of the record, but it was the B-side that made listeners sit up and take note -- they kept calling in to hear "the song by the frog man". Poppa Stoppa turned to Henry, who was in the studio with him, and said "from now on you're Frogman". The record went out with "Ain't Got No Home" on the A-side, and it became a big hit, going to number three on the R&B charts and hitting the top twenty in the pop charts. However, the follow-up, "Lonely Tramp", didn't chart: [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry, "Lonely Tramp"] After a couple more failed attempts at follow-ups, Henry went back to just being a live performer, and didn't make a record for three years. But then in 1961 he teamed up with the songwriter Bobby Charles. Charles was a white Cajun songwriter who had been as influenced by Fats Domino as Henry was. He'd written hits for Domino, but was best known for his song "Later Alligator", which as "See You Later Alligator" had been a big hit for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, "Later Alligator"] Charles and Gayten wrote a ballad called "I Don't Know Why (But I Do)" which they gave to Henry to sing. Allen Toussaint produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result was absolutely nothing like his first hit, but a catchy pop ballad that became a perennial classic: [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry, "But I Do"] "But I Do" became a worldwide hit, reaching number four in the pop charts and number three in the UK. Several follow-ups also charted, though less well. Many listeners believed Henry to be white -- something that Chess encouraged by putting a stock photo of a white man with his head in his hands on the cover of his first album. This was a common technique in the early sixties when a black artist had crossover appeal. Clarence "Frogman" Henry was no longer a one-hit wonder who'd had a hit with a novelty record, but a serious artist who'd had multiple big hits. While he would never again reach the heights of "But I Do", that was enough to ensure him a career which continues to this day. For decades Henry had a residency in a club on Bourbon Street, New Orleans, but he also spent lengthy periods in Britain, where he had a big following. His most famous British fans were the Beatles, who invited him to perform as their opening act on their first US tour. He'd first met them on a UK tour a little earlier, and they had occasionally played "But I Do" in their set when that had been in the charts. But he had other UK fans as well, and would occasionally perform with them, as this record from 1983 shows: [Excerpt: Clarence "Frogman" Henry with Chas and Dave, "That Old Piano"] That's Frogman with Chas and Dave, remaking one of their songs, released on Chas & Dave's "Rockney" record label. He also toured with Cannon & Ball around that time. Clarence "Frogman" Henry is still alive, aged eighty-two, and was still performing at least as recently as May 2017, the most recent gig I've been able to find for him, still playing his classic hits. Here's hoping he carries on for many more years.

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes fellow podcasters Gurdip Ladhar and Justin Gausman of TCBCast to discuss Peter Guralnick's classic “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.” Nate, Gurdip and Justin talk about Sam and Dewey Phillips, Vernon and Gladys, Scotty and Bill and the infamous Col. Tom Parker and the amazing rise of a share-cropper's son to stardom.Visit our sponsor Adam & Eve for 50% off almost any item, get tons of free gifts AND receive free shipping. Just go to adamandeve.com and type “LIRPOD” at checkout.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes fellow podcasters Gurdip Ladhar and Justin Gausman of TCBCast to discuss Peter Guralnick's classic “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.” Nate, Gurdip and Justin talk about Sam and Dewey Phillips, Vernon and Gladys, Scotty and Bill and the infamous Col. Tom Parker and the amazing rise of a share-cropper's son to stardom.Visit our sponsor Adam & Eve for 50% off almost any item, get tons of free gifts AND receive free shipping. Just go to adamandeve.com and type “LIRPOD” at checkout.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes fellow podcasters Gurdip Ladhar and Justin Gausman of TCBCast to discuss Peter Guralnick’s classic “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.” Nate, Gurdip and Justin talk about Sam and Dewey Phillips, Vernon and Gladys, Scotty and Bill and the infamous Col. Tom Parker and the amazing rise of a share-cropper’s son to stardom. Visit our sponsor Adam & Eve for 50% off almost any item, get tons of free gifts AND receive free shipping. Just go to adamandeve.com and type “LIRPOD” at checkout. This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes fellow podcasters Gurdip Ladhar and Justin Gausman of TCBCast to discuss Peter Guralnick’s classic “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.” Nate, Gurdip and Justin talk about Sam and Dewey Phillips, Vernon and Gladys, Scotty and Bill and the infamous Col. Tom Parker and the amazing rise of a share-cropper’s son to stardom. Visit our sponsor Adam & Eve for 50% off almost any item, get tons of free gifts AND receive free shipping. Just go to adamandeve.com and type “LIRPOD” at checkout. This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I’ve also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley’s life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley’s music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on “The Flying Saucer”, for backers who’ve not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let’s talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like “Flying Disc Man From Mars”, “Radar Men From The Moon”, “It Came From Outer Space”, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”, and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term “flying saucer” had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold’s experience has entered into legend as the canonical “first flying saucer sighting”, mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person — or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he’d seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation — religious fanatics who saw in Arnold’s vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold’s sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn’t want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes — and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard’s terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can’t understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, “the Flying Saucer”, I’ve actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here — it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] And there’d been “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer” by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer”] But today we’re going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time — for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn’t know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws’ house in Arkansas to his parents’ house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald “Slim” Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he’d started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business — Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor — he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn’t be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace’s band as well as Epley’s. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources — they’d use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money — while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they’d been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace’s wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace’s wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn’t actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley’s talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn’t actually built the studio — he’d bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn’t quite got round to making Wallace’s garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn’t think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who’d played on Elvis’ last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, “Rock With Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, “Rock With Me Baby”] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement — rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label — second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn’t liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a “Heartbreak Hotel” knockoff called “Trouble Bound”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound”] That was much more to Sam’s liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley’s first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun’s stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions — usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There’s one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first single, a cover version of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms”. That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn’t play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley’s guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we’re going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don’t want to talk too much about him here, but you’ll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on “Matchbox”. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people’s lives. So while this isn’t an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley’s career. He’s just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it’s his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley’s first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more — it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn’t have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios — just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together — but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention — they’d only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn’t seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was “one of the weirdest of early rock ‘n’ roll records – and early rock ‘n’ roll records were weird!” — and he’s right. “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said “Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!” — and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley’s backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley’s stage show was — at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing — except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley’s next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy “the Kid” Emerson, in 1955. “Red Hot” had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy “the Kid” Emerson, “Red Hot”] While “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of “Red Hot” would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Red Hot”] The song was recorded either at the same session as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist — accounts vary — but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”, and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on “Take Me To That Place” by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, “Take Me To That Place”]  Rhythm guitar on “Miracle of You” by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, “Miracle of You”] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of “Red Hot”, which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area — the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that “Red Hot” hadn’t been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson’s version of Little Junior Parker’s “Love My Baby”, another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after “Red Hot”, credited to Thompson “with Billy Lee Riley’s band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘pumping piano'”: [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, “Love My Baby”]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. “Red Hot” should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn’t it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for “Red Hot” come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album — and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips’ latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label — that just wouldn’t make any sense. He said ““Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, “I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn’t last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” called “Rockin’ on the Moon”, which I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Rockin’ on the Moon”] But that wasn’t a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on “Shimmy Shimmy Walk” by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of “You Don’t Love Me”: [Excerpt: The Megatons, “Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1”] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn’t play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, “Green Onions”] But we’ll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months’ time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he’d been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Ronda”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Help Me, Ronda”] And on Dean Martin’s “Houston”: [Excerpt: Dean Martin, “Houston”] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales — and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis’ career. That song, Tony Joe White’s “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby”] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley’s version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley’s old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform “Red Hot” with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, “Red Hot”] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the “Musicares person of the year” award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It’s one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you’ll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won’t quote all of it, but I’ll quote a short section: “He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don’t stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who’s got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor’s bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn’t be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll" by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 "Silhouettes" by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I've also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley's life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley's music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on "The Flying Saucer", for backers who've not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let's talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like "Flying Disc Man From Mars", "Radar Men From The Moon", "It Came From Outer Space", "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term "flying saucer" had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold's experience has entered into legend as the canonical "first flying saucer sighting", mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person -- or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he'd seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation -- religious fanatics who saw in Arnold's vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold's sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn't want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes -- and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard's terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can't understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, "the Flying Saucer", I've actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here -- it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] And there'd been "Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer" by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer"] But today we're going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll"] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time -- for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn't know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws' house in Arkansas to his parents' house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald "Slim" Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he'd started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business -- Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor -- he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn't be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace's band as well as Epley's. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources -- they'd use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money -- while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they'd been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace's wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace's wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn't actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley's talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn't actually built the studio -- he'd bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn't quite got round to making Wallace's garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn't think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who'd played on Elvis' last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, "Rock With Me Baby": [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, "Rock With Me Baby"] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement -- rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label -- second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn't liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a "Heartbreak Hotel" knockoff called "Trouble Bound": [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "Trouble Bound"] That was much more to Sam's liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley's first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun's stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions -- usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There's one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first single, a cover version of Ray Price's "Crazy Arms". That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn't play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley's guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we're going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don't want to talk too much about him here, but you'll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on "Matchbox". Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people's lives. So while this isn't an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley's career. He's just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it's his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley's first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more -- it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn't have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios -- just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together -- but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention -- they'd only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn't seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll"] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was "one of the weirdest of early rock 'n' roll records - and early rock 'n' roll records were weird!" -- and he's right. "Flying Saucers Rock & Roll" is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said "Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!" -- and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley's backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky's on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley's stage show was -- at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing -- except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley's next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy "the Kid" Emerson, in 1955. "Red Hot" had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy "the Kid" Emerson, "Red Hot"] While "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of "Red Hot" would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Red Hot"] The song was recorded either at the same session as "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist -- accounts vary -- but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll", and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on "Take Me To That Place" by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, "Take Me To That Place"]  Rhythm guitar on "Miracle of You" by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, "Miracle of You"] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of "Red Hot", which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area -- the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that "Red Hot" hadn't been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson's version of Little Junior Parker's "Love My Baby", another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after "Red Hot", credited to Thompson "with Billy Lee Riley's band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis' 'pumping piano'": [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, "Love My Baby"]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. "Red Hot" should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn't it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for "Red Hot" come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album -- and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips' latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label -- that just wouldn't make any sense. He said "“Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, "I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn't last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to "Flying Saucers Rock & Roll" called "Rockin' on the Moon", which I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "Rockin' on the Moon"] But that wasn't a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on "Shimmy Shimmy Walk" by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of "You Don't Love Me": [Excerpt: The Megatons, "Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1"] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn't play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Green Onions"] But we'll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months' time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he'd been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys' "Help Me Ronda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Ronda"] And on Dean Martin's "Houston": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Houston"] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales -- and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis' career. That song, Tony Joe White's "I've Got a Thing About You Baby" started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "I've Got A Thing About You Baby"] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley's version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley's old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform "Red Hot" with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, "Red Hot"] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the "Musicares person of the year" award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It's one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you'll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won't quote all of it, but I'll quote a short section: "He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don't stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who's got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor's bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn't be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I’ve also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley’s life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley’s music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on “The Flying Saucer”, for backers who’ve not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let’s talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like “Flying Disc Man From Mars”, “Radar Men From The Moon”, “It Came From Outer Space”, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”, and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term “flying saucer” had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold’s experience has entered into legend as the canonical “first flying saucer sighting”, mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person — or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he’d seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation — religious fanatics who saw in Arnold’s vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold’s sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn’t want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes — and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard’s terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can’t understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, “the Flying Saucer”, I’ve actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here — it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] And there’d been “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer” by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer”] But today we’re going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time — for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn’t know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws’ house in Arkansas to his parents’ house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald “Slim” Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he’d started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business — Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor — he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn’t be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace’s band as well as Epley’s. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources — they’d use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money — while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they’d been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace’s wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace’s wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn’t actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley’s talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn’t actually built the studio — he’d bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn’t quite got round to making Wallace’s garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn’t think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who’d played on Elvis’ last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, “Rock With Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, “Rock With Me Baby”] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement — rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label — second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn’t liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a “Heartbreak Hotel” knockoff called “Trouble Bound”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound”] That was much more to Sam’s liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley’s first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun’s stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions — usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There’s one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first single, a cover version of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms”. That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn’t play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley’s guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we’re going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don’t want to talk too much about him here, but you’ll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on “Matchbox”. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people’s lives. So while this isn’t an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley’s career. He’s just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it’s his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley’s first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more — it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn’t have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios — just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together — but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention — they’d only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn’t seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was “one of the weirdest of early rock ‘n’ roll records – and early rock ‘n’ roll records were weird!” — and he’s right. “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said “Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!” — and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley’s backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley’s stage show was — at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing — except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley’s next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy “the Kid” Emerson, in 1955. “Red Hot” had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy “the Kid” Emerson, “Red Hot”] While “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of “Red Hot” would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Red Hot”] The song was recorded either at the same session as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist — accounts vary — but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”, and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on “Take Me To That Place” by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, “Take Me To That Place”]  Rhythm guitar on “Miracle of You” by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, “Miracle of You”] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of “Red Hot”, which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area — the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that “Red Hot” hadn’t been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson’s version of Little Junior Parker’s “Love My Baby”, another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after “Red Hot”, credited to Thompson “with Billy Lee Riley’s band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘pumping piano'”: [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, “Love My Baby”]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. “Red Hot” should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn’t it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for “Red Hot” come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album — and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips’ latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label — that just wouldn’t make any sense. He said ““Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, “I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn’t last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” called “Rockin’ on the Moon”, which I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Rockin’ on the Moon”] But that wasn’t a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on “Shimmy Shimmy Walk” by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of “You Don’t Love Me”: [Excerpt: The Megatons, “Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1”] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn’t play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, “Green Onions”] But we’ll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months’ time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he’d been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Ronda”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Help Me, Ronda”] And on Dean Martin’s “Houston”: [Excerpt: Dean Martin, “Houston”] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales — and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis’ career. That song, Tony Joe White’s “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby”] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley’s version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley’s old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform “Red Hot” with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, “Red Hot”] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the “Musicares person of the year” award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It’s one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you’ll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won’t quote all of it, but I’ll quote a short section: “He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don’t stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who’s got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor’s bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn’t be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

This week author Stanley Booth joins Nate to talk about his book “Red Hot and Blue”, found here: https://amzn.to/2Fv1ZrB In this episode,Stanley shares some of his many Memphis music stories with Nate including watching Otis Redding write and record "Dock of the Bay" and the story that may have spurred Elvis Presley's 1968 comeback.

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late -- health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn't see the previous post -- my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried -- everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney -- nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was -- and still is -- someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story -- we've dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I'm talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we're talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I'm fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he's queer, I'm using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use "he" and "him" pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we're again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale -- the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase "sex and drugs and rock and roll" and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil -- several times he's gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I've seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he's happy in his current situation. But at the time we're talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces -- wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn't much different to Vicks' VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with "Doc Hudson", and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Caldonia"] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan's vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard's own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name "Little Richard". However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Married Woman's Boogie"] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright's style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage -- Pancake 31 -- and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English -- people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard's talent, he got them to sign him. Richard's first single was called "Every Hour", and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Every Hour"] It was so close to Wright's style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard's song, "Every Evening". [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Every Evening"] At this point Richard was solely a singer -- he hadn't yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as "Eskew" Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word "excreta". Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard -- who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations -- has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita's, Esquerita was better. It's hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard's piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn't make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard's later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: "Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: "I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then." Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: "Ain't That Good News"] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of "Directly From My Heart To You", a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called "Little Richard's Boogie": [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, "Little Richard's Boogie"] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for "lewd conduct" -- what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn't allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he'd moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price's label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard's constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles' gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty's owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of "Wonderin'", and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Wonderin'"] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars -- one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa's studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey "Piano" Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu" from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey "Piano" Smith, "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu"] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino's style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino's records. However, the session didn't go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it "If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out." They did record some usable material -- "Wonderin'", which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded "I'm Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy" by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of "Directly From My Heart to You", a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn't have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard's potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard's career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. "Tutti Frutti" started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. "Tutti Frutti" in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable -- "A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn't understand that songs had to have different melodies -- all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington's "Blowtop Blues": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Blowtop Blues"] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, "I'm Just a Lonely Lonely Guy", with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem -- Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn't have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her -- but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn't see this innocent-looking young woman's face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years -- both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn't deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie's new lyrics were rudimentary at best. "I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do". But they fit the metre, they weren't about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn't matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn't have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti"] "Tutti Frutti" was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But... you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, "Tutti Frutti"] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard's version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn't be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like "Tutti Frutti" for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate -- normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He'd got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn't want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do -- hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction... Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than "Tutti Frutti" had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he'd have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for "Long Tall Sally" came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there's no such place -- Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt -- the "Aunt Mary" in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn't want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"] The song, about a "John" who "jumps back in the alley" when he sees his wife coming while he's engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with "Sally", who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Long Tall Sally"] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing "Ain't" rather than "Isn't". But he was also becoming a big star himself -- and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we'll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Bring It On, Hamilton, the most recent revival of CATS, the revival of Falsettos, and this season’s Head Over Heels are just a few of the credits my guests today have on their impressive resumes. Shonica Gooden made her Broadway debut in 2012 in the musical Bring It On and three years later replaced Ariana DeBose as ‘The Bullet’ in the ensemble of Hamilton. Earlier this month, she was seen on the Damn Yankees episode of the TV miniseries Fosse/Verdon. Ellenore Scott was a finalist and All-Star on the TV reality show So You Think You Can Dance? and is the Associate Choreographer for this season’s larger-than-life Broadway musical King Kong. Both women started out as concert dancers but found their way to Broadway. And this month, they find themselves in Fayetteville working on the Cape Fear Regional production of the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis. Memphis is loosely inspired on the story of Dewey Phillips, one of the first white DJs to play black music in the 1950s. Shonica stars as Felicia in this production, which Ellenore is choreographing. Also notable about this production is that for the first time in the history of the show, the character of Delray is being played by a woman. Hear what Shonica and Ellenore have to say about that, their work on Broadway, on television, and of course, working here in North Carolina.  About the Guests Ellenore Scott is a New York City-based choreographer and performer. Scott was a finalist and All-Star on the hit television show, So You Think You Can Dance? She was the Associate Choreographer for Head Over Heels on Broadway and is also the Associate Choreographer for King Kong: The Musical. Ellenore was the Assistant Choreographer for the Broadway Revivals of Cats and Falsettos. She also choreographed Off-Broadway’s Pride and Prejudice at the Cherry Lane Theater. She is also directing the revival of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. She is the Artistic Director of ELSCO Dance, a contemporary dance company. For more information visit: https://www.ellenorescott.co/ (https://www.ellenorescott.co/). Shonica Gooden toured and made her Broadway debut with the high flying cast of Bring It On: The Musical. Throughout the past eight years, Shonica has had the privilege and honor of being a part of other critically acclaimed shows such as Hamilton: An American Musical (The Bullet; Broadway), CATS (Rumpleteazer; Broadway Revival), Cinderella (Broadway), and Matilda”(1st National Tour). Shonica is spreading her wings in the film and Television industry, as well, co-starring this past summer in NBC’s Manifest. She can also be seen in The First Purge, Ted 2, and on the TV miniseries Fosse/Verdon. For more information visit: https://www.shonicagooden.com/about-me (https://www.shonicagooden.com/). Connect with RDU on Stage Facebook – @rduonstage Twitter – @rduonstage Instagram – @rduonstage Web http://www.rduonstage.com/ (www.rduonstage.com) Support this podcast

Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “That’s All Right Mama” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

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

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

  Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Crazy Man Crazy" by Bill Haley and the Comets. 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.   Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I've excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", but it has everything else.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We've talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name "rock and roll". There's rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We've looked at most of these – and the ones we haven't we'll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven't looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that's the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it's the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it's also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it's the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets' music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn't set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn't a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills' band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt "Blue Yodel (T For Texas)": Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that's the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of "Yodel Your Blues Away" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That's how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn't sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You'd expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like "Foolish Questions". [Excerpt of "Foolish Questions" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley's future career, it's unlikely there'd be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don't really make a dent in country music history, and didn't have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn't even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn't leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his... Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren't Haley's idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley's band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they'd showed up to discover that he didn't have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band's manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn't make much money at first -- they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station's recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio's recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like "Ten Gallon Stetson", and in one case the single wasn't even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show "Make Believe Ballroom", in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet -- in this case aided by the Musicians' Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians' strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels -- especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners -- realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations -- and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming -- and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced "high fidelity" records -- the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn't have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we've talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later -- their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you'd never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn't have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn't. And the time we're talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man -- but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA -- all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren't given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley's country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. "Judge Rhythm's Court" was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of "Shorty the Bailiff". Reeves' theme was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt "Rock the Joint", Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing -- in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown -- and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen's setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn't record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley's earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians' union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn't too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band's success. Haley would try things like turning up the band's amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn't hear themselves talking, they'd be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn't buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn't afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn't work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it's a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist's. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis' records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley's band was "Rocket 88" This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, "Rocket 88" was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn't sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] Obviously it's not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there's the drum sound.... Oh wait, there's no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let's listen again... [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] There are no drums there. It's what's called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I'd better explain that there's some terminological confusion, because "slap bass" is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word "slapback" is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about "rockabilly slapback bass" can end up a bit like "Who's on first?" But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It's used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley's band, and because of the playing style Haley's bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you're playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don't just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you'd never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn't particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley's band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen's version of "Rocket 88" had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston's original, as "the first rock and roll record". As we've said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley's recording makes an attractive candidate – it's the mythical "merging of black R&B with white country music", which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it's the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. "Rocket 88" wasn't that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of "Wabash Cannonball" retitled "Jukebox Cannonball", and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with "Rock the Joint", which had been in Haley's setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves' programme. The original "Rock the Joint" had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris' version of "Good Rockin' Tonight", but it hadn't done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo... [excerpt "Rock the Joint" – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley's early records. He wasn't a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound -- but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after "Rocket 88" but before "Rock the Joint" – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie", would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time -- instead, he didn't record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie" by The Esquire Boys) "Rock the Joint" was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after "Rock the Joint", the problems continued. Haley's next two records were "Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin')" – which was to the tune of "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight?" – and "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush", which was a rewrite of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" as a hillbilly boogie. But "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush" was notable for one reason – it was the first record by "Bill Haley and Haley's Comets", rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley's comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn't pick up on the term "rock and roll" til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn't familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in "Crazy Man Crazy", which became the Comets' first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band's success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn't go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande's count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers' favourite slang expression was "crazy", and so he wrote... [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets' bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it's the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it's the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. "Crazy Man Crazy" is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan's records. With Danny Cedrone's solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn't stay successful very long – he wasn't part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we're talking about in this series, you'll see that they're all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the "lone genius" is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There's a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn't have any kind of peer group or community. They weren't part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we'll see when we return to them in a few weeks...

  Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. 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.   Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print — one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post — it’s very good on the facts — but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I’ve excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, but it has everything else.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name “rock and roll”. There’s rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We’ve looked at most of these – and the ones we haven’t we’ll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven’t looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that’s the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it’s the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it’s also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it’s the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets’ music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn’t set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn’t a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills’ band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt “Blue Yodel (T For Texas)”: Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that’s the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of “Yodel Your Blues Away” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That’s how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn’t sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You’d expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like “Foolish Questions”. [Excerpt of “Foolish Questions” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley’s future career, it’s unlikely there’d be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don’t really make a dent in country music history, and didn’t have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn’t even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn’t leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his… Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren’t Haley’s idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley’s band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they’d showed up to discover that he didn’t have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band’s manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn’t make much money at first — they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station’s recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio’s recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like “Ten Gallon Stetson”, and in one case the single wasn’t even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show “Make Believe Ballroom”, in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet — in this case aided by the Musicians’ Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians’ strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels — especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners — realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations — and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming — and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced “high fidelity” records — the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn’t have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we’ve talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later — their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you’d never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn’t have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn’t. And the time we’re talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man — but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA — all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren’t given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley’s country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. “Judge Rhythm’s Court” was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of “Shorty the Bailiff”. Reeves’ theme was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt “Rock the Joint”, Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing — in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown — and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen’s setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn’t record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley’s earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians’ union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn’t too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band’s success. Haley would try things like turning up the band’s amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn’t hear themselves talking, they’d be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn’t buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn’t afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn’t work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it’s a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist’s. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis’ records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley’s band was “Rocket 88” This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, “Rocket 88” was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn’t sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] Obviously it’s not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there’s the drum sound…. Oh wait, there’s no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let’s listen again… [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] There are no drums there. It’s what’s called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I’d better explain that there’s some terminological confusion, because “slap bass” is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word “slapback” is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about “rockabilly slapback bass” can end up a bit like “Who’s on first?” But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It’s used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley’s band, and because of the playing style Haley’s bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you’re playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don’t just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you’d never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn’t particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley’s band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen’s version of “Rocket 88” had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston’s original, as “the first rock and roll record”. As we’ve said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley’s recording makes an attractive candidate – it’s the mythical “merging of black R&B with white country music”, which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it’s the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. “Rocket 88” wasn’t that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of “Wabash Cannonball” retitled “Jukebox Cannonball”, and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with “Rock the Joint”, which had been in Haley’s setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves’ programme. The original “Rock the Joint” had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris’ version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but it hadn’t done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo… [excerpt “Rock the Joint” – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley’s early records. He wasn’t a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound — but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after “Rocket 88” but before “Rock the Joint” – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie”, would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time — instead, he didn’t record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie” by The Esquire Boys) “Rock the Joint” was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after “Rock the Joint”, the problems continued. Haley’s next two records were “Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin’)” – which was to the tune of “Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” – and “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush”, which was a rewrite of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” as a hillbilly boogie. But “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush” was notable for one reason – it was the first record by “Bill Haley and Haley’s Comets”, rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley’s comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn’t pick up on the term “rock and roll” til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn’t familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in “Crazy Man Crazy”, which became the Comets’ first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band’s success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn’t go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande’s count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers’ favourite slang expression was “crazy”, and so he wrote… [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets’ bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it’s the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it’s the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. “Crazy Man Crazy” is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan’s records. With Danny Cedrone’s solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn’t stay successful very long – he wasn’t part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we’re talking about in this series, you’ll see that they’re all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the “lone genius” is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There’s a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn’t have any kind of peer group or community. They weren’t part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we’ll see when we return to them in a few weeks…

Wink & Sandy Martindale are our guests as we continue our Elvis Celebration on Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour.  We recorded our conversation during a break at this year's Nashville Elvis Festival where Wink & Sandy were judges for the Elvis Tribute Artist contest.  Wink Martindale is a legendary game show host, television producer and radio personality.  He was also working at WHBQ in Memphis, TN and happened to be at the studio with Dewey Phillips the evening he first played Elvis Presley.  Sandy Martindale has wonderful stories of dating Elvis, dancing in his movies and designing Elvis eye-wear.  We'll hear about all of these stories and more!  This is an episode you do NOT want to miss!  Plus, we play Wink's "That Was Elvis To Me" narrative, a NEW song from Pokey LaFarge (who portrays Hank Snow in CMT's "Sun Records") and tunes from Janis Martin, Dale Watson and The Starlight Drifters!   Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Janis Martin- "My Boy Elvis" Ed Sullivan snippet Dale Watson- "Big Boss Man"   Wink & Sandy Martindale interview: Wink Martindale- "All Love Broke Loose" Segment 1 Elvis Presley- "That's All Right" Segment 2 Dewey Phillips snippet Segment 3 Elvis Presley- "What'd I Say" Segment 4 Wink Martindale- "That Was Elvis To Me" Segment 5 Elvis Presley- "Suspicious Minds" Segment 6 Elvis Presley- "I Was The One"   Pokey LaFarge- "Better Man Than Me" The Starlight Drifters- "She Just Misses Elvis (Sometimes)"   Outro Music Bed:  Scotty Moore- "Heartbreak Hotel"

Elvis, Johnny Cash, Car Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis. . . and yeah that's right, now the Pigs have recorded at the legendary Sun Records. We had the sheer pleasure of sitting with Sun's engineer, Ples Hampton, to hear some of the amazing history behind this amazing recording studio and the birthplace of Rock and Roll.  We were giddy and full of goosebumps from the moment we stepped into the studio.  Ples, whose father was a producer at Ardent Records for over forty years, is well connected to the Memphis music scene and its rich history from the early days before the term "rock and roll" was ever coined (which we do dig into in this episode) to today's artists still making their way through Memphis and Sun Records to lay down tracks.  We couldn't have picked a better way to record at Sun.  Ples was nice enough to put some time aside for us before heading out the door to the premier of the new Sun Records show that was premiering on CMT that very evening.  And some great stories were told, including some secret nuggets, or happy accidents, that made it into some well known recordings.  Tune into to hear about the humble beginning of Mr. Sam Phillips as well as the pioneering disc jockey, which without him Sam's artists may never have been heard, the one and only Dewey Phillips.