Podcasts about Fred Foster

MONOLOGUE Mark Carney: The Davos Devil Here to Dismantle Canada—And He's Just Getting Started NEWSMAKER Danielle Smith leaves the door open for a vote on Alberta leaving Canada https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/bell-danielle-smith-vote-alberta-leaving-canada   Sheila Gunn-Reid, Rebel News' Alberta Bureau Chief and Host of “The Gunn Show” Wednesday 8pm ET OPEN LINES THE CULT OF CLIMATE CHANGE Dramatic cuts in China's air pollution drove surge in global warming https://www.newscientist.com/article/2474067-dramatic-cuts-in-chinas-air-pollution-drove-surge-inglobal-warming/   Global warming of more than 3°C this century may wipe 40% off the world's economy, new analysis reveals https://theconversation.com/global-warming-of-more-than-3-c-this-century-may-wipe-40-off-the-worlds-economy-new-analysis-reveals-253032   Tony Heller- Geologist, weather historian, founder of Real Climate Science dot com MONOLOGUE Mark Carney: Canada's Climate Conman Unmasked—Brookfield's Billions Over Our Blood NEWSMAKER A Catholic's caution about Mark Carney - Questions raised about Liberal leader and his party's principles https://www.catholicregister.org/item/1935-a-catholic-s-caution-about-mark-carney   Scott Ventureyra is an Ottawa-based philosopher, theologian, and author. His books include Making Sense of Nonsense: Navigating through the West's Current Quagmire. OPEN LINES THIS DAY IN ROCK HISTORY 2 Apr 1969 Bruce Springsteen's new group Child made their live debut at the Pandemonium Club in Wanamassa, New Jersey.   2 Apr 1971 Janis Joplin was at No.1 on the US album charts with the posthumously released Pearl. The album features the No.1 hit 'Me and Bobby McGee', written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster on which she played acoustic guitar.    2 Apr 1977 Fleetwood Mac went to No.1 on the US album chart with Rumours. The album is Fleetwood Mac's most successful release; along with winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978, the record has sold over 45 million copies worldwide.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pink Floyd's Catalog Sale: A New EraIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, Larry Michigan explores the rich history of the Grateful Dead's music, focusing on a specific concert from 1980. He discusses the significance of various songs, including 'Iko Iko' and 'Me and Bobby McGee', while also reflecting on the impact of Chris Christopherson's songwriting. The conversation shifts to current events in the music and cannabis industries, including Pink Floyd's catalog sale and the ongoing challenges faced by the hemp industry. Larry emphasizes the importance of medical marijuana legalization and shares insights on how cannabis enhances the music experience. He concludes with personal strain recommendations and highlights record sales in legal marijuana states. TakeawaysThe Grateful Dead's acoustic sets were a significant part of their live performances.Audience tapes capture the energy of live shows better than soundboard recordings.Chris Christopherson's 'Me and Bobby McGee' remains a classic, showcasing the intersection of music and storytelling.Pink Floyd's recent catalog sale reflects the changing dynamics in the music industry.The Betty Boards represent a pivotal moment in Grateful Dead tape trading history.The hemp industry faces legal challenges that could impact small businesses.A majority of chronic pain patients support the legalization of medical marijuana.Cannabis enhances the enjoyment of music, as confirmed by recent studies.Record sales in legal marijuana states are reaching new heights, indicating a thriving market.Personal strain recommendations can enhance the cannabis experience for users. Chapters00:00Introduction and Context of the Grateful Dead's Music04:50Exploring 'Iko Iko' and Audience Tapes10:42The Significance of 'Monkey and the Engineer'15:24Remembering Chris Christopherson and 'Me and Bobby McGee'22:31Pink Floyd's Catalog Sale to Sony Music28:15The Mystery of the Betty Boards54:16Current Issues in the Hemp Industry01:08:10Support for Medical Marijuana Legalization01:15:50The Impact of Marijuana on Music Enjoyment01:21:09Record Sales in Legal Marijuana States01:25:53Strain Recommendations and Personal Experiences Grateful DeadOctober 7, 1980 (44 years ago)Warfield TheaterSan Francisco, CAGrateful Dead Live at Warfield Theater on 1980-10-07 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Part of 23 show run in late September to the end of October, 1980 split between the Warfield (September 27th – October 14th) and Radio City Music Hall in NYC (October 22 – 31st)   Each show opened with an acoustic set followed by two full electric sets.  These were the last shows where the Dead played acoustic sets.  Songs from all of these concerts were pulled for the two related Dead double album releases, Reckoning (acoustic music, released April 1, 1981- the Band's sixth live album and 17th overall) and Dead Set (electric music, released August 26, 1981, the Band's seventh live album and 18th overall).  Today's episode is broken up into three acoustic numbers from this show and then three electric numbers. INTRO:                     Iko Iko                                    Track #1                                    0:00 – 1:37 "Iko Iko" (/ˈaɪkoʊˈaɪkoʊ/) is a much-coveredNew Orleans song that tells of a parade collision between two tribes of Mardi Gras Indians and the traditional confrontation. The song, under the original title "Jock-A-Mo", was written and released in 1953 as a single by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford and his Cane Cutters but it failed to make the charts. The song first became popular in 1965 by the girl groupthe Dixie Cups, who scored an international hit with "Iko Iko" released in March, 1965. In 1967, as part of a lawsuit settlement between Crawford and the Dixie Cups, the trio were given part songwriting credit for the song.  A permanent part of the Dead's  repertoire since first played in May, 1977 in St. Louis, almost by accident out of and back into a Not Fade Away.  The intro, one verse and back to NFA.  Overtime, became a tune that was not frequently played, usually once, maybe twice, a tour, but whenever it was played it created a party atmosphere out of whatever the mood had been prior to its playing.  Perfect song for Jerry with the call and response chorus that everyone joined in on.  The song that “fastened my seatbelt on the bus” when I saw it for the first time at my second show ever in Syracuse in 1982 with good buddy Mikey.  Once you hear it live, you are always looking for it at future shows. I love this song as do many Deadheads.  But getting to hear it played acoustically is a real treat and a great way to open this “hometown” show.  Jerry played it right up until the end. Played:  185 timesFirst:  May 15, 1977 at St. Louis Arena, St. Louis, MO, USALast:  July 5, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheatre, Maryland Heights, MO, USA SHOW No. 1:         Monkey And The Engineer                                    Track #4                                    0:48 – 2:25 Jesse Fuller tune Jesse Fuller (March 12, 1896 – January 29, 1976) was an American one-man band musician, best known for his song "San Francisco Bay Blues".  Starting in the 1950's after a number of non-music related jobs, Fuller began to compose songs, many of them based on his experiences on the railroads, and also reworked older pieces, playing them in his syncopated style. His one-man band act began when he had difficulty finding reliable musicians to work with: hence, he became known as "The Lone Cat". Starting locally, in clubs and bars in San Francisco and across the bay in Oakland and Berkeley, Fuller became more widely known when he performed on television in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles. In 1958, at the age of 62, he recorded an album, released by Good Time Jazz Records.[3] Fuller's instruments included 6-string guitar (an instrument which he had abandoned before the beginning of his one-man band career), 12-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo, cymbal (high-hat) and fotdella. He could play several instruments simultaneously, particularly with the use of a headpiece to hold a harmonica, kazoo, and microphone. In the summer of 1959 he was playing in the Exodus Gallery Bar in Denver. Bob Dylan spent several weeks in Denver that summer, and picked up his technique of playing the harmonica by using a neck-brace from Fuller.[ Monkey And The Engineer was played by the pre-Dead group Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1964. The song was performed by the Grateful Dead in acoustic sets in 1969, 1970, 1980 and 1981. Also performed by Bob Weir with Kingfish. A fun tune that is perfect for kids as well.  Good one to get them hooked into the Dead on! Played:  38 timesFirst:  December 19, 1969 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast: February 12, 1989 at Great Western Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA  MUSIC NEWS:                         Intro Music:           Me and Bobby McGee                                                            Kris Kristofferson - Me And Bobby McGee (1979) (youtube.com)                                                            0:00 – 1:27 "Me and Bobby McGee" is a song written by American singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson and originally performed by Roger Miller. Fred Foster shares the writing credit, as Kristofferson wrote the song based on a suggestion from Foster.[1] Foster had a bit of a crush on Barbara "Bobbie" McKee who was a secretary on Nashville's music row. When he pitched the title to Kristofferson, he misheard the name as "Me and Bobby McGee," and the name stuck. Kristofferson found inspiration for his lyrics from a film, 'La Strada,' by Fellini, and a scene where Anthony Quinn is going around on this motorcycle and Giulietta Masina is the feeble-minded girl with him, playing the trombone. He got to the point where he couldn't put up with her anymore and left her by the side of the road while she was sleeping," Kristofferson said.  A posthumously released version by Janis Joplin topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, making the song the second posthumously released No. 1 single in U.S. chart history after "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding. Gordon Lightfoot released a version that reached number 1 on the Canadian country charts in 1970. Jerry Lee Lewis released a version that was number 1 on the country charts in December 1971/January 1972 as the "B" side of "Would You Take Another Chance on Me". Billboard ranked Joplin's version as the No. 11 song for 1971. Janis Joplin recorded the song for inclusion on her Pearl album only a few days before her death in October 1970. Singer Bob Neuwirth taught it to her while Kristofferson was in Peru filming The Last Movie with Dennis Hopper.[5] Kristofferson did not know she had recorded the song until after her death. The first time he heard her recording of it was the day after she died.[6]Record World called it a "perfect matching of performer and material."[7] Joplin's version topped the charts to become her only number one single; her version was later ranked No. 148 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2002, the 1971 version of the song by Janis Joplin on Columbia Records was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The song is the story of two drifters, the narrator and Bobby McGee. The pair hitch a ride from a truck driver and sing as they drive through the American South before making their way westward. They visit California and then part ways, with the song's narrator expressing sadness afterwards. Due to the singer's name never being mentioned and the name "Bobby" being gender-neutral (especially in America), the song has been recorded by both male and female singers with only minor differences in the lyrical content. Me And Bobby McGee was first performed by the Grateful Dead in November 1970. It was then played well over 100 times through to October 1974. The song returned to the repertoire for three performances in 1981 after which it was dropped for good.  Sung by Weir.    RIP Kris Kristofferson Kris Kristofferson, the iconic country music singer-songwriter and accomplished Hollywood actor, passed away peacefully at his home in Maui, Hawaii, at the age of 88. The family has not disclosed the cause of death. It was confirmed that Kristofferson was surrounded by loved ones during his final moments. In a statement, the family shared: "It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, Sept. 28 at home. We're all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he's smiling down at us all." Tributes poured in from across the entertainment world and fans as the news of Kris Kristofferson's death spread. Barbra Streisand, his co-star in A Star Is Born, praised him as a "special” and “charming" in a post on X. Dolly Parton, who collaborated with Kristofferson, shared on X, "What a great loss. I will always love you, Dolly." Kristofferson's career was nothing short of extraordinary. He achieved stardom as both a country music artist and a successful actor. Throughout his prolific career, Kristofferson earned numerous accolades. These include three Grammy Awards and an induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. Additionally, he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1985 for Best Original Song for Songwriter. In 1971, Janis Joplin, who had dated Kristofferson, had a number one hit with "Me and Bobby McGee" from her posthumous album Pearl. It stayed on the number-one spot on the charts for weeks.  In 2021, after releasing his final album, The Cedar Creek Sessions, in 2016, Kristofferson announced his retirement from music. His legacy as a musician, actor, and cultural icon leaves a profound impact on both industries. He is survived by his wife, Lisa, his children, and his grandchildren.  Pink Floyd sells song rights (Rolling Stone Magazine) After years of in-fighting and near-agreements, Pink Floyd have finally reached a deal to sell the rights to their recorded music catalog to Sony Music, according to the Financial Times.The deal is reported to be worth around $400 million and also includes the rights to the band's name and likenesses. That means, along with gaining full control over Pink Floyd's music, Sony will have the crucial rights for most things Pink Floyd-related, from merch to movies. A rep for Sony Music declined to comment. A source confirmed the veracity of the details to Rolling Stone. In an interview with Rolling Stone in August, Gilmour confirmed that the band was “in discussion” about a potential catalog sale, with the guitarist adding he was tired of the continued in-fighting and “veto system” that has resulted in animosity and delayed reissues over petty issues like liner notes.   “To be rid of the decision-making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going is my dream,” Gilmour said of a catalog sale. “If things were different… and I am not interested in that from a financial standpoint. I'm only interested in it from getting out of the mud bath that it has been for quite a while.” With the Sony deal in place, the label — and not the band — will now bear the responsibility for the next Pink Floyd release, a 50th-anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here that is expected to arrive in 2025. The Sony deal comes 18 months after Pink Floyd made traction on a $500 million agreement to sell their music, only for more bickering between band mates to make the deal “basically dead,” as sources told Variety in March 2023. The Sony deal only includes Pink Floyd's recorded music catalog, which allows for the band to keep its largely Waters-penned publishing catalog and retain ownership of now-apropos lyrics like “Money/It's a crime/Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie” and “We call it riding the gravy train.” What happened to the Betty Boards In May 1986, a storage auction took place in California's Marin County that would altogether change the nature of Grateful Dead tape trading, the group's distribution of its live recordings and, ultimately, the Dead's place in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. An advertisement in a local paper drew in a few dozen curious parties anticipating the range of memorabilia and household items that typically become available through the auction of lockers that had fallen into arrears due to lack of payments.  Among the items up for auction that day were hundreds of reel-to-reel soundboard tapes of the Grateful Dead originally recorded by Betty Cantor-Jackson during a golden age between 1971-80. The Betty Boards, as copies of these recordings became known, eventually found their way into the collections of longstanding Deadheads and newbies alike, ending some aspects of a tape-trading hierarchy by which certain individuals lorded over their collections, denying access to those who were unfamiliar with the secret handshake. The appearance and subsequent dissemination of these recordings became a source of fascination and speculation for Deadheads in 1986 and the questions have only compounded over the years: How did the tapes fall into the auction? Who won them? How and why were they initially distributed? Are there more recordings that have yet to make it into circulation? And jumping ahead to the present, where are those tapes today? Just what has become of the Bettys? What can be said with certainty is that a new cache of tapes has been unearthed and a plan is underway by Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Rob Eaton, who has painstakingly restored many of the boards, to complete the job and then facilitate their return to the band. Eaton hopes that a series of official releases might follow that will also yield a small royalty to the woman who recorded the reels and then lost them due to her own financial hardship, even if Deadheads owe her a debt of gratitude. Before the auction, before the boards, there was Betty. Betty Cantor was still in her teens when she began setting up mics and helping to record sound at San Francisco venues— first at the Avalon Ballroom and then, the Carousel (the latter during the Grateful Dead's brief stab at venue management in 1968). She worked alongside Bob Matthews, initially assisting with setups during the recording of the Dead's Anthem of the Sun. A true pioneer, as a woman staking her claim in a patriarchal business, she partnered with Matthews into the early 1970s to produce and engineer live multi- track recordings (she had a hand or two in Live/Dead) as well as studio efforts (Aoxomoxoa and Workingman's Dead). While she worked for other artists during this period, she maintained a close relationship with the Grateful Dead, catalyzed by her marriage to crew member Rex Jackson, who would die a few years later in an auto accident. (The philanthropic Rex Foundation is named in his honor.) “My late husband started recording on the road when he was on the equipment crew,” Cantor Jackson explains. “He and I purchased our own gear and tape. I recorded whenever I could get to the gigs. I recorded the Grateful Dead frequently when they were at home venues, I recorded any and all Jerry Garcia Band gigs I could get to for years, in all its configurations, as well as other bands I liked whenever I could. In those days, bands were cool and happy about me getting a feed. Rex was killed in a car accident in ‘76. In ‘77 and ‘78, I was put on Grateful Dead road crew salary, taping and handling Bobby's stage setup.” She later began a romantic relationship with Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland but, after that ended, she sensed that she had been frozen out. “Brent and I split up after a few years, with the last year spent in the studio working on his solo project. This put me in the category of the dreaded ‘ex.' I didn't think that could apply to me, but he was a band member. Everyone was paranoid of me being around, so I no longer had access to my studio or the vault.” Trying times followed. In 1986, she found herself in a dire financial predicament and forced out of her home. “All my things were moved to storage facilities. Unable to foot the bill at the storage center, Cantor-Jackson forfeited the rights to her worldly possessions. She remembers contacting the Grateful Dead office to inform them of the situation, but the group took no action, resulting in a public auction of Cantor-Jackson's personal assets, which included more than 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes—mostly Grateful Dead recordings, along with performances by Legion of Mary, Kingfish, Jerry Garcia Band, Old and In The Way, the Keith and Donna Band, and New Riders of The Purple Sage. The majority of the 1,000-plus reels that have come to be known as the Betty Boards were acquired by three principals, none of whom were fervid Deadheads at the time. The first of these individuals set his tapes aside in a storage locker where they remain to this day. A second, who was more interested in the road cases that held the tapes, left them to rot in his barn for a decade. The final party was a couple with a particular interest in progressive rock, who nonetheless held an appreciation for the performances captured on tape. So while some tapes unquestionably were scattered to the wind, following the four- hour event and a second auction for a final lot of tapes held a few weeks later, the three prime bidders each held hundreds of reels. While two of the winning bidders had no plans for the tapes, within a few months the couple decided that they would place the music in circulation. This was our way of getting new material into circulation and also breaking the hierarchy of those collectors who held on to prime shows for themselves. Initially, we started transferring the tapes to VHS Hi-Fi on our own, but soon realized what a daunting task this was going to be. So we reached out to one of our trading buddies who we knew had connections in the Dead trading community. From there, he gathered together what was later to become known as the ‘Unindicted Co-conspirators,' who put in a massive archiving effort to back up the tapes and distribute them.” The individual they selected as their point person was Ken Genetti, a friend and longtime Deadhead. “I went into their house, and I opened up this closet and they had all the stuff arranged on a shelf in order,” Genetti reflects. “For me, it was like King Tut's tomb. I knew immediately what they had when I looked in there. The first thing I saw was Port Chester, N.Y., Feb. 18, 1971, an incredible show which was Mickey [Hart]'s last concert for many years and I said, ‘You've got to be kidding me!' Then I saw Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, Calif., ‘73, my favorite concert I ever went to. I pulled it out and I went, ‘Holy shit!'” They explain: “We had sought to keep the operation as low key as possible because of the potential for a backlash. It wasn't until someone contacted the Grateful Dead office and offered them a copy of the tapes that we knew it was only a matter of time before we would be hearing from their lawyers. When we did hear from them, there was a bit of back and forth between their lawyers and our lawyer, but the bottom line was we had purchased the tapes legally and owned them but didn't own the rights to the music contained on them. Therefore, we could not sell the music on them, which was never our intent anyway. That pretty much left us at a stalemate and, not wanting to stir up any more issues with the Grateful Dead office, is also why we avoided re-digitizing the tapes.” In late 1995, Eaton received a call from a high-school teacher who had purchased one of the lots predominantly for the road cases that held the tapes. The teacher now hoped to sell the reels and wanted Eaton to assess them. In a cluttered barn, Eaton discovered a grimy, mold-infested collection. This might have been the end of the story, but the Betty Boards have proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. The teacher never found a buyer for the tapes—his asking price was a million dollars—and two years ago, facing monetary struggles and fearing that that the bank might foreclose on his home, he contacted Eaton once again to see if he would be willing to take custody of the tapes. The teacher also explained that he had discovered another 50 reels while cleaning out the barn. Emboldened by success with this latest batch, Eaton set a new goal for himself: “I had this dream to try to reclaim all of this music and archive it properly so that it's there for generations to come in the best possible form.” Emboldened by success with this latest batch, Eaton set a new goal for himself: “I had this dream to try to reclaim all of this music and archive it properly so that it's there for generations to come in the best possible form.” So through a chain of contacts, he eventually located the couple. While completing his work on the couple's reels, Eaton began researching the original auction, hoping to identify the third individual who had purchased the Bettys. He eventually found him, and in January 2014, the pair entered into discussions about this final batch of tapes, which Eaton hopes to restore. What then? Eaton has a plan that he already has set in motion. “What I'd love to see done—in a perfect world—is I think all the tapes need to go back to the vault,” he says. “I think the people that have purchased these tapes should be compensated. I don't think we're talking huge sums of money but enough to make them relinquish the tapes back to the Grateful Dead. They should be part of the collection. Another thing that's important is if these tapes do get back to the vault, Betty should get her production royalty on anything that gets released, which is completely reasonable. Those were her tapes; those weren't the Dead's tapes. I'd love to see Betty get her due.”  SHOW No. 2:         Heaven Help The Fool                                    Track #6                                    1:30 – 3:10Heaven Help the Fool is the second solo album by Grateful Deadrhythm guitaristBob Weir, released in 1978. It was recorded during time off from touring, in the summer of 1977, while Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart recovered from injuries sustained in a vehicular accident. Weir returned to the studio with Keith Olsen, having recorded Terrapin Station with the producer earlier in the year. Several well-known studio musicians were hired for the project, including widely used session player Waddy Wachtel and Toto members David Paich and Mike Porcaro. Only "Salt Lake City" and the title track were played live by the Grateful Dead, the former in its namesake location on February 21, 1995,[1] and the latter in an instrumental arrangement during their 1980 acoustic sets.[2] Despite this, Weir has continued to consistently play tracks from the album with other bands of his, including RatDog and Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros. "Bombs Away" was released as a single and peaked at number 70 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming his only solo song to make the chart.[3] The album itself stalled at number 69, one spot behind his previous album, Ace. The title track was written by Bobby and John Barlow.  While a staple at Bob shows with the Midnights, Rob Wasserman, Rat Dog, Wolf Bros., etc., the Dead only played it during these Warfield/Radio City and only as an instrumental arrangement. Played:  17 timesFirst:  September 29, 1980 at The Warfield, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  October 31, 1980 at Radio City Music Hall, New York, NY, USA Now the electric tunes from today's show: SHOW No. 3:         Cold, Rain & Snow                                    Track #10                                    0:00 – 1:30 "Rain and Snow", also known as "Cold Rain and Snow" (Roud 3634),[1] is an American folksong and in some variants a murder ballad.[2] The song first appeared in print in Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp's 1917 compilation English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, which relates that it was collected from Mrs. Tom Rice in Big Laurel, North Carolina in 1916. The melody is pentatonic. Campbell and Sharp's version collected only a single verse: Lord, I married me a wife,She gave me trouble all my life,Made me work in the cold rain and snow.Rain and snow, rain and snow,Made me work in the cold rain and snow.  In 1965, Dillard Chandler recorded a graphic murder ballad version of the song that ends with the wife being shot by the husband. According to the liner notes on Chandler's album, Chandler learned the song from Berzilla Wallin, who said that the song related to a murder that had occurred in Madison County, North Carolina: Well, I learned it from an old lady which says she was at the hanging of – which was supposed to be the hanging, but they didn't hang him. They give him 99 long years for the killing of his wife... I heard the song from her in 1911. She was in her 50s at that time. It did happen in her girlhood... when she was a young girl... She lived right here around in Madison County. It happened here between Marshall and Burnsville; that's where they did their hanging at that time – at Burnsville, North Carolina. That's all I know, except they didn't hang the man.'[2] Subsequent performances have elaborated a variety of additional verses and variants beyond the single verse presented by Campbell and Sharp. Several verses consistently appear. Some sources for lyrics that appear in some later versions may be from Dock Boggs's 1927 song "Sugar Baby" (Roud 5731),[1] another lament of a henpecked husband, which may have contributed a line about "red apple juice".[4] A British folksong, The Sporting Bachelors (Roud 5556),[1] contains similar themes, but was collected in the 1950s.[2][5] Earlier possible precursors include a series of broadside ballads on the general subject of "Woeful Marriage"; one frequently reprinted nineteenth-century example begins with the words "On Monday night I married a wife", (Roud 1692).[1][6] These British antecedents mostly share common themes and inspirations; the song originated in the local tradition of Big Laurel, Madison County, and relate to a nameless murderer who committed the crime at some time between the end of the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. A recent origin is also suggested by the relatively limited number of variations on the tune; most performances use the Campbell-Sharp melody as written.[2] Despite the apparent violence of the lyrics, women feature prominently in the oral tradition of the song. It was collected from "Mrs. Tom Rice", and sung by Berzilla Wallin, who learned it from "an old lady" who remembered the murder trial the song was about. The song is closely associated with the Grateful Dead; a studio version appeared on their first album The Grateful Dead (1967), and the song was a standard part of the Dead's repertoire throughout their career. They would often open with the song, or perform it early in the first set.[2] Unlike Chandler's recording, in the Dead's version of the lyrics the husband generally laments his mistreatment at his greedy wife's hands, but does not kill her. The lyrics from the Grateful Dead's version were adapted from an earlier recording by Obray Ramsey. Played:  249 timesFirst:  May 5, 1965 at Magoo's Pizza Parlor, Menlo Park, CA, USALast:  June 19, 1995 at Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ, USA  MJ NEWS:  Hemp Industry Advocates Ask Court To Halt California's Ban On Products With Any ‘Detectable Amount' Of THC Amid Legal Challenge2.      Most Pain Patients And Doctors Support Legalizing Medical Marijuana And Having Insurance Companies Cover The Cost, AMA Study Shows3.      Marijuana Enhances Enjoyment Of Music, New Study Finds, Confirming What Every Stoner Already Knows4.      Six U.S. States Report Setting New Monthly Marijuana Sales Records M.J. Strains:           Blackwater – an indica marijuana strain made by crossing Mendo Purps with San Fernando Valley OG Kush.  The strain offers effects that start out mellow but will eventually melt down through your entire body for a classic head to toe euphoric high.  A sweet grape aroma that blends well with subtle undertones of lemon and pine.  MMJ uses include for relieving symptoms associated with chronic pain, appetite loss and MS.  Recommended for late night consumption as it can cause mental cloudiness and detract from productivity.                      NYSD – this classic strain is sativa leaning, created by Soma Seeds in Amsterdam, a staple for stoners since its inception in 1997.  Its name is inspired by the tragic events in NYC on September 11, 2001.  It is a product of crossbreeding Mexican sativa and Afghani landrace strains.  Has a unique aroma and taste that sets it apart from the crowd.                       Pure Gas - a hybrid cross of E85 and OG Kush. The parent strains are carefully chosen for their complex terpene profiles and effects. The OG Kush is known for its lemon-pine-fuel taste and an aroma of fuel, skunk, and spice. Additionally, its high-THC content provides a potentially heavy-hitting experience that shines through in the Pure Gas strain. As far as THC level in Pure Gas, it is one of our higher testers and definitely a high-potency strain. Smoking Pure Gas might bring effects similar to that of the OG Kush. The strain may be a creeper, meaning its effects may sneak up on you, so we recommend trying a little at a time, especially if you're new to smoking. Users may experience a deep body relaxation and cerebral high. The strain is definitely one that might activate your munchies, so make sure you have your favorite snack on hand. The overall effects of the Pure Gas strain might make it perfect for a movie night with friends, pre-dinner smoke sessions, and just hanging out. For users who suffer from appetite loss, the strain may help stimulate your hunger.  SHOW No. 4:         Loser                                    Track #12                                    4:13 – 6:13 David Dodd:  The song seems covered in the Americana dust of so many songs from this period of Hunter's and Garcia's songwriting partnership. Abilene, whether in Texas or Kansas, is a dusty cowtown—at the time in which the song seems to be set, the cattle outnumbered the human inhabitants by a factor of tens. It's easy to see the scene Hunter so casually sets, of a broken-down gambler in a saloon, with a dirt street outside full of armed cowpokes. Appearing, as it does, on Garcia, the song seems to pair naturally with the other gambling song on the album, “Deal.” It could be sung by the same character on a different day, in fact. And it fits in, as I mentioned, with a whole suite of songs that might be set in the same generic America of the late 19th or early 20th centuries: “Brown-Eyed Women,” “Jack Straw,” “Mister Charlie,” “Tennessee Jed,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Candyman,” and others, as well as certain selected covers, such as “Me and My Uncle,” and “El Paso.” Those songs share certain motifs, and among them are the various accoutrements of a gambler's trade, whether dice or cards. Money plays a role—and, in the case of “Loser,” the particular money mentioned helps place the song chronologically. Gold dollar coins were minted from 1849 (the Gold Rush!) to 1889. They were tiny little coins. I have one, and it is amazingly small—between 13 and 15 mm in diameter. “All that I am asking for is ten gold dollars…” C'mon! They're tiny little things. In fact, originally, the line was “one gold dollar,” but that changed at some point to the “ten” The crowning glory of the song, as in many other Garcia/Hunter compositions, is the bridge.The song culminates in this cry of hopefulness: “Last fair deal in the country, Sweet Susie, last fair deal in the town. Put your gold money where your love is, baby, before you let my deal go down—go down.” (It's noted that “Sweet Susie” was dropped at some point, but then, occasionally, brought back. I think it was an optional decoration to the line. Alex Allan, in his Grateful Dead Lyric and Song Finder site, notes that “Sweet Susie” rarely appears after 1972, but that it's sung in performances in 1974 and 1979.) Almost always played as a first set Jerry ballad. This version might have been the high point of this show.  So nicely played and sung by Jerry. Played:  353First:  February 18, 1971 at Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY, USALast:  June 28, 1995 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, MI  OUTRO:                   Good Lovin'                                    Track #27                                    3:25 – 5:04 "Good Lovin'" is a song written by Rudy Clark and Arthur Resnick that was a #1 hit single for the Young Rascals in 1966. The song was first recorded by Lemme B. Good (stage name of singer Limmie Snell) in March 1965 and written by Rudy Clark. The following month it was recorded with different lyrics by R&B artists The Olympics, produced by Jerry Ragovoy; this version reached #81 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. The tale has been told that Rascal Felix Cavaliere heard The Olympics' recording on a New York City radio station and the group added it to their concert repertoire, using the same lyrics and virtually the same arrangement as The Olympics' version. Co-producer Tom Dowd captured this live feel on their 1966 recording, even though the group did not think the performance held together well. "Good Lovin'" rose to the top of the Billboard Pop Singles chart in the spring of 1966 and represented the Young Rascals' first real hit. "Good Lovin'" is one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, and was ranked #333 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.[4] Writer Dave Marsh placed it at #108 in his 1989 book The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, saying it is "the greatest example ever of a remake surpassing the quality of an original without changing a thing about the arrangement." A popular version was by the Grateful Dead, who made it a workhorse of their concert rotation, appearing almost every year from 1969 on.[6] It was sung in their early years during the 1960s and early 1970s by Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and later by Bob Weir. The Weir rendition was recorded for the group's 1978 Shakedown Street album and came in for a good amount of criticism: Rolling Stone said it "feature[d] aimless ensemble work and vocals that Bob Weir should never have attempted."[7] On November 11, 1978, the Grateful Dead performed it on Saturday Night Live. Typically, at least by the time I started seeing them, usually played as a second set closer or late in the second set. As good buddy AWell always said, “if they play Good Lovin, everyone leaves with a smile on their face.”  Can't argue with that. Played:  442First:  May 5, 1965 at Magoo's Pizza Parlor, Menlo Park, CA, USALast:  June 28, 1995 at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, MI, USA Easy fast on Yom Kippur .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Hosts: Dave BinckJanis Joplin “Me and Bobby McGee" from the 1971 album "Pearl" released on Columbia. Written by Kris Kristofferson  and Fred Foster and produced by Paul A Rothchild.Personel:Full Tilt Boogie BandJanis Joplin – vocals, acoustic guitarRichard Bell – pianoKen Pearson – Hammond organJohn Till – electric guitarBrad Campbell – bass guitarClark Pierson – drumsCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Johnny Cash

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Hosts: Dave BinckJanis Joplin “Me and Bobby McGee" from the 1971 album "Pearl" released on Columbia. Written by Kris Kristofferson  and Fred Foster and produced by Paul A Rothchild.Personel:Full Tilt Boogie BandJanis Joplin – vocals, acoustic guitar Richard Bell – pianoKen Pearson – Hammond organJohn Till – electric guitarBrad Campbell – bass guitarClark Pierson – drumsCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Steph CurryLeBron JamesHermanos GutierrezHabeCounting CrowsSantanaMarcy's PlaygroundWoody GuthrieKenny RogersJimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower”Big Brother and the Holding CompanyBline Melon “Change”La StradaFederico FelliniBrokeback MountainThe Doors “People Are Strange”The Paul Butterfield Blues BandJanis Joplin “Piece of My Heart”Janis Joplin “Cry Baby”Janis Joplin “Mercedes Bendz”Otis Redding “Sittin on the Dock of the Bay”Gordon Lightfoot “If You Could Read My Mind”Jerry Lee LewisJennifer Love HewittTaylor SwiftBob DylanJoe CockerThe Doors “LA Woman”Phil OaksMerle HaggardAretha FranklinNina SimoneBillie HollidayFleetwood MacHeartJoan JettThe Grateful DeadRick DankoThe BandLed Zeppelin “Going to California”Paul Simon “Homeward Bound”Paul Simon “America”Neil Young “Out on the Weekend”Lee Greenwood “God Bless the USA”Tracey Chapman “Fast Car”Willie NelsonWaylon Jennings “Lonesome, Orn'ry and Mean”The HighwaymenJohnny CashBob WeirRoger MillerCaptain KangarooHank Williams, Jr.

Converted from reel to reel in the 60's

In Part 2 of our series on loneliness, Kevin and Niseema talk about the idea of having a "high" or "low" tolerance for loneliness based on your family heritage or genetic makeup.  When you look at your own background can you see whether or not you have a high or low tolerance for loneliness? Does this make it easier for you to talk about loneliness in a non-judgemental, less shameful way?In the second part of the show, we talk about the physical effects of loneliness, and the wear and tear that it can take on both the heart and the immune system. John Caciopo in his book, "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," unveils his pioneering research on the startling effects of loneliness: a sense of isolation or social rejection disrupts not only your thinking abilities and willpower but also your immune system, and can be as damaging as obesity or smoking. His book demonstrates that, as individuals and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for social bonds.Tune in next week when we talk about ways of minimizing and "easing" a sense of loneliness.Follow this link to take the UCLA Loneliness Scale-----------------------------------------For more information or support contact hosts Kevin O'Donoghue LMHC or Niseema Dyan Diemer SEP  at: info@thepositivemindcenter.com, or call 212-757-4488. You can sign up for our weekly newsletter at www.tffpp.org.These are challenging times and we hope this episode served to validate and ease your anxiety about what you may be experiencing. Please feel free to also suggest show ideas to the above email. Thank you for listening,Kevin and Niseemawww.tffpp.orghttps://www.kevinlmhc.comwww.niseema.comwww.thepositivemindcenter.comPRODUCTION CREDITSOpening Music : Another Country, Pure Shadowfax, ShadowfaxBreak Music: "In Dreams." Performed by Roy Orbison. Written By Roy Orbison,.Produced by Fred Foster. Source: Legacy RecordsEnd Music : TFFPP Theme - Giullian Goiello for The Foundation for Positive PsychologyThe Positive Mind is produced with the help of:Engineering: Geoff BradyProducer: Connie Shannon Website Design and End Music: Giullian GioelloMarketing and PR: Jen Maguire, Maguire PR, jen@maguirepr.com

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Kevin McDevittRoy Orbison “In Dreams” from the 1963 album "In Dreams" released on Monument. Written by  Roy Orbison  and produced by Fred Foster.Personel:Roy Orbison - vocals, rhythm guitarCover:Performed by Josh Bond and Neal MarshIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Kevin McDevittRoy Orbison “In Dreams” from the 1963 album "In Dreams" released on Monument. Written by  Roy Orbison  and produced by Fred Foster.Personel:Roy Orbison - vocals, rhythm guitarCover:Performed by Josh Bond and Neal MarshIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Pedro MartinezKevin DurantKyrie IrvingThe Black KeysArcade Fire  “Lightning I”Arcade Fire “Sprawl II”Arcade Fire “Unconditional Love I”Will Smith “Gettin' Jiggy With It”MC Hammer “Hammertime”Vanilla IceMadonnaSeal “Kiss From a Rose”Sophie B Hawkins “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”Deee-Lite “Groove is in the Heart”Salt n PeppaUs3 “Cantaloop”En VogueBillie HolidayRoy Orbison “Pretty Woman”Blue VelvetRoy Orbison “Crying”The John Wayne Gacy TapesCapturing the FriedmansThe Travelling WilburysBob DylanTom PettyJimmy StewartIt's a Wonderful LifeChronicles Vol 1Aretha FranklinElton JohnWhitney HoustonWill FerrellOld SchoolJohnny CashPavarottiThe Chordettes “Mr. Sandman”Metallica “Enter Sandman”Metallica “One”ElvisWillie NelsonDolly PartonKris Kristofferson “Me and Bobby McGee”The Beatles “I Want to Hold Your Hand”John LennonPaul McCartneyDavid LynchDennis HopperDean StockwellQuantum LeapElvis CostelloBruce SpringsteinWeekend at Bernie'sFor the Kings “Under Her Breath”For the Kings “A Collection of Songs for the Kings”For the Kings “In a Dream”Beach BoysBrian WilsonBobby Darin “Dreamlover”The Everly Brother “All I Have To Do Is Dreams”Billy Ocean “Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car”Weezer “Only In Dreams”Meat LoafBonoThe EdgeRoy Orbison “She's A Mystery To Me”Fleetwood Mac “Dreams”Stevie NicksBruce SpringsteinReed JamisonAdam SandletMechnerLos Lobos “When the Circus Comes”Ray LaMontaigneDan CarlinJulius CeasarSiera FerrilLA Philharmonic SymphonyThe Moody Blues “Nights in White Satin”Ed O'NeillTed BundyMarried With ChhildrenThe X Files

Tony Kurre talks about his Easter weekend, the lineup on Tony Kurre Radio, the memorial event coming up for Fred Foster at Workplay on Thursday, a new study shows that surgeons perform better when listening to upbeat rock music!

Tony Kurre and Dr. Josh Klapow talk about a big event coming up to remember Fred Foster, entertainment headlines, Elon Musk, Twitter, money's corruption of people, figuring out women, and more!

Tony Kurre talks about the lineup on Tony Kurre Radio, a special event to remember Fred Foster, the passing of Gilbert Gottfried, a crazy event last night at the Clippers-Timberwolves game, and more!

Tony Kurre talks about the great lineup on Tony Kurre Radio, an event to remember the late Fred Foster, does celebrity birthdays, lessons Tony has learned from his daughter on her birthday, how to figure out women, and more!

Kris Kristofferson, Fred Foster, and hangovers.

Texas born Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970, and Pearl was posthumously released in January.  Producer Paul A. Rothchild created a more polished sound on this album than her previous solo work or her work with other bands.  The Full Tilt Boogie Band, Joplin's touring band at the time, also participated in this studio album.  It would be her best selling album, peaking at number 1 on the Billboard 200, and being certified quadruple platinum.After leaving Big Brother and the Holding Company at the end of 1968, Joplin moved away from the psychedelic sound towards a more R&B orientation with the Kozmic Blues Band, her backing band at the time.  Although her first album went gold within two weeks of its release, reviews were mixed as critics had trouble with the new soul and blues orientation.  Pearl would continue the blues trend and would receive much more positive reviews, certainly influenced by its posthumous release.Joplin's struggles with drug abuse were well known, and she died of a heroin overdose towards the end of the recording sessions. Move OverJoplin composed the opening track to the album.  It is her take on how men can end a relationship but refuse to move on, but instead drag the woman around long afterwards.Cry BabyThis is a song written by Bert Berms and Jerry Ragovoy was originally recorded in 1963 by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters in 1963.  Mimms' rendition went to number 4 on the charts, while Joplin's went to number 42.Me and Bobby McGeeWhen most think of Janis Joplin, they think of this single, her most successful.  Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster penned the song, and it was originally performed by Roger Miller in 1969.  Miller's version hit number 12 on the country charts, but Joplin's would go to number 1 on the Hot 100.  Mercedes BenzThe second song penned by Joplin, this track was recorded a cappella in one take on October 1, 1970, three days before Joplin's death.  It is a tongue in cheek critique of consumerism. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family"The Partridge Family" began its 5-year run as a sitcom in the fall of 1970, and this song was on the top of the charts in January 1971. STAFF PICKS:Love the One You're With by Stephen StillsIf Rob's staff pick sounds more like Crosby Stills and Nash than a Stills solo effort, that may be because David Crosby and Graham Nash are singing on this track, along with a host of other well known musicians of the time.  Both Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix played on the album.Stoney End  by Barbara StreisandBruce risks the ire of the group by making Streisand his staff pick this week.  The title track to Streisand's 12th studio album was the one that found her successfully making the jump from Broadway music to the pop/rock genre.  The song itself is a story of bad choices with a boy leading down a bad road to a stony end.Superstar by Murray Head & ChoirWayne's staff pick is the theme of the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar," and represents a questioning ghost of Judas asking Jesus if he intended for things to happen the way they did.  In addition to the hippie culture of the time, there was also an ascendant Jesus movement happening in culture which this musical successfully tapped.One Man Band by Three Dog NightBrian wraps up the staff picks with a harmonic hit from Three Dog Night's album "Naturally."  The song peaked at number 19 in the U.S.     INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Way Back Home by the Jazz CrusadersThis instrumental was on the charts just before the Jazz Crusaders shortened their name to the Crusaders in 1971. 

Dolly Parton is the first ever successful female singer-songwriter, writing over 3,000 songs. In this unique conversation about her writing process she describes her early days at Monument Records under the guidance of Fred Foster, turning down several requests to meet with Elvis and refusing his demand for a publishing credit on one of her biggest hits. She talks about her relationship with collaborators Porter Wagoner and Kenny Rogers, being mad at Linda Ronstadt for missing out a key lyric in one of her songs and the clause she gave Whitney Houston for the use of I Will Always Love You in The Bodyguard soundtrack. Dolly shares the stories behind her songs and the real events centred around her humble up-bringing. Plus she describes the opportunity to bring her songs to the stage for 9 To 5 The Musical and revisit the themes of the original movie in the #MeToo movement.

Following up Armand's 2009 interview with the author, John Cacciopo, about his book, "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection,"  Kevin and Niseema talk about the idea of having a "high" or  "low" tolerance for loneliness based on your family heritage or genetic makeup.When you look at your own family, your own heritage, can you see whether or not you have a high or low tolerance for loneliness? Does this make it easier for you to talk about loneliness in a non-judgemental, less shameful way? We hope that it does.In the second part of the show, we talk about the physical effects of loneliness, and the wear and tear that it can take on both the heart and the immune system. Tune in next week where we talk about ways of minimizing and "easing" a sense of loneliness.For more information or support contact hosts Kevin O'Donoghue LMHC or Niseema Dyan Diemer SEP  at: info@thepositivemindcenter.com, or call 212-757-4488. You can sign up for our weekly newsletter at www.tffpp.org.These are challenging times and we hope this episode served to validate and ease your anxiety about what you may be experiencing. Please feel free to also suggest show ideas to the above email. Thank you for listening,Kevin and Niseemawww.tffpp.orghttps://www.kevinlmhc.comwww.niseema.comwww.thepositivemindcenter.comPRODUCTION CREDITSOpening Music : Another Country, Pure Shadowfax, ShadowfaxBreak Music: "In Dreams." Performed by Roy Orbison. Written By Roy Orbison,.Produced by Fred Foster. Source: Legacy RecordsEnd Music : TFFPP Theme - Giullian Goiello for The Foundation for Positive PsychologyThe Positive Mind is produced with the help of:Engineering: Geoff BradyProducer: Connie Shannon Website Design and End Music: Giullian GioelloMarketing and PR: Jen Maguire, Maguire PR, jen@maguirepr.com

This week we welcome, star of The Grand Ole Opry, Jeannie Seely! On the night of September 16, 1967, Jeannie Seely marked an important milestone in her music career by joining the world-famous Grand Ole Opry. The distinctive-voiced lady referred to as “Miss Country Soul” became the first Pennsylvania native to become an Opry member. Today Jeannie makes clear that it's still a thrill and an honor each time she performs on the Opry stage. "I feel very fortunate to be part of the Opry tradition," the Grammy-winning singer says, "and I truly am indebted to all the wonderful fans who have supported me over the years.” Jeannie Seely is among a select group of country artists who have scored chart- topping hits as a solo artist, as a duet partner, and as a songwriter. Born on July 6, 1940, in Titusville, Pennsylvania – the town where the world’s very first oil well was drilled in 1859 – Jeannie grew up as the youngest of Leo and Irene Seely's four children. The family's two-story farmhouse still stands along a dirt road outside of nearby Townville, a community of about 300 folks located in the northwestern corner of the Keystone State. Jeannie's interest in music was influenced strongly by her parents. Leo Seely worked hard on the family's farm and at a Titusville steel mill, but found time on weekends to play the banjo and call local square dances. Irene Seely would sing with her daughter every Saturday morning while the two baked bread together. “I grew up in a time when all the neighbors gathered together to help each other get the hay in and that kind of thing,” recalls Jeannie. “It seemed like everybody back in the country played guitars and fiddles, and when we got together there was always pickin’ and singin’.” When she was barely tall enough to reach the dial on her family's big Philco console radio, Jeannie was tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on station WSM 650. At age 11, she began singing for a Saturday morning radio show on Meadville station WMGW. "I can still remember standing on a stack of wooden soda cases because I wasn't tall enough to reach the unadjustable microphones," she laughs. By age 16, Jeannie was performing on television station WICU in Erie. Jeannie recalls many Saturday nights as a teenager when she would sit in her family's car, eat popcorn and listen to the Grand Ole Opry while her parents played cards at the homes of friends. "I also remember looking forward to attending country music shows at a place near Franklin called Hillbilly Park," says Jeannie. “They would do an afternoon and an evening show. Mother would bake a chicken and fix up a picnic basket, and we’d just go there and spend the whole day and the evening. I was always on the ground right in front of the front row, looking up at the stage.” At Hillbilly Park Jeannie had the opportunity to see performers like Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley, as well as Josh Graves who would later play on her Life’s Highway CD. "I still have the 8 by 10 photos I bought and had autographed there by stars like Jean Shepard, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper," she proudly notes. “I’ve been very blessed to later become friends with these Opry legends.” A cheerleader, majorette, and honor student while attending Townville High School, Jeannie sang at local amateur contests and began performing at weekend dances throughout northwestern Pennsylvania. "Back then a lot of people made fun of me because I sang country," she admits today. "In those days calling somebody 'country' was actually a put-down." Jeannie remembers how the residents of tiny Townville didn't believe that anyone, especially a female, could make a living by singing or writing songs. "Some people didn't even think it was right for a girl to be singing with a band at dances,” she remembers. Following high school graduation in 1958, Jeannie worked for three years at the Titusville Trust Company. Initially hired as a stenographer at the bank, she was later promoted to a secretarial position for the bank's auditor. During this period Jeannie continued her education by completing night classes that were conducted by the American Institute of Banking in Oil City. "Those courses in subjects like business finance and law were beneficial even later in my music career," Jeannie says. Both the local and national American Institute of Banking organizations have since made Jeannie an honorary lifetime member for her efforts in promoting the name and spirit of the organization. According to Jeannie, it was the weather conditions one Sunday morning on a country back road that finalized her decision to move to California. "It was Easter, and I got my car stuck in a snow bank," she chuckles. "I had to walk the whole way home in my new dress to get my Dad's help. I decided right then and there that I was ready to make a change." At age 21, Jeannie packed everything she could into her car, shipped the rest to "General Delivery, Los Angeles", and headed west. She initially took a job at a Beverly Hills bank, but left it after a year to take a secretarial position for half the money at Liberty and Imperial Records in Hollywood. With a foot in the door of the music business, she began writing songs for Four Star Music and became a regular act, along with an unknown Glen Campbell, on the "Hollywood Jamboree" television series. Rhythm and blues artist Irma Thomas recorded a composition by Jeannie titled "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is" and scored a national pop and R&B hit with it. Jeannie's songwriting led to her own recording contract on Challenge Records. A couple regional hits and a West Coast tour resulted, but unfortunately she received no national attention. A young songwriter visiting California named Hank Cochran was impressed with Jeannie's talent and suggested she move to Nashville. Jeannie, however, didn't think she was ready. Upon the encouragement of singer Dottie West who recorded one of her songs, Jeannie finally moved to Nashville in the fall of 1965. "When I arrived in town, I only had $50 and a Ford Falcon to my name," she recalls. "Within a month though, Porter Wagoner hired me to replace Norma Jean as the female singer for his road show and syndicated television series." Initially turned down by every record label in town, Jeannie finally got the big break she needed when a recording contract was offered by Monument Records. She went in the studio and recorded a Hank Cochran ballad titled "Don't Touch Me" on March 12, 1966. Within only a few weeks the song debuted on the country music charts where it stayed for over five months. Although it held at the No. 2 position for three weeks on Billboard, the record went to No. 1 on all the other major charts, including Cashbox and Record World. It was also a crossover hit on the national pop charts. Today "Don't Touch Me" is considered a standard in country music. Jeannie’s recording of the song is ranked at No. 97 in the book titled Heartaches By the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles written by David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren. The book, released in 2003, was published by the Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation Press. “Don’t Touch Me” is also included in The Stories Behind Country Music’s All-Time Greatest 100 Songs written by Ace Collins and published by Boulevard Books. The author writes, “Cochran’s ‘Don’t Touch Me’ has stood the test of time like few other works. Hauntingly beautiful, poetry set to meter, this composition merits particular praise for the exquisite manner in which it relates its story of love, doubt, and commitment.” The book describes how Buck Owens desperately wanted the song that Jeannie ultimately recorded and made a hit. Country versions of “Don’t Touch Me” have been recorded by Don Gibson, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Lorrie Morgan, Ray Price, Lynn Anderson, Eddy Arnold, Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark, Jack Greene, Dottie West, and many others (but none were charted singles). The popularity of “Don’t Touch Me” has crossed all musical styles – Etta James recorded a rhythm and blues version, Carolyn Hester a folk version, Bettye Swann a soul version, and Eleni Mandell a pop version. A reggae version was even recorded by Nicky Thomas. In June of 1966 Jeannie was invited to make her first guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. She received "Most Promising New Artist" awards that same year from all the national trade publications including Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World, as well as from polls of country music fans and radio DJs across the country. On March 2, 1967, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences honored Jeannie with the 1966 Grammy Award for the "Best Country Vocal Performance by a Female". Edging out friends and fellow nominees Loretta Lynn (“Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’”), Dottie West (“Would You Hold It Against Me”), Connie Smith (“Ain’t Had No Loving”), and Jan Howard (“Evil On your Mind”), Jeannie Seely became only the third female country artist to receive the coveted Grammy. She accepted her award from Chet Atkins. With a successful breakthrough hit, Jeannie found herself traveling from coast to coast for concert appearances. The new demands forced her to leave Porter Wagoner's show – and today Jeannie jokes that she was replaced by friend Dolly Parton because Dolly’s ‘hits’ were bigger. New opportunities for Jeannie included many concert and television appearances with the legendary Ernest Tubb. On the liner notes for one of Jeannie's early albums, the legendary Tubb wrote, "She puts heart and soul into every ballad she sings. Whether a new song or an old one, when Jeannie sings it, it becomes 'Jeannie's song'." In September of 1967, Jeannie fulfilled her lifelong dream by joining the Grand Ole Opry. She remembers her Opry induction, attended by her parents from Pennsylvania, as "a very emotional night." "I started crying," she recalls, "and then I encored and that was even worse." Often referred to as the "Mother Church of Country Music", the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville was home to the Opry when Jeannie became a member. Although hot in the summer and drafty in the winter, Jeannie says the Ryman had a magic all its own. She fondly recalls sharing a crowded dressing room, which was actually the ladies restroom, with fellow performers like Minnie Pearl and Barbara Mandrell (who today lists Jeannie as one of her major influences). After 31 years at the Ryman, the Grand Ole Opry moved on March 16, 1974, to the new 4,400 seat Opry House on the grounds of the Opryland theme park. At the much- publicized grand opening show which was broadcast on over 1,300 radio stations worldwide, special guest President Richard Nixon told the audience, "Some girls have looks but can't sing. Others can sing but don't have looks. Jeannie Seely's got them both." That quote subsequently appeared in newspapers across the country. Known throughout her career as an individualist, as well as for her infectious humor, Jeannie Seely is widely recognized for changing the image of female country performers. Jeannie is in fact credited for breaking the "calico curtain" by being the first woman to wear a mini-skirt on the Grand Ole Opry stage. "I really didn't think anything of it at the time, but it did cause quite a stir," she laughs. "The Opry manager even called me into his office." In their book Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, authors Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann wrote, "Jeannie's frank talk, striking intelligence, free- spirited life-style, and deeply moving vocals have long set her apart from most female country stars. When she arrived in Nashville in 1965, women were still expected to portray the submissive country sweetheart. Jeannie blazed a nonconformist trail from the moment she hit the Opry in her miniskirt...." A string of hit records in the late '60's and early '70's solidified Jeannie's reputation as a country torch singer and earned her the nickname of "Miss Country Soul", a title still frequently used today. Country Music Hall of Fame member Marty Robbins once said, "Jeannie Seely is one of the great stylists of our time." When at home, Jeannie made frequent guest appearances on television shows like "Hee Haw" and “That Nashville Music”. On March 22, 1970, Jeannie was a featured guest on "Glen Campbell's Goodtime Hour" on CBS-TV. Working with distinguished producers like Fred Foster and Owen Bradley, the blonde, blue-eyed singer recorded more than a dozen albums and over two dozen singles on the Monument, Decca, MCA, and Columbia labels. Jeannie placed singles on Billboard's national country music charts for 13 consecutive years from 1966 through 1978. Among over two dozen hits were "It's Only Love,” "A Wanderin' Man,” "I'll Love You More,” "He Can Be Mine,” "Welcome Home To Nothing,” "Little Things,” "Farm in Pennsyltucky,” and "When It's Over.” In 1973 Jeannie transformed the hobo lament "Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?" into the top ten hit "Can I Sleep In Your Arms?". The following year she adapted the Appalachian ballad "Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies" into another hit single titled "Lucky Ladies.” For two years Jeannie served as a radio disc jockey on her own Armed Forces Network Show, and for several months she traveled on military tours throughout Europe and Asia. Upon returning from an overseas tour, Jeannie noted during an Opry performance that there was no U.S. flag — a patriotic symbol that she was accustomed to seeing. There has been an American flag displayed on the Opry stage ever since. A 1969 duet recorded with fellow Opry member Jack Greene titled "Wish I Didn't Have to Miss You" went to No. 1 on the charts and launched one of the most successful duos and road shows in country music history. Nominated for numerous Country Music Association (CMA) awards and a Grammy, Jack Greene and Jeannie Seely toured together for over ten years, performing everywhere from New York's Madison Square Garden to London's Wembley Arena. The duo changed the format of “package shows” and were considered forerunners in opening doors and bringing country music to wider audiences around the world. Through a special invitation from the White House they were named Goodwill Ambassadors to the annual United Nations Concert. A long list of artists – including Dottie West, Norma Jean, Tex Williams, Lorrie Morgan, Jack Greene, Chris LeDoux, Doyle Lawson, and Hank Williams, Jr. – have recorded compositions written by Jeannie. In 1972, Faron Young took “Leavin’ And Sayin’ Goodbye” to the No. 1 position, earning Jeannie a BMI Songwriter’s Award. In addition to Faron Young, other Country Music Hall of Fame members have recorded Jeannie’s songs – including Merle Haggard, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb, Grandpa Jones, and Connie Smith. The lyrics to one of Jeannie’s songs was used for a Hallmark greeting card. For several years Jeannie was married to Hank Cochran, the writer of such songs as “Make The World Go Away.” “She’s Got You,” “I Fall To Pieces,” “The Chair,” and “Ocean Front Property.” The marriage – the first for Jeannie but the fourth for Hank – finally ended in a divorce. In 1977 the career of Jeannie Seely almost ended abruptly when she was involved in a near fatal automobile accident that left her with serious multiple injuries. "You know, it sounds like a cliche, but it's true that your perspective changes when you have a close call," she reflects. "What you took for granted you come to appreciate more." It was with the help and support of best friend Dottie West that Jeannie was able to recover and get back on her feet. Ironically, Dottie West's death in 1991 was due to injuries she suffered in an automobile accident while en route to the Opry. "I still think about Dottie all the time and miss her very much," says Jeannie. In 1995 she served as a consultant for the CBS television movie about Dottie’s life titled Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story. Jeannie was portrayed in the movie by actress Cathy Worthington. In the early 80's, Jeannie performed as the opening act for friend Willie Nelson's concert dates across the country. She also appeared in Willie's successful Honeysuckle Rose movie and sang on the soundtrack recording, a contribution which earned her a platinum album. Jeannie became the first female artist to regularly host half-hour segments of the Grand Ole Opry. Those hosting duties actually began on January 19, 1985, when she was called upon as a last minute replacement for Del Reeves, the scheduled host, who was caught in a rare Nashville snowstorm. During the late 80's Jeannie starred in several major stage productions. She played Jean Shepard’s daughter and Lorrie Morgan’s mother in the 1986 country musical called Takin' It Home. In 1988 she portrayed "Miss Mona" in a sold-out run of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and the following year took a nonmusical role as the title character in Everybody Loves Opal. In 1988 Jeannie published her own book, Pieces of a Puzzled Mind, containing a collection of Jeannie's unique witticisms. The popular book was out of print for several years, but Jeannie republished the book in 2012. Also known as "Seely-isms" around Nashville, Jeannie notes that many of the sayings actually began as song titles or opening lines. “County music has made so many of my dreams come true,” Jeannie wrote in the book, “I just wish someone would have warned me about the nightmares.” One of the most popular quotes from the book is “You don’t have to kiss anyone’s a-- in this world, but sometimes it’s best to bend a little bit and make ‘em think you’re goin’ to.” Jeannie portrayed lead singer Danny Shirley’s mother in Confederate Railroad’s 1993 chart-topping music video for the song “Trashy Women”. She also was featured in a video shot at Dollywood for the song “Wrapped Around” by fellow Opry member Brad Paisley who took Jeannie as his date to the 2000 CMA Awards Show. Ironically, the video was shown during Brad’s performance on the 2001 CMA Awards Show – and Jeannie could be seen in the video clip. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, Jeannie appeared frequently on shows like “Nashville Now,” “Crook and Chase,” “Music City Tonight,” “Grand Ole Opry Live,” “You Can Be A Star,” “Family Feud,” and “Prime Time Country.” She served as a regular host of “Opry Backstage,” interviewing everyone from new and upcoming acts to superstars like Garth Brooks. County artist Lorrie Morgan recorded a song co-written by Jeannie titled "I've Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand" for her 1997 album Shakin' Things Up. Lorrie has credited Jeannie as being a major influence in her career and often refers to the Opry cohort as her "second mom.” Lorrie’s father, the late George Morgan, was an Opry star who became a close friend of Jeannie’s. “I admire Lorrie not only for her musical talent, but because she also inherited that wonderful sense of humor that her dad had,” notes Jeannie. “I don’t take lightly the fact that I was fortunate enough to know people like George Morgan, to work with him, and then to go on and become friends and work with his daughter. That’s pretty amazing.” Together Jeannie and Lorrie sang George’s hit “Candy Kisses” for an Opry anniversary special televised on CBS. According to Jeannie, recent years have been some of the busiest years of her career. Nashville music critic Robert K. Oermann wrote in his 2003 book Finding Her Voice: Women In Country Music, "With her chin-out, tough/tender, heart-of-gold manner, Jeannie Seely remains one of country's most completely modern female personalities." Jeannie has entertained on several cruise ships, including the week-long Grand Ole Opry cruises, and for several summers she performed at the Dollywood theme park. She’salso been part of a successful overseas tour with the "Grand Ladies of the Grand Ole Opry,” Jeannie performed on extensive tours of Ireland in both 2008 and 2009. Jeannie continues to enjoy acting and for three months in 2000 she portrayed the role of Louise Seger during a successful run of the Always, Patsy Cline musical in Atlantic City. Along with friends Jan Howard and Rita Coolidge, Jeannie filmed the heart-warming motion picture Changing Hearts in late 2001. The movie, which featured Faye Dunaway, Lauren Holly, Tom Skerritt, and Ian Somerhalder, is now available on DVD and VHS. Jeannie portrays a comical role as a do-good Women’s Baptist League hospital volunteer named Mrs. Shelby. Proceeds from the movie help non-profit organizations dedicated to cancer research, education and support. From 2004 to 2007, Jeannie and fellow country singer Helen Cornelius starred in successful runs of the musical production Count It Be Love, including a performance at the historic Ryman Auditorium. In February 2005, Jeannie was featured in a Nashville performance of The Vagina Monologues with fellow entertainers Pam Tillis and Kathy Mattea. Among the many honors and accolades that Jeannie has received is the 2000 induction to the North America Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2003 she was honored with induction into the George D. Hay Music Hall of Fame located in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas. Jeannie also received the 2003 Legend Award from Bluebird Country News. In 2006 Jeannie received the Songwriter of the Year Award from the R.O.P.E. (Reunion of Professional Entertainers) organization. In 2007 she received R.O.P.E.’s Entertainer of the Year Award. In 2009 Jeannie was honored with the prestigious Colonel Aide-de-Camp Award presented by Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. The award recognizes citizens for meritorious public service with the distinction of being included in the Honorable Order of Tennessee Colonels. Also in 2009, an interview conducted by Rik Paleri with Jeannie at the Grand Ole Opry for Rik’s “Songwriters Notebook” television show was permanently entered into the archives of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Re-released on CD format, Jeannie Seely's Greatest Hits On Monument continues to receive strong praise, including a review in the All Music Guide To Country. Jeannie’s music projects in recent years include a 23-song anthology CD called Personal, an album or traditional holiday songs titled Number One Christmas and a collection of standards, fan favorites, and duets appropriately labeled Been There, Sung That. In 2001 Jeannie sang with fellow Opry member Ralph Stanley on Clinch Mountain Sweethearts which received an International Bluegrass Music Association Award for “Recorded Event of the Year”, as well as a Grammy nomination for “Bluegrass Album of the Year”. In addition to her own recordings, Jeannie’s vocals can be found on over 75 additional compilation albums and CDs.Her vocals on the Janis Joplin hit “Piece Of My Heart” appear on Bluegrass Goes To Town: Pop Songs Bluegrass Style released in April of 2002. In the fall of 2003 Jeannie released her own acoustic and bluegrass project on OMS Records titled Life’s Highway. The album features musicians Josh Graves, Glen Duncan, Steve Wariner, Jesse McReynolds, and Buck White – as well as harmony vocals from Charlie Louvin, the Osborne Brothers, and the Whites. Country Weekly magazine reviewed the CD and wrote, “Life’s Highway is one of the year’s most welcome surprises – a thoughtful, inventive acoustic winner that’s a much- needed slap in the face for anyone who might have forgotten how Jeannie earned her gig as one of the friendliest faces on the Grand Ole Opry. Jeannie simply owns these 13 tracks...” The recording career of Jeannie Seely spanned six decades with the early 2011 release of a new CD titled Vintage Country which is available on Jeannie’s website and at select retail and online outlets. In 2017, Jeannie’s long-awaited new album Written In Song became available in select stores, through digital retailers, and on her website. The 14-track album contains original songs recorded by artists like Merle Haggard (“Life of a Rodeo Cowboy), Dottie West (“He’s All I Need”), Ernest Tubb (“Sometimes I Do”), Willie Nelson (“Senses”) and several more. Written In Song topped the list of CMT’s ‘New Albums in the New Year,’ and The Boot’s ‘Most Anticipated Albums’ and it continues to receive great reviews: She is “Miss Country Soul,” a beloved member of the Grand Ole Opry, a country icon and a Pennsylvania hit-maker well before Taylor Swift was born... Seely’s latest album WRITTEN IN SONG features 14 updated timeless classics she has written and co-written. -CMT.com, Lauren Tingle Jeannie Seely proves that her songs and her voice are as great as they ever were on this fantastic new album. -Roughstock, Matt Bjorke The country music singer has written songs for numerous artists and it’s refreshing to hear her voice along with her very own take and production on these songs. These are, after all, her songs to sing and she certainly has the vocal prowess to do so! -Backstage Axxess, Dee Haley Jeannie Seely soars on her new album, Written in Song. "Miss Country Soul" is back stronger than ever. There is a variety on her latest musical effort. It garners an A rating. -Digital Journal, Markos Papadatos Jeannie brought back the traditional country sound that fans have been longing for on Written In Song. Tracks include “Leavin’ & Sayin’ Goodbye” featuring special guests Kenny and Tess Sears, “Senses” with guests Connie Smith and Marty Stuart and “We’re Still Hangin’ In There Ain’t We Jessi” with Jan Howard and Jessi Colter. Written In Song is distributed by Smith Music Group. “Written In Song is such an exciting project for me for many reasons,” states Seely. “It consists of 14 songs that I have written over the years, most of them recorded by my peers and my heroes. It’s also very rewarding to know that these songs have stood the test of time and are just as viable today. I am extremely grateful to the musicians and singers who made them sound brand new.” For the past three decades Jeannie has lived close to the Grand Ole Opry in a quaint and comfortable home along the Cumberland River that she renovated and decorated herself. A major setback occurred in May 2010 when Jeannie lost her home, car and personal belongings in the devastating Nashville flood. Jeannie decided to rebuild her home and returned to it around the same time the Grand Ole Opry returned to the Opry House, her second home, which was also damaged. On November 20, 2010, Jeannie married Nashville attorney Gene Ward. Jeannie routinely performs at benefit shows for a wide variety of charities and causes. She has served as the co-host for the annual awards program for SOURCE, a nonprofit organization seeking to unify women executives and professionals that work in all facets of the Nashville music industry. Jeannie is proud to serve as a longtime spokesperson for the Humane Society by recording public service announcements and by serving as a HSUS “Special Friend” involved in supporting their animal protection programs. Jeannie is actively involved in numerous other organizations and causes such as the Opry Trust Fund (which provides financial assistance to needy individuals in the country music industry) and R.O.P.E. (Reunion Of Professional Entertainers). In April 2017, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives unanimously approved House Resolution 259 honoring Jeannie Seely on her 50th anniversary as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. In accepting the honor Jeannie noted, “Never have I been more proud of my heritage than I was today. It is my hope that I will always represent Pennsylvania in a manner that would make them proud of their native daughter, and I thank them for this distinguished honor.” Jeannie will be honored by the Nashville Association of Talent Directors (NATD) at their 7th Annual NATD Honors Gala scheduled for November 14, 2017, at the Hermitage Hotel. NATD has been a vital part of the Nashville Music Business Community by professionally representing, directing, and promoting the entertainment industry through its members. When not booked on concert dates out of town, Jeannie performs weekly on the Grand Ole Opry’s shows. She frequently hosts the Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree, appears on RFD television shows and specials, and has been featured in the Family Reunion TV and DVD tapings. Jeannie will be one of the featured performers on the Country Music Cruise that will set sail in February of 2018. Looking to the future of the Grand Ole Opry, Jeannie hopes for a peaceful coexistence of the old and the new. “I like adding the new talent to the Opry, but I don’t want them to ever change the Opry to where it becomes just another concert venue,” she states. “I like seeing the new artists, but value that tradition also and the uniqueness of it. And the music and all should change and will change. It always has.” “Hopefully, I will see a future of doing pretty much what I have done in the past,” explains Jeannie. “I want to keep doing personal appearances and shows and what I’ve been so blessed to be able to do in my life. I want to be anywhere they ask me to be. There are plenty of life’s highways I want to travel. I’m not done yet.” Jeannie notes, “I want to extend a huge ‘thanks’ to all of you who have been on my bandwagon for such a long time. To those of you just joining us, I hope the ride’s not over - so welcome aboard - and hang on!” Fans can write to Jeannie Seely in care of the Grand Ole Opry, 2804 Opryland Drive, Nashville, TN 37214. Jeannie’s website can be found at www.JeannieSeely.com, and Jeannie maintains a Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/JeannieSeely.

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it’s been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander’s Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger’s biography of Alexander. It’s unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we’re going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we’re going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties — studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it’s also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians — there were jobs that weren’t open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist — many were very vocally opposed to racism — but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we’ve looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we’re going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we’re going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we’re going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You’d Better Move On”] Arthur Alexander’s is one of the most tragic stories we’ll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander’s hit single “You Better Move On”. He said to Harrison, “Did you know I played bass on that?” and Harrison replied, “If I phoned Paul up now, he’d come over and kiss your feet”. That’s how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it’s hard to escape the fact that Alexander’s music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself — in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films — people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would “play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn’t make no distinction. That’s the way it was until much later”. The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold’s 1946 country hit “That’s How Much I Love You”: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “That’s How Much I Love You”] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place — by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn’t even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it’s almost always the latter, so from this point on, I’ll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander’s music, but as we’ve seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander’s father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as “June”, for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it — he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he’d never made a nickel as a player, and didn’t want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said — he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn’t stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat “King” Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes — though he wasn’t satisfied by McPhatter’s answer that “It’s just there”, thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song “One Mint Julep”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “One Mint Julep”] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like “Sixty Minute Man”, and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn’t need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening — there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it — W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they’d all done truly great things, but they’d done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big — making records of people’s weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. “A Fallen Star” was done as cheaply as humanly possible — it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time — he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn’t a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I’ve not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people — Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn’t understand his type of music — but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton’s recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison’s first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Sweet and Innocent”] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I’ve been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a “reality-hacking poet”, and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way — and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I’m not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn’t count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don’t even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm’s length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford’s fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley’s studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, “She Wanna Rock”] That record wasn’t a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun’s Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote “Stand By Your Man” with Tammy Wynette, and produced “He Stopped Loving Her Today” for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford’s studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford’s partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton’s record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, “Sally Sue Brown”] It’s a good record, but it didn’t have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events — his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he’d found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, “You Better Move On”, to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn’t produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King — he would later say, “It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to ‘Stand By Me’, which was a big record at the time. But I didn’t want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You Better Move On”] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”, which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on “You Better Move On”, and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said “If it wasn’t for Arthur Alexander, we’d all be at Reynolds” — the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn’t record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out — allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine — and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander’s talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander’s heart wasn’t in it — his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley’s studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, “Where Have You Been?” was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Where Have You Been?”] While the B-side, “Soldiers of Love” (and yes, it was called “Soldiers of Love” on the original label, rather than “Soldier”), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee’s backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Soldiers of Love”] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn’t having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur’s songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He’d started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he’d better write one himself, and he’d make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann — though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Anna (Go To Him)”] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry’s country classic “I Hang My Head and Cry” as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, “Go Home Girl”, another attempt at a “You Better Move On” soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn’t want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, “Every Day I Have To Cry”] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He’d often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox’s old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with “Snap Your Fingers”: [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, “Snap Your Fingers”] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other’s addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn’t been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison’s classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with “Raunchy” on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, “Baby For You”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Baby For You”] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life — he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur’s plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him — and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur’s version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song “Every Day I Have To Cry”, as “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”, in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn’t chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland — construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Better Move On", and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Mother-In-Law" by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it's been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander's Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger's biography of Alexander. It's unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we're going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we're going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties -- studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it's also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians -- there were jobs that weren't open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist -- many were very vocally opposed to racism -- but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we've looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we're going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we're going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we're going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You'd Better Move On"] Arthur Alexander's is one of the most tragic stories we'll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander's hit single "You Better Move On". He said to Harrison, "Did you know I played bass on that?" and Harrison replied, "If I phoned Paul up now, he'd come over and kiss your feet". That's how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it's hard to escape the fact that Alexander's music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself -- in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films -- people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry -- and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would "play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn't make no distinction. That's the way it was until much later". The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold's 1946 country hit "That's How Much I Love You": [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "That's How Much I Love You"] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place -- by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn't even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it's almost always the latter, so from this point on, I'll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander's music, but as we've seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander's father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as "June", for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it -- he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he'd never made a nickel as a player, and didn't want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said -- he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn't stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat "King" Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes -- though he wasn't satisfied by McPhatter's answer that "It's just there", thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song "One Mint Julep": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "One Mint Julep"] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like "Sixty Minute Man", and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn't need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening -- there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it -- W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they'd all done truly great things, but they'd done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big -- making records of people's weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. "A Fallen Star" was done as cheaply as humanly possible -- it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time -- he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn't a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I've not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people -- Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn't understand his type of music -- but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton's recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison's first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Sweet and Innocent"] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I've been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a "reality-hacking poet", and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way -- and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I'm not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn't count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don't even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm's length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford's fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley's studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, "She Wanna Rock"] That record wasn't a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun's Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" with Tammy Wynette, and produced "He Stopped Loving Her Today" for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford's studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford's partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton's record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, "Sally Sue Brown"] It's a good record, but it didn't have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events -- his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he'd found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, "You Better Move On", to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn't produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King -- he would later say, "It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to 'Stand By Me', which was a big record at the time. But I didn't want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You Better Move On"] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues", which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues"] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on "You Better Move On", and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said "If it wasn't for Arthur Alexander, we'd all be at Reynolds" -- the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn't record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out -- allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine -- and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander's talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander's heart wasn't in it -- his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley's studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, "Where Have You Been?" was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Where Have You Been?"] While the B-side, "Soldiers of Love" (and yes, it was called "Soldiers of Love" on the original label, rather than "Soldier"), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee's backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Soldiers of Love"] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn't having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur's songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He'd started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he'd better write one himself, and he'd make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann -- though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Anna (Go To Him)"] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry's country classic "I Hang My Head and Cry" as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, "Go Home Girl", another attempt at a "You Better Move On" soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn't want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, "Every Day I Have To Cry"] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He'd often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox's old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with "Snap Your Fingers": [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, "Snap Your Fingers"] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other's addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn't been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison's classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with "Raunchy" on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, "Baby For You": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Baby For You"] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life -- he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, "Johnny's Heartbreak": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Johnny's Heartbreak"] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur's plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him -- and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur's version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song "Every Day I Have To Cry", as "Every Day I Have To Cry Some", in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Every Day I Have To Cry Some"] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn't chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland -- construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

Rick Wolff is twenty-three-year veteran of ETC with many client-facing positions in Customer Service, Demo, and Events. After an almost twelve-year stint as the Hospitality Coordinator providing tours of the ETC facility, managing merch/SWAG as well as Corporate Events, he recently moved into IT to help support development efforts of new online business software and internal CRM. Known industry-wide for his high energy and fun tours of ETC, he accomplished his 1,500th customer tour last December. His goofy and theatrical inner nerd with merchandise led to creative offerings such as the now-famous Source 4 pillow, Eos console USB, and amazingly comfortable line of clothing that are ETC fan favorites. He credits his upbeat personality and “fun” mentality from the mentorship of the late Fred Foster who founded ETC. An alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rick is a rabid Badger fan and former member of the UW Band. With three adult children independently growing their lives, Rick enjoys time as an empty nester with his wife Valerie and two dogs on their lake property in rural Wisconsin.

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com (more…)

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Only the Lonely" by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts -- part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----  Resources Apologies for the delay this week -- I'm still trying to catch up after last week.    As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. I have relied for biographical information mostly on two books -- The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison's children, and Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth.  For the musicological analysis, I referred a lot to the essay “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style,” by Albin Zak, in Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music.   There are many Orbison collections available, but many have rerecordings rather than the original versions of his hits. The Monument Singles Collection is the originals.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript It's been nearly a year since we last looked at Roy Orbison, so it's probably a good idea to quickly catch up with where we were up to. Roy Orbison had started out as a rockabilly singer, with a group called the Wink Westerners who changed their name to the Teen Kings and were signed to Sun Records. Orbison had thought that he would like to be a ballad singer, but everyone at Sun was convinced that he would never make it as anything other than a rocker. He had one minor hit on Sun, "Ooby Dooby", but eventually got dissatisfied with the label and asked to be allowed to go to another label -- Sam Phillips agreed to free him from his contract, in return for all the songwriting royalties and credits for everything he'd recorded for Sun. Newly free, Orbison signed to a major publisher and a major record label, recording for RCA with the same Nashville A-Team that were recording with Elvis and Brenda Lee. He had some success as a songwriter, writing "Claudette", which became a hit for the Everly Brothers, but he did no better recording for RCA than he had recording for Sun, and soon he was dropped by his new label, and the money from "Claudette" ran out. By the middle of 1959, Roy Orbison was an absolute failure. But this episode, we're going to talk about what happened next, and the startling way in which someone who had been a failure when produced by both Sam Phillips and Chet Atkins managed to become one of the most important artists in the world on a tiny label with no track record. Today, we're going to look at "Only the Lonely", and the records that turned Roy Orbison into a star: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely"] It seems odd that Roy Orbison could thank Wesley Rose for introducing him to Monument Records. Rose was the co-owner of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest country music publishing company in the world, and the company to which Orbison had signed as a songwriter. Fred Foster, the owner of Monument, describes being called to a meeting of various Nashville music industry professionals, at which Rose asked him in front of everyone "Why are you trying to destroy Nashville by making these..." and then used an expletive I can't use here and a racial slur I *won't* use here, to describe the slightly R&B-infused music Foster was making. Foster was part of the new wave of Nashville record makers that also included Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, though at this time he was far less successful than either of them. Foster had started out as a songwriter, writing the words for the McGuire Sisters' hit "Picking Sweethearts": [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, "Picking Sweethearts"] He had moved from there into record production, despite having little musical or technical ability. He did, though, have a good ear for artists, and he made his career in the business by picking good people and letting them do the music they wanted. He started out at 4 Star Records, a small country label. From there he moved to Mercury Records, but he only spent a brief time there -- he was in favour of moving into the rockabilly market, while his superiors in the company weren't. He quickly found another role at ABC/Paramount, where he produced hits for a number of people, including one track we've already covered in this podcast, Lloyd Price's version of "Stagger Lee". He then put his entire life savings into starting up his own company, Monument, which he initially co-owned with a DJ named Buddy Deane. As Foster and Deane were based in Washington at this time, they used an image of the Washington Monument as the label's logo, and that also inspired the name. The first single they put out on the label caused them some problems. Billy Grammer, their first signing, recorded a song that they believed to be in the public domain, "Done Laid Around", which had recently been recorded by the Weavers under the name "Gotta Travel On": [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Gotta Travel On"] However, after putting out Grammer's version, Foster discovered that the song was actually in copyright, with a credit to the folk singer and folklorist Paul Clayton. I don't know if Clayton actually wrote the song or not -- it was common practice at that time for folk songs to be copyrighted in the name of an artist. But whether Clayton wrote the song or not, "Done Laid Around" had to be withdrawn from sale, and reissued under the name "Gotta Travel On", with Clayton credited as the composer -- something which cost the new label a substantial amount of money. But it worked out well for everyone, with Grammer's record eventually reaching number four on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Billy Grammer, "Gotta Travel On"] After that success, Foster bought out Buddy Deane and moved the label down to Nashville. They put out a few more singles over the next year, mostly by Grammer, but nothing recaptured that initial success. But it did mean that Foster started working with the Nashville A-Team of session musicians -- people like Bob Moore, the bass player who played on almost every important record to come out of Nashville at that time, including the Elvis records we looked at last week. Moore had also played on Roy Orbison's last sessions for RCA, where he'd seen how downcast Orbison was. Orbison had explained to Moore about how this was going to be his last session for RCA -- his contract was about to expire, and it was clear that Chet Atkins had no more idea than Sam Phillips how to make a successful Roy Orbison record. Moore told him not to worry -- he very obviously had talent, and Moore would speak to Wesley Rose about him. As well as being Orbison's music publisher, Rose was also Orbison's manager, something that would nowadays be considered a conflict of interest, but was par for the course at the time -- he was also the Everly Brothers' manager and publisher, which is how Orbison had managed to place "Claudette" with them. There were a lot of such backroom deals in the industry at the time, and few people knew about them -- for example, none of Bob Moore's fellow session players on the A-Team knew that he secretly owned thirty-seven percent of Monument Records. While Fred Foster is credited as the producer on most of Orbison's sessions from this point on, it's probably reasonable to think of Bob Moore as at the very least an uncredited co-producer -- he was the arranger on all of the records, and he was also the person who booked the other musicians on the sessions. Orbison was by this point so depressed about his own chances in the music industry that he couldn't believe that anyone wanted to sign him at all -- he was convinced even after signing that Fred Foster was confusing his own "Ooby Dooby" with another Sun single, Warren Smith's similar sounding "Rock and Roll Ruby": [Excerpt: Warren Smith, "Rock and Roll Ruby"] Wesley Rose had very clear ideas as to what Orbison's first single for Monument should be -- that last session at RCA had included two songs, "Paper Boy", and "With the Bug", that RCA had not bothered to release, and so Orbison went into the studio with much the same set of musicians he'd been working with at RCA, and cut the same songs he'd recorded there. The single was released, and made absolutely no impact -- unsurprising for a record that was really the end of Orbison's period as a failure, rather than the beginning of his golden period. That golden period came when he started collaborating with Joe Melson. The two men had known each other for a while, but the legend has it that they started writing songs together after Melson was walking along and saw Orbison sat in his car playing the guitar -- Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently had a son, Roy DeWayne Orbison (his middle name was after Orbison's friend Duane Eddy, though spelled differently), and the flat they were living in was so small that the only way Orbison could write any songs without disturbing the baby was to go and write them in the car. Melson apparently tapped on the car window, and asked what Roy was doing, and when Roy explained, he suggested that the two of them start working together. Both men were more than capable songwriters on their own, but they brought out the best in one another, and soon they were writing material that was unlike anything else in popular music at the time. Their first collaboration to be released was Orbison's second Monument single, "Uptown", a bluesy rock and roll track which saw the first big change in Orbison's style -- the introduction of a string section along with the Nashville A-Team. This was something that was only just starting to be done in Nashville, and it made little sense to most people involved that Orbison would want strings on what would otherwise be a rockabilly track, but they went ahead: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Uptown"] The string arrangement was written by Anita Kerr, of the Anita Kerr Singers, the female vocal group that would be called into any Nashville session that required women's voices (the male equivalent was the Jordanaires). Kerr would write a lot of the string arrangements for Orbison's records, and her vocal group -- with Joe Melson adding a single male voice -- would provide the backing vocals on them for the next few years. Wesley Rose was still unsure that Orbison could ever be a star, mostly because he thought he was so odd-looking, but "Uptown" started to prove him wrong. It made number seventy-two on the pop charts -- still not a massive hit, but the best he'd done since "Ooby Dooby" three years and two record labels earlier. But it was the next single, another Orbison/Melson collaboration, that would make him into one of the biggest stars in music. "Only the Lonely" had its roots in two other songs. Melson had written a song called "Cry" before ever meeting Orbison, and the two of them had reworked it into one called "Only the Lonely", but they were also working on another song at the same time. They had still not had a hit, and were trying to write something in the style of a current popular record. At the time, Mark Dinning was having huge success with a ballad called "Teen Angel", about a girl who gets run over by a train: [Excerpt: Mark Dinning, "Teen Angel"] Orbison and Melson were writing their own knock-off of that, called "Come Back to Me My Love". But when they played it for Fred Foster, he told them it was awful, and they should scrap the whole thing -- apart from the backing vocal hook Joe was singing. That was worth doing something with: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", vocal intro] They took that vocal part and put it together with "Only the Lonely" to make a finished song. According to most reports, rather than have Orbison record it, they initially tried to get Elvis to do it -- if they did, they must have known that they had no chance of it getting recorded, because Elvis was only recording songs published by Hill and Range, and Orbison and Melson were Acuff-Rose songwriters. They also, though, tried to get it recorded by the Everly Brothers, who were friends of Orbison, were also signed with Acuff-Rose, and were also managed by Wesley Rose, and even they turned it down. This is understandable, because the finished "Only the Lonely" is one of the most bizarrely structured songs ever to be a hit. Now, I've known this song for more than thirty years, I have a fair understanding of music, *and* I am explaining this with the help of a musicological essay on the song I've read, analysing it bar by bar. I am *still* not sure that my explanation of what's going on with this song is right. *That's* how oddly structured this song is. The intro is straightforward enough, the kind of thing that every song has. But then the lead vocal comes in, and rather than continue under the lead, like you would normally expect, the lead and backing vocals alternate, and push each other out of phase as a result. Where in the intro, the first "dum dum dum" starts on the first bar of the phrase, here it starts on the *second* bar of the phrase and extends past the end of Orbison's line, meaning the first line of the verse is actually five bars (from where the instruments come in after the a capella "Only the"), and not only that, the backing vocals are stressing different beats to the ones the lead vocal is stressing: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", first line of verse] This is quite astonishingly jarring. Pop songs, of whatever genre -- country, or blues, or rock and roll, or doo-wop, or whatever -- almost all work in fours. You have four-bar phrases that build up into eight- or twelve-bar verses, choruses, and bridges. Here, by overlaying two four-bar phrases out of synch with each other, Orbison and Melson have created a five-bar phrase -- although please note if you try to count bars along with these excerpts, you may come out with a different number, because phrases cross bar lines and I'm splitting these excerpts up by the vocal phrase rather than by the bar line. The lead vocal then comes back, on a different beat than expected -- the stresses in the melody have moved all over the place. Because the lead vocal starts on a different beat for the second phrase, even though it's the same length as the first phrase, it crosses more bar lines, meaning two five-bar phrases total eleven bars. Not only that, but the bass doesn't move to a new chord where you expect, but it stays on its original chord for an extra two beats, giving the impression of a six-beat bar, even though the drums are staying in four-four. So the first half of the verse is eleven bars long, if you don't get thrown by thinking one of the bars is six beats rather than four. Structurally, harmonically, and rhythmically, it feels like someone has tried to compromise between a twelve-bar blues and an eight-bar doo-wop song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", second line] There's then another section, which in itself is perfectly straightforward -- an eight-bar stop-time section, whose lyric is possibly inspired by the Drifters song that had used strings and rhythmic disorientation in a similar way a few months earlier: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", "There goes my baby..."] The only incongruity there is a very minor one -- a brief move to the fifth-of-fifth chord, which is the kind of extremely minor deviation from the key that's par for the course in pop music. That section by itself is nothing unusual. But then after that straightforward eight-bar section, which seems like a return to normality, we then get a five-bar section which takes us to the end of the verse: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", "But only the lonely know why..."] The song then basically repeats all its musical material from the start, with a few changes – the second time, the verse starts on the third of the scale rather than the first, and the melody goes up more, but it's structured similarly, and finishes in under two and a half minutes. So the musical material of the song covers twenty-four bars, not counting the intro. Twenty-four bars is actually a perfectly normal number of bars for a song to cover, but it would normally be broken down into three lots of eight or two lots of twelve -- instead it's a five, a six, an eight, and a five. I think. Honestly, I've gone back and forth several times about how best to break this up. The song is so familiar to most of us now that this doesn't sound strange any more, but I distinctly remember my own first time listening to it, when I was about eight, and wondering if the backing vocalists just hadn't known when to come in, if the people making the record just hadn't known how to make one properly, because this just sounded *wrong* to me. But it's that wrongness, that strangeness, of course -- along with Orbison's magnificent voice -- that made the record a hit, expressing perfectly the confusion and disorientation felt by the song's protagonist. It went to number two in the US, and number one in the UK, and instantly made Roy Orbison a star. A couple of slightly more conventional singles followed -- "Blue Angel" and "I'm Hurtin'" -- and they were both hits, but nowhere near as big as "Only the Lonely", and this seems to have convinced Orbison and Melson that they needed to follow their instincts and go for different structures than the norm. They started to make their songs, as far as possible, through-composed pieces. While most songs of the time break down into neat little sections -- verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, instrumental solo, chorus to fade, or a similar structure, Orbison and Melson's songs rarely have sections that repeat without any changes. Instead a single melody develops and takes twists and turns over the course of a couple of minutes, with Orbison usually singing throughout. This also had another advantage, as far as Orbison was concerned -- their songs hardly ever had space for an instrumental break, and so he never had to do the rock and roll star thing of moving around the stage and dancing while the instrumentalists soloed, which was something he felt uncomfortable doing. Instead he could just stand perfectly still at the microphone and sing. The first single they released that fit this new style was inspired by a piece of music Fred Foster introduced Orbison to -- Ravel's "Bolero": [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero" (West-Eastern Divan Orchestra)] Orbison and Melson took that basic feel and changed it into what would become Orbison's first number one in the US, "Running Scared": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Running Scared"] That song was apparently one that met some resistance from the Nashville A-Team. A chunk of the song is in rubato, or "free time", where the musicians speed up or slow down slightly to make the music more expressive. This was not something that Bob Moore, in particular, was comfortable with -- they were making pop music, weren't they? Pop music was for kids to dance to, and if kids were going to dance to it, it had to have a steady beat. Orbison wasn't very good at all at dealing with conflict, and wherever possible he would try to take the most positive attitude possible, and in this case he just went into the control room and waited, while the musicians tried to figure out a way of playing the song in strict tempo, and found it just didn't work. After a while, Orbison walked back into the studio and said "I think we should play it the way it was written", and the musicians finally went along with him. It may also have been on "Running Scared" that they pioneered a new recording technique, or at least new for Nashville, which was surprisingly conservative about recording technology for a town so rooted in the music industry. I've seen this story written about three different early Orbison songs, and it could have been any of them, but the descriptions of the "Running Scared" session are the most detailed. While Orbison had a great voice, at this point it wasn't especially powerful, and with the addition of strings, the band were overpowering his voice. At this time, it was customary for singers to record with the band, all performing together in one room, but the sound of the instruments was getting into Orbison's mic louder than his voice, making it impossible to get a good mix. Eventually, they brought a coatrack covered with coats into the studio, and used it to partition the space -- Orbison would stand on one side of it with his mic, and the band and their mics would be on the other side. The coats would deaden the sound of the musicians enough that Orbison's voice would be the main sound on his vocal mic. In this case, the reason his voice was being overpowered was that right at the end of the song he had to hit a high A in full voice -- something that's very difficult for a baritone like Orbison to do without going into falsetto. It may also be that he was nervous about trying this when the musicians could see him, and the coats in the way helped him feel more secure. Either way, he does a magnificent job on that note: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Running Scared", tag] Apparently when Chet Atkins popped into the studio for a visit, he was utterly bemused by what he saw -- but then he was impressed enough by the idea that he got RCA to build a proper vocal isolation booth at their studios to get the same effect. "Running Scared" also came along just after Orbison made one big change to his image. He'd been on tour with Patsy Cline, promoting "Blue Angel", and had left his glasses on the plane. As he couldn't see well without them, he had to resort to using his prescription sunglasses on stage, and was astonished to find that instead of looking gawky and rather odd-looking, the audience now seemed to think he looked cool and brooding. From that point on, he wore them constantly. For the next three years, Orbison and Melson continued working together and producing hits -- although Orbison also wrote several hits solo during this time, including "In Dreams", which many consider his greatest record. But Melson was becoming increasingly convinced that he was the real talent in the partnership. Melson was also putting out singles on his own at this time, and you can judge for yourself whether his most successful solo track, "Hey Mr. Cupid" is better or worse than the tracks Orbison did without him. [Excerpt: Joe Melson, "Hey Mr. Cupid"] Eventually Melson stopped working with Orbison altogether, after their last major collaboration, "Blue Bayou". This turned out to be the beginning of the collapse of Orbison's entire life, though it didn't seem like it at the time. It was the first crack in the team that produced his biggest hits, but for now he was on a roll. He started collaborating with another writer, Bill Dees, and even though Beatlemania was raging in the UK, and later in the US, he was one of a tiny number of American artists who continued to have hits. Indeed, two of the early collaborations by Orbison and Dees were the *only* two records by an American artist to go to number one in the UK between August 1963 and February 1965. The second of those, "Oh, Pretty Woman", also went to number one in the US, and became one of his most well-known songs: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Oh, Pretty Woman"] That song again caused problems with his new collaborator, as Bill Dees sang the harmony vocals on it, and felt he wasn't getting enough credit for that. But that was the high point for Orbison. Wesley Rose and Fred Foster had never got on, and Rose decided that he was going to move Orbison over to MGM Records, who gave him an advance of a million dollars, but immediately the hits dried up. And the events of the next few years were the kind of thing that would would break almost anyone. He had divorced his wife Claudette, who had inspired "Oh, Pretty Woman", in November 1964, just before signing to MGM, because he'd discovered she was cheating on him. But the two of them had been so in love they'd ended up reconciling and remarrying in December 1965. But then six months later, they were out riding motorbikes together, Claudette crashed hers, and she died. And then a little over two years later, while he was on tour in the UK, his house burned down, killing two of his three children. Orbison continued to work, putting out records that no-one was buying, and playing the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in the UK. He even remarried in 1969, and found happiness and a new family with his second wife. But for about twenty years, from 1965 through to 1985, he was in a wilderness period. Between personal tragedy, changing fashions in music, and the heart condition he developed in the 70s, he was no longer capable of making records that resonated with the public, even though his voice was as strong as ever, and he could still get an audience when singing those old hits. And even the old hits were hard to get hold of -- Monument Records went bankrupt in the seventies, and reissues of his old songs were tied up in legal battles over their ownership. But then things started to change for him in the mid-eighties. A few modern artists had had hits with cover versions of his hits, but the big change came in 1985, when he collaborated with his fellow ex-Sun performers Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, on an album called Class of 55: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Class of 55, "Coming Home"] That came out in 1986, and made the top twenty on the country charts -- the first time he'd had an album make any chart at all since 1966. Also in 1986, David Lynch used Orbison's "In Dreams" in his film Blue Velvet, which brought the record to a very different audience. He collaborated with k.d. lang, who was then one of the hottest new singers in country music, on a new version of his hit "Crying": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, "Crying"] That later won a Grammy. He recorded a new album of rerecordings of his greatest hits, which made the lower reaches of the charts. He got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame, and recorded a live TV special, A Black and White Night, where he was joined by Elvis' seventies backing band, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits, among others, all just acting as backing singers and musicians for a man they admired. He also joined with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys, whose first album made the top five: [Excerpt: The Travelling Wilburys, "Handle With Care"] And he recorded an album of new material, his best in decades, Mystery Girl, produced by Lynne and with songs written by Orbison, Lynne, and Petty -- along with a couple of songs contributed by famous admirers like Bono and the Edge of U2. But by the time that came out, Orbison was dead -- after a day flying model aeroplanes with his sons, he had a heart attack and died, aged only fifty-two. When Mystery Girl came out a couple of months later, it rose to the top five or better almost everywhere -- and in the UK and US, he had two albums in the top five at the same time, as in the UK a hits compilation was also up there, while in the US the Wilburys album was still near the top of the charts. Orbison's is one of the saddest stories in rock music, with one of the greatest talents in history getting derailed for decades by heartbreaking tragedies unimaginable to most of us, and then dying right at the point he was finally starting to get the recognition he deserved. But the work he did, both as a songwriter and as a singer, would inspire people long after his death.

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’m still trying to catch up after last week.    As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. I have relied for biographical information mostly on two books — The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children, and Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth.  For the musicological analysis, I referred a lot to the essay “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style,” by Albin Zak, in Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music.   There are many Orbison collections available, but many have rerecordings rather than the original versions of his hits. The Monument Singles Collection is the originals.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript It’s been nearly a year since we last looked at Roy Orbison, so it’s probably a good idea to quickly catch up with where we were up to. Roy Orbison had started out as a rockabilly singer, with a group called the Wink Westerners who changed their name to the Teen Kings and were signed to Sun Records. Orbison had thought that he would like to be a ballad singer, but everyone at Sun was convinced that he would never make it as anything other than a rocker. He had one minor hit on Sun, “Ooby Dooby”, but eventually got dissatisfied with the label and asked to be allowed to go to another label — Sam Phillips agreed to free him from his contract, in return for all the songwriting royalties and credits for everything he’d recorded for Sun. Newly free, Orbison signed to a major publisher and a major record label, recording for RCA with the same Nashville A-Team that were recording with Elvis and Brenda Lee. He had some success as a songwriter, writing “Claudette”, which became a hit for the Everly Brothers, but he did no better recording for RCA than he had recording for Sun, and soon he was dropped by his new label, and the money from “Claudette” ran out. By the middle of 1959, Roy Orbison was an absolute failure. But this episode, we’re going to talk about what happened next, and the startling way in which someone who had been a failure when produced by both Sam Phillips and Chet Atkins managed to become one of the most important artists in the world on a tiny label with no track record. Today, we’re going to look at “Only the Lonely”, and the records that turned Roy Orbison into a star: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”] It seems odd that Roy Orbison could thank Wesley Rose for introducing him to Monument Records. Rose was the co-owner of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest country music publishing company in the world, and the company to which Orbison had signed as a songwriter. Fred Foster, the owner of Monument, describes being called to a meeting of various Nashville music industry professionals, at which Rose asked him in front of everyone “Why are you trying to destroy Nashville by making these…” and then used an expletive I can’t use here and a racial slur I *won’t* use here, to describe the slightly R&B-infused music Foster was making. Foster was part of the new wave of Nashville record makers that also included Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, though at this time he was far less successful than either of them. Foster had started out as a songwriter, writing the words for the McGuire Sisters’ hit “Picking Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Picking Sweethearts”] He had moved from there into record production, despite having little musical or technical ability. He did, though, have a good ear for artists, and he made his career in the business by picking good people and letting them do the music they wanted. He started out at 4 Star Records, a small country label. From there he moved to Mercury Records, but he only spent a brief time there — he was in favour of moving into the rockabilly market, while his superiors in the company weren’t. He quickly found another role at ABC/Paramount, where he produced hits for a number of people, including one track we’ve already covered in this podcast, Lloyd Price’s version of “Stagger Lee”. He then put his entire life savings into starting up his own company, Monument, which he initially co-owned with a DJ named Buddy Deane. As Foster and Deane were based in Washington at this time, they used an image of the Washington Monument as the label’s logo, and that also inspired the name. The first single they put out on the label caused them some problems. Billy Grammer, their first signing, recorded a song that they believed to be in the public domain, “Done Laid Around”, which had recently been recorded by the Weavers under the name “Gotta Travel On”: [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Gotta Travel On”] However, after putting out Grammer’s version, Foster discovered that the song was actually in copyright, with a credit to the folk singer and folklorist Paul Clayton. I don’t know if Clayton actually wrote the song or not — it was common practice at that time for folk songs to be copyrighted in the name of an artist. But whether Clayton wrote the song or not, “Done Laid Around” had to be withdrawn from sale, and reissued under the name “Gotta Travel On”, with Clayton credited as the composer — something which cost the new label a substantial amount of money. But it worked out well for everyone, with Grammer’s record eventually reaching number four on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Billy Grammer, “Gotta Travel On”] After that success, Foster bought out Buddy Deane and moved the label down to Nashville. They put out a few more singles over the next year, mostly by Grammer, but nothing recaptured that initial success. But it did mean that Foster started working with the Nashville A-Team of session musicians — people like Bob Moore, the bass player who played on almost every important record to come out of Nashville at that time, including the Elvis records we looked at last week. Moore had also played on Roy Orbison’s last sessions for RCA, where he’d seen how downcast Orbison was. Orbison had explained to Moore about how this was going to be his last session for RCA — his contract was about to expire, and it was clear that Chet Atkins had no more idea than Sam Phillips how to make a successful Roy Orbison record. Moore told him not to worry — he very obviously had talent, and Moore would speak to Wesley Rose about him. As well as being Orbison’s music publisher, Rose was also Orbison’s manager, something that would nowadays be considered a conflict of interest, but was par for the course at the time — he was also the Everly Brothers’ manager and publisher, which is how Orbison had managed to place “Claudette” with them. There were a lot of such backroom deals in the industry at the time, and few people knew about them — for example, none of Bob Moore’s fellow session players on the A-Team knew that he secretly owned thirty-seven percent of Monument Records. While Fred Foster is credited as the producer on most of Orbison’s sessions from this point on, it’s probably reasonable to think of Bob Moore as at the very least an uncredited co-producer — he was the arranger on all of the records, and he was also the person who booked the other musicians on the sessions. Orbison was by this point so depressed about his own chances in the music industry that he couldn’t believe that anyone wanted to sign him at all — he was convinced even after signing that Fred Foster was confusing his own “Ooby Dooby” with another Sun single, Warren Smith’s similar sounding “Rock and Roll Ruby”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “Rock and Roll Ruby”] Wesley Rose had very clear ideas as to what Orbison’s first single for Monument should be — that last session at RCA had included two songs, “Paper Boy”, and “With the Bug”, that RCA had not bothered to release, and so Orbison went into the studio with much the same set of musicians he’d been working with at RCA, and cut the same songs he’d recorded there. The single was released, and made absolutely no impact — unsurprising for a record that was really the end of Orbison’s period as a failure, rather than the beginning of his golden period. That golden period came when he started collaborating with Joe Melson. The two men had known each other for a while, but the legend has it that they started writing songs together after Melson was walking along and saw Orbison sat in his car playing the guitar — Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently had a son, Roy DeWayne Orbison (his middle name was after Orbison’s friend Duane Eddy, though spelled differently), and the flat they were living in was so small that the only way Orbison could write any songs without disturbing the baby was to go and write them in the car. Melson apparently tapped on the car window, and asked what Roy was doing, and when Roy explained, he suggested that the two of them start working together. Both men were more than capable songwriters on their own, but they brought out the best in one another, and soon they were writing material that was unlike anything else in popular music at the time. Their first collaboration to be released was Orbison’s second Monument single, “Uptown”, a bluesy rock and roll track which saw the first big change in Orbison’s style — the introduction of a string section along with the Nashville A-Team. This was something that was only just starting to be done in Nashville, and it made little sense to most people involved that Orbison would want strings on what would otherwise be a rockabilly track, but they went ahead: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Uptown”] The string arrangement was written by Anita Kerr, of the Anita Kerr Singers, the female vocal group that would be called into any Nashville session that required women’s voices (the male equivalent was the Jordanaires). Kerr would write a lot of the string arrangements for Orbison’s records, and her vocal group — with Joe Melson adding a single male voice — would provide the backing vocals on them for the next few years. Wesley Rose was still unsure that Orbison could ever be a star, mostly because he thought he was so odd-looking, but “Uptown” started to prove him wrong. It made number seventy-two on the pop charts — still not a massive hit, but the best he’d done since “Ooby Dooby” three years and two record labels earlier. But it was the next single, another Orbison/Melson collaboration, that would make him into one of the biggest stars in music. “Only the Lonely” had its roots in two other songs. Melson had written a song called “Cry” before ever meeting Orbison, and the two of them had reworked it into one called “Only the Lonely”, but they were also working on another song at the same time. They had still not had a hit, and were trying to write something in the style of a current popular record. At the time, Mark Dinning was having huge success with a ballad called “Teen Angel”, about a girl who gets run over by a train: [Excerpt: Mark Dinning, “Teen Angel”] Orbison and Melson were writing their own knock-off of that, called “Come Back to Me My Love”. But when they played it for Fred Foster, he told them it was awful, and they should scrap the whole thing — apart from the backing vocal hook Joe was singing. That was worth doing something with: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, vocal intro] They took that vocal part and put it together with “Only the Lonely” to make a finished song. According to most reports, rather than have Orbison record it, they initially tried to get Elvis to do it — if they did, they must have known that they had no chance of it getting recorded, because Elvis was only recording songs published by Hill and Range, and Orbison and Melson were Acuff-Rose songwriters. They also, though, tried to get it recorded by the Everly Brothers, who were friends of Orbison, were also signed with Acuff-Rose, and were also managed by Wesley Rose, and even they turned it down. This is understandable, because the finished “Only the Lonely” is one of the most bizarrely structured songs ever to be a hit. Now, I’ve known this song for more than thirty years, I have a fair understanding of music, *and* I am explaining this with the help of a musicological essay on the song I’ve read, analysing it bar by bar. I am *still* not sure that my explanation of what’s going on with this song is right. *That’s* how oddly structured this song is. The intro is straightforward enough, the kind of thing that every song has. But then the lead vocal comes in, and rather than continue under the lead, like you would normally expect, the lead and backing vocals alternate, and push each other out of phase as a result. Where in the intro, the first “dum dum dum” starts on the first bar of the phrase, here it starts on the *second* bar of the phrase and extends past the end of Orbison’s line, meaning the first line of the verse is actually five bars (from where the instruments come in after the a capella “Only the”), and not only that, the backing vocals are stressing different beats to the ones the lead vocal is stressing: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, first line of verse] This is quite astonishingly jarring. Pop songs, of whatever genre — country, or blues, or rock and roll, or doo-wop, or whatever — almost all work in fours. You have four-bar phrases that build up into eight- or twelve-bar verses, choruses, and bridges. Here, by overlaying two four-bar phrases out of synch with each other, Orbison and Melson have created a five-bar phrase — although please note if you try to count bars along with these excerpts, you may come out with a different number, because phrases cross bar lines and I’m splitting these excerpts up by the vocal phrase rather than by the bar line. The lead vocal then comes back, on a different beat than expected — the stresses in the melody have moved all over the place. Because the lead vocal starts on a different beat for the second phrase, even though it’s the same length as the first phrase, it crosses more bar lines, meaning two five-bar phrases total eleven bars. Not only that, but the bass doesn’t move to a new chord where you expect, but it stays on its original chord for an extra two beats, giving the impression of a six-beat bar, even though the drums are staying in four-four. So the first half of the verse is eleven bars long, if you don’t get thrown by thinking one of the bars is six beats rather than four. Structurally, harmonically, and rhythmically, it feels like someone has tried to compromise between a twelve-bar blues and an eight-bar doo-wop song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, second line] There’s then another section, which in itself is perfectly straightforward — an eight-bar stop-time section, whose lyric is possibly inspired by the Drifters song that had used strings and rhythmic disorientation in a similar way a few months earlier: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, “There goes my baby…”] The only incongruity there is a very minor one — a brief move to the fifth-of-fifth chord, which is the kind of extremely minor deviation from the key that’s par for the course in pop music. That section by itself is nothing unusual. But then after that straightforward eight-bar section, which seems like a return to normality, we then get a five-bar section which takes us to the end of the verse: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, “But only the lonely know why…”] The song then basically repeats all its musical material from the start, with a few changes – the second time, the verse starts on the third of the scale rather than the first, and the melody goes up more, but it’s structured similarly, and finishes in under two and a half minutes. So the musical material of the song covers twenty-four bars, not counting the intro. Twenty-four bars is actually a perfectly normal number of bars for a song to cover, but it would normally be broken down into three lots of eight or two lots of twelve — instead it’s a five, a six, an eight, and a five. I think. Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth several times about how best to break this up. The song is so familiar to most of us now that this doesn’t sound strange any more, but I distinctly remember my own first time listening to it, when I was about eight, and wondering if the backing vocalists just hadn’t known when to come in, if the people making the record just hadn’t known how to make one properly, because this just sounded *wrong* to me. But it’s that wrongness, that strangeness, of course — along with Orbison’s magnificent voice — that made the record a hit, expressing perfectly the confusion and disorientation felt by the song’s protagonist. It went to number two in the US, and number one in the UK, and instantly made Roy Orbison a star. A couple of slightly more conventional singles followed — “Blue Angel” and “I’m Hurtin'” — and they were both hits, but nowhere near as big as “Only the Lonely”, and this seems to have convinced Orbison and Melson that they needed to follow their instincts and go for different structures than the norm. They started to make their songs, as far as possible, through-composed pieces. While most songs of the time break down into neat little sections — verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, instrumental solo, chorus to fade, or a similar structure, Orbison and Melson’s songs rarely have sections that repeat without any changes. Instead a single melody develops and takes twists and turns over the course of a couple of minutes, with Orbison usually singing throughout. This also had another advantage, as far as Orbison was concerned — their songs hardly ever had space for an instrumental break, and so he never had to do the rock and roll star thing of moving around the stage and dancing while the instrumentalists soloed, which was something he felt uncomfortable doing. Instead he could just stand perfectly still at the microphone and sing. The first single they released that fit this new style was inspired by a piece of music Fred Foster introduced Orbison to — Ravel’s “Bolero”: [Excerpt: Ravel, “Bolero” (West-Eastern Divan Orchestra)] Orbison and Melson took that basic feel and changed it into what would become Orbison’s first number one in the US, “Running Scared”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Running Scared”] That song was apparently one that met some resistance from the Nashville A-Team. A chunk of the song is in rubato, or “free time”, where the musicians speed up or slow down slightly to make the music more expressive. This was not something that Bob Moore, in particular, was comfortable with — they were making pop music, weren’t they? Pop music was for kids to dance to, and if kids were going to dance to it, it had to have a steady beat. Orbison wasn’t very good at all at dealing with conflict, and wherever possible he would try to take the most positive attitude possible, and in this case he just went into the control room and waited, while the musicians tried to figure out a way of playing the song in strict tempo, and found it just didn’t work. After a while, Orbison walked back into the studio and said “I think we should play it the way it was written”, and the musicians finally went along with him. It may also have been on “Running Scared” that they pioneered a new recording technique, or at least new for Nashville, which was surprisingly conservative about recording technology for a town so rooted in the music industry. I’ve seen this story written about three different early Orbison songs, and it could have been any of them, but the descriptions of the “Running Scared” session are the most detailed. While Orbison had a great voice, at this point it wasn’t especially powerful, and with the addition of strings, the band were overpowering his voice. At this time, it was customary for singers to record with the band, all performing together in one room, but the sound of the instruments was getting into Orbison’s mic louder than his voice, making it impossible to get a good mix. Eventually, they brought a coatrack covered with coats into the studio, and used it to partition the space — Orbison would stand on one side of it with his mic, and the band and their mics would be on the other side. The coats would deaden the sound of the musicians enough that Orbison’s voice would be the main sound on his vocal mic. In this case, the reason his voice was being overpowered was that right at the end of the song he had to hit a high A in full voice — something that’s very difficult for a baritone like Orbison to do without going into falsetto. It may also be that he was nervous about trying this when the musicians could see him, and the coats in the way helped him feel more secure. Either way, he does a magnificent job on that note: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Running Scared”, tag] Apparently when Chet Atkins popped into the studio for a visit, he was utterly bemused by what he saw — but then he was impressed enough by the idea that he got RCA to build a proper vocal isolation booth at their studios to get the same effect. “Running Scared” also came along just after Orbison made one big change to his image. He’d been on tour with Patsy Cline, promoting “Blue Angel”, and had left his glasses on the plane. As he couldn’t see well without them, he had to resort to using his prescription sunglasses on stage, and was astonished to find that instead of looking gawky and rather odd-looking, the audience now seemed to think he looked cool and brooding. From that point on, he wore them constantly. For the next three years, Orbison and Melson continued working together and producing hits — although Orbison also wrote several hits solo during this time, including “In Dreams”, which many consider his greatest record. But Melson was becoming increasingly convinced that he was the real talent in the partnership. Melson was also putting out singles on his own at this time, and you can judge for yourself whether his most successful solo track, “Hey Mr. Cupid” is better or worse than the tracks Orbison did without him. [Excerpt: Joe Melson, “Hey Mr. Cupid”] Eventually Melson stopped working with Orbison altogether, after their last major collaboration, “Blue Bayou”. This turned out to be the beginning of the collapse of Orbison’s entire life, though it didn’t seem like it at the time. It was the first crack in the team that produced his biggest hits, but for now he was on a roll. He started collaborating with another writer, Bill Dees, and even though Beatlemania was raging in the UK, and later in the US, he was one of a tiny number of American artists who continued to have hits. Indeed, two of the early collaborations by Orbison and Dees were the *only* two records by an American artist to go to number one in the UK between August 1963 and February 1965. The second of those, “Oh, Pretty Woman”, also went to number one in the US, and became one of his most well-known songs: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Oh, Pretty Woman”] That song again caused problems with his new collaborator, as Bill Dees sang the harmony vocals on it, and felt he wasn’t getting enough credit for that. But that was the high point for Orbison. Wesley Rose and Fred Foster had never got on, and Rose decided that he was going to move Orbison over to MGM Records, who gave him an advance of a million dollars, but immediately the hits dried up. And the events of the next few years were the kind of thing that would would break almost anyone. He had divorced his wife Claudette, who had inspired “Oh, Pretty Woman”, in November 1964, just before signing to MGM, because he’d discovered she was cheating on him. But the two of them had been so in love they’d ended up reconciling and remarrying in December 1965. But then six months later, they were out riding motorbikes together, Claudette crashed hers, and she died. And then a little over two years later, while he was on tour in the UK, his house burned down, killing two of his three children. Orbison continued to work, putting out records that no-one was buying, and playing the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in the UK. He even remarried in 1969, and found happiness and a new family with his second wife. But for about twenty years, from 1965 through to 1985, he was in a wilderness period. Between personal tragedy, changing fashions in music, and the heart condition he developed in the 70s, he was no longer capable of making records that resonated with the public, even though his voice was as strong as ever, and he could still get an audience when singing those old hits. And even the old hits were hard to get hold of — Monument Records went bankrupt in the seventies, and reissues of his old songs were tied up in legal battles over their ownership. But then things started to change for him in the mid-eighties. A few modern artists had had hits with cover versions of his hits, but the big change came in 1985, when he collaborated with his fellow ex-Sun performers Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, on an album called Class of 55: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Class of 55, “Coming Home”] That came out in 1986, and made the top twenty on the country charts — the first time he’d had an album make any chart at all since 1966. Also in 1986, David Lynch used Orbison’s “In Dreams” in his film Blue Velvet, which brought the record to a very different audience. He collaborated with k.d. lang, who was then one of the hottest new singers in country music, on a new version of his hit “Crying”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, “Crying”] That later won a Grammy. He recorded a new album of rerecordings of his greatest hits, which made the lower reaches of the charts. He got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame, and recorded a live TV special, A Black and White Night, where he was joined by Elvis’ seventies backing band, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits, among others, all just acting as backing singers and musicians for a man they admired. He also joined with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys, whose first album made the top five: [Excerpt: The Travelling Wilburys, “Handle With Care”] And he recorded an album of new material, his best in decades, Mystery Girl, produced by Lynne and with songs written by Orbison, Lynne, and Petty — along with a couple of songs contributed by famous admirers like Bono and the Edge of U2. But by the time that came out, Orbison was dead — after a day flying model aeroplanes with his sons, he had a heart attack and died, aged only fifty-two. When Mystery Girl came out a couple of months later, it rose to the top five or better almost everywhere — and in the UK and US, he had two albums in the top five at the same time, as in the UK a hits compilation was also up there, while in the US the Wilburys album was still near the top of the charts. Orbison’s is one of the saddest stories in rock music, with one of the greatest talents in history getting derailed for decades by heartbreaking tragedies unimaginable to most of us, and then dying right at the point he was finally starting to get the recognition he deserved. But the work he did, both as a songwriter and as a singer, would inspire people long after his death.

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes.  Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “16 Candles” by the Crests. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis’ less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today’s episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I’m dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I’ve used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I’ve come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I’ll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I’ll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we’re going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we’re going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don’t, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino’s biggest hits. Price had a song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino’s earlier hit “The Fat Man”, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, “Just Because” went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Just Because”] But it wasn’t until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I’ve changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that’s better known as “Alabamy Bound”, but was here called “Don’t You Leave Me Here”: [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, “Don’t You Leave Me Here”] The line, “If the boat don’t sink and the Stack don’t drown” refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”. But it was probably the boats’ reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name “Stack Lee”, at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn’t want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as “Billy the Bully”, but bully didn’t quite, or didn’t only, mean what it means today. A “bully”, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family — one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons’ rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, “Stack-A-Lee Blues”] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it’s difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, “Who’s treating?” and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons’ step-brother had murdered Shelton’s friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other’s hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons’ hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton’s hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits — seventy-five cents — for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn’t going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn’t hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to *make* you kill me” and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said “I told you to give me my hat”, picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, “Stack O’ Lee Blues”] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail — that’s something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today’s money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer — a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics — a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton’s arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater’s political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton’s faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn’t reselected, Shelton’s trial wasn’t held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn’t going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he’d gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison — presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial — just before Dryden’s death, in fact — a song called “Stack-A-Lee” was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin’s performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as “Little Egypt” who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin’s, had written “Harlem Rag”, which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, “Harlem Rag”] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton’s release. While we can’t know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the “Stagger Lee” song were written by Turpin. It’s been suggested that he based the song on “Bully of the Town”, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here’s a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, “Bully of the Town”] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully — in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully — and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It’s easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went “Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee”. In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called “Stack O’Lee Blues”, and we’ve heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode — that’s what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called “Skeg-A-Lee Blues” in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, “Skeg-A-Lee Blues”] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from “Frankie and Johnny”, another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn’t sound like him to me, and I can’t find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to “the Bully of the Town”: [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull — Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can’t arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee (1928 version)”] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn’t be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as “Bama” who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, “Stackerlee”] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone’s repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with — Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender’s glass. From there, the story might change — in some versions, Lee would go free — sometimes because they couldn’t catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn’t as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I’ve read, able to play “Stagger Lee” for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by “Archibald and His Orchestra”: [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, “Stack A’Lee”] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald’s only hit. That’s the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts — which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price’s career was revitalised — and “Stagger Lee” was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song — in versions usually based on Price’s — became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, “Stagger Lee”] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, “Stagger Lee”] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we’ve been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority — a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some — I’ve seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of “Stagger Lee” at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said “Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I’m concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee.” The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called “toasts”. Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Jo Jo Gunne”), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain’s daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition”, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson’s field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here’s the version of Stagger Lee he collected — there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you’re listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, “Stagger Lee”] After Jackson’s book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including “The Great Stack-A-Lee”, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “The Great Stack-A-Lee”] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson’s book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there’s more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There’s this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] That’s not in the versions of the toast in Jackson’s book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, “Two-Time Slim”: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “Two-Time Slim”] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin’s great poem “Stagolee Wonders”, a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from “Stagolee Wonders” on “Poems for a Listener”,] Baldwin’s view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, “a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee’s roots are there, and Stagger Lee’s often been a preacher. He’s one who conveys the real history.” It’s a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it’s a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price’s hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of “Stagger Lee”, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he’s now best known, “Personality”: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Personality”] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion — he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours — indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with “Stagger Lee”, and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Episode seventy-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” by Buddy Holly, and at the reasons he ended up on the plane that killed him. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper.  Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/—-more—- Before I get to the resources and transcript, a quick apology. This one is up more than a day late. I’ve not been coping very well with all the news about coronavirus outbreak (I’m one of those who’s been advised by the government to sel-isolate for three months) and things are taking longer than normal. Next week’s should be up at the normal time. Also, no Mixcloud this week — I get a server error when uploading the file to Mixcloud’s site. Erratum I mention that Bob Dylan saw the first show on the Winter Dance Party tour with no drummer. He actually saw the last one with the drummer, who was hospitalised that night after the show, not before the show as I had thought.  Resources   I’ve used two biographies for the bulk of the information here — Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman. I also used  Beverly Mendheim’s book on Ritchie Valens. There are many collections of Buddy Holly’s work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection, which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before I begin, this episode will deal with both accidental bereavement and miscarriage, so if you think those subjects might be traumatising, you may want to skip this one. Today, we’re going to look at a record that holds a sad place in rock and roll’s history, because it’s the record that is often credited as “the first posthumous rock and roll hit”. Now, that’s not strictly true — as we’ve talked about before in this podcast, there is rarely, if ever, a “first” anything at all, and indeed we’ve already looked at an earlier posthumous hit when we talked about “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace. But it is a very sad fact that “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” by Buddy Holly ended up becoming the first of several posthumous hit records that Holly had, and that there would be many more posthumous hit records by other performers after him than there had been before him. Buddy Holly’s death is something that hangs over every attempt to tell his story. More than any other musician of his generation, his death has entered rock and roll mythology. Even if you don’t know Holly’s music, you probably know two things about him — that he wore glasses, and that he died in a plane crash. You’re likely also to know that Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in the same crash, even if you don’t know any of the songs that either of those two artists recorded. Normally, when you’re telling a story, you’d leave that to the end, but in the case of Holly it overshadows his life so much that there’s absolutely no point trying to build up any suspense — not to mention that there’s something distasteful about turning a real person’s tragic death into entertainment. I hope I’ve not done so in episodes where other people have died, but it’s even more important not to do so here. Because while the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper is always portrayed as an accident, the cause of their death has its roots in exploitation of young, vulnerable, people, and a pressure to work no matter what. So today, we’re going to look at how “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” became Buddy Holly’s last single: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”] People often talk about how Buddy Holly’s career was short, but what they don’t mention is that his chart career was even shorter. Holly’s first chart single, “That’ll Be the Day”, was released in May 1957. His last top thirty single during his lifetime, “Think it Over”, was released in May 1958. By the time he went on the Winter Dance Party, the tour that led to his death, in January 1959, he had gone many months without a hit, and his most recent record, “Heartbeat”, had only reached number eighty-two. He’d lost every important professional relationship in his life, and had split from the group that had made him famous. To see how this happened, we need to pick up where we left off with him last time. You’ll remember that when we left the Crickets, they’d released “That’ll Be the Day”, and it hadn’t yet become a hit, and they’d also released “Words of Love” as a Buddy Holly solo single. While there were different names on them, the same people would make the records, whether it was a solo or group record — Buddy Holly on vocals and lead guitar, Niki Sullivan on rhythm guitar, Jerry Allison on drums, Joe Mauldin on bass, and producer Norman Petty and his wife sometimes adding keyboards. They didn’t distinguish between “Buddy Holly” and “Crickets” material when recording — rather they separated it out later. The more straight-ahead rock and roll records would have backing vocals overdubbed on them, usually by a vocal group called the Picks, and would be released as Crickets records, while the more experimental ones would be left with only Holly’s vocal on, and would be released as solo records. (There were no records released as by “Buddy Holly and the Crickets” at the time, because the whole idea of the split was that DJs would play two records instead of one if they appeared to be by different artists). And they were recording *a lot*. Two days after “That’ll be the Day” was released, on the twenty-seventh of May 1957, they recorded “Everyday” and “Not Fade Away”. Between then and the first of July they recorded “Tell Me How”, “Oh Boy”, “Listen to Me”, “I’m Going to Love You Too”, and cover versions of Fats Domino’s “Valley of Tears” and Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”. Remember, this was all before they’d had a single hit — “That’ll Be the Day” and “Words of Love” still hadn’t charted. This is quite an astonishing outpouring of songs, but the big leap forward came on the second of July, when they made a second attempt at a song they’d attempted to record back in late 1956, and had been playing in their stage show since then. The song had originally been titled “Cindy Lou”, after Buddy’s niece, but Jerry Allison had recently started dating a girl named Peggy Sue Gerrison, and they decided to change the lyrics to be about her. The song had also originally been played as a Latin-flavoured number, but when they were warming up, Allison started playing a fast paradiddle on his snare drum. Holly decided that they were going to change the tempo of the song and have Allison play that part all the way through, though this meant that Allison had to go out and play in the hallway rather than in the main studio, because the noise from his drums was too loud in the studio itself. The final touch came when Petty decided, on the song’s intro, to put the drums through the echo chamber and keep flicking the switch on the echo from “on” to “off”, so it sounded like there were two drummers playing: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Peggy Sue”] Someone else was flicking a switch, too — Niki Sullivan was already starting to regret joining the Crickets, because there really wasn’t room for his rhythm guitar on most of the songs they were playing. And on “Peggy Sue” he ended up not playing at all. On that song, Buddy had to switch between two pickups — one for when he was singing, and another to give his guitar a different tone during the solo. But he was playing so fast that he couldn’t move his hand to the switch, and in those days there were no foot pedals one could use for the same sort of effect. So Niki Sullivan became Holly’s foot pedal. He knelt beside Holly and waited for the point when the solo was about to start, and flicked the switch on his guitar. When the solo came to an end again, Sullivan flicked the switch again and it went back to the original sound. [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Peggy Sue”] It’s a really strange sounding record, if you start to pay attention to it. Other than during the solo, Holly’s guitar is so quiet that you can hear the plectrum as loudly as you can hear the notes. He just keeps up a ram-a-ram-a quaver downstrum throughout the whole song, which sounds simple until you try to play it, at which point you realise that you start feeling like your arm’s going to fall off about a quarter of the way through. And there’s just that, those drums (playing a part which must be similarly physically demanding) with their weird echo, and Holly’s voice. In theory, Joe Mauldin’s bass is also in there, but it’s there at almost homeopathic levels. It’s a record that is entirely carried by the voice, the drums, and the guitar solo. Of course, Niki Sullivan wasn’t happy about being relegated to guitar-switch-flicker, and there were other tensions within the group as well. Holly was having an affair with a married woman at the time — and Jerry Allison, who was Holly’s best friend as well as his bandmate, was also in love with her, though not in a relationship with her, and so Holly had to keep his affair hidden from his best friend. And not only that, but Allison and Sullivan were starting to have problems with each other, too. To help defuse the situation, Holly’s brother Larry took him on holiday, to go fishing in Colorado. But even there, the stress of the current situation was showing — Buddy spent much of the trip worried about the lack of success of “That’ll Be the Day”, and obsessing over a new record by a new singer, Paul Anka, that had gone to number one: [Excerpt: Paul Anka, “Diana”] Holly was insistent that he could do better than that, and that his records were at least as good. But so far they were doing nothing at all on the charts. But then a strange thing happened. “That’ll Be the Day” started getting picked up by black radio stations. It turned out that there had been another group called the Crickets — a black doo-wop group from about five years earlier, led by a singer called Dean Barlow, who had specialised in smooth Ink Spots-style ballads: [Excerpt The Crickets featuring Dean Barlow, “Be Faithful”] People at black radio stations had assumed that this new group called the Crickets was the same one, and had then discovered that “That’ll Be the Day” was really rather good. The group even got booked on an otherwise all-black tour headlined by Clyde McPhatter and Otis Rush, booked by people who hadn’t realised they were white. Before going on the tour, they formally arranged to have Norman Petty be their manager as well as their producer. They were a success on the tour, though when it reached the Harlem Apollo, which had notoriously hostile audiences, the group had to reconfigure their sets, as the audiences didn’t like any of Holly’s original material except “That’ll Be the Day”, but did like the group’s cover versions of R&B records like “Bo Diddley”: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Bo Diddley (Undubbed Version)”] Some have said that the Crickets were the first white act to play the Apollo. That’s not the case — Bobby Darin had played there before them, and I think so had the jazz drummer Buddy Rich, and maybe one or two others. But it was still a rarity, and the Crickets had to work hard to win the audience around. After they finished that tour, they moved on to a residency at the Brooklyn Paramount, on an Alan Freed show that also featured Little Richard and Larry Williams — who the Crickets met for the first time when they walked into the dressing room to find Richard and Williams engaged in a threesome with Richard’s girlfriend. During that engagement at the Paramount, the tensions within the group reached boiling point. Niki Sullivan, who was in an awful mood because he was trying to quit smoking, revealed the truth about Holly’s affair to Allison, and the group got in a fist-fight. According to Sullivan — who seems not to have always been the most reliable of interviewees — Sullivan gave Jerry Allison a black eye, and then straight away they had to go to the rooftop to take the photo for the group’s first album, The “Chirping” Crickets. Sullivan says that while the photo was retouched to hide the black eye, it’s still visible, though I can’t see it myself. After this, they went into a three-month tour on a giant package of stars featuring Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, the Bobbettes, the Drifters, LaVern Baker, and many more. By this point, both “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” had risen up the charts — “That’ll Be the Day” eventually went to number one, while “Peggy Sue” hit number three — and the next Crickets single, “Oh Boy!” was also charting. “Oh Boy!” had originally been written by an acquaintance of the band, Sonny West, who had recorded his own version as “All My Love” a short while earlier: [Excerpt: Sonny West, “All My Love”] Glen Hardin, the piano player on that track, would later join a lineup of the Crickets in the sixties (and later still would be Elvis’ piano player and arranger in the seventies). Holly would later also cover another of West’s songs, “Rave On”. The Crickets’ version of “Oh Boy!” was recorded at a faster tempo, and became another major hit, their last top ten: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Oh Boy!”] Around the time that came out, Eddie Cochran joined the tour, and like the Everly Brothers he became fast friends with the group. The group also made an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, with Holly, Mauldin, and Allison enthusiastically performing “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue”, and Sullivan enthusiastically miming and playing an unplugged guitar. Sullivan was becoming more and more sidelined in the group, and when they returned to Lubbock at the end of the tour — during which he’d ended up breaking down and crying — he decided he was going to quit the group. Sullivan tried to have a solo career, releasing “It’s All Over” on Dot Records: [Excerpt: Niki Sullivan, “It’s All Over”] But he had no success, and ended up working in electronics, and in later years also making money from the Buddy Holly nostalgia industry. He’d only toured as a member of the group for a total of ninety days, though he’d been playing with them in the studio for a few months before that, and he’d played on a total of twenty-seven of the thirty-two songs that Holly or the Crickets would release in Holly’s lifetime. While he’d been promised an equal share of the group’s income — and Petty had also promised Sullivan, like all the other Crickets, that he would pay 10% of his income to his church — Sullivan got into endless battles with Petty over seeing the group’s accounts, which Petty wouldn’t show him, and eventually settled for getting just $1000, ten percent of the recording royalties just for the single “That’ll Be the Day”, and co-writing royalties on one song, “I’m Going to Love You Too”. His church didn’t get a cent. Meanwhile, Petty was busy trying to widen the rifts in the group. He decided that while the records would still be released as either “Buddy Holly” or “the Crickets”, as a live act they would from now on be billed as “Buddy Holly and the Crickets”, a singer and his backing group, and that while Mauldin and Allison would continue to get twenty-five percent of the money each, Holly would be on fifty percent. This was an easy decision, since Petty was handling all the money and only giving the group pocket money rather than giving them their actual shares of the money they’d earned. The group spent all of 1958 touring, visiting Hawaii, Australia, the UK, and all over the US, including the famous last ever Alan Freed tour that we looked at recently in episodes on Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They got in another guitarist, Tommy Allsup, who took over the lead role while Buddy played rhythm, and who joined them on tour, though he wasn’t an official member of the group. The first recording Allsup played on was “It’s So Easy”: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “It’s So Easy”] But the group’s records were selling less and less well. Holly was getting worried, and there was another factor that came into play. On a visit to New York, stopping in to visit their publisher in the Brill Building, all three of the Crickets became attracted to the receptionist, a Puerto Rican woman named Maria Elena Santiago who was a few years older than them. They all started to joke about which of them would ask her out, and Holly eventually did so. It turned out that while Maria Elena was twenty-five, she’d never yet been on a date, and she had to ask the permission of her aunt, who she lived with, and who was also the head of the Latin-American division of the publishing company. The aunt rang round every business contact she had, satisfied herself that Buddy was a nice boy, and gave her blessing for the date. The next day, she was giving her blessing for the two to marry — Buddy proposed on the very first date. They eventually went on a joint honeymoon with Jerry Allison and Peggy Sue. But Maria Elena was someone who worked in the music industry, and was a little bit older, and she started saying things to Buddy like “You need to get a proper accounting of the money that’s owed you”, and “You should be getting paid”. This strained his relationship with Petty, who didn’t want any woman of colour butting her nose in and getting involved in his business. Buddy moved to a flat in Greenwich Village with Maria Elena, but for the moment he was still working with Petty, even after Petty used some extremely misogynistic slurs I’m not going to repeat here against his new wife. But he was worried about his lack of hits, and they tried a few different variations on the formula. The Crickets recorded one song, a cover version of a song they’d learned on the Australian tour, with Jerry Allison singing lead. It was released under the name “Ivan” — Allison’s middle name — and became a minor hit: [Excerpt: Ivan, “Real Wild Child”] They tried more and more different things, like getting King Curtis in to play saxophone on “Reminiscing”, and on one occasion dispensing with the Crickets entirely and having Buddy cut a Bobby Darin song, “Early in the Morning”, with other musicians. They were stockpiling recordings much faster than they could release them, but the releases weren’t doing well at all. “It’s So Easy” didn’t even reach the top one hundred. Holly was also working with other artists. In September, he produced a session for his friend Waylon Jennings, who would later become a huge country star. It was Jennings’ first ever session, and they turned out an interesting version of the old Cajun song “Jole Blon”, which had earlier been a hit for Moon Mullican. This version had Holly on guitar and King Curtis on saxophone, and is a really interesting attempt at blending Cajun music with R&B: [Excerpt: Waylon Jennings, “Jole Blon”] But Holly’s biggest hope was placed in a session that was really breaking new ground. No rock and roll singer had ever recorded with a full string section before — at least as far as he was aware, and bearing in mind that, as we’ve seen many times, there’s never truly a first anything. In October 1958, Holly went into the studio with the Dick Jacobs Orchestra, with the intention of recording three songs — his own “True Love Ways”, a song called “Moondreams” written by Petty, and one called “Raining in My Heart” written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who’d written many hits for his friends the Everly Brothers. At the last minute, though, he decided to record a fourth song, which had been written for him by Paul Anka, the same kid whose “Diana” had been so irritating to him the year before. He played through the song on his guitar for Dick Jacobs, who only had a short while to write the arrangement, and so stuck to the simplest thing he could think of, basing it around pizzicato violins: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”] At that point, everything still seemed like it could work out OK. Norman Petty and the other Crickets were all there at the recording session, cheering Buddy on. That night the Crickets appeared on American Bandstand, miming to “It’s So Easy”. That would be the last time they ever performed together, and soon there would be an irreparable split that would lead directly to Holly’s death — and to his posthumous fame. Holly was getting sick of Norman Petty’s continual withholding of royalties, and he’d come up with a plan. The Crickets would, as a group, confront Petty, get him to give them the money he owed them, and then all move to New York together to start up their own record label and publishing company. They’d stop touring, and focus on making records, and this would allow them the time to get things right and try new things out, which would lead to them having hits again, and they could also produce records for their friends like Waylon Jennings and Sonny Curtis. It was a good plan, and it might have worked, but it relied on them getting that money off Norman Petty. When the other two got back to Texas, Petty started manipulating them. He told them they were small-town Texas boys who would never be able to live in the big city. He told them that they didn’t need Buddy Holly, and that they could carry on making Crickets records without him. He told them that Maria Elena was manipulating Buddy, and that if they went off to New York with him it would be her who was in charge of the group from that point on. And he also pointed out that he was currently the only signatory on the group’s bank account, and it would be a real shame if something happened to all that money. By the time Buddy got back to Texas, the other two Crickets had agreed that they were going to stick with Norman Petty. Petty said it was fine if Buddy wanted to fire him, but he wasn’t getting any money until a full audit had been done of the organisation’s money. Buddy was no longer even going to get the per diem pocket money or expenses he’d been getting. Holly went back to New York, and started writing many, many, more songs, recording dozens of acoustic demos for when he could start his plan up: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”] It was a massive creative explosion for the young man. He was not only writing songs himself, but he was busily planning to make an album of Latin music, and he was making preparations for two more projects he’d like to do — an album of duets on gospel songs with Mahalia Jackson, and an album of soul duets with Ray Charles. He was going to jazz clubs, and he had ambitions of following Elvis into films, but doing it properly — he enrolled in courses with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, to learn Method Acting. Greenwich Village in 1958 was the perfect place for a young man with a huge amount of natural talent and appetite for learning, but little experience of the wider world and culture. But the young couple were living off Maria Elena’s aunt’s generosity, and had no income at all of their own. And then Maria Elena revealed that she was pregnant. And Norman Petty revealed something he’d kept hidden before — by the terms of Buddy’s contract, he hadn’t really been recording for Brunswick or Coral, so they didn’t owe him a penny. He’d been recording for Petty’s company, who then sold the masters on to the other labels, and would get all the royalties. The Crickets bank account into which the royalties had supposedly been being paid, and which Petty had refused to let the band members see, was essentially empty. There was only one thing for it. He had to do another tour. And the only one he could get on was a miserable-seeming affair called the Winter Dance Party. While most of the rock and roll package tours of the time had more than a dozen acts on, this one had only five. There was an opening act called Frankie Sardo, and then Dion and the Belmonts, who had had a few minor hits, and had just recorded, but not yet released, their breakthrough record “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] Then there was the Big Bopper, who was actually a fairly accomplished songwriter but was touring on the basis of his one hit, a novelty song called “Chantilly Lace”: [Excerpt: the Big Bopper, “Chantilly Lace”] And Ritchie Valens, whose hit “Donna” was rising up the charts in a way that “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” was notably failing to do: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Donna”] Buddy put together a new touring band consisting of Tommy Allsup on guitar, Waylon Jennings on bass — who had never played bass before starting the tour — and a drummer called Carl Bunch. For a while it looked like Buddy’s friend Eddie Cochran was going to go on tour with them as well, but shortly before the tour started Cochran got an offer to do the Ed Sullivan Show, which would have clashed with the tour dates, and so he didn’t make it. Maria Elena was very insistent that she didn’t want Buddy to go, but he felt that he had no choice if he was going to support his new child. The Winter Dance Party toured Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, through the end of January and the beginning of February 1959, and the conditions were miserable for everyone concerned. The tour had been put together with no thought of logistics, and it zig-zagged wildly across those three states, with gigs often four hundred miles away from each other. The musicians had to sleep on the tour bus — or buses. The tour was being run on a shoe-string, and they’d gone with the cheapest vehicle-hire company possible. They went through, according to one biography I’ve read, eight different buses in eleven days, as none of the buses were able to cope with the Midwestern winter, and their engines kept failing and the heating on several of the buses broke down. I don’t know if you’ve spent any time in that part of America in the winter, but I go there for Christmas every year (my wife has family in Minnesota) and it’s unimaginably cold in a way you can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it. It’s not unusual for temperatures to drop to as low as minus forty degrees, and to have three feet or more of snow. Travelling in a bus, with no heating, in that weather, all packed together, was hell for everyone. The Big Bopper and Valens were both fat, and couldn’t fit in the small seats easily. Several people on the tour, including Bopper and Valens, got the flu. And then finally Carl Bunch got hospitalised with frostbite. Buddy’s band, which was backing everyone on stage, now had no drummer, and so for the next three days of the tour Holly, Dion, and Valens would all take it in turns playing the drums, as all of them were adequate drummers. The shows were still good, at least according to a young man named Robert Zimmerman, who saw the first drummerless show, in Duluth Minnesota, and who would move to Greenwich Village himself not that long afterwards. After a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy had had enough. He decided to charter a plane to take him to Fargo, North Dakota, which was just near Moorhead, Minnesota, where they were planning on playing their next show. He’d take everyone’s laundry — everyone stank and had been wearing the same clothes for days — and get it washed, and get some sleep in a real bed. The original plan was to have Allsup and Jennings travel with him, but eventually they gave up their seats to the two other people who were suffering the most — the Big Bopper and Valens. There are different stories about how that happened, most involving a coin-toss, but they all agree that when Buddy found out that Waylon Jennings was giving up his seat, he jokingly said to Jennings “I hope your old bus freezes”, and Jennings replied, “Yeah, well I hope your ol’ plane crashes”. The three of them got on the plane in the middle of the night, on a foggy winter’s night, which would require flying by instruments. Unfortunately, while the pilot on the plane was rated as being a good pilot during the day, he kept almost failing his certification for being bad at flying by instrument. And the plane in question had an unusual type of altitude meter. Where most altitude meters would go up when the plane was going up and down when it was going down, that particular model’s meter went down when the plane was going up, and up when it was going down. The plane took off, and less than five minutes after takeoff, it plummeted straight down, nose first, into the ground at top speed, killing everyone on board instantly. As soon as the news got out, Holly’s last single finally started rising up the charts. It ended up going to number thirteen on the US charts, and number one in many other countries. The aftermath shows how much contempt the music industry — and society itself — had for those musicians at that time. Maria Elena found out about Buddy’s death not from the police, but from the TV — this later prompted changes in how news of celebrity deaths was to be revealed. She was so upset that she miscarried two days later. She was too distraught to attend the funeral, and to this day has still never been able to bring herself to visit her husband’s grave. The grief was just too much. The rest of the people on the tour were forced to continue the remaining thirteen days of the tour without the three acts anyone wanted to go and see, but were also not paid their full wages, because the bill wasn’t as advertised. A new young singer was picked up to round out the bill on the next gig, a young Minnesotan Holly soundalike called Bobby Vee, whose first single, “Suzy Baby”, was just about to come out: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] When Vee went on tour on his own, later, he hired that Zimmerman kid we mentioned earlier as his piano player. Zimmerman worked under the stage name Elston Gunn, but would later choose a better one. After that date Holly, Valens, and the Bopper were replaced by Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Jimmy Clanton, and the tour continued. Meanwhile, the remaining Crickets picked themselves up and carried on. They got Buddy’s old friend Sonny Curtis on guitar, and a succession of Holly-soundalike singers, and continued playing together until Joe Mauldin died in 2015. Most of their records without Buddy weren’t particularly memorable, but they did record one song written by Curtis which would later become a hit for several other people, “I Fought the Law”: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “I Fought the Law”] But the person who ended up benefiting most from Holly’s death was Norman Petty. Suddenly his stockpile of unreleased Buddy Holly recordings was a goldmine — and not only that, he ended up coming to an agreement with Holly’s estate that he could take all those demos Holly had recorded and overdub new backing tracks on them, turning them into full-blown rock and roll songs. Between overdubbed versions of the demos, and stockpiled full-band recordings, Buddy Holly kept having hit singles in the rest of the world until 1965, though none charted in the US, and he made both Petty and his estate very rich. Norman Petty died in 1984. His last project was a still-unreleased “updating” of Buddy’s biggest hits with synthesisers. These days, Buddy Holly is once again on tour, or at least something purporting to be him is. You can now go and see a “hologram tour”, in which an image of a look-not-very-alike actor miming to Holly’s old recordings is projected on glass, using the old Victorian stage trick Pepper’s Ghost, while a live band plays along to the records. Just because you’ve worked someone to death aged twenty-two, doesn’t mean that they can’t still keep earning money for you when they’re eighty-three. And a hologram will never complain about how cold the tour bus is, or want to wash his laundry.

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, and is the first of a two-part story which will conclude next week with an episode on Buddy Holly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Only one biography of Valens has ever been written — understandably since his public career lasted a matter of months and he died when he was seventeen — but Beverly Mendheim’s book is about as good as one could expect given that. And this CD compiles all three of the posthumous album releases, Valens’ entire musical legacy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This is actually going to be part one of a two-part story, which will be continued in next week’s episode. Ritchie Valens died so young that he is nowadays mostly known for his death, but in this episode we’re going to look at why people cared about him at all — the story of the plane crash that took his life will wait for next week’s episode. This week, we’re going to look at his short recording career, and at his most famous record: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “La Bamba”] So far in this podcast, when we’ve looked at race, we’ve mostly dealt with either black or white musicians, along with a few people who are clearly white by the standards of 2020 but might not have been considered so at the time. But there was, in Los Angeles, a whole parallel music culture growing up around Latino teenagers. This subculture only rarely impinged on the consciousness of the wider American public, but without it we would have had no garage rock and no punk, as we know them today. And the first big star, the person around whom that culture coalesced, was Ritchie Valens. Now, I have to stress here that I am at even more of a disadvantage when talking about this subculture than I am when talking about black America. While black culture has been extensively documented in all sorts of other popular culture I’ve consumed, and I’ve studied mid-twentieth-century black American culture to a reasonable extent (though nowhere near enough, of course, that my thoughts on the subject should be taken as authoritative), I have had almost no exposure to the Latino culture of the same time period. And on top of that, there’s an additional problem, which is that I am going to have to refer to quite a few Spanish terms in the course of this episode, and I don’t speak Spanish. While I’m going to try my best with those, I will undoubtedly mangle some things. But that’s sort of appropriate, at least, in the case of Ritchie Valens, because one of the things that people who knew him would say is that he spoke Spanish terribly — while he was a Mexican-American, he was raised in an English-speaking household, and only spoke Spanish as a second language, in which he wasn’t especially fluent. By all accounts, in fact, Valens — who was born Richard Valenzuela, but had his name shortened when he got a record deal — was at least somewhat unpopular among the other Mexican-Americans at his school. Some of this was due to his appearance — he was notably light-skinned for a Mexican-American, and apparently there was a level of colourism among Latino kids in that area at that time, and he was also quite fat — and some was due to his willingness to associate with people of other races, as he had both black and white friends. Valens’ big interest in school was music, especially R&B, and especially the music of Little Richard and Larry Williams, and other people who had recorded for Specialty Records. When he was in high school, he joined a group called the Silhouettes, who had named themselves after a recent hit of that name by the Rays: [Excerpt: The Rays, “Silhouettes”] That song was also the inspiration for another group, a doo-wop group also called the Silhouettes, who had a hit with “Get a Job”. That’s not this group, and they weren’t yet known at the time. These Silhouettes never recorded, and after Valens became famous there were a lot of interviews with various members of the band who disagreed, of course, on who it was who invited Valens into the band, who the leader of the band was, and who had really taught Valens everything he knew about performing, as well as disagreeing on what songs the band performed, and who contributed what to the songs that made Valens famous. The Silhouettes were by modern standards a very big band, having three trumpets, five saxophones, a vibraphone player, a pianist, a drummer, and a couple of singers, as well as Valens on guitar and vocals. They were very unusual for the time in being a mixed-race group — they were mostly Mexican-Americans, but there were also black and Italian members (at a time when Italians weren’t considered fully white by then-prevailing racial standards) and a Japanese-American saxophone player. Their repertoire was apparently largely based around R&B songs, but they would occasionally play Mexican material, usually when requested for a particular event such as a wedding. Valens usually didn’t sing on those songs, because he didn’t speak Spanish, but he was eventually persuaded to sing one song in Spanish, “La Bamba”. “La Bamba” is an old folk song from Veracruz in Mexico, and is an example of a style called son jarocho, [CUT THIS which fuses Mexican and African musical styles]. The earliest known recording of “La Bamba” is from 1939, but there are suggestions it’s been around for centuries: [Excerpt: El Jarocho, “La Bamba”] The song is traditionally sung at weddings, and its origins are fairly obscure. I’ve seen claims that the song has its origins in music made by slaves in Mexico, and that the title is a reference either to the Mbamba tribe from Angola or to a seventeenth-century slave uprising called the Bambarria — but the only references I can find to that uprising talk about how it was an inspiration for the song, and seem to differ on all the other details. As I’ve said before on this podcast, I tend to doubt a lot of stories claiming that various bits of music and folklore have their origin in African traditions kept up by slaves, as the majority of such stories tend to have very little evidence backing them up, and in the case of “La Bamba” I think it’s far more likely that the song, whose lyrics are mostly about a dance, is referring to the Spanish word “bambolear”, which means to sway, swing, or wobble. Which is not to say that there’s no African influence on the song — I’ve talked before about how African music has influenced Central and South American musical forms, and the son jarocho tradition “La Bamba” is a part of is a mixture of Spanish, indigenous, and African styles. But I think it’s safe to say that the song doesn’t have a “ring a ring a roses” style hidden meaning (and, for that matter, nor does ring a ring a roses” in reality) and that it is what it sounds like — a song about a dance, with nonsense lyrics thrown in. When the Silhouettes played the song, they did it more or less the same way everyone else at the time would play it. There are no recordings of the Silhouettes, but they likely based their performance on a successful recording of the song like the version by Hermanos Huesca: [Excerpt: Hermanos Huesca, “La Bamba”] The Silhouettes built up quite a local following, and in January 1958 they played a show that they promoted themselves, in a hall they’d rented out in order to raise money to pay for Valens’ family’s mortgage payment for that month. One of the people who attended the show was a twenty-year-old from the area named Doug Macchia, who vaguely knew a couple of the band members. Macchia was, at the time, employed by Bob Keane. We’ve not mentioned Keane himself before, but we have mentioned one of the labels he owned, Keen Records, which was the label on which he’d released Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Many of the people involved in that record, like guitarist René Hall and drummer Earl Palmer, had worked with many of the Specialty acts that Valens admired, and Keane had started employing them on a regular basis, both on Keen Records and on his new label, Del-Fi. Macchia recorded the Silhouettes at the gig on a portable tape recorder, and took the recording (which is now lost) to Keane, who was impressed enough with Valens, though not with the other members, that he requested that they come to audition for him in his home recording studio. Valens was at first reluctant to go to the audition when Macchia told him about it, and he also delayed the audition, because when Macchia came round Valens was minding the other children at home and had to wait until his mother got back before he could go to the studio. While he was waiting, Macchia helped Valens finish up a song he was working on, which he named after a girl with whom he’d been having some sort of relationship (people differ on whether it was just a crush he had or whether they were in some great doomed romance): [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Donna”] When it came to the audition, Keane was impressed with Valens, not because of his ability, but because of his energy. Keane signed him, and started shaping him into a new style of performer. Valens was not a particularly proficient guitarist. He had a lot of natural skill, and a love of the instrument, but when he first started recording he could only play in a handful of keys. Almost everything he recorded is in the key of D or A, and had only three or four chords. When he recorded one song and needed to drop the key down to D flat, he ended up tuning his guitar down half a step, because he didn’t know the chords in that key — and on another occasion, when he was trying to tell the bass player on a session what part to play, he became frustrated because the part he could hear in his head had a low D, but the bass only goes down as far as a low E. He would rarely play the same song the same way twice, and most of the recordings he completed were pulled together by Bob Keane from multiple takes — the tapes were spliced so much that Stan Ross, the co-owner of Gold Star Studios, described them as “looking like they’d been through World War Fourteen”. Valens would go into the studio with a rough idea for a melody and a few words, and improvise several different variations on the song, and the best bits of each improvisation would be used for the finished recording. According to at least some sources, Bob Keane would shape the actual song during the recording and in the edit, helping Valens finish the lyrics and editing together bits of different performances to make a coherent song out of them. Other sources, including Ross, say that wasn’t the case and that Valens essentially produced his own sessions and wrote all the material himself. I actually lean towards Keane’s claims in this case, because Keane was one of the few record company owners who was himself an accomplished musician, being a fairly respectable jazz clarinettist, and Valens seems to have had a very laissez-faire attitude towards structure. Members of the Silhouettes have talked about Valens’ performances on stage, where he would start out playing, for example, “Jenny Jenny” by Little Richard, but after a few lines, he would start improvising his own new melody and lyrics, which would be different every time. This seems to back up Bob Keane’s claims that Valens would only bring in a four or eight-bar riff and a few lines of lyric and improvise the rest in performances which Keane would shape. The most obvious example of Valens working this way is the song “Ooh My Head”, a song that’s credited as a solo Valens composition. Listen to Valens’ song: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Ooh My Head”] And now compare Little Richard’s earlier “Ooh! My Soul”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] You can see that Valens’ song seems to have come from precisely this process, of performing someone else’s song and changing it around until it became something different, though in this case not all that different. Amusingly, Led Zeppelin later did exactly the same thing with Valens’ song, resulting in “Boogie With Stu”: [Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “Boogie With Stu”] While Little Richard never sued over his song being appropriated by Valens, Bob Keane, who owned the publishing for Valens’ songs, did sue Led Zeppelin for that one, even though they had tried to forestall the possibility of a lawsuit by crediting Valens’ mother as a co-writer. So it seems safe to say that Valens’ music was largely spontaneous, to the extent that even after the recording had gone out, he would change the song dramatically in live performance. Compare, for example, the studio version of “Come On Let’s Go”: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Come On Let’s Go”] With this recording of him performing the song live at his old junior high school after it had already become a hit: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Come On Let’s Go (live at Pacoima Junior High School)”] As you can hear, the basic structure of the song remains the same, but there are huge variations in both the lyrics and the melody. At the time of his audition, Valens still thought of himself as primarily an R&B singer, and he was being referred to as “the Little Richard of the Valley”, but Keane had other ideas. Keane didn’t believe that anyone other than black people could make good R&B music, and while Valens would record R&B songs as album tracks — he’d record both “Bony Moronie” by Larry Williams and “Framed” by the Robins — Keane was more interested in emphasising the Latin sound of Valens’ music. Happily for Keane, Valens’ relatively limited guitar playing skills allowed him to do just that. Most R&B and rock and roll of the time was based on a handful of different chord sequences, of which the most common was the twelve-bar blues. The twelve-bar blues has only three chords in, which are the first, fourth, and fifth chords of the major scale. You play four bars of the first, two bars of the fourth, two more of the first, then one each of the fifth and fourth, and two more of the first, like this: [demonstrates twelve-bar blues on guitar] A lot of Latin music uses those same three chords, just arranged in different ways. For example, there’s what’s known as the I-IV-V-I progression: [demonstrates on guitar] That’s the basis of quite a few Latin songs, and it also became the basis of the first record Valens released, “Come On Let’s Go”: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Come On Let’s Go”] “Come On Let’s Go” was recorded along with its B-side, a cover of “Framed” by the Robins, by Valens at Gold Star studios backed by a group of session musicians who would become regulars on his sessions. The union documents for the sessions are not available, so there’s some question as to exactly who played on which recordings, but they would usually involve Rene Hall, Bill Pitman, and/or Carol Kaye on guitar along with Valens himself, Red Callender or Buddy Clarke on standup bass, Earl Palmer on drums, and Ernie Freeman on piano. Sometimes one of the guitarists would instead play a Danelectro bass — a six-string bass guitar with a unique tone that became a signature of many records made in LA. Many of these musicians would later go on to be important parts of the Wrecking Crew, the informal collective of session musicians who played on a huge number of hit records made in LA in the sixties. “Come On Let’s Go” was a minor hit, reaching number forty-two on the Hot One Hundred. This was enough to prove to Keane that his instincts were right — if he pushed Valens into a Latin rock sound, he could have a big star on his hands. He just needed some more material in that style. And he found the next single by accident, when he heard Valens noodling “La Bamba” on his guitar in the back seat of Keane’s car. Keane insisted that that should be Valens’ next single, but Valens was very hesitant. He considered the song to be an important part of his family’s culture, and didn’t want to be accused of selling out his cultural background for a cheap hit. Keane thought that was ridiculous, though personally I have a lot more sympathy with Valens’ problem. Valens was also worried about his Spanish — he basically didn’t speak Spanish at all, and he originally thought it might be an idea to get his aunt to help him translate the lyrics into English and sing those. But eventually it was decided that he’d just sing it in the original Spanish, and he got his aunt to write down as many of the lyrics as she could remember, and learned them phonetically. While Valens normally could only sing while playing his guitar, this time he recorded the vocal as an overdub, apparently with Bob Keane standing behind him whispering the lyrics to him. The arrangement was very different from any earlier versions of the song, and the result was the first record to successfully meld Latin and rock and roll styles into one coherent whole: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “La Bamba”] For the B-side, Keane wanted something that could be a throwaway, so as not to distract from the A-side, and so he just got the musicians to overdub onto the original demo of “Donna” that Valens had recorded in his basement: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, “Donna”] As it turned out, “Donna” became the bigger hit — “Donna” reached number two on the charts, while “La Bamba” only reached number twenty-two. But “La Bamba” is the record that became far more influential. “La Bamba” has another three-chord sequence, based around those same three chords, but in yet another order. This one is known as the three-chord trick, and goes I-IV-V-IV, like this: [Demonstrates I-IV-V-IV on guitar] “La Bamba” wasn’t the first rock and roll record to use that pattern — there are only a small number of patterns that one can make out of the same three chords, and in particular Chuck Berry had recorded “Havana Moon” a year earlier, and that song would itself go on to be particularly influential. But “La Bamba” definitely was the one that inspired a *lot* of other records to use the same pattern, and one can hear the distinctly Latin echoes of it in records like “Hang on Sloopy”: [Excerpt: The McCoys, “Hang on Sloopy”] or “Twist and Shout”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Twist and Shout”] Between that and the influence of “Havana Moon” on records like “Louie Louie” and “Wild Thing”, the three-chord trick became one of the most important chord sequences in rock music, and “La Bamba” was the first record to make that chord sequence popular, and inspired thousands of garage bands. On the back of the success of “La Bamba” and “Donna”, Valens appeared in the Alan Freed film “Go Johnny Go”, which featured Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, the Flamingos and Jackie Wilson. Valens performed “Ooh My Head”, and also appeared in several scenes of the film, but had no lines, as the musical performers weren’t being paid, as the film was considered to be promotion for them, while anyone who had a line was considered an actor and had to be paid. That film was the last major piece of work that Valens did before he headed off for what would be his last tour, which we’ll talk about next week, when we look at the last recording Buddy Holly released in his lifetime.  

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble” by Elvis Presley, his induction into the army, and his mother’s death. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “When” by the Kalin Twins. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis’ 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And King Creole itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   As 1957 turned into 1958, Elvis’ personal life was going badly wrong, even as he was still the biggest star in the world. In particular, his relationships with everyone involved in his career — everyone except the Colonel, of course — were getting weakened. In September, Scotty Moore and Bill Black had written to Elvis, resigning from his band — they’d been put on a salary, rather than a split of the money, and then Elvis’ concert schedule had been cut back so much that they’d only played fourteen shows so far all year. They were getting into debt while Elvis was earning millions, but worse than that, they felt that the Colonel was controlling access to Elvis so much that they couldn’t even talk to him. DJ Fontana wouldn’t sign the letter — he’d joined the group later than the others, and so he’d not lost his position in the way that the others had. But the other two were gone. Elvis offered them a fifty dollar raise, but Scotty said that on top of that he would need a ten thousand dollar bonus just to clear his debts — and while Elvis was considering that, a newspaper interview with Moore and Black appeared, in which they talked about Elvis having broken his promise to them that when he earned more, they would earn more. Elvis was incensed, and decided that he didn’t need them anyway. He could replace them easily. And for one show, he did just that. He played the fair at his old home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, with DJ and the Jordanaires, and with two new musicians. On guitar was Hank Garland, a great country session musician who was best known for his hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Hank Garland, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Garland would continue to play with Elvis on recordings and occasional stage performances until 1961, when he was injured in an accident and became unable to perform. On bass, meanwhile, was Chuck Wigington, a friend of DJ’s who, like DJ, had been a regular performer in the Louisiana Hayride band, and who had also played for many years with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys: [Excerpt: Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, “Screwball”] Wigington actually didn’t have a contract for the show, and he wasn’t even a full-time musician at the time — he had to take a leave of absence from his job working in a bank in order to play the gig. Meanwhile, Scotty and Bill were off on their own playing the Dallas State Fair. But Elvis found that performing live without Scotty and Bill was just not the same, even though Garland and Wigington were perfectly fine musicians, and he decided to offer Scotty and Bill their old jobs back — sort of. They’d be getting paid a per diem whether or not they were performing, which was something, but after the next recording sessions Bill never again recorded with Elvis — he was replaced in the studio by Bob Moore. Scotty remained a regular in Elvis’ studio band too, but only on rhythm guitar — Hank Garland was going to be the lead player on Elvis’ records from now on. The new arrangement required a lot of compromise on both sides, but it meant that Moore and Black were on a better financial footing, and Elvis could remain comfortable on stage, but it was now very clear that the Colonel, at least, saw Black and Moore as replaceable, and neither of them were necessary for Elvis to continue making hit records. His relationship with the two men who had come up with him had now permanently changed — and that was going to be the case with a lot of other relationships as well. In particular, the Colonel was starting to think that Leiber and Stoller should be got rid of. The two of them were dangerous as far as the Colonel was concerned. Elvis respected them, they weren’t under the Colonel’s control, they didn’t even *like* the Colonel, and they had careers that didn’t rely on their association with Elvis. But they were also people who were able to generate hits for Elvis, and they were currently working for RCA, so while that was the case he would put them to use. But they were loose cannons. Now, before we go further, I should point out that what I’m about to describe is *one* way that Leiber and Stoller have explained what happened. In various different tellings, they’ve told events in different orders, and described things slightly differently. This is, to the best of my understanding, the most likely series of events, but I could be wrong. Leiber and Stoller had a complex attitude towards their work with Elvis. They liked Elvis himself, a lot, and they admired and respected his work ethic in the studio, and shared his taste in blues music. But at the same time, they didn’t consider the work they were doing with Elvis to be real art, in the way that they considered their R&B records to be. It was easy money — anything Elvis recorded was guaranteed to sell in massive amounts, so they didn’t have to try too hard to write anything particularly good for him, but they didn’t like the Colonel, and they were already, after a couple of films, getting bored with the routine nature of writing for Elvis’ films. I’m going to paraphrase a quote from Jerry Leiber here, because I don’t want to get this podcast moved into the adults-only section on Apple Podcasts, and the Leiber quote is quite full of expletives, but the gist of it is that they believed that if they were given proper artistic freedom with Elvis they could have made history, but that the people in his management team only wanted money. Every film needed just a few songs to plug into gaps, and they were usually the same type of songs to go in the same type of gaps. They were bored. And they actually had a plan for a project that would stretch them all creatively. Leiber vaguely knew the film producer Charles Feldman, who had produced On The Waterfront and The Seven-Year Itch, and Feldman had come to Leiber with a proposition. He’d recently acquired the rights to the novel A Walk on the Wild Side, set in New Orleans, and he thought that it would be perfect for Elvis. He’d have the script written by Budd Schulberg, and have Elia Kazan direct — the same team that had made On The Waterfront. Elvis would be working with people who had made Marlon Brando, one of his idols, a star. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs, and given that Kazan was known as an actors’ director, the chances were that the film could take Elvis to the next level in film stardom — he could become another Sinatra, someone who was equally respected as an actor and as a singer. Leiber took the proposal to Jean Aberbach, who was one of the heads of Hill and Range, the music publishing company that handled all the songs that Elvis performed. Aberbach listened to the proposal, called the Colonel to relay the idea, and then said “If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking in this direction again, you will never work for us again.” So they resigned themselves to just churning out the same stuff for Elvis’ films. Although, while they were soured on the process, the next film would be more interesting: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “King Creole”] “King Creole” was the first of Elvis’ films to be based on a book — though “Loving You” had been based on a short story that had appeared in a magazine. “A Stone For Danny Fisher” was one of Harold Robbins’ early novels, and was about a boxer in New York who accepts a bribe from criminals to lose a fight, but then wins the fight anyway, goes on the run, but encounters the criminals who bribed him two years later. It’s the kind of basic plot that has made perfectly good films in the past — like the Bruce Willis sequence in Pulp Fiction, for example. But while it’s a fairly decent plot, it is… not the plot of “King Creole”. Hal Wallis had bought the rights to the book in the hope of making it a vehicle for James Dean, before Dean’s death. When it was reworked as a Presley vehicle, obviously it was changed to be about a singer rather than a boxer, and so the whole main plotline about throwing a fight was dropped, and then the setting was changed to New Orleans… and truth be told, the resulting film seems to have more than a hint of “Walk on the Wild Side” about it, with both being set in New Orleans’ underworld, and both having a strained relationship between a father and a son as a main theme. Oddly, Leiber and Stoller have never mentioned these similarities, even though it seems very likely to me that someone involved in the Elvis organisation took their idea and used it without credit. They’ve both, though, talked about how dull they found working on the film’s soundtrack — and even though they were currently Elvis’ favourite writers, and producing his sessions, they ended up writing only three of the eleven songs for the film. “King Creole” is, in fact, a rather good film. It has a good cast, including Walter Matthau, and it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was one of those directors of the time who could turn his hand to anything and make good films in a huge variety of genres. He’d directed, among many, many, many other films, “White Christmas”, the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and “Casablanca”. However, Leiber and Stoller’s writing for the film was more or less on autopilot, and they produced songs like “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, which is widely regarded as the very worst song they ever wrote: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”] That said, there is an important point that should be made about the songs Elvis recorded for his films generally, and which applies to that song specifically. Many of the songs Elvis would record for his films in later years are generally regarded as being terrible, terrible songs, and with good reason. Songs like “There’s No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car”, “Yoga is as Yoga Does”, “Queenie Wahini’s Papaya”, or “Ito Eats” have few if any merits. But in part that’s because they are not intended to work as songs divorced from their context in the film. They’re part of the storytelling, not songs that were ever intended to be listened to as songs on their own. But still, Leiber and Stoller could undoubtedly have come up with something better than “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, had they not been working with the attitude of “that’ll do, it’s good enough”. Indeed, the most artistically interesting song on the soundtrack is one that was not written by Leiber and Stoller at all, a jazz song sung as a duet with Kitty White, “Crawfish”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Kitty White, “Crawfish”] While other songwriters were turning out things like that, Leiber and Stoller were putting in a minimal amount of effort, despite their previous wish to try to be more artistically adventurous with their work with Elvis. They still, however, managed to write one song that would become known as a classic, even if they mostly did it as a joke: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble”] That song combines two different elements of Leiber and Stoller’s writing we’ve looked at previously. The first is their obsession with that stop-time blues riff, which had first turned up in Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” back in 1954: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Leiber and Stoller had latched on to that riff, as we saw when we talked about “Riot in Cell Block #9” back in the episode on “The Wallflower”. They would consistently use it as a signifier of the blues — they used the same riff not only in “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Trouble”, but also “I’m A Woman” for Peggy Lee and “Santa Claus is Back in Town” for Elvis, and slight variations of it in “Framed” by the Robins and “Alligator Wine” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, among many others. It’s clearly a riff that they loved — so much so that they pretty much single-handedly made it into something people will now think of as a generic indicator of the blues rather than, as it was originally, a riff that was used on one specific song — but it’s also a riff they could fall back on when they were just phoning in a song. The other aspect of their songwriting that “Trouble” shows is their habit of writing songs as jokes and then giving them to singers as serious songs. They’d done this before with Elvis, when they’d written “Love Me” as a parody of a particular kind of ballad, and he’d then sung it entirely straight. Leiber compared “Trouble” to another song they’d written as a joke, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”: [Excerpt: The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”] Leiber later said of “Trouble”, comparing it to that song, “the only people who are going to take them seriously are Hell’s Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose there was a bit of contempt on our part.” He went on to say “There’s something laughable there. I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis did not sound right to us. “ Either way, Elvis performs the song with enough ferocity that it sounded right to a lot of other people: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble” 2] He thought well enough of the song that when, a decade later, he recorded what became known as his comeback special, that was the first song in the show. And while Leiber clearly thought that Elvis didn’t really sound like he was trouble in that song, you only have to compare, for example, the French cover version of it by Johnny Hallyday — the man often referred to as the French Elvis — to see how much less intense the vocal could have been: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, “La Bagarre”] But some time after the King Creole sessions, the Colonel had the chance to separate Elvis from Leiber and Stoller for good. Elvis wanted them at all of his sessions, but Jerry Leiber got pneumonia and was unable to travel to a session. The Colonel kept insisting, and eventually Leiber asked Stoller what he should do, and Stoller said to tell him to do something to himself using words that you can’t use without being bumped into the adult section of the podcast directories. I assume from looking at the dates that this was for a session in June 1958 which Chet Atkins produced. From this point on, Leiber and Stoller would never work in the studio with Elvis again, and nor would they ever again be commissioned to write a song for him. They soon lost their jobs at RCA, which left them to concentrate on their work with R&B artists like the Clovers, the Coasters, and the Drifters. Their active collaboration with Elvis — a collaboration that would define all of them in the eyes of the public — had lasted only ten months, from April 1957 through February 1958. But Elvis kept an eye on their careers. He took note of songs they wrote for LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, “Saved”] The Clovers: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Bossa Nova Baby”] The Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] and more, and would record many more of their songs. He’d just never again have them write a song specifically for him. Not that this mattered in the short term for Leiber and Stoller, as that June 1958 session was Elvis’ last one for a couple of years. Because Colonel Parker had forced Elvis into the Army. At the time, and for many years afterwards, the US military still drafted every man in his early twenties for two years, and so of course Elvis was going to be drafted, but both the Army and Elvis assumed he’d be able to join Special Services, which would mean he’d be able to continue his career, so long as he performed a few free concerts for the military. But Colonel Parker had other ideas. He didn’t want his boy going around doing free shows all over the place and devaluing his product, and he also thought that Elvis was getting too big for his boots. Getting him sent away to Germany to spend two years scrubbing latrines and driving tanks, and away from all the industry people who might fill his head with ideas, sounded like an excellent plan. And not only that, but if he didn’t give RCA much of a backlog to release while he was away, RCA would realise how much they needed the Colonel. So the Colonel leaked to the press that Elvis was going to get special treatment, and got a series of stories planted saying how awful it was that they were going to treat Elvis with kid gloves, so that he could then indignantly deny that Elvis would do anything other than his duty. For the next two years, the only recordings Elvis would make would be private ones, of himself and his army friends playing and singing during their down time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Earth Angel”] But there was still one final person in the Colonel’s way, and fate took care of that: [Excerpt: Gladys Presley, “Home Sweet Home”] Elvis’ mother had been unwell for some time — and the descriptions of her illness sound an awful lot like the descriptions of Elvis’ own final illness a couple of decades later. Recent reports have suggested that Elvis may have had hereditary autoimmune problems — and that would seem to make a lot of sense given everything we know about him. Given that, it seems likely that his mother also had those problems. It also won’t have helped that she was on a series of fad diets, and taking diet pills, in order to lose weight, as the Colonel kept pressuring her to look thinner in photos with Elvis. Whatever the cause, she ended up hospitalised with hepatitis, which seemed to come from nowhere. Elvis was given compassionate leave to visit her in hospital, where she had the pink Cadillac that Elvis had bought her parked outside the window, so she could see it. When she died on August 14, aged forty-six, Elvis was distraught. There are descriptions in biographies of him that go into detail about his reactions. I won’t share those, because reading about them, even more than sixty years later, after everyone involved is dead, feels prurient to me, like an intrusion on something we’re not meant to see or even really to comprehend. Suffice it to say that his mother’s death was almost certainly the greatest trauma, by far, that Elvis ever experienced. At the funeral, Elvis got the Blackwood Brothers — Gladys’ favourite gospel quartet — to sing “Precious Memories”: [Excerpt: The Blackwood Brothers, “Precious Memories”] Gladys’ death, even more than his induction into the army, was the real end of the first phase of Elvis’ life and career. From that point on, while he always cared about his father, he had nobody in his life who he could trust utterly. And even more importantly, Colonel Parker now had nobody standing in his way. Gladys had never really liked or trusted Colonel Parker, but Vernon Presley saw him as somebody with whom he could do business, and as the only person around his son who really understood business. The Colonel had little but contempt for Vernon Presley, but knew how to keep him happy. While Elvis was in the Army, of course Scotty and Bill had to find other work. Scotty became a record producer, producing the record “Tragedy” for Thomas Wayne, whose full name was Thomas Wayne Perkins, and who was the brother of Johnny Cash’s guitarist Luther Perkins: [Excerpt: Thomas Wayne, “Tragedy”] That went to number five on the pop charts, and after that Scotty took a job working for Sam Phillips, and when Elvis got out of the Army and Scotty rejoined him, he continued working for Phillips for a number of years. Bill Black, meanwhile, formed Bill Black’s Combo, who had a number of instrumental hits over the next few years: [Excerpt: Bill Black’s Combo, “Hearts of Stone”] Unlike Scotty, Bill never worked with Elvis again after Elvis joined the army, and he concentrated on his own career. Bill Black’s Combo had eight top forty hits, and were popular enough that they became the opening act for the Beatles’ first US tour. Unfortunately, by that point, Black himself was too ill to tour, and he had to send the group out without him. He died in 1965, aged thirty-nine, from a brain tumour. As Elvis entered the Army, a combination of deliberate effort on the Colonel’s part and awful events had meant that every possible person who could give Elvis advice about his career, everyone who might tell him to trust his own artistic instincts, or who might push him in new directions, was either permanently removed from his life or distanced from him enough that they could have no further influence on him. From now on, the Colonel was in charge.    

Note: This is a new version because I uploaded the wrong file originally   Episode seventy-one of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs continues our look at British music TV by looking at the first time it affected American R&B, and is also our final look at Johnny Otis. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Shorts” by the Royal Teens, a group whose members went on to be far more important than one might expect.  Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  Much of the information on Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz.  I’ve also referred extensively to two books by Otis himself, Listen to the Lambs, and Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. I’ve used two main books on the British side of things:  Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and talks about the problems between the musicians’ unions. This three-CD set provides a great overview of Otis’ forties and fifties work, both as himself and with other artists. Many of the titles will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so we come to our last look at Johnny Otis, one of those people who has been turning up throughout the early episodes of the podcast. Indeed, he may continue to appear intermittently until at least the late sixties, as an influence and occasional collaborator. But the days of his influence on rock and roll music more or less came to an end with the rise of the rockabillies in the mid fifties, and from this point on he was not really involved in the mainstream of rock and roll. But in one of those curious events that happens sometimes, just as Otis was coming to the end of the run of hits he produced or arranged or performed on for other people, and the run of discoveries that changed music, he had a rock and roll hit under his own name for the first and only time. And that hit was because of the Six-Five Special, the British TV show we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The way this podcast works, telling stories chronologically and introducing new artists as they come along, can sometimes make it seem like the music business in the fifties was in a constant state of revolution, with a new year zero coming up every year or two. “First-wave rockabilly is *so* January through August 1956, we’re into late 1958 and everything’s prototype soul now, granddad!” But of course the majority of the podcast so far has looked at a very small chunk of time, concentrating on the mid 1950s, and plenty of people who were making hits in 1955 were still having very active careers as of 1958, and that’s definitely the case for Johnny Otis. While he didn’t have that many big hits after rockabilly took over from R&B as the predominant form of rock and roll music, he was still making important records. For example, in 1957 he produced and co-wrote “Lonely, Lonely Nights” for Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, which became a local hit, and which he thought at the time was the first big record to feature a Chicano singer. We’re going to talk about the Chicano identity in future episodes of the show, but Chicano (or Chicana or Chicanx) is a term that is usually used for Americans of Mexican origin. It can be both an ethnic and a cultural identifier, and it has also been used in the past as a racial slur. It’s still seen as that by some people, but it’s also the chosen identifier for a lot of people who reject other labels like Hispanic or Latino. To the best of my knowledge, it’s a word that is considered acceptable and correct for white people to use when talking about people who identify that way — which, to be clear, not all Americans of Mexican descent do, by any means — but I’m very happy to have feedback about this from people who are affected by the word. And Little Julian Herrera did identify that way, and he became a hero among the Chicano population in LA when “Lonely Lonely Nights” came out on Dig Records, a label Otis owned: [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, “Lonely, Lonely Nights”] But it turned out shortly afterwards that Herrera wasn’t exactly what he seemed. Police came to Otis’ door, and told him that the person he knew as Julian Herrera was wanted on charges of rape. And not only that, his birth name was Ron Gregory, and he was of Jewish ethnicity, and from a Hungarian-American family from Massachusetts. Apparently at some point he had run away from home and travelled to LA, where he had been taken in by a Mexican-American woman who had raised him as if he were her own son. That was pretty much the end of Little Julian Herrera’s career — and indeed shortly after that, Dig Records itself closed down, and Otis had no record contract. But then fate intervened, in the form of Mickey Katz. Mickey Katz was a comedian, who is now probably best known for his famous family — his son is Joel Grey, the star of Cabaret, while his granddaughter, Jennifer Grey, starred in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Katz’s comedy consisted of him performing parodies of currently-popular songs, giving them new lyrics referencing Jewish culture. A typical example is his version of “Sixteen Tons”, making it about working at a deli instead of down a mine: [Excerpt: Mickey Katz, “Sixteen Tons”] Even though Katz’s music was about as far from Otis’ as one can imagine, Katz had been a serious musician before he went into comedy, and when he went to see Otis perform live, he recognised his talent as a bandleader, and called his record label, urging them to sign him. Katz was on Capitol, one of the biggest labels in the country, and so for the first time in many years, Otis had guaranteed major-label distribution for his records. In October 1957, Capitol took the unusual step of releasing four Johnny Otis singles at the same time, each of them featuring a different vocalist from his large stable of performers. None did especially well on the American charts at the time, but one, featuring Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy, would have a major impact on Otis’ career. Marie Adams was someone who had been on the R&B scene for many years, and had been working with Otis in his show since 1953. She’d been born Ollie Marie Givens, but dropped the Ollie early on. She was a shy woman, who had to be pushed by her husband to audition for Don Robey at Peacock Records. Robey had challenged her to sing along with Dinah Washington’s record “Harbor Lights”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Harbor Lights”] When she’d proved she could sing that, Robey signed her, hoping that he’d have a second Big Mama Thornton on his hands. And her first single seemed to confirm him in that hope — “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks” went to number three on the R&B chart and became one of the biggest hit records Peacock had ever released: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks”] But her later career with Peacock was less successful. The follow-up was a version of Johnny Ace’s “My Song”, which seems to have been chosen more because Don Robey owned the publishing than because the song and arrangement were a good fit for her voice, and it didn’t do anything much commercially: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “My Song” Like many of Peacock’s artists who weren’t selling wonderfully she was handed over to Johnny Otis to produce, in the hopes that he could get her making hits. Sadly, he couldn’t, and her final record for Peacock came in 1955, when Otis produced her on one of many records recorded to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death, “In Memory”: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “In Memory”] But that did so poorly that it’s never had an official rerelease, not even on a digital compilation I have which has half a dozen other tributes to Ace on it by people like Vanetta Dillard and Linda Hayes. Adams was dropped by her record label, but she was impressive enough as a vocalist that Otis — who always had an ear for great singing — kept her in his band, as the lead singer of a vocal trio, the Three Tons of Joy, who were so called because they were all extremely fat. (I say this not as a criticism of them. I’m fat myself and absolutely fat-positive. Fat isn’t a term of abuse in my book). There seems to be some debate about the identity of the other two in the Three Tons of Joy. I’ve seen reliable sources refer to them as two sisters, Sadie and Francine McKinley, and as *Adams’* two sisters, Doris and Francine, and have no way of determining which of these is correct. The three of them would do synchronised dancing, even when they weren’t singing, and they remained with Otis’ show until 1960. And so when Capitol came to release its first batch of Johnny Otis records, one of them had vocals by Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy. The song in question was “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me”, a vaudeville song which dated back to 1921, and had originally sounded like this: [Excerpt: Billy Jones, “Ma! She’s Making Eyes at Me”] In the hands of the Otis band and the Three Tons of Joy, it was transformed into something that owed more to Ruth Brown (especially with Marie Adams’ pronunciation of “mama”) than to any of the other performers who had recorded versions of the song over the decades: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and his Orchestra with Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy: “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me”] In the US, that did nothing at all on the charts, but for some reason it took off massively in the UK, and went to number two on the pop charts over here. It was so successful, in fact, that there were plans for a Johnny Otis Show tour of the UK in 1958. Those plans failed, because of something I’ve not mentioned in this podcast before, but which radically shaped British music culture, and to a lesser extent American music culture, for decades. Both the American Federation of Musicians and their British equivalent, the Musicians’ Union, had since the early 1930s had a mutual protectionist agreement which prevented musicians from one of the countries playing in the other. After the Duke Ellington band toured the UK in 1933, the ban came into place on both sides. Certain individual non-instrumental performers from one country could perform in the other, but only if they employed musicians from the other country. So for example Glenn Miller got his first experience of putting together a big band because Ray Noble, a British bandleader, had had hits in the US in the mid thirties. Noble and his vocalist Al Bowlly were allowed to travel to the US, but Noble’s band wasn’t, and so he had to get an American musician, Miller, to put together a new band. Similarly, when Johnnie Ray had toured the UK in the early fifties, he’d had to employ British musicians, and when Lonnie Donegan had toured the US on the back of “Rock Island Line”‘s success, he was backed by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio — Donegan was allowed to sing, but not allowed to play guitar. In 1955, the two unions finally came to a one-in-one-out agreement, which would last for the next few decades, where musicians from each country could tour, but only as a like-for-like swap. So Louis Armstrong was allowed to tour the UK, but only on condition that Freddie Randall, a trumpet player from Devon, got to tour the US. Stan Kenton’s band toured the UK, while the Ted Heath Orchestra (which was not, I should point out, led by the Prime Minister of the same name) toured the US. We can argue over whether Freddie Randall was truly an adequate substitute for Louis Armstrong, but I’m sure you can see the basic idea. The union was making sure that Armstrong wasn’t taking a job that would otherwise have gone to a British trumpeter. Similarly, when Bill Haley and the Comets became the first American rock and roll group to tour the UK, in 1957, Lonnie Donegan was allowed to tour the US again, and this time he could play his guitar. The Three Tons of Joy went over to the UK to appear on the Six-Five Special, backed by British musicians and to scout out some possible tour venues with Otis’ manager, but the plans fell through because of the inability to find a British group who could reasonably do a swap with Otis’ band. They came back to the US, and cut a follow-up to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me”, with vocals by Marie and Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and Marie Adams, “Bye Bye Baby”] That’s an example of what Johnny Otis meant when he said later that he didn’t like most of his Capitol recordings, because he was being pushed too far in a commercial rock and roll direction, while he saw himself as far closer in spirit to Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, or Louis Jordan than to Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. The song is just an endless litany of the titles of recentish rock and roll hits, with little to recommend it. It made the top twenty in the UK, mostly on the strength of people having bought the previous single. The record after that was an attempt to capitalise on “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me” — it was another oldie, this time from 1916, and another song about making eyes at someone. Surely it would give them another UK hit, right?: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] Sadly, it sank without a trace — at least until it was picked up by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, who released a soundalike cover version, which became the last British number one of the fifties and first of the sixties, and was also the first number one hit by a black British artist and the first record by a black British person to sell a million copies: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] We’ll be hearing more from Ford’s co-producer on that record, a young engineer named Joe Meek, later in the series. But Otis had another idea for how to crack the British market. While the Three Tons of Joy had been performing on Six-Five Special, they had seen the British audiences doing a weird dance that only used their arms. It was a dance that was originally popularised by a British group that was so obscure that they never made a record, and the only trace they left on posterity was this dance and three photos, all taken on the same night by, of all people, Ken Russell. From those photos, the Bell Cats were one of the many British bands trying to sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. Their regular gig was at a coffee house called The Cat’s Whisker, where they were popular enough that the audience were packed in like sardines — the venue was so often dangerously overcrowded that the police eventually shut it down, and the owner reopened it as the first Angus Steak House, an infamous London restaurant chain. In those Bell Cats performances, the audience were packed so tightly that they couldn’t dance properly, and so a new dance developed among the customers, and spread — a dance where you only moved your hands. The hand jive. That dance spread to the audiences of the Six-Five Special, so much that Don Lang and his Frantic Five released “Six-Five Hand Jive” in March 1958: [Excerpt: Don Lang and His Frantic Five, “Six-Five Hand Jive”] Oddly, despite Six-Five Special not being shown in Sweden, that song saw no less than three Swedish soundalike cover versions, from (and I apologise if I mangle these names) Inger Bergrenn, Towa Carson, and the Monn-Keys. The Three Tons of Joy demonstrated the hand jive to Otis, and he decided to write a song about the dance. There was a fad for dance songs in 1958, and he believed that writing a song about a dance that was popular in Britain, where he’d just had a big hit — and namechecking those other dances, like the Walk and the Stroll — could lead to a hit followup to “Ma He’s Making Eyes At Me”. The dance also appealed to Otis because, oddly, it was very reminiscent of some of the moves that black American people would do when performing “Hambone”, the folk dance-cum-song-cum-game that we discussed way back in episode thirty, and which inspired Bo Diddley’s song “Bo Didlley”. Otis coupled lyrics about hand-jiving to the Bo Diddley rhythm — though he would always claim, for the rest of his life, that he’d heard that rhythm from convicts on a chain gang before Diddley ever made a record: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] Surprisingly, the record did nothing at all commercially in the UK. In fact, its biggest impact over here was that it inspired another famous dance. Cliff Richard cut his own version of “Willie and the Hand Jive” in 1959: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] His backing band, the Shadows, were looking for a way to liven up the visual presentation of that song when they performed it live, and they decided that moving in unison would work well for the song, and worked out a few dance steps. The audience reaction was so great that they started doing it on every song. The famous — or infamous — Shadows Walk had developed. But while “Willie and the Hand Jive” didn’t have any success in the UK, in the US it became Otis’ only top ten pop hit, and his first R&B top ten hit as a performer in six years, reaching number nine on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts. This was despite several radio stations banning it, as they assumed the “hand jive” was a reference to masturbation — even though on Otis’ TV shows and his stage performances, the Three Tons of Joy would demonstrate the dance as Otis sang. As late as the nineties, Otis was still having to deal with questions about whether “Willie and the Hand Jive” had some more lascivious meaning. Of course, with him now being on a major label, he had to do follow-ups to his big hit, like “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”] But chart success remained elusive, and nothing he did after this point got higher than number fifty-two on the pop charts. The music industry was slowly moving away from the kind of music that Otis had always made — as genres got narrower, his appreciation for all forms of black American music meant that he no longer appealed to people who wanted one specific style of music. He was also becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, writing a weekly newspaper column decrying racism, helping his friend Mervyn Dymally who became the joint first black person elected to statewide office in the USA since the reconstruction, and working with Malcolm X and others. He had to deal with crosses burning on his lawn, and with death threats to his family — while Otis was white, his wife was black. The result was that Otis recorded and toured only infrequently during the sixties, and at one point was making so little as a musician that his wife became the main breadwinner of the family while he was a stay-at-home father. After the Watts riots in 1965, which we’ll talk about much more when we get to that time period, Otis wrote the book Listen to the Lambs, a combination political essay, autobiography, and mixture of eyewitness accounts of the riots that made a radical case that the first priority for the black community in which he lived wasn’t so much social integration, which he believed impossible in the short term due to white racism, as economic equality — he thought it was in the best interests, not only of black people but of white people as well, if black people were made equal economic participants in America as rapidly as humanly possible, and if they should be given economic and political control over their own lives and destinies. The book is fierce in its anger at systemic racism, at colonialism, at anglocentric beauty standards that made black people hate their own bodies and faces, at police brutality, at the war in Vietnam, and at the systemic inequalities keeping black people down. And over and again he makes one point, and I’ll quote from the book here: “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. Just to remind you, the word he uses there was the correct word for black people at the time he was writing. Some of the book is heartrending, like the description from a witness — Otis gives over thirty pages of the book to the voices of black witnesses of the riots — talking about seeing white police officers casually shoot black teenagers on the street and make bullseye signals to their friends as if they’d been shooting tin cans. Some is, more than fifty years later, out of date or “of its time”, but the sad thing is that so many of the arguments are as timely now as they were then. Otis wrote a follow-up, Upside Your Head, in the early nineties inspired by the LA riots that followed the Rodney King beating, and no doubt were he alive today he would be completing the trilogy. But while politics had become Otis’ main occupation, he hadn’t stopped making music altogether, and in the late sixties he was contacted by Frank Zappa, who was such a fan of Otis that he copied his trademark beard from Otis. Otis and Zappa worked together in a casual way, with Otis mostly helping Zappa get in touch with musicians he knew who Zappa wanted to work with, like Don “Sugarcane” Harris. Otis also conducted the Mothers of Invention in the studio on a few songs while Zappa was in the control room, helping him get the greasy fifties sound he wanted on songs like “Holiday in Berlin”: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, “Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown”] Apparently while they were recording that, Otis was clapping his hands in the face of the bass player, Roy Estrada, who didn’t like it at all. Given what I know of Estrada that’s a good thing. Otis’ teenage son Shuggie also played with Zappa, playing bass on “Son of Mr. Green Genes” from Zappa’s Hot Rats album. Zappa then persuaded a small blues label, Kent Records, which was owned by two other veterans of the fifties music industry, the Bihari brothers, to sign Otis to make an album. “Cold Shot” by the New Johnny Otis Show featured a core band of just three people — Otis himself on piano and drums, Delmar “Mighty Mouth” Evans on vocals, and Shuggie playing all the guitar and bass parts. Shuggie was only fifteen at the time, but had been playing with his father’s band since he was eleven, often wearing false moustaches and sunglasses to play in venues serving alcohol. The record brought Otis his first R&B hit since “Willie and the Hand Jive”, more than a decade earlier, “Country Girl”: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show, “Country Girl”] Around the same time, that trio also recorded another album, called “For Adults Only”, under the name Snatch and the Poontangs, and with a cover drawn by Otis in a spot-on imitation of the style of Robert Crumb. For obvious reasons I won’t be playing any of that record here, but even that had a serious sociological purpose along with the obscene humour — Otis wanted to preserve bits of black folklore. Songs like “The Signifying Monkey” had been performed for years, and had even been recorded by people like Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, but they’d always stripped out the sexual insults that make up much of the piece’s appeal. Otis would in later years laugh that he’d received accusations of obscenity for “Roll With Me Henry” and for “Willie and the Hand Jive”, but nobody had seemed bothered in the slightest by the records of Snatch and the Poontangs with their constant sexual insults. “Cold Shot” caused a career renaissance for Otis, and he put together a new lineup of the Johnny Otis Show, one that would feature as many as possible of the veteran musicians who he thought deserved exposure to a new audience. Probably the highest point of Otis’ later career was a 1970 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where his band featured, along with Johnny and Shuggie, Esther Phillips, Big Joe Turner, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Roy Milton, Pee Wee Crayton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Roy Brown: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show featuring Roy Brown, “Good Rocking Tonight”] That performance was released as a live album, and Clint Eastwood featured footage of that show — the band performing “Willie and the Hand Jive” — in his classic film Play Misty For Me. It was probably the greatest example of Otis’ belief that all the important strands of black American music shared a commonality and could work in combination with each other. For the next few decades, Otis combined touring with as many of his old collaborators as possible — Marie Adams, for example, rejoined the band in 1972 — with having his own radio show in which he told people about black musical history and interviewed as many old musicians as he could, writing more books, including a cookbook and a collection of his art, running an organic apple juice company and food store, painting old blues artists in a style equally inspired by African art and Picasso, and being the pastor of a Pentecostal church — but one with a theology so broadminded that it was not only LGBT-affirming but had Buddhist and Jewish congregants. He ran Blues Spectrum Records in the seventies, which put out late-career recordings by people like Charles Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Louis Jordan, some of them their last ever recordings. And he lectured in the history of black music at Berkeley. Johnny Otis died in 2012, aged ninety, having achieved more than most of us could hope to achieve if we lived five times that long, and having helped many, many more people to make the most of their talents. He died three days before the discovery of whom he was most proud, Etta James, and she overshadowed him in the obituaries, as he would have wanted.