Podcasts about Elmore James

It seems as though the 12 bar blues structure is an immovable object, an obelisk of sacred, ritualistic, totemic authority. But the form contains multitudes of variety. Here are two examples of the plasticity of that container, which holds the magic blues elixir and can pour it smoothly, or have it gush out, uncontrollably, like a tidal wave. So, be careful when you put your lips to the chalice … the edges can be sharp, and the liquid it delivers may be too intoxicating! Up first, we have Harvey Mandel, the “Snake”- a guitar wizard, brandishing and slashing his ax-cutlass like a pirate, as he boards equilibrium's frigate docked inside your ear canal, with his own composition, 4pm; then, JB Hutto and the Hawks stagger through “Too Much Alcohol” like drunkards in search of another, much needed pint of medicine - with his razor sharp slide work JB illustrates those sensations perfectly, with an insistent, whimpering pulse.HARVEY MANDELIn 1967, Samuel Charters, for Vanguard records, in an early effort to reveal and showcase the second generation of Chicago's blues scene,  produced harmonica master, Charley Musselwhite's first album STAND BACK! HERE COMES CHARLEY MUSSELWHITE'S SOUTHSIDE BAND, and caused a literal big bang in the hearts and minds of American youth. This was Harvey Mandel's first recording, and launched the notable guitar slinger for hire's 60 year career, going on to join Canned Heat, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, recording many solo efforts, and landing one step away from becoming a Rolling Stone.   Known as “the King of Sustain,” our track, 4pm, showcases the longest sustained electric guitar note at age 21, a feat copied by Jimi Hendrix two years later. Harvey's inventive style is trademarked, and you can hear those clarion notes ringing out like a buzz saw, transitioning from one amazing improvisation to the next. JB HUTTO AND THE HAWKSThe next cut, TOO MUCH ALCOHOL, also on the Vanguard label - featured on 1966's Chicago / Blues / Today! Sounds almost like it could have been recorded in the previous century, when, fresh off the farm, players were captured in their first big city outings on lo-fi recordings - it's that raw and spiky. And, yet, both Mandel and Hutto were breathing the same mid-60s Chicago air. JB's slide style was influenced by Elmore James, of DUST MY BROOM acclaim, and he carried that torch forward. The son of a preacher from South Carolina, Hutto made his way to Chicago after his father's death in the early 50s, but ended up working as a janitor for 11 years, until, in the mid 60s, he was discovered and unleashed on the world by Vanguard. 

Show #1093 Got It Done 01. Joanne Shaw Taylor - Hell Of A Good Time (4:07) (Black & Gold, Journeyman Records, 2025) 02. Sunny Bleau & the Moons - Peacock Strut (3:15) (Passion & Regrets, Endless Blues Records, 2025) 03. Kid Ramos - An Answer For Isaac (4:56) (Strange Things Happening, Nola Blue Records, 2025) 04. Rick Revel - Son Of A Moonshiner (3:54) (That Muscle Shoals Sound, Tunesmith Records, 2024) 05. Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen - So Damn Good (4:12) (The Bywater Sessions, Well Kept Secret, 2025) 06. Ben Hemming - Devil May Care (4:09) (The Meaning of All Things, self-release, 2025) 07. Emillia Quinn - Does She Know (3:55) (Dented Halos, self-release, 2025) 08. Jarkka Rissanen & Sons Of The Desert - Tailwind (4:07) (Mixed Waste, Humu Records, 2025) 09. Woody Crabapple - Thinkin' And Drinkin' (2:15) (Drowning Man Blues EP, The Orchard, 2025) 10. D. Scott Riggs - These Walls Don't Own Me (4:50) (Somewhere Not Here, Pure Panhandle Music, 2025) 11. Eric Johanson - Yellow Moon (4:35) (Live In Mississippi, Ruf Records, 2025) 12. Matt Andersen - Magnolia (4:20) (The Hammer & The Rose, Sonic Records, 2025) 13. Polyrhythmics - Mayo Con Yayo (4:44) (Life From Below, self-release, 2025) 14. Jim Brewer - It Hurts Me Too [1980] (3:04) (Take It Easy Greasy, Earwig Music, 2025) 15. GA-20 - It Hurts Me Too (2:46) (Try It... You Might Like It!, Colemine Records, 2021) 16. Danielle Miraglia - It Hurts Me Too (3:29) (Bright Shining Stars, VizzTone Records, 2020) 17. The Jujubes - It Hurts Me Too (3:52) (Where Are We Now, self-release, 2021) 18. First Aid Kit - It Hurts Me Too (2:58) (Single, Third Man Records, 2011) 19. Beaucoup Blue - It Hurts Me Too (3:16) (Hearts At Home, self-release, 2005) 20. Chuck Berry - It Hurts Me Too (2:59) (Chuck Berry In Memphis, Mercury Records, 1967) 21. Paul Geremia - When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too) (3:07) (Just Enough, Folkways Records, 1968) 22. Elmore James & his Broomdusters - It Hurts Me Too (3:17) (78 RPM Shellac, Chief Records, 1957) 23. Tampa Red - It Hurts Me Too (2:28) (78 RPM Shellac, Bluebird Records, 1940) 25. Tampa Red - You Got To Reap What You Sow (3:20) (78 RPM Shellac, Vocalion Records, 1929) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Happy Birthday Fats Domino!Pacific St Blues & AmericanaSpotlight on Fats DominoSupport our Show and get the word out by wearin' our gear Enjoy all our Spotlights Shows including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Cash, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck, Muddy Waters, The Folk & Blues Roots of Led Zeppelin, Hank Williams, Elmore James, Etta James, John Hiatt, The Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, and more...If you like music and trivia, try...What's the Common Thread, The Music Trivia Game1. Van Morrison / Domino2. Fats Domino / Lady Madonna3. Louis Jordan / Saturday Night Fish Fry4. Hank Ballard & the Midnighters / Let's Go, Let's Go (Thrill Upon the Hill) 5. Louis Armstrong / Blueberry Hill 6. Louis Prima & Phil Harris / I Wanna Be Like You (OST The Jungle Book) 7. Jelly Roll Morton / New Orleans Blues (the Spanish tinge) 8. Fats Domino / Blue MondayEarly Influences on Fats Domino9. Amos Milburn / Chicken Shack Boogie (Christine Perfect nee' McVie w/ 10. Charles Brown / Trouble Blues 11. Ella Fitzgerald / A Tisket, A Tasket12. Meade Lux Lewis / Doll House Boogie 13. Lloyd Price / Lawdy Miss Clawdy Hit Parade - 194914. Wynonie Harris / Good Rockin' Tonight (1948)15. Babe Ruth retires from baseball (1947) 16. Count Basie / Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball (Buddy Johnson Orchestra, 1949) 17. Sister Rosetta Tharpe / Up Above My Head (1949)16. Fats Domina / The Fat Man 17. John Lee Hooker / Boogie ChillenNew Orleans and The Big Beat (Earl Palmer & Dave Bartholomew) 18. Archibald / Stack-a-Lee (Stagger Lee)19. Little Richard / Long Tall Sally 20. Smiley Lewis / I Hear You Knocking21. Roy Brown / Let the Four Winds Blow22. Earl King /Trick Bag

The Cash Box Kings perform live at the 2024 Blues Music Awards in Memphis on Edition 675 of Blues Radio International, with Elmore James, Guy Davis, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Henry Gray, and Albert Collins.Photograph by Roman Sobus.Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net

This week our guest is Paul B. Elmore. Long before he was America's most reviled traitor, Benedict Arnold had a personal grudge with James Easton. For more information visit www.allthingsliberty.com. 

On this week's Loudini Rock & Roll Circus we dig deep into the history of distortion and the electric guitar and how is shaped the sound of rock music.     Topics Discussed: What we did this week: Loudini: Twan Moore & the Train, Black Snake Moan, Are meet and greets worth it? Perry & Dave, The VMA's are still a thing, why that's bad, How D2C is poised to destroy streaming, The tools that musician's need to get hired (not what you think), What Rick Beato (and others) don't understand about today's "charts". Why no bands on "the charts". Robert Epstein explains our "Google-fied" world. Mr. Pittsburgh: Selling guitar to the Wolf, What happened to The Donnas?     The History or Distortion: https://www.guitarworld.com/features/the-evolution-of-distortion-how-advances-in-gear-paved-the-way-for-heavy-music   https://thejhsshow.com/articles/what-you-need-to-know-about-overdrive-pedals       The history of distortion is deeply intertwined with the development of the electric guitar, as the two evolved together to shape the sound of modern music. Here's an overview:   ### **Early Days: Accidental Origins (1940s-1950s)** Distortion originally came about as a mistake. In the 1940s and early 1950s, guitarists accidentally discovered that pushing tube amplifiers beyond their normal limits created a gritty, overdriven sound. This was typically caused by damaged speaker cones or malfunctioning amp circuits. Guitarists like Willie Johnson of Howlin' Wolf and bluesmen such as Elmore James and Muddy Waters were among the early users of this overdriven tone, which gave their sound more power and raw emotion.   ### **First Deliberate Use: 1950s-1960s** By the late 1950s, guitarists started to intentionally seek out distorted sounds. Link Wray, known for his 1958 instrumental "Rumble," achieved distortion by poking holes in his amplifier's speaker cone. This gave the song a unique, menacing tone that laid the foundation for rock and roll's aggressive edge.   In 1961, the first commercially available distortion device, the Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal (FZ-1), was created by Gibson, famously used in The Rolling Stones' 1965 hit "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." This marked a pivotal moment in the history of guitar distortion, as fuzz became a sought-after effect in rock music.   ### **The Rise of Fuzz and Overdrive (1960s-1970s)** The 1960s saw distortion evolve further with the fuzz effect. Artists like Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards popularized fuzz pedals, using them to achieve a thick, saturated tone. Hendrix, especially, made innovative use of distortion in tracks like “Purple Haze,” helping to push the boundaries of what was possible with the electric guitar.   Around the same time, the concept of overdrive became more refined. Instead of extreme fuzz, overdrive pedals like the Ibanez Tube Screamer simulated the natural distortion that tube amps produced when cranked to high volumes. This allowed guitarists to achieve warm, harmonically rich distortion at lower volumes, making it more versatile for different styles of playing.   ### **Heavy Metal and High-Gain Amplifiers (1970s-1980s)** In the 1970s and 1980s, distortion became even heavier as bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and later Metallica pushed the limits of gain. Marshall amplifiers, known for their high-gain tone, became the go-to choice for hard rock and metal bands, allowing for more sustained and aggressive sounds. Guitarists like Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and Eddie Van Halen were known for their iconic distorted tones, which relied heavily on both amp overdrive and distortion pedals.   ### **The Modern Era: Digital Distortion (1990s-Present)** In the 1990s, digital technology revolutionized distortion. Digital pedals and multi-effects units began to emulate the classic sounds of tube amps and analog pedals with greater precision. This era also saw the rise of more extreme metal genres that demanded even more distortion and gain, pushing pedal manufacturers to create high-gain stompboxes like the Boss Metal Zone.   Today, digital amplifiers and software (e.g., Line 6 Helix, Kemper Profiling Amp) allow guitarists to access a wide range of distortion tones, from vintage fuzz to modern high-gain sounds, all in one device. Players can easily shape their sound using a combination of analog and digital tools, blending the warmth of traditional   New & Notable: Loudini: The Damn Truth; Love Out Of Luck Mr Pittsburgh: The Warning; Six Feet Deep

Samantha Fish performs live at the Funky Biscuit in Boca Raton in March 2016 on Ediition 662 of Blues Radio International, with Keb Mo, Elmore James, Shemekia Copeland and Junior Kimbrough.Photograph by Jay SkolnickFind more at BluesRadioInternational.net/

Rundown -    Intro - 00:35   Judge Bob Orr in Craig's Lawyers' Lounge - 14:45   Troubadour Dave Gunders - 01:25:44   "It Hurts Me Too" by Dave Gunders - 01:41:16   Outro - 01:47:11   Prominent North Carolina Republican mainstay and NC Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr returns to show (Ep. 88) with his home state in the headlines. NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is a hot MAGA mess, and Hurricane Helene has just wreaked havoc.   Bob Orr ran for Governor in North Carolina as a Republican in 2008. The GOP was different then. After his celebrated exit in 2016 at the Cleveland GOP national convention, Orr has led the Never Trump movement. https://www.youtube.com/live/gu_xkKuGguM   Now, Bob Orr is an asset for the Harris-Walz campaign in the key state of North Carolina. Find out how that happened. He's a principled North Carolina conservative who loves the law and calls out racism and misogyny. https://www.citizen-times.com/videos/news/local/elections/2024/09/18/longtime-republican-speaks-at-walz-rally-denounces-gop/75280599007/   Bob knows Appalachia but is not impressed by JD Vance. He is impressed by Governor Tim Walz, with whom he interacted. The guest and host mainly admire Kamala Harris's talented attorney skills. We wonder about the bigotry of people who call her dumb.   We remember Al Campanis in 1987: “They may not have some of the necessities.” And Dan Caplis from Denver Unified Reich Trump Radio on 9.24.24: “There is some kind of impairment with her (Kamala Harris) and I can't diagnose it from the outside. There's something that renders her unable to do the things necessary to be president.”   MAGA propaganda is horrific, especially when it comes from the United States Supreme Court. We discuss how the Rule of Law is now on the line and some special statutes in NC that may allow its GOP super-majority to make mischief.   Israel's pounding of Hezbollah in Beirut was discussed as Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his speech at the United Nations in New York. The world's nations are not too united, and Army vet Bob Orr discussed his military service. Does Bibi have clean hands?   Mitt Romney now fears retribution and may leave America if Trump is elected. Bob Orr asked about fears of retribution. Trump has told all Jews, Catholics, and seniors that their heads should be examined if we vote against him. Lord, help us.   Troubadour Dave Gunders brings his cover of Elmore James' blues song “It Hurts Me Too.” Hurt people hurt other people, and we discuss why Netanyahu and Donald Trump do the things they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvqprTLcApI

Sesión de rock’n’roll y rhythm and blues para mover las caderas y practicar tus mejores pasos en la pista de baile.Playlist;KING COLEMAN “Bulldog”FENTON and THE CASTLE ROCKERS “The freeze”JIMMY and STAN “Tahiti”RON and JOE and THE CREW “Riot in cell block n9”JULES BLATTNER and THE TEEN TONES “Gamblin’ man”WARNER MACK “Roc-a-chicka”THE QUINTET PLUS “Grease and Grit”THE SENTINALS “Blue booze”JIMMY VAN EATON “Foggy”CLYDE ARNOLD “I’ve got you baby”THE MYSTICS “Fox”JERRY JAYE “How could you lose your trust in me”ELMORE JAMES “Rollin’ and tumblin’”THE ROCKIN’ RC’s “The Beat”GENE SUMMERS “Nervous”THE CREW “Hot wire”STAN ROBINSON “Can she gives you fever”OSCAR BOYD “When things get a little better”ERMA FRANKLIN “I don’t want no mama’s boy”THE NUGGETS “Shtiggy room”CAL GREEN “The big push”DON JULIAN and THE MEADOWLARKS “It’s stompin’ time”MACK JOHNSON “Sting-Ray”ESTHER SUTHERLAND “Clock mambo”MIGUEL CORDOBA “Oye”Escuchar audio

ICYMI the winner of our last Trivia Contest for the year was SueUK, CONGRATULATIONS SUE!!!! She won the $100 gift card from Glow Flow Denver!!! Today, August 20th is "National Bacon Lovers Day"!!! One of The Old Man's FAVORITE Days!!!!! GET YOUR BACON ON!!!!! We have a GREAT line up of Blues artists this week: Koko Taylor, Karen Wolfe, Ray Charles, BB King, Elmore James, Bad Smitty and MANY MORE!! Tune in at https://www.easyridertenerife.com/ridetimeradio (12noon pst / 3pm east / 8pm Tenerife) for "The Old Man's Rhythm and Blues Hour". GET YOUR MUSIC ON!!! Tune in Monday's to "The Old Man's Podcast, Where Wasting Time is Time Well Wasted and Doing Nothing is on the TOP of the Do Nothing List!!!" Later Gators!!   Get everything you need to start your own successful podcast on Podbean here: https://www.podbean.com/tomspodcastPBFree   Visit our webpage where you can catch up on Current / Past Episodes: www.theoldmanspodcast.com  

"The Old Man's Rhythm and Blues Hour" is TODAY at 12noon pst / 3pm east / 8pm Tenerife. We have Jimmy Dawkins, T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elmore James and MANY MORE!!!! Tune in to Ride Time Radio here: https://www.easyridertenerife.com/ridetimeradio  What a GREAT way to head into the weekend!!! Later Gators!!   Get everything you need to start your own successful podcast on Podbean here: https://www.podbean.com/tomspodcastPBFree   Visit our webpage where you can catch up on Current / Past Episodes: www.theoldmanspodcast.com     Contact us at: theoldmanspodcast@gmail.com

Wilmington, Delaware's George Thorogood got his start on acoustic blues.  He formed a band called the Delaware Destroyers in 1973, and this would eventually become his band, known as George Thorogood & The Destroyers.  He released his first record in 1977, and received more mainstream notice when he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981.  The same year his touring schedule included the “50/50 tour” where George Thorogood & the Destroyers toured all 50 states in 50 days.  Thorogood's high energy shows and relentless touring schedule would be a hallmark of the band, creating a dedicated audience worldwide.The 1980's saw a resurgence in interest in blues rock, and this was a benefit for George Thorrogood.  The band would see continued success from their commercial breakthrough album, “Bad to the Bone,” released in 1982.  Albums would consist of both original material and covers of classic blues songs.  Much of their material has a humorous angle, though the blues style is solid and unapologetic, drawing influence from such artists as Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, and Bo Diddley.The George Thorogood Collection showcases some of the biggest hits from the band throughout the 70's and 80's.  It was released in March 1989, and we will be covering several hits from this album today.Wayne takes us through this blues boogie greatest hits album for this week's podcast. I Drink AloneOne of the better known George Thorogood hits, this pun-laden song peaked at number 13 on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks, and was an original from Thorogood.  “Now every morning just before breakfast, I don't want no coffee or tea.  Just me and by good buddy Weiser - that's all I ever need.”Bad to the BoneThis is the signature song of George Thorogood and the Destroyers.  Despite failing to crack the Top 100 in the US, it is universally identifiable from commercials, TV shows, movies, and the song itself.  It has been in over 25 films, including the iconic biker scene from “Terminator 2.”Move It On OverWhile this song does not appear on the “Collection,” we had to include it in this look at the band.  It is a cover song originally written and recorded by Hank Williams in 1947, and depicts the struggles of a guy who has come home late and found himself - literally - in the doghouse.Gear JammerThe deeper cut originally came out in 1985, and has become an anthem of truckers everywhere.  It talks about rolling down the road in an 18-wheeler, and looking to make time so the trucker can get home to his baby.  You'll find yourself moving at a high speed if you play this song in your car! ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Bad Boys by Inner Circle (from the television series “COPS”)This reality-based show premiered in 1989, and had an iconic song with a reggae riff. STAFF PICKS:You're What You Want to Be by Cruel Story of YouthRob launches the staff picks with a deep cut from a lost band.  This Wisconsin foursome produced their only album (self-titled) in 1989).  The song itself is a good one in the alternative music genre, though it seems overproduced to us.  Girl You Know Its True by Milli VanilliBruce risks cancellation from the show for putting this decidedly non-rock travesty on the picks.  Milli Vanilli released the album of the same name, which got them both commercial success and critical recognition via a Grammy award in 1989 despite not singing a note on the album.  No musical survey of 1989 would be complete without acknowledging the Milli Vanilli controversy.Eternal Flame by The BanglesLynch brings us a ballad from Susanna Hoffs from the girl group The Bangles.  They started their career singing 60's rock songs, then incorporated some 70's punk before hitting it big with their own material.  It topped the charts in 9 different countries.  You Got It by Roy OrbisonWayne closes out the staff picks  with a hit posthumously released from Roy Orbison's album "Mystery Girl." It went to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Fellow Traveling Wilburys alumni Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne co-wrote the song with Orbison, and they play on the single along with an uncredited George Harrison. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Ytse Jam by Dream TheaterWe close out with a prog rock instrumental from Dream Theater's debut album. Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock-worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

rWotD Episode 2556: Peter "Mars" Cowling Welcome to random Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a random Wikipedia page every day.The random article for Friday, 3 May 2024 is Peter "Mars" Cowling.Peter "Mars" Cowling (May 26, 1946 – March 20, 2018) was an English bass guitarist, best known for his work with Canadian blues rock guitarist Pat Travers.Cowling for many years lived in Grimsby where, in 1962, he formed The Syndicate with Steve Mills on vocals, Frank Singleton on lead guitar, Doug Hollingworth rhythm guitar, Geoff Smith on piano, and John Smith on drums. This band played covers of tracks by Elmore James, Ray Charles, Rufus Thomas, Bobby Troup, and John Lee Hooker. After that, Cowling played in British groups including Gnidrolog and the Flying Hat Band, before joining forces with Pat Travers in 1975.Cowling recorded eight albums for Travers from 1976 to 1982. He left Travers that year and later in the 1980s joined sisters Pam and Paula Mattioli in US AOR band Gypsy Queen (later to become Cell Mates in the early 1990s after Cowling's time in the band), appearing at the 1987 Reading Rock Festival and on Gypsy Queen's debut album before leaving the band later the same year. He rejoined Travers in 1989, and remained until 1993. He performed on Travers' singles "Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights)" and "Snortin' Whiskey". Cowling was also featured on two video releases. The first was Hooked On Music, a live performance originally shot for the German television programme, Rockpalast in 1976, which showcased an early line-up that also included Nicko McBrain. Cowling's other video appearance was Boom Boom-Live At The Diamond Club, a 1991 concert filmed in Toronto, that also featured Jerry Riggs.Cowling died on March 20, 2018, after having been diagnosed in February with an aggressive form of Leukemia.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:24 UTC on Friday, 3 May 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Peter "Mars" Cowling on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Brian Neural.

Air Week: April 29-May 5, 2024 Elmore James: 1951-55 Elmore James never tried to have crossover success. He was a bluesman through and through; an ambassador of the Mississippi Delta Blues with a modern, 1950s electric twist. Elmore's blues was as pure as his ambitions when starting out as a sideman for now legendary blues […]

fWotD Episode 2550: Cross Road Blues Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.The featured article for Sunday, 28 April 2024 is Cross Road Blues."Cross Road Blues" (commonly known as "Crossroads") is a song written by the American blues artist Robert Johnson. He performed it as a solo piece with his vocal and acoustic slide guitar in the Delta blues-style. The song has become part of the Robert Johnson mythology as referring to the place where he supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talent. This is based largely on folklore of the American South that identifies a crossroads as the site where such pacts are made, although the lyrics do not contain any references to Satan or a Faustian bargain. "Cross Road Blues" may have been in Johnson's repertoire since 1932 and, in 1936, he recorded two performances. One was released in 1937 as a single that was heard mainly in the Mississippi Delta area. The second, which reached a wider audience, was included on King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation album of some of Johnson's songs released in 1961 during the American folk music revival.Over the years, several bluesmen have recorded versions of the song, usually as ensemble pieces with electrified guitars. Elmore James' recordings in 1954 and 1960–1961 have been identified as perhaps the most significant of the earlier renditions. In the late 1960s, guitarist Eric Clapton and the British rock group Cream popularized the song as "Crossroads". Their blues rock interpretation became one of their best-known songs and inspired many cover versions.Both Johnson and Cream's recordings of the song have received accolades from various organizations and publications. Both have also led the song to be identified as a blues standard as well as an important piece in the repertoires of blues-inspired rock musicians. Clapton continues to be associated with the song and has used the name for the drug treatment center he founded and the series of music festivals to raise money for it.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:10 UTC on Sunday, 28 April 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Cross Road Blues on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Danielle Neural.

Leo Schumaker's "Bluesland" music podcast of Bluesland radio show February 29, 2024. Also iinterview with James "Super "Chikan" Johnson.Great music featured including Elmore James, Tommy Castro, Son House, Tinsley Ellis, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters and more. Also an interview with James "Super Chikan" Johnson in support of the upcoming movie "A Life In Blues" and his music. Just click on the link/picture and turn up your speakers. 

Eén van de twee nummers van George Harrison op het Let It Be-album is het eenvoudige For You Blue, een 'twelve bar blues' geïnspireerd op het werk van Elmore James. Hoe kwam dit nummer tot stand? Jan-Cees neemt ons mee... Wil je ons financieel ondersteunen? Word dan Vriend Van Fab4Cast en luister naar exclusieve afleveringen die je alleen als donateur kunt beluisteren! Kijk op petjeaf.com/fab4cast voor de mogelijkheden. We zouden je heel dankbaar zijn voor je steun.

Aquesta setmana comencem amb els singles del proper disc de la gran cantant saharaui Aziza Brahim, seguim amb la descoberta d'Alogte Oho i la seva recuperació del só del Highlife dels 50 a Ghana, parlem dels propers concerts del Black Music Festival amb The Gramophone All Stars, Errol Linton i Momi Maiga, i acabem amb un record per Elmore James.

The Black Crowes got their start as “Mr. Crowe's Garden” when Chris and Rich Robinson formed the band while attending Walton High School in Marietta, Georgia.  The name comes from the children's book “Johnny Crow's Garden” by Leonard Leslie Brooke.  They changed their name after moving to New York City where they met producer George Drakoulias who introduced them to music like The Faces and Humble Pie, and signed them at Def American.  Their debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, gets its name from an old Elmore James blues song, though that song does not appear on the album.  It was recorded in the summer of 1989 in Atlanta and Los Angeles.  This debut turned out to be a rocket of an album, peaking at number 4 on the Billboard 200, and it has sold over 5 million copies.  Readers of Rolling Stone magazine voted the Black Crowes “Best New American Band” at the end of 1990.The Black Crowes are often compared to late 60's and early 70's acts like the Faces and the Rolling Stones.  The group at the time consisted of Chris Robinson on vocals, Rich Robinson on guitar, Jeff Cease on guitar (the only Black Crowes album for which he would be a member), Johnny Colt on bass and Steve Gorman on drums.The group would break up a couple of times, and reformed for a third time in 2019.  They released an EP of newly recorded tracks called 1972 which consists of covers of songs released in 1972.  They released a double live album in 2023 called Shake Your Money Maker Live.Bruce presents this album which reinterprets the blues. Jealous AgainThe debut single from the band and the album would reach number 75 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number 5 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks charts.  The song is about jealousy and the inner turmoil that it causes.  There was a lawsuit against Gretchen Wilson for her song “Work Hard, Play Harder,” which was settled out of court.  Chris and Rich Robinson were given songwriting credits for the track, along with an undisclosed sum in the settlement.Struttin' BluesThis deep cut will be unfamiliar to those who haven't played the album or CD, but it gives you a good flavor for the album as a whole.  It is pretty much a straightforward blues piece.  “My baby got her engine hummin' Struttin' blues gonna' find me again.”Twice As HardThis is the starting track to the album.  The lyrics are about the difficulties of leaving a relationship for the second time, or perhaps about getting off drugs.  One theory is that it is a little of both, with the first time being when the guy leaves his love over her use of drugs, and the second time when he says goodbye at her funeral. She Talks to AngelsOne of the bigger hits from the album, this song reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 1 on the Albums tracks.  The riff and the lyrics are older, going back to their early days.  The picture of the girl is an amalgam of girls they saw at clubs in Atlanta who would dress goth.  Much of the lyrics were written early in Chris and Rich Robinson's life when hey really hadn't lived the drug lifestyle that they talk about.  The song inspired Hootie and The Blowfish's song “Let Her Cry.” ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series “Twin Peaks”David Lynch's quirky show got its start in this month. STAFF PICKS:Big Blue '82 by Daniella DaxWayne gets the staff pick party hopping with this deep but danceable cut.  Danielle Dax is an experimental musician from England who tells a simple story of being newly in love with this song.  Although not as well known in the States, Dax was big in the club circuit in Europe before switching to a career in interior design in 1996.Nothing Compares 2  by Sinead O'ConnorLynch brings us the unmistakable sound of O'Connor's biggest hit and cover of a song originally penned and performed by Prince.  While the original was a funk and soul ballad, O'Connor strips the ballad down to a raw, emotional piece focusing on her powerful vocals.Big Love by Robert Plant Rob features Led Zeppelin's vocalist on a track from his third album, “Manic Nirvana.”  This was the playful first single, and is filled with double entendres.  Sexual innuendoes were common in Led Zeppelin songs, so this continues the tradition.  It is about an affair with a flight attendant when it references “free air miles.”  Kiss This Thing Goodbye by Del AmitriBruce closes out the staff picks with a shuffle beat song off Del Amitri's second studio album, “Waking Hours.”  Del Amitri will be better known to U.S. listeners for their 1995 single, “Roll to Me.”  This song tells the tale of a love that has been over for a while, and the couple need to make the decision to move on. LAUGH TRACK:Heartbreaker (At the End of Lonely Street) by Dread ZeppelinWhat do you get when you cross Led Zeppelin with an Elvis impersonator?  Find out as we leave this week's podcast. 

Tempranito por la mañana nada mejor que escuchar el blues homónimo de Elmore James, nuestro guitarrista de blues eléctrico favorito con permiso de Hound Dog Taylor. También de mañanita les va a apetecer mucho nuestro surtido de boogies blancos y negros locos, números tropicales calientes, vaqueradas finas y hasta un garrotín bugui de los Xey. A partir de las ocho de la mañana en la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio

Salty Dog's BEANIE Podcast, August 2023 Visit: www.salty.com.au Get out ya beanie tone hounds, there a fine mess-o-tunes coming your way. Cuts from The Band, Rod Paine, Rick Holstrom, Ray Beadle, Jess Parker, Jason Isbell, Phil Manning, 8 Ball Aitken, Rodney Crowell, Michael Bloomfield, Elmore James, GA-20, Lisa Miller, Sara Tindley, John Gorka, Chris Smither, Neil Young, Delvon Lamarr, Harpo Walker, Voodoo Preachers, Dom Turner, Perry Keyes, Towwnes Van Zandt, Hazel Foucault, Stevie Ray Vaughan. TRACK / ARTIST / ALBUM ** Australia 1. Up On Crippled Creek / The Band / The Band 2. ** Slide Into The Bend / Rod Paine N Full Time Lovers / Dirt On Velvet 3. Lone Wolf / Rick Holstrom, Duke Logan / Twist-O-Lettz 4. ** Years Since Yesterday / Ray Beadle / Bound To Get The Blues 5. ** Rabbit / Jess Parker / Death Songs N Kitchen Spirituals 6. When We Were Close / Jason Isbell N 400 Unit / Weathervanes 7. ** Burnin' Low / Phil Manning / Out Of My Shed 8. ** Wading Through Muddy Water / 8 Ball Aitken / Ice Cream Man 2 9. Everything At Once / Rodney Crowell, Jeff Tweedy / The Chicago Sessions 10. Linda Lou / Michael Bloomfield / Live Chicago Blues 11. Mean Mistreatin' Mama / Elmore James / Memorial Album 12. Gone For Good / GA-20 / Crackdown 13. ** Wipe The Floor / Lisa Miller / As Far As Life Goes 14. ** Heart It Was A Desert / Sara Tindley / Lucky The Sun 15. The Gypsy Life / John Gorka / Temporary Road 16. Outside Inside / Chris Smither / The Songs of Billy Conway 17. Love and Only Love / Neil Young N Crazy Horse / Ragged Glory 18. Concussion / Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio / Close But No Cigar 19. ** Start Again / Harpo Walker / Bruised Heart Blues 20. ** Roadhouse / Paul Buchanan's Voodoo Preachers / Down Sellings Lane 21. ** Bad Weather / Dom Turner N Rural Blues Project / Sit Tight 22. ** Sunnyholt / Perry Keyes / Sunnyholt 23. Sanitarium Blues / Townes Van Zandt / A Far Cry From Dead 24. Trouble In Heaven / Hazel Foucault / The Songs of Billy Conway 25. Cold Shot / Stevie Ray Vaughan / Couldn't Stand The Weather

DAVE HOLE is Australia's premier internationally successful bluesman and a highly acclaimed slide guitar virtuoso. He first burst onto the international scene in 1991 with “Short Fuse Blues”, the first of his seven albums released on the prestigious Alligator Records label.  He is widely regarded as one of the all-time slide guitar greats whose playing is infused with the spirit of such legends as Elmore James, Duane Allman and Johnny Winter. Nine successful albums and countless tours of the U.S. and Europe have solidified Dave's stature as one of the very best slide guitarists playing today.  Dave grew up in Western Australia where, as a child he was somewhat isolated and somewhat lonely. So, he sought solace in music via the family radio and by the age of eleven had convinced his parents to buy him his first guitar.  He was immediately smitten and so began a lifelong passion for music and guitar in particular. On leaving school Dave completed a degree in physics but by 1974 he was playing music full time. In 1976 he broke the little finger of his left hand playing Australian Rules football. The mishap led him to adopt his unusual slide guitar technique, one which caught the eyes and ears of the American public and turned the musician into a highly sought after player.  The press gave him rave reviews reporting him as “Magnificent, staggering, almost beyond belief...” Almost overnight, Dave Hole became an international phenomenon.  Hole was soon gigging non-stop across America and Europe, leaving audiences spellbound wherever he went. And it wasn't just the critics who were paying attention. Metallica's Kirk Hammett names Dave Hole as one of his favourite guitarists, saying “His slide playing kills me. He plays so fast, and his phrasing, intonation and tone are perfect”. To contact me with feedback, comments or any guest suggestions, send a message through my website https://www.abreathoffreshair.com.au  

Singles Going Around- Mimosa Tree BluesThe Byrds- "It's No Use"Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs- "Little Red Riding Hood"Tony Joe White- "Whompt Out On You"The Monkees- "Daily Nightly"Joe South- "Hush"Elvis- "The Power of My Love"Simon & Garfunkel- "Fakin' It"Percy Sledge- "Take The Time To Know Her"Tommy McClain- "Before I Grow Too Old"The Animals- "Talking About You"Sonny & Cher- "I Look For You"Booker T & The MG's- "Sunny"The Beatles- "We Can Work It Out"Elmore James- "It Hurts Me Too"Bobby Charles- "Goodnight Irene"Lazy Lester- "Strange Things Happen"Neil Diamond- "Brother Love's Traveling Salvtion Show"Vanilla Fudge- "You Keep Me Hangin' On" (QT Edit)*All songs taken from the original Lp's and 45 rpm records.

El legendario bluesman Elmore James es el guitarrista slide más influyente de la posguerra. Ha sido acreditado como uno de los principales arquitectos del blues-rock en virtud de sus riffs primarios energizantes y su intensidad cruda. Su influencia (en enfoque, actitud y tono) es incalculable, y se puede escuchar en casi todos los guitarristas que ponen un tubo en su dedo y lloran el blues.

An eclectic episode full of sass, gas and plenty of brass. We're going the free form route today and there'll be plenty of embellishments to the morning as we take a blindfolded trip through a hall of mirrors with some classy vocals from Frankie, Peggy Lee and Helen Forrest; some honky tonk whiskey-in-the-bottle twangin' from George Jones, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee; rocking rhythm passion from Tina Turner, The Marquees, and Elmore James; and much more including some little known nuggets from Bob Dylan, Merle Travis, and Daddy Cleanhead. We're going to set the morning on fire with plenty of fuel from the deeper wells of the past century of America's music. You don't want to miss out. Join Dave Stroud for another Friday morning selection of wild tune-age on KOWS Community Radio.

We explore two rhythm & blues icons who had a huge impact on early rock: Elmore James and Bo Diddley! Both men were fantastic craftsmen with not only their music but even their instruments, both of them being famous tinkerers who developed new designs for guitars and louder amps. We also spend a little time on Ike and Tina Turner, plus I've included some great bloopers at the very end (for those who listen to the whole episode ;)

Part I - Talk Interview - The Life & Musical Career of Blues Music legend, Luther Guitar Junior Johnson (1939-2022)  In January 2020, we were blessed to spend some time with Luther, who was always a gracious & honored guest at the home of BRI's Audrey Michelle & Michael Wolf.In this part 1 of 2 Luther tells us about his life, starting from the beginning in Mississippi. At the age of 13 he received his first guitar from his parents who were fans of Muddy Waters, not knowing that later in his life he would go on to play guitar in the Muddy Waters Band. He learned how to play guitar from his uncle, who he paid 15 cents for lessons. Making his way to Chicago in the 1950's where he played in pop up basement juke joints with players like, Robert Nighthawk, Howlin' Wolf, Lil' Walter, Elmore James & many others. (You can only imagine what that scene was like!) The story goes on from there so, you will just have to listen to hear the rest of Luther's incredible life story. You will hear jokes & lots of playful laughter which was always in abundance when you were in Luther's company.Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson, who hails from Itta Bena Mississippi (also the birthplace  of B.B. King)  A West Side Chicago guitarist,  had a storied career, including a stint with The Muddy Waters Band. He had 21 albums, was in countless music videos, made hundreds of recordings & appeared with John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton, Pinetop Perkins, Calvin Jones & Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith in the original 1980 Blues Brothers Movie.  @thebluesbrothers7474   In part 2 of this interview, the musical portion, you may notice that Luther is playing an electric custom guitar by Delaney Guitars.  This guitar was originally designed for & owned by, blues man, Mike Zito. It is an honor to have Luther play & to have signed this one of a kind instrument made by Mr. Michael Delaney in Texas, USA.   @ValDelaneyGuitars We give our love & sincere thanks to the late Michael Shivvers of The Blues Roots Digital Archive, our dear friend, & fellow blues music documentarian who passed suddenly in 2020. Mike & Luther traveled The United States together by car with their gear in tow from gig to gig promoting, 'Won't Be Back No More,' Luthers newest & final album. An acoustic recording with with a whopping 17 tracks & 8 new original tunes. Luther & Michael recorded the album, at Luther's home in Wildwood, Florida. They both stayed with Audrey & Michael on this trip, it was an honor to host these two incredible, talented humans.  @MichaelShivvers_BluesArchive Your Host: Jesse FinkelsteinAudio mix-down & video production by Audrey Michelle for BRIVideography & audio recording by Audrey Michelle & Michael Wolf   @datflys &  @audreymichelle6436  #LutherGuitarJuniorJohnson #LutherGuitarJrJohnson #GuitarJr #GuitarJunior #bluesradiointernational #bluesmusic #chicagoblues #blues #bluesandrootsdigitalarchive #muddywatersFind more at BluesRadioInternational.net/radio-show

Counting Down the Greatest Cover Songs of All-Time!!#5-1Intro: Iris by Colbie CaillatOutro: Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls5. HurtOriginal: Hurt by Nine Inch NailsAlternate: Hurt by 2CELLOSCover: Hurt by Johnny Cash4. With a Little Help From My FriendsOriginal: With a Little Help From My Friends by The BeatlesAlternate: With a Little Help From My Friends by *Mystery Artist*Alternate: With a Little Help From My Friends by *Mystery Artist*Alternate: With a Little Help From My Friends by Mumford & SonsAlternate: With a Little Help From My Friends by ShinedownAlternate: With a Little Help From My Friends by Josh KelleyCover: With a Little Help From My Friends by Joe Cocker3. CrossroadsOriginal: Cross Road Blues by Robert JohnsonAlternate: Standing at the Crossroads by Elmore James & the Broom DustersAlternate: Crossroads by *Mystery Artist*Alternate: Crossroads by *Mystery Artist*Alternate: Crossroads by RushCover: Crossroads by Cream2. All Along the WatchtowerOriginal: All Along the Watchtower by Bob DylanAlternate: All Along the Watchtower by U2Alternate: All Along the Watchtower by Dave Matthews BandCover: All Along the Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience1. RespectOriginal: Respect by Otis ReddingAlternate: Respect by Jennifer HudsonCover: Respect by Aretha FranklinVote on your favorite cover version from today's episodeLast chance to vote on any episodes that you haven't!!Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 1Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 2Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 3Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 4Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 5Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 6Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 7Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 8Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 9Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 10Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 11Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 12Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 13Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 14Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 15Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 16Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 17Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 18Vote on your favorite cover version from Episode 19

Singles Going Around- Eyesight To The BlindJohn Mayall with Eric Clapton- "All Your Love"R.L. Burnside- "See My Jumper Hanging On the Line"The Beatles- "Yer Blues"Elmore James- "Dust My Broom"Jimi Hendrix- "Born Under a Bad Sign" Muddy Waters- "Honey Bee"The Rolling Stones- "Ventilator Blues"Jimmy Reed- "You Don't Have To Go"Taj Mahal- "Everybody's Got To Change Sometime"Junior Wells- "Cut That Out"Hound Dog Taylor- Give Me Back My Wig"James Cotton- "Cotton Crop Blues"Led Zepplin- "I Can't Quit You Baby"The Byrds- "My Back Pages/ B.J. Blues/ Baby, What You Want Me To Do"

JazzX5 #564 en una entrega especial titulada Siniestro Total y el Blues. Suenan además de la música del grupo gallego, algunos clásicos del blues como Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson o Elmore James. JazzX5 es un podcast de Pachi Tapiz.

Rundown -   Chris Hansen - 03:40   Sam Kaufman - 56:57   Troubadour Dave Gunders - 01:52:21   "Shake Your Moneymaker" by Dave Gunders - 01:59:42   'You People' Movie Review - 02:02:43   Colorado state Senator Chris Hansen makes his strong case to be elected Denver's 46th mayor. Senator Hansen is an engineer by training and experience. Growing up in Goodland, Kansas, Hansen always looked up to the regional capital of Denver, and frequently visited.   Elected to represent SD21 (central and east Denver), Hansen is a legislative leader who wants to now turn his attention to solving Denver's problems. Hansen is a father of two boys who is proud of his attorney wife. Learn also about Hansen's father, a necktie-wearing teacher, and his mother, a nurse.    Hansen gets passionate about climate change and electric heat pump technology that could revolutionize Denver's buildings. Dr. Hansen also knows budgets, having served as the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Vice Chair of the Joint Budget Committee.   So is Hansen's good humor as he talks about the neckties he and his father have long favored. The Colorado Senate's strict necktie rule is no problem for this mayoral candidate who wore a solid red tie to Thursday's first Denver mayoral debate held at Regis College.   The candidate discusses his first priority commitment to Denver public safety. Denver's ongoing crime and vehicular collision problems are unacceptable. Hansen claims he's the infrastructure knowledgeable mayoral candidate Denver needs and his decision making skills are suited to the job.   Sam Kaufman's job was to sell men neckties and it lasted many decades. As son of late great Fred Kaufman and proprietor of this region's preeminent big and tall men's clothing store, Sam is an expert at men's fashion. He's also sold hundreds of thousands of extra long ties.   Listen to the great yarns spun by this master clothier who spent decades also selling suits and shoes and other apparel at Kaufman's Big and Tall Store in Englewood. The location at Hampden and Broadway was chosen after Fred Kaufman turned down offers to locate at Cinderella City.   Great athletes galore were among the Kaufman patrons. Listen for the invited name dropping including Julius Erving and Broncos' greats Paul Smith and Randy Gradishar.     What are neckties all about? Personal expression and a show of respect. Are neckties going extinct? Perhaps. One necktie killer was Raymond Burr who went through them like dishrags as he sweated out playing Perry Mason in the Denver courthouse. Kaufman's Burr necktie story is a classic.   Sam Kaufman is a brilliant storyteller who loved his famous father who helped bring pro basketball to Denver. Byron Beck is a big Kaufman's fan and vice versa. These old Denver stories are classics.   For lawyers, a good necktie can be his moneymaker. Shake your Moneymaker is the cover song sung by show Troubadour Dave Gunders who pays tribute to Elmore James and neckties he too has known. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08U7tcjKWFM   As a special feature, Troubadour Dave Gunders give their reviews of the controversial number one movie on Netflix, You People. Was this the right way to cover mixed race marriage controversies, and were Jews treated fairly? https://www.timesofisrael.com/critics-pan-painful-portrayal-of-jews-in-race-relations-rom-com-you-people/

A pesar de su corta vida, el guitarrista y cantante dejó una legión de admiradores y un puñado de discípulos que se encargaron de perpetuar su estilo en el rock de las nuevas generaciones.

Además de una de indios hoy tendremos en Melodías Pizarras a Elmore James, Wilmoth Houdini, Cuarteto Machín. Lalo Guerrero y sus Cinco Lobos, Frank Ferera & John Paaluhi, Blue Ridge Highballers, Adolph Hofner And His Texans, Lonnie Johnson, Cab Calloway... A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

After just celebrating the 20th anniversary of a band he was reluctant to name after himself, Anthony Renzulli has earned the right to say he's in it for all the right reasons. You have to be when you decide to put our a solo record in 2022 that sounds like it could have been made in 1932. Anthony has played just about every sub-genre of rock in his career, starting out as a drummer in metal and rap rock, then shifting to being a band leader on the instrument that was always within arm's reach since before he could even play it - the guitar. He came into the blues through the portal of 60's rock - Cream, Zepplin, Hendrix - and found his way back to the Delta Blues from the early 20th century, devouring music from artists like Robert Johnson and Elmore James.  Anthony recently finished a full-length blues record, aptly titled Mad, Mad Blues and I was lucky to be able to preview a vinyl test pressing, which honestly transported me to a place I don't usually visit in a musical sense.   Anthony and I met up at Meadows Diner in Blackwood, NJ and we talked about his long strange journey to get back to right where he started from. As with several of the conversations I've been having lately on TatD, this one could have easily made two episodes, but I think I got the essence of who Anthony Renzulli is as an artist, and a truly good dude who has dedicated his life to his love of music. Enjoy!!

Singles Going Around- 2000 ManBack with this week's podcast episode, full of classics.The Rolling Stones- "Citadel"Tommy James & The Shondells- "Crimson & Clover"The Kinks- "Muswell Hillbilly"Led Zepplin- "You Shook Me"John Lee Hooker- "Dimples"Jimi Hendrix- "Come On"The Beach Boys- "I Was Made To Love Her"Love- "My Little Red Book"The Standells- "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White"The Beatles- "Baby You're A Rich Man"Lightnin Hopkins- "Wine Spodee O Dee"The Rolling Stones- "Respectable"Elmore James- "Coming Home"The Beach Boys- "Gettin Hungry"The Kinks- "Act Nice & Gentle"The Beatles- "You Know My Name"The Byrds- "Wasn't Born To Follow"The Rolling Stones- "2000 Man"*All selections taken from vinyl records.

Will Kallinderis aka Harpin' Will K joins Di Spillane this week to discuss his musical journey, a journey that has followed him from Ottawa, Edmonton Alberta, Vancouver, and since 2005 South Australia. Will Kallinderis aka 'Harpin' Will K' is a singer-songwriter who performs a lively mix of original roots, funk, and blues. Emerging in 2016 with his debut solo album Last Of The Singing Peace Chiefs, a collection of acoustic guitar-driven songs, full-throttled harmonica soloing, and backup harmony vocals. More recently he has been revisiting early influences to create a repertoire of raw ‘n' gritty stripped-back blues. Will's been performing on the local Adelaide scene as a soloist and in various projects since 2007. At 16, Will was inspired to pick up the harmonica after hearing the music of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, and Bob Dylan. The following year he took up the guitar and was influenced by Hubert Sumlin (Howlin' Wolf), John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters to name a few. Will's soulful roots sound is a result of many years honing his skills as a regular busker on the streets of Edmonton, Alberta followed by performances in the local blues and folk scene. Over the years his musical influences expanded to include the sounds of R&B, folk, rock as well as Latin, funk, and world music. Will moved to Adelaide in 2005 and in 2007 he formed a power trio called Star Step Evolution with Mike Palmer on bass and Benjamin Gallasch on drums. Featuring a funky, bluesy, reggae style with plenty of harmonica soloing. The members parted ways in late 2009. Will continued gigging around town as a solo performer honing and evolving his singer-songwriter roots originals as well as building a repertoire of blues. In 2017 Will joined local slide guitarist Cal Williams Jr for several festival shows. He stepped in at late notice when Adelaide's blues icon Chris Finnen had to pull out of the Fringe show ‘A History Of Early Blues'. The success of the show led to Will joining Cal Williams Jr and Kory Horwood on double bass for the next two seasons. Will also joined Cal and Kory in Cal's project The Ukulele Blues Explosion featuring stripped-back possibilities with ukulele, bass, and harmonica. In 2018 Will formed The Young Sequoias with Matt Colyer on drums featuring upbeat guitar and amplified harmonica together with Matt's catchy rhythms that introduced new interpretations of Will's debut album along with a vast range of new songs drawing on roots, rock, jazz, soul, funk and electric delta blues. One of the highlights for the duo was the successful sold-out 2020 Fringe show, ‘Electric Delta – Blues Hits Big Town' celebrating the Blues from raw and gritty Mississippi to the refined urban sounds of Chicago, featuring popular classics by such artists as Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi Fred McDowell and more. The Young Sequoias have taken a break and may remain dormant indefinitely. In the meantime, Will is focusing on recording his next solo album and considering teaching harmonica. Music: intro "Band It About", written and recorded by Catherine Lambert and Michael Bryant. Outro "Where Eagles Fly" by Will Kallinderis, from his debut album "Last Of The Singing Peace Chiefs" Links: BAND IT ABOUT - Podcast Series links can be found here: https://linktr.ee/banditaboutpodcastseries Will's Links: https://harpinwillk.com https://www.instagram.com/harpinwillk https://www.facebook.com/harpinwillk https://harpinwillk.bandcamp.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dianne-spillane/message

Label: Tangerine 967Year: 1971Condition: M-Price: $80.00What a great single! The A side is a cover of the Elmore James' Blues classic, remade in a Northern Soul style so different you won't recognize the song if you're familiar with it. The B side is another uptempo Northern Soul dancer well worth seeking out. The couple had no Tangerine albums, so this was a non-album single. They re-released this recoring in 1971 on Tangerine 1019. Note: This beautiful copy has Near Mint labels. The vinyl looks untouched, and the audio sounds pristine Mint!

469. Part 2 of our interview with Sybil Gage. Born and raised in New Orleans Sybil Gage had front row schooling in what makes that city great. Now living in Florida, Sybil is spreading New Orleans music to the rest of the world. The “Little Dynamo” is slinky in sequins, and funky in fishnets and has become the darling of the East Coast from New Orleans (Old U.S. Mint Theater) to New York City (Triad Theater W. 72nd St. Broadway). Witness “Sybil Gage and Her Mighty Catahoulas” and a typical evening will include the legendary music of Professor Longhair and James Booker, fun tunes from Smiley Lewis and Jesse Hill and Eddie Bo, blues from Elmore James, Little Willie John, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson, Etta James, Gus Cannon, as well as many of her own award winning original contributions. On intimate evenings, with only piano to accompany, she sings Pre War Blues, Hokum, Traditional New Orleans inspired Jazz and original tunes that fit seamlessly into her vast repertoire. This week in Louisiana history. May 14, 1845. First free public school opened in LA. This week in New Orleans history. On May 14, 2011, the Morganza Spillway on the Mississippi River was opened for the second time in its history, deliberately flooding 3,000 square miles of rural Louisiana and placing three nuclear power plants at risk to avert possible flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This week in Louisiana. Bogalusa Balloon Fest May 20-22, 2022 10:00 am - 10:00 pm 401 Walker St. Bogalusa LA 70427 We are a hot air balloon festival which includes hot air balloons, a carnival, vendors and live entertainment. May 20-22, 2022 10:00 am - 10:00 pm Amenities: Senior Citizen Discount, Student Discount, Family Friendly, Free Parking. View Website Phone: 985-750-3905 Email: bprcc.70427@gmail.com Postcards from Louisiana. Guitarist on Royal St.Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.  

468. Part 1 of our interview with returning guest Sybil Gage. Born and raised in New Orleans Sybil had front row schooling in what makes that city great. Now living in Florida, Sybil is spreading New Orleans music to the rest of the world. The “Little Dynamo” is slinky in sequins, and funky in fishnets and has become the darling of the East Coast from New Orleans (Old U.S. Mint Theater) to New York City (Triad Theater W. 72nd St. Broadway). Witness “Sybil Gage and Her Mighty Catahoulas” and a typical evening will include the legendary music of Professor Longhair and James Booker, fun tunes from Smiley Lewis and Jesse Hill and Eddie Bo, blues from Elmore James, Little Willie John, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson, Etta James, Gus Cannon, as well as many of her own award winning original contributions. On intimate evenings, with only piano to accompany, she sings Pre War Blues, Hokum, Traditional New Orleans inspired Jazz and original tunes that fit seamlessly into her vast repertoire. This week in Louisiana history. May 7, 1862. The Union Army captures Baton Rouge during the Civil War. This week in New Orleans history. The corner stone for Notre Dame Seminary on Carrollton Avenue was laid on May 7, 1922. This week in Louisiana. 46th Annual Cochon de Lait Festival 1832 Leglise Mansura, LA 71350 May 12-15, 2022 The first official festival was in 1961, but that doesn't mean that is when the magic happened. That happend in 1960 during Mansura's Centennial celebration when over 10,000 people converged on Mansura. From that weekend on, Mansura has been known as the Cochon de Lait Festival of the world. After celebrating for 12 years straight and a record crowd of 100,000 in 1972, the town of Mansura took a little break. That all changed in 1987 when the Cochon de Lait festival was revived and Mansura has been never been the same again. We continue the tradition again this year. The Mansura Chamber of Commerce invites you to come pass a good time and join us for the 46th annual Cochon de Lait Festival! Postcards from Louisiana. Lauren Sturm sings and plays piano. Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.  

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of  "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend,  who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a  few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going.  After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style".  This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time  sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech.  He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

21. George Thorogood / Madison Blues22. Tom Petty / Done Somebody Wrong23. Stevie Ray Vaughan / The Sky is Crying 24. Warren Haynes (gov't mule), Billy Gibbons (zz top), Mickey Raphael / Mean Mistreatin' Mama25. Kris Lager Band / Matchbox Blues26. Jonny Lang / Lie to Me 27. Hector Anchondo / I'm Going to Missouri28. Free / Come Together in the Morning 29. Larry Williams (Speciality Records / Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Beatles) 30. Larry Williams (Speciality Records / She Said Yeah  (Rolling Stones) 31. Larry Williams (Speciality Records / Bony Moronie (Johhny Winter)  32. Larry Williams (Speciality Records / Slow Down (Beatles, The Jam) 33. Larry Williams (Speciality Records / Bad Boy (Beatles) 34. Tommy Castro / I Caught a Break 35. Kenny Blues Boss Wayne / Go, Just Do It! 36. Sue Foley / Okie Dokie Swamp37. Dave Spectre / Sanctifunkious

Born in 1919, Mississippi's Elmore Brooks took his father's last name and became arguably the most influential slide blues guitar player of the post-war era. As a sideman for Sonny Boy Williamson II (a/k/a/ Rice Miller), James' would write several songs made popular by Williamson including Look Over Yonder Wall and One Way Out. After serving in the military, stationed in Guam, like many from the agricultural south, James' moved north to Chicago and recorded most of his iconic songs for the Modern Recording label. James died in 1963 from a long-term heart ailment. Pacific St Blues & AmericanaApril 10, 20221. J Geils Band / Struttin' with My Baby 2. Harvey Brindell / Mississippi Medicaid3. BB King / See That My Grave is Kept Clean4. Bonnie Raitt / Ain't Gonna Let You The Influence of Elmore James5. Keb Mo / Look on Yonder Wall 6. Elmore James / Blacksnake Blues 7. Fleetwood Mac / Got to Move8. Jeremy Spencer (Fleetwood Mac)  / Bleeding Heart 9. The Beatles / For You Blue ("Elmore James' got nothing on this baby...") 10. Tedeschi Trucks Band / Rollin' and Tumblin' 11. Rodney Crowell / Shake Your Moneymaker12. Eric Clapton / It Hurts Me Too 13. Lowell Fulsom / Every day I have the Blues 14. Kansas City Jay McShann / Confessin' the Blues 15. Etta James / Dust My Broom16. Johnny Winter & Ben Harper / I Can't Hold Out (Talk to Me) 17. Allman Brothers / One Way Out18. Gov't Mule / Blues Before Sunrise19. Jimi Hendrix / My Bleeding Heart20. Shelby Lynne & Allison Moore / Strange Angels21. George Thorogood / Madison Blues22. Tom Petty / Done Somebody Wrong23. Stevie Ray Vaughan / The Sky is Crying 24. Warren Haynes (gov't mule), Billy Gibbons (zz top), Mickey Raphael / Mean Mistreatin' Mama

Episode 134 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “In the Midnight Hour", the links between Stax, Atlantic, and Detroit, and the career of Wilson Pickett. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Mercy Mercy" by Don Covay. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say “After Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records” – I meant to say “Dot Records” here, the label that Alexander moved to *before* Monument. I also misspeak at one point and say "keyboard player Chips Moman", when I mean to say "keyboard player Spooner Oldham". This is correct in the transcript/script, I just misread it. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Pickett. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Wilson Pickett was In the Midnight Hour: The Life and Soul of Wilson Pickett. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. The episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I reference are the ones on Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team. And information on the Falcons comes from Marv Goldberg. Pickett's complete Atlantic albums can be found in this excellent ten-CD set. For those who just want the hits, this single-CD compilation is significantly cheaper. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start, just to say that this episode contains some discussion of domestic abuse, drug use, and abuse of employees by their employer, and one mention of an eating disorder. Also, this episode is much longer than normal, because we've got a lot to fit in. Today we're going to move away from Motown, and have a look at a record recorded in the studios of their great rival Stax records, though not released on that label. But the record we're going to look at is from an artist who was a bridge between the Detroit soul of Motown and the southern soul of Stax, an artist who had a foot in both camps, and whose music helped to define soul while also being closer than that of any other soul man to the music made by the white rock musicians of the period. We're going to look at Stax, and Muscle Shoals, and Atlantic Records, and at Wilson Pickett and "In the Midnight Hour" [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett: "In the Midnight Hour"] Wilson Pickett never really had a chance. His father, Wilson senior, was known in Alabama for making moonshine whisky, and spent time in prison for doing just that -- and his young son was the only person he told the location of his still. Eventually, Wilson senior moved to Detroit to start earning more money, leaving his family at home at first. Wilson junior and his mother moved up to Detroit to be with his father, but they had to leave his older siblings in Alabama, and his mother would shuttle between Michigan and Alabama, trying vainly to look after all her children. Eventually, Wilson's mother got pregnant while she was down in Alabama, which broke up his parents' marriage, and Wilson moved back down to Alabama permanently, to live on a farm with his mother. But he never got on with his mother, who was physically abusive to him -- as he himself would later be to his children, and to his partners, and to his bandmates. The one thing that Wilson did enjoy about his life in Alabama was the gospel music, and he became particularly enamoured of two gospel singers, Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Blind Boys, "Will My Jesus Be Waiting?"] And Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales: [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "God's World Will Never Pass Away"] Wilson determined to become a gospel singer himself, but he couldn't stand living with his mother in rural Alabama, and decided to move up to be with his father and his father's new girlfriend in Detroit.  Once he moved to Detroit, he started attending Northwestern High School, which at the time was also being attended by Norman Whitfield, Florence Ballard, and Melvin Franklin. Pickett also became friendly with Aretha Franklin, though she didn't attend the same school -- she went to school at Northern, with Smokey Robinson -- and he started attending services at New Bethel Church, the church where her father preached. This was partly because Rev. Franklin was one of the most dynamic preachers around, but also because New Bethel Church would regularly feature performances by the most important gospel performers of the time -- Pickett saw the Soul Stirrers perform there, with Sam Cooke singing lead, and of course also saw Aretha singing there. He joined a few gospel groups, first joining one called the Sons of Zion, but he was soon poached by a more successful group, the Violinaires. It was with the Violinaires that he made what is almost certainly his first recording -- a track that was released as a promo single, but never got a wide release at the time: [Excerpt: The Violinaires, "Sign of the Judgement"] The Violinaires were only moderately successful on the gospel circuit, but Pickett was already sure he was destined for bigger things. He had a rivalry with David Ruffin, in particular, constantly mocking Ruffin and saying that he would never amount to anything, while Wilson Pickett was the greatest. But after a while, he realised that gospel wasn't where he was going to make his mark. Partly his change in direction was motivated by financial concern -- he'd physically attacked his father and been kicked out of his home, and he was also married while still a teenager, and had a kid who needed feeding. But also, he was aware of a certain level of hypocrisy among his more religious acquaintances. Aretha Franklin had two kids, aged only sixteen, and her father, the Reverend Franklin, had fathered a child with a twelve-year-old, was having an affair with the gospel singer Clara Ward, and was hanging around blues clubs all the time. Most importantly, he realised that the audiences he was singing to in church on Sunday morning were mostly still drunk from Saturday night. As he later put it "I might as well be singing rock 'n' roll as singing to a drunken audience. I might as well make me some money." And this is where the Falcons came in. The Falcons were a doo-wop group that had been formed by a Black singer, Eddie Floyd, and a white singer, Bob Manardo. They'd both recruited friends, including bass singer Willie Schofield, and after performing locally they'd decided to travel to Chicago to audition for Mercury Records. When they got there, they found that you couldn't audition for Mercury in Chicago, you had to go to New York, but they somehow persuaded the label to sign them anyway -- in part because an integrated group was an unusual thing. They recorded one single for Mercury, produced by Willie Dixon who was moonlighting from Chess: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Baby That's It"] But then Manardo was drafted, and the group's other white member, Tom Shetler, decided to join up along with him. The group went through some other lineup changes, and ended up as Eddie Floyd, Willie Schofield, Mack Rice, guitarist Lance Finnie, and lead singer Joe Stubbs, brother of Levi. The group released several singles on small labels owned by their manager, before having a big hit with "You're So Fine", the record we heard about them recording last episode: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "You're So Fine"] That made number two on the R&B charts and number seventeen on the pop charts. They recorded several follow-ups, including "Just For Your Love", which made number 26 on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Just For Your Love"] To give you some idea of just how interrelated all the different small R&B labels were at this point, that was originally recorded and released on Chess records. But as Roquel Davis was at that point working for Chess, he managed to get the rights to reissue it on Anna Records, the label he co-owned with the Gordy sisters -- and the re-released record was distributed by Gone Records, one of George Goldner's labels. The group also started to tour supporting Marv Johnson. But Willie Schofield was becoming dissatisfied. He'd written "You're So Fine", but he'd only made $500 from what he was told was a million-selling record. He realised that in the music business, the real money was on the business side, not the music side, so while staying in the Falcons he decided he was going to go into management too. He found the artist he was going to manage while he was walking to his car, and heard somebody in one of the buildings he passed singing Elmore James' then-current blues hit "The Sky is Crying": [Excerpt: Elmore James, "The Sky is Crying"] The person he heard singing that song, and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, was of course Wilson Pickett, and Schofield signed him up to a management contract -- and Pickett was eager to sign, knowing that Schofield was a successful performer himself. The intention was at first that Schofield would manage Pickett as a solo performer, but then Joe Stubbs got ideas above his station, and started insisting that the group be called "Joe Stubbs and the Falcons", which put the others' backs up, and soon Stubbs was out of the group. This experience may have been something that his brother later had in mind -- in the late sixties, when Motown started trying to promote groups as Lead Singer and The Group, Levi Stubbs always refused to allow his name to go in front of the Four Tops. So the Falcons were without a lead singer. They tried a few other singers in their circle, including Marvin Gaye, but were turned down. So in desperation, they turned to Pickett. This wasn't a great fit -- the group, other than Schofield, thought that Pickett was "too Black", both in that he had too much gospel in his voice, and literally in that he was darker-skinned than the rest of the group (something that Schofield, as someone who was darker than the rest of the group but less dark than Pickett, took offence at). Pickett, in turn, thought that the Falcons were too poppy, and not really the kind of thing he was at all interested in doing. But they were stuck with each other, and had to make the most of it, even though Pickett's early performances were by all accounts fairly dreadful. He apparently came in in the wrong key on at least one occasion, and another time froze up altogether and couldn't sing. Even when he did sing, and in tune, he had no stage presence, and he later said “I would trip up, fall on the stage and the group would rehearse me in the dressing room after every show. I would get mad, ‘cos I wanted to go out and look at the girls as well! They said, ‘No, you got to rehearse, Oscar.' They called me Oscar. I don't know why they called me Oscar, I didn't like that very much.” Soon, Joe Stubbs was back in the group, and there was talk of the group getting rid of Pickett altogether. But then they went into the studio to record a song that Sam Cooke had written for the group, "Pow! You're in Love". The song had been written for Stubbs to sing, but at the last minute they decided to give Pickett the lead instead: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Pow! You're in Love"] Pickett was now secure as the group's lead singer, but the group weren't having any success with records. They were, though, becoming a phenomenal live act -- so much so that on one tour, where James Brown was the headliner, Brown tried to have the group kicked off the bill, because he felt that Pickett was stealing his thunder. Eventually, the group's manager set up his own record label, Lu Pine Records, which would become best known as the label that released the first record by the Primettes, who later became the Supremes.  Lu Pine released the Falcons' single "I Found a Love",   after the group's management had first shopped it round to other labels to try to get them to put it out: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] That song, based on the old Pentecostal hymn "Yes Lord", was written by Pickett and Schofield, but the group's manager, Robert West, also managed to get his name on the credits. The backing group, the Ohio Untouchables, would later go on to become better known as The Ohio Players. One of the labels that had turned that record down was Atlantic Records, because Jerry Wexler hadn't heard any hit potential in the song. But then the record started to become successful locally, and Wexler realised his mistake. He got Lu Pine to do a distribution deal with Atlantic, giving Atlantic full rights to the record, and it became a top ten R&B hit. But by this point, Pickett was sick of working with the Falcons, and he'd decided to start trying for a solo career. His first solo single was on the small label Correc-Tone, and was co-produced by Robert Bateman, and featured the Funk Brothers as instrumental backing, and the Primettes on vocals. I've seen some claims that the Andantes are on there too, but I can't make them out -- but I can certainly make out the future Supremes: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Let Me Be Your Boy"] That didn't do anything, and Pickett kept recording with the Falcons for a while, as well as putting out his solo records. But then Willie Schofield got drafted, and the group split up. Their manager hired another group, The Fabulous Playboys, to be a new Falcons group, but in 1964 he got shot in a dispute over the management of Mary Wells, and had to give up working in the music industry. Pickett's next single, which he co-wrote with Robert Bateman and Sonny Schofield, was to be the record that changed his career forever. "If You Need Me" once again featured the Funk Brothers and the Andantes, and was recorded for Correc-Tone: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "If You Need Me"] Jerry Wexler was again given the opportunity to put the record out on Atlantic, and once again decided against it. Instead, he offered to buy the song's publishing, and he got Solomon Burke to record it, in a version produced by Bert Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] Burke wasn't fully aware, when he cut that version, that Wilson Pickett, who was his friend, had recorded his own version. He became aware, though, when Double-L Records, a label co-owned by Lloyd Price, bought the Correc-Tone master and released Pickett's version nationally, at the same time as Burke's version came out. The two men were annoyed that they'd been put into unwitting competition, and so started an unofficial nonaggression pact -- every time Burke was brought into a radio station to promote his record, he'd tell the listeners that he was there to promote Wilson Pickett's new single. Meanwhile, when Pickett went to radio stations, he'd take the opportunity to promote the new record he'd written for his good friend Solomon Burke, which the listeners should definitely check out. The result was that both records became hits -- Pickett's scraped the lower reaches of the R&B top thirty, while Burke, as he was the bigger star, made number two on the R&B chart and got into the pop top forty. Pickett followed it up with a soundalike, "It's Too Late", which managed to make the R&B top ten as there was no competition from Burke. At this point, Jerry Wexler realised that he'd twice had the opportunity to release a record with Wilson Pickett singing, twice he'd turned the chance down, and twice the record had become a hit. He realised that it was probably a good idea to sign Pickett directly to Atlantic and avoid missing out. He did check with Pickett if Pickett was annoyed about the Solomon Burke record -- Pickett's response was "I need the bread", and Wilson Pickett was now an Atlantic artist. This was at the point when Atlantic was in something of a commercial slump -- other than the records Bert Berns was producing for the Drifters and Solomon Burke, they were having no hits, and they were regarded as somewhat old-fashioned, rooted in a version of R&B that still showed its roots in jazz, rather than the new sounds that were taking over the industry in the early sixties. But they were still a bigger label than anything else Pickett had recorded for, and he seized the opportunity to move into the big time. To start with, Atlantic teamed Pickett up with someone who seemed like the perfect collaborator -- Don Covay, a soul singer and songwriter who had his roots in hard R&B and gospel music but had written hits for people like Chubby Checker.  The two got together and recorded a song they wrote together, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)"] That did nothing commercially -- and gallingly for Pickett, on the same day, Atlantic released a single Covay had written for himself, "Mercy Mercy", and that ended up going to number one on the R&B chart and making the pop top forty. As "I'm Gonna Cry" didn't work out, Atlantic decided to try to change tack, and paired Pickett with their established hitmaker Bert Berns, and a duet partner, Tami Lyn, for what Pickett would later describe as "one of the weirdest sessions on me I ever heard in my life", a duet on a Mann and Weil song, "Come Home Baby": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett and Tami Lyn, "Come Home Baby"] Pickett later said of that track, "it didn't sell two records", but while it wasn't a hit, it was very popular among musicians -- a few months later Mick Jagger would produce a cover version of it on Immediate Records, with Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and the Georgie Fame brass section backing a couple of unknown singers: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] Sadly for Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, that didn't get past being issued as a promotional record, and never made it to the shops. Meanwhile, Pickett went out on tour again, substituting on a package tour for Clyde McPhatter, who had to drop out when his sister died. Also on the tour was Pickett's old bandmate from the Falcons, Mack Rice, now performing as Sir Mack Rice, who was promoting a single he'd just released on a small label, which had been produced by Andre Williams. The song had originally been called "Mustang Mama", but Aretha Franklin had suggested he call it "Mustang Sally" instead: [Excerpt: Sir Mack Rice, "Mustang Sally"] Pickett took note of the song, though he didn't record it just yet -- and in the meantime, the song was picked up by the white rock group The Young Rascals, who released their version as the B-side of their number one hit, "Good Lovin'": [Excerpt: The Young Rascals, "Mustang Sally"] Atlantic's problems with having hits weren't only problems with records they made themselves -- they were also having trouble getting any big hits with Stax records. As we discussed in the episode on "Green Onions", Stax were being distributed by Atlantic, and in 1963 they'd had a minor hit with "These Arms of Mine" by Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] But throughout 1964, while the label had some R&B success with its established stars, it had no real major breakout hits, and it seemed to be floundering a bit -- it wasn't doing as badly as Atlantic itself, but it wasn't doing wonderfully. It wasn't until the end of the year when the label hit on what would become its defining sound, when for the first time Redding collaborated with Stax studio guitarist and producer Steve Cropper on a song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] That record would point the way towards Redding's great artistic triumphs of the next couple of years, which we'll look at in a future episode. But it also pointed the way towards a possible future sound for Atlantic. Atlantic had signed a soul duo, Sam & Dave, who were wonderful live performers but who had so far not managed to translate those live performances to record. Jerry Wexler thought that perhaps Steve Cropper could help them do that, and made a suggestion to Jim Stewart at Stax -- Atlantic would loan out Sam & Dave to the label. They'd remain signed to Atlantic, but make their records at Stax studios, and they'd be released as Stax records. Their first single for Stax, "A Place Nobody Can Find", was produced by Cropper, and was written by Stax songwriter Dave Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "A Place Nobody Can Find"] That wasn't a hit, but soon Porter would start collaborating with another songwriter, Isaac Hayes, and would write a string of hits for the duo. But in order to formalise the loan-out of Sam and Dave, Atlantic also wanted to formalise their arrangement with Stax. Previously they'd operated on a handshake basis -- Wexler and Stewart had a mutual respect, and they simply agreed that Stax would give Atlantic the option to distribute their stuff. But now they entered into a formal, long-term contract, and for a nominal sum of one dollar, Jim Stewart gave Atlantic the distribution rights to all past Stax records and to all future records they released for the next few years. Or at least, Stewart *thought* that the agreement he was making was formalising the distribution agreement. What the contract actually said -- and Stewart never bothered to have this checked over by an entertainment lawyer, because he trusted Wexler -- was that Stax would, for the sum of one dollar, give Atlantic *permanent ownership* of all their records, in return. The precise wording was "You hereby sell, assign and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever and without any limitations or restrictions whatever, not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title and interest in and to each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon." Jerry Wexler would later insist that he had no idea that particular clause was in the contract, and that it had been slipped in there by the lawyers. Jim Stewart still thought of himself as the owner of an independent record label, but without realising it he'd effectively become an employee of Atlantic. Atlantic started to take advantage of this new arrangement by sending other artists down to Memphis to record with the Stax musicians. Unlike Sam and Dave, these would still be released as Atlantic records rather than Stax ones, and Jerry Wexler and Atlantic's engineer Tom Dowd would be involved  in the production, but the records would be made by the Stax team. The first artist to benefit from this new arrangement was Wilson Pickett, who had been wanting to work at Stax for a while, being a big fan of Otis Redding in particular. Pickett was teamed up with Steve Cropper, and together they wrote the song that would define Pickett's career. The seeds of "In the Midnight Hour" come from two earlier recordings. One is a line from his record with the Falcons, "I Found a Love": [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] The other is a line from a record that Clyde McPhatter had made with Billy Ward and the Dominoes back in 1951: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Do Something For Me"] Those lines about a "midnight hour" and "love come tumbling down" were turned into the song that would make Pickett's name, but exactly who did what has been the cause of some disagreement. The official story is that Steve Cropper took those lines and worked with Pickett to write the song, as a straight collaboration. Most of the time, though, Pickett would claim that he'd written the song entirely by himself, and that Cropper had stolen the credit for that and their other credited collaborations. But other times he would admit "He worked with me quite a bit on that one". Floyd Newman, a regular horn player at Stax, would back up Pickett, saying "Every artist that came in here, they'd have their songs all together, but when they leave they had to give up a piece of it, to a certain person. But this person, you couldn't be mad at him, because he didn't own Stax, Jim Stewart owned Stax. And this guy was doing what Jim Stewart told him to do, so you can't be mad at him." But on the other hand, Willie Schofield, who collaborated with Pickett on "I Found a Love", said of writing that "Pickett didn't have any chord pattern. He had a couple of lyrics. I'm working with him, giving him the chord change, the feel of it. Then we're going in the studio and I've gotta show the band how to play it because we didn't have arrangers. That's part of the songwriting. But he didn't understand. He felt he wrote the lyrics so that's it." Given that Cropper didn't take the writing credit on several other records he participated in, that he did have a consistent pattern of making classic hit records, that "In the Midnight Hour" is stylistically utterly different from Pickett's earlier work but very similar to songs like "Mr. Pitiful" cowritten by Cropper, and Pickett's longstanding habit of being dismissive of anyone else's contributions to his success, I think the most likely version of events is that Cropper did have a lot to do with how the song came together, and probably deserves his credit, but we'll never know for sure exactly what went on in their collaboration. Whoever wrote it, "In the Midnight Hour" became one of the all-time classics of soul: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] But another factor in making the record a success -- and in helping reinvent the Stax sound -- was actually Jerry Wexler. Wexler had started attending sessions at the Stax studios, and was astonished by how different the recording process was in the South. And Wexler had his own input into the session that produced "In the Midnight Hour". His main suggestion was that rather than play the complicated part that Cropper had come up with, the guitarist should simplify, and just play chords along with Al Jackson's snare drum. Wexler was enthusing about a new dance craze called the Jerk, which had recently been the subject of a hit record by a group called the Larks: [Excerpt: The Larks, "The Jerk"] The Jerk, as Wexler demonstrated it to the bemused musicians, involved accenting the second and fourth beats of the bar, and delaying them very slightly. And this happened to fit very well with the Stax studio sound. The Stax studio was a large room, with quite a lot of reverb, and the musicians played together without using headphones, listening to the room sound. Because of this, to stay in time, Steve Cropper had started taking his cue not just from the sound, but from watching Al Jackson's left hand going to the snare drum. This had led to him playing when he saw Jackson's hand go down on the two and four, rather than when the sound of the snare drum reached his ears -- a tiny, fraction-of-a-second, anticipation of the beat, before everyone would get back in sync on the one of the next bar, as Jackson hit the kick drum. This had in turn evolved into the whole group playing the backbeat with a fractional delay, hitting it a tiny bit late -- as if you're listening to the echo of those beats rather than to the beat itself. If anyone other than utterly exceptional musicians had tried this, it would have ended up as a car crash, but Jackson was one of the best timekeepers in the business, and many musicians would say that at this point in time Steve Cropper was *the* best rhythm guitarist in the world, so instead it gave the performances just enough sense of looseness to make them exciting. This slight delayed backbeat was something the musicians had naturally fallen into doing, but it fit so well with Wexler's conception of the Jerk that they started deliberately exaggerating it -- still only delaying the backbeat minutely, but enough to give the record a very different sound from anything that was out there: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] That delayed backbeat sound would become the signature sound of Stax for the next several years, and you will hear it on the run of classic singles they would put out for the next few years by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MGs, Eddie Floyd and others. The sound of that beat is given extra emphasis by the utter simplicity of Al Jackson's playing. Jackson had a minimalist drum kit, but played it even more minimally -- other than the occasional fill, he never hit his tom at all, just using the kick drum, snare, and hi-hat -- and the hi-hat was not even miced, with any hi-hat on the actual records just being the result of leakage from the other mics. But that simplicity gave the Stax records a power that almost no other records from the period had: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] "In the Midnight Hour" made number one on the R&B charts, and made number twenty-one on the pop charts, instantly turning Pickett from an also-ran into one of the major stars of soul music. The follow-up, a soundalike called "Don't Fight It", also made the top five on the R&B charts. At his next session, Pickett was reunited with his old bandmate Eddie Floyd. Floyd would soon go on to have his own hits at Stax, most notably with "Knock on Wood", but at this point he was working as a staff songwriter at Stax, coming up with songs like "Comfort Me" for Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "Comfort Me"] Floyd had teamed up with Steve Cropper, and they'd been... shall we say, "inspired"... by a hit for the Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789", written by Marvin Gaye, Gwen Gordy and Mickey Stevenson: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789"] Cropper and Floyd had come up with their own song, "634-5789", which Pickett recorded, and which became an even bigger hit than "In the Midnight Hour", making number thirteen on the pop charts as well as being Pickett's second R&B number one: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "634-5789"] At the same session, they cut another single. This one was inspired by an old gospel song, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do", recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe among others: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] The song was rewritten by Floyd, Cropper, and Pickett, and was also a moderate R&B hit, though nowhere as big as "634-5789": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] That would be the last single that Pickett recorded at Stax, though -- though the reasoning has never been quite clear. Pickett was, to put it as mildly as possible, a difficult man to work with, and he seems to have had some kind of falling out with Jim Stewart -- though Stewart always said that the problem was actually that Pickett didn't get on with the musicians. But the musicians disagree, saying they had a good working relationship -- Pickett was often an awful person, but only when drunk, and he was always sober in the studio. It seems likely, actually, that Pickett's move away from the Stax studios was more to do with someone else -- Pickett's friend Don Covay was another Atlantic artist recording at Stax, and Pickett had travelled down with him when Covay had recorded "See Saw" there: [Excerpt: Don Covay, "See Saw"] Everyone involved agreed that Covay was an eccentric personality, and that he rubbed Jim Stewart up the wrong way. There is also a feeling among some that Stewart started to resent the way Stax's sound was being used for Atlantic artists, like he was "giving away" hits, even though Stax's company got the publishing on the songs Cropper was co-writing, and he was being paid for the studio time. Either way, after that session, Atlantic didn't send any of its artists down to Stax, other than Sam & Dave, who Stax regarded as their own artists. Pickett would never again record at Stax, and possibly coincidentally once he stopped writing songs with Steve Cropper he would also never again have a major hit record with a self-penned song. But Jerry Wexler still wanted to keep working in Southern studios, and with Southern musicians, and so he took Pickett to FAME studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We looked, back in the episode on Arthur Alexander, at the start of FAME studios, but after Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records, Rick Hall had turned FAME into a home for R&B singers looking for crossover success. While Stax employed both Black and white musicians, FAME studios had an all-white rhythm section, with a background in country music, but that had turned out to be absolutely perfect for performers like the soul singer Joe Tex, who had himself started out in country before switching to soul, and who recorded classics like "Hold What You Got" at the studio: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "Hold What You Got"] That had been released on FAME's record label, and Jerry Wexler had been impressed and had told Rick Hall to call him the next time he thought he had a hit. When Hall did call Wexler, Wexler was annoyed -- Hall phoned him in the middle of a party. But Hall was insistent. "You said to call you next time I've got a hit, and this is a number one". Wexler relented and listened to the record down the phone. This is what he heard: [Excerpt: Percy Sledge, "When a Man Loves a Woman"] Atlantic snapped up "When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge, and it went to number one on the pop charts -- the first record from any of the Southern soul studios to do so. In Wexler's eyes, FAME was now the new Stax. Wexler had a bit of culture shock when working at FAME, as it was totally unlike anything he'd experienced before. The records he'd been involved with in New York had been mostly recorded by slumming jazz musicians, very technical players who would read the music from charts, and Stax had had Steve Cropper as de facto musical director, leading the musicians and working out their parts with them. By contrast, the process used at FAME, and at most of the other studios in what Charles Hughes describes as the "country-soul triangle" of Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Nashville, was the process that had been developed by Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team in Nashville (and for a fuller description of this, see the excellent episodes on Bradley and the A-Team in the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones). The musicians would hear a play through of the song by its writer, or a demo, would note down the chord sequences using the Nashville number system rather than a more detailed score, do a single run-through to get the balance right, and then record. Very few songs required a second take. For Pickett's first session at FAME, and most subsequent ones, the FAME rhythm section of keyboard player Spooner Oldham, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bass player Junior Lowe and drummer Roger Hawkins was augmented with a few other players -- Memphis guitarists Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill, and the horn section who'd played on Pickett's Stax records, moonlighting. And for the first track they recorded there, Wexler wanted them to do something that would become a signature trick for Pickett over the next couple of years -- record a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul record. Wexler's thinking was that the best way for Pickett to cross over to a white audience was to do songs that were familiar to them from white pop cover versions, but songs that had originated in Pickett's soul style. At the time, as well, the hard backbeat sound on Pickett's hits was one that was more associated with white rock music than with soul, as was the emphasis on rhythm guitar. To modern ears, Pickett's records are almost the definition of soul music, but at the time they were absolutely considered crossover records. And so in the coming months Pickett would record cover versions of Don Covay's "Mercy Mercy", Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", and Irma Thomas' "Time is on My Side", all of which had been previously covered by the Rolling Stones -- and two of which had their publishing owned by Atlantic's publishing subsidiary. For this single, though, he was recording a song which had started out as a gospel-inspired dance song by the R&B singer Chris Kenner: [Excerpt: Chris Kenner, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] That had been a minor hit towards the bottom end of the Hot One Hundred, but it had been taken up by a lot of other musicians, and become one of those songs everyone did as album filler -- Rufus Thomas had done a version at Stax, for example. But then a Chicano garage band called Cannibal and the Headhunters started performing it live, and their singer forgot the lyrics and just started singing "na na na na", giving the song a chorus it hadn't had in its original version. Their version, a fake-live studio recording, made the top thirty: [Excerpt: Cannibal and the Headhunters, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] Pickett's version was drastically rearranged, and included a guitar riff that Chips Moman had come up with, some new lyrics that Pickett introduced, and a bass intro that Jerry Wexler came up with, a run of semiquavers that Junior Lowe found very difficult to play. The musicians spent so long working on that intro that Pickett got annoyed and decided to take charge. He yelled "Come on! One-two-three!" and the horn players, with the kind of intuition that comes from working together for years, hit a chord in unison. He yelled "One-two-three!" again, and they hit another chord, and Lowe went into the bass part. They'd found their intro. They ran through that opening one more time, then recorded a take: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] At this time, FAME was still recording live onto a single-track tape, and so all the mistakes were caught on tape with no opportunity to fix anything, like when all but one of the horn players forget to come in on the first line of one verse: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] But that kind of mistake only added to the feel of the track, which became Pickett's biggest hit yet -- his third number one on the R&B chart, and his first pop top ten. As the formula of recording a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul song had clearly worked, the next single Pickett recorded was "Mustang Sally", which as we saw had originally been an R&B record by Pickett's friend Mack Rice, before being covered by the Young Rascals. Pickett's version, though, became the definitive version: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] But it very nearly wasn't. That was recorded in a single take, and the musicians went into the control room to listen to it -- and the metal capstan on the tape machine flew off while it was rewinding. The tape was cut into dozens of tiny fragments, which the machine threw all over the room in all directions. Everyone was horrified, and Pickett, who was already known for his horrific temper, looked as if he might actually kill someone. Tom Dowd, Atlantic's genius engineer who had been a physicist on the Manhattan Project while still a teenager, wasn't going to let something as minor as that stop him. He told everyone to take a break for half an hour, gathered up all the randomly-thrown bits of tape, and spliced them back together. The completed recording apparently has forty splices in it, which would mean an average of a splice every four seconds. Have a listen to this thirty-second segment and see if you can hear any at all: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] That segment has the one part where I *think* I can hear one splice in the whole track, a place where the rhythm hiccups very slightly -- and that might well just be the drummer trying a fill that didn't quite come off. "Mustang Sally" was another pop top thirty hit, and Wexler's crossover strategy seemed to have been proved right -- so much so that Pickett was now playing pretty much all-white bills. He played, for example, at Murray the K's last ever revue at the Brooklyn Paramount, where the other artists on the bill were Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Young Rascals, Al Kooper's Blues Project, Cream, and the Who. Pickett found the Who extremely unprofessional, with their use of smoke bombs and smashing their instruments, but they eventually became friendly. Pickett's next single was his version of "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", the Solomon Burke song that the Rolling Stones had also covered, and that was a minor hit, but his next few records after that didn't do particularly well. He did though have a big hit with his cover version of a song by a group called Dyke and the Blazers. Pickett's version of "Funky Broadway" took him to the pop top ten: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Funky Broadway"] It did something else, as well. You may have noticed that two of the bands on that Paramount bill were groups that get called "blue-eyed soul". "Soul" had originally been a term used for music made by Black people, but increasingly the term was being used by white people for their music, just as rock and roll and rhythm and blues before it had been picked up on by white musicians. And so as in those cases, Black musicians were moving away from the term -- though it would never be abandoned completely -- and towards a new slang term, "funk". And Pickett was the first person to get a song with "funk" in the title onto the pop charts. But that would be the last recording Pickett would do at FAME for a couple of years. As with Stax, Pickett was moved away by Atlantic because of problems with another artist, this time to do with a session with Aretha Franklin that went horribly wrong, which we'll look at in a future episode. From this point on, Pickett would record at American Sound Studios in Memphis, a studio owned and run by Chips Moman, who had played on many of Pickett's records. Again, Pickett was playing with an all-white house band, but brought in a couple of Black musicians -- the saxophone player King Curtis, and Pickett's new touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who had had a rough few years, being largely ostracised from the music community because of his relationship with Sam Cooke's widow. Womack wrote what might be Pickett's finest song, a song called "I'm in Love" which is a masterpiece of metrical simplicity disguised as complexity -- you could write it all down as being in straight four-four, but the pulse shifts and implies alternating bars of five and three at points: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm In Love"] Womack's playing on those sessions had two effects, one on music history and one on Pickett. The effect on music history was that he developed a strong working relationship with Reggie Young, the guitarist in the American Sound studio band, and Young and Womack learned each other's styles. Young would later go on to be one of the top country session guitarists, playing on records by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings and more, and he was using Womack's style of playing -- he said later "I didn't change a thing. I was playing that Womack style on country records, instead of the hillbilly stuff—it changed the whole bed of country music." The other effect, though, was a much more damaging one. Womack introduced Pickett to cocaine, and Pickett -- who was already an aggressive, violent, abusive, man, became much more so. "I'm in Love" went to number four on the R&B charts, but didn't make the pop top forty. The follow-up, a remake of "Stagger Lee", did decently on the pop charts but less well on the R&B charts. Pickett's audiences were diverging, and he was finding it more difficult to make the two come together. But he would still manage it, sporadically, throughout the sixties. One time when he did was in 1968, when he returned to Muscle Shoals and to FAME studios. In a session there, the guitarist was very insistent that Pickett should cut a version of the Beatles' most recent hit. Now obviously, this is a record that's ahead in our timeline, and which will be covered in a future episode, but I imagine that most of you won't find it too much of a spoiler when I tell you that "Hey Jude" by the Beatles was quite a big hit: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] What that guitarist had realised was that the tag of the song gave the perfect opportunity for ad-libbing. You all know the tag: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] And so on. That would be perfect for a guitar solo, and for Pickett to do some good soul shouting over. Neither Pickett nor Rick Hall were at all keen -- the Beatles record had only just dropped off number one, and it seemed like a ridiculous idea to both of them. But the guitarist kept pressing to do it, and by the time the other musicians returned from their lunch break, he'd convinced Pickett and Hall. The record starts out fairly straightforward: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] But it's on the tag when it comes to life. Pickett later described recording that part -- “He stood right in front of me, as though he was playing every note I was singing. And he was watching me as I sang, and as I screamed, he was screaming with his guitar.”: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] That was not Pickett's biggest hit, but it was one of the most influential. It made the career of the guitarist, Duane Allman, who Jerry Wexler insisted on signing to his own contract after that, and as Jimmy Johnson, the rhythm guitarist on the session said, "We realised then that Duane had created southern rock, in that vamp." It was big enough that Wexler pushed Pickett to record a whole series of cover versions of rock songs -- he put out versions of "Hey Joe", "Born to be Wild" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" -- the latter going back to his old technique of covering a white cover version of a Black record, as his version copied the Vanilla Fudge's arrangement rather than the Supremes' original. But these only had very minor successes -- the most successful of them was his version of "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. As the sixties turned into the seventies, Pickett continued having some success, but it was more erratic and less consistent. The worlds of Black and white music were drifting apart, and Pickett, who more than most had straddled both worlds, now found himself having success in neither. It didn't help that his cocaine dependency had made him into an egomaniac. At one point in the early seventies, Pickett got a residency in Las Vegas, and was making what by most standards was a great income from it. But he would complain bitterly that he was only playing the small room, not the big one in the same hotel, and that the artist playing the big room was getting better billing than him on the posters. Of course, the artist playing the big room was Elvis Presley, but that didn't matter to Pickett -- he thought he deserved to be at least that big. He was also having regular fights with his record label. Ahmet Ertegun used to tell a story -- and I'm going to repeat it here with one expletive cut out in order to get past Apple's ratings system. In Ertegun's words “Jerry Wexler never liked Crosby, Stills & Nash because they wanted so much freaking artistic autonomy. While we were arguing about this, Wilson Pickett walks in the room and comes up to Jerry and says, ‘Jerry,' and he goes, ‘Wham!' And he puts a pistol on the table. He says, ‘If that [Expletive] Tom Dowd walks into where I'm recording, I'm going to shoot him. And if you walk in, I'm going to shoot you. ‘Oh,' Jerry said. ‘That's okay, Wilson.' Then he walked out. So I said, ‘You want to argue about artistic autonomy?' ” As you can imagine, Atlantic were quite glad to get rid of Pickett when he decided he wanted to move to RCA records, who were finally trying to break into the R&B market. Unfortunately for Pickett, the executive who'd made the decision to sign him soon left the company, and as so often happens when an executive leaves, his pet project becomes the one that everyone's desperate to get rid of.  RCA didn't know how to market records to Black audiences, and didn't really try, and Pickett's voice was becoming damaged from all the cocaine use. He spent the seventies, and eighties going from label to label, trying things like going disco, with no success. He also went from woman to woman, beating them up, and went through band members more and more quickly as he attacked them, too. The guitarist Marc Ribot was in Pickett's band for a short time and said, (and here again I'm cutting out an expletive) " You can write about all the extenuating circumstances, and maybe it needs to be put in historical context, but … You know why guys beat women? Because they can. And it's abuse. That's why employers beat employees, when they can. I've worked with black bandleaders and white bandleaders who are respectful, courteous and generous human beings—and then I've worked with Wilson Pickett." He was becoming more and more paranoid. He didn't turn up for his induction in the rock and roll hall of fame, where he was scheduled to perform -- instead he hid in his house, scared to leave. Pickett was repeatedly arrested throughout this time, and into the nineties, spending some time in prison, and then eventually going into rehab in 1997 after being arrested for beating up his latest partner. She dropped the charges, but the police found the cocaine in his possession and charged him with that. After getting out, he apparently mellowed out somewhat and became much easier to get along with -- still often unpleasant, especially after he'd had a drink, which he never gave up, but far less violent and more easy-going than he had been. He also had something of a comeback, sparked by an appearance in the flop film Blues Brothers 2000. He recorded a blues album, It's Harder Now, and also guested on Adlib, the comeback duets album by his old friend Don Covay, singing with him and cowriting on several songs, including "Nine Times a Man": [Excerpt: Don Covay and Wilson Pickett, "Nine Times a Man"] It's Harder Now was a solid blues-based album, in the vein of similar albums from around that time by people like Solomon Burke, and could have led to Pickett having the same kind of late-career resurgence as Johnny Cash. It was nominated for a Grammy, but lost in the category for which it was nominated to Barry White. Pickett was depressed by the loss and just decided to give up making new music, and just played the oldies circuit until 2004, at which point he became too ill to continue. The duet with Covay would be the last time he went into the studio. The story of Pickett's last year or so is a painful one, with squabbles between his partner and his children over his power of attorney while he spent long periods in hospital, suffering from kidney problems caused by his alcoholism, and also at this point from bulimia, diabetes, and more. He was ill enough that he tried to make amends with his children and his ex-wife, and succeeded as well as anyone can in that situation. On the eighteenth of January 2006, two months before his sixty-fifth birthday, his partner took him to get his hair cut and his moustache shaped, so he'd look the way he wanted to look, they ate together at his assisted living facility, and prayed together, and she left around eleven o'clock that night. Shortly thereafter, Pickett had a heart attack and died, alone, some time close to the midnight hour.

Bobby Rush is an actively performing bluesman and American and International treasure who began his musical career in 1947 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas playing in the juke joints and honky tonks of the so-called “chitlin' circuit” with many of the legendary founders of recorded blues and rock and roll. He grew up playing with legendary blues and rock and roll artists including Elmore James, Jimmy Reed, Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Chuck Berry and others. In the early 1970s he had his first chart topping song, “Chicken Heads” which was certified gold. His legendary energy and comedy of his live shows full of ribald humor have made him a leading octogenarian sex symbol rivalling Betty White. He has released 22 studio albums and He was inducted in 2006 into the Blues Hall of Fame and won his first Grammy at the age of 83 in 2017 for his album Porcupine Meat in the category Best Traditional Blues Album. He has won 17 Blues Music Awards and nominated for many more. His albums Down In Louisiana and Decisions featuring Blinddog Smokin' and Dr. John both received Grammy nominations. He was the first blues artists to perform in China in 2007 where he earned the moniker “International Dean of the Blues” and received the Friendship Ambassador to the Great Wall of China after performing the largest concert ever held at the site. He appeared singing his legendary hit “Ain't Studdin' You” in Eddie Murphy's Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/back-story-song/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Brent is my youngest brother (I’m the oldest of four). He was an incredible skater at a VERY early age and an all around phenomenal athlete. His love of music began when he started skating and is something that he and I have discussed ad-nauseum for our entire lives. I thought that it might be […]

Brent is my youngest brother (I’m the oldest of four). He was an incredible skater at a VERY early age and an all around phenomenal athlete. His love of music began when he started skating and is something that he and I have discussed ad-nauseum for our entire lives. I thought that it might be […]

This podcast provides 7 performances of blues songs performed by excellent musical artists Pops and Mavis Staple, Elmore James, Napoleon Hariston, Howlin' Wolf, Sleepy John Estes, Texas Alexander.

For this solo episode I talk some other great slide guitar players not named Derek Trucks or Duane Allman. Thought it might be fun to share some great slide work and talk a little bit deeper about the whole slide guitar genre itself. I play a bunch of audio clips including great guitar work from Elmore James, Mick Taylor, Warren Haynes, and more. http://instagram.com/tedeschitruckspodcast, http://instagram.com/adamchoit, http://twitter.com/adamchoit, http://tedeschitrucksband.com