Podcasts about Georgia Gibbs

Songs include: You Don't Know What Love Is by Dinah Washington, You Don't Have To Know the Language by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, It's Too Soon To Know by the Orioles, Ask Anyone Who Knows by the Ink Spots and I'll Know by Georgia Gibbs. 

Sintonía: "Scorpion" - The Carnations"I´m Gonna Destroy That Boy" - The What Four; "If You Can´t Say Anything Nice" - Gia Mateo; "I Can´t Stay Mad At You" - Skeeter Davis; "I Don´t Want No Mama´s Boy" - Erma Franklin; "Gonna Make Him My Baby" - April Young; "Gee Dad" - Andrea Carroll; "I Wish I Had Known" - Sandra Phillips; "I Just Don´t Understand" - Carmen Cole; "Why Don´t You Do Right?" - Nichelle Nichols; "Don´t Monkey With Me" - The Lollipops; "You´re My Loving Baby" - The Sweet Things; "Stand By Me" - Little Eva; todas las canciones extraídas de la recopilación (1xCD) "Honeybeat : Groovy 60s Girl-Pop" (Real Gone Music/Sony, 2017), compilado por Sheila Burgel y Rob Santos"Night and Day" - Francis Faye; "He Cha Cha´d in" - Kay Starr; "It´s So Fine" - Lavern Baker; "Anything Can Happen-Mambo" - Dolores Hawkins; "My Mama Likes You" - Dolores Gray; "Let´s Mambo" - Betty Reilly; "Christine" - Miss X; "Hollywood Calypso" - Josephine Premice; "Mambo Baby" - Georgia Gibbs; "Hot Tamale Blues" - Ruby Dandridge. Todas las canciones extraídas de la recopilación (1xLP+CD) "Mambo, Cha-Cha-Cha & Calypso Vol. 1: Girls Session!" (Jukebox Music Factory, 2018) compilado por El VidocqEscuchar audio

Con Cyndi Lauper, Lester Sterling & Stranger Cole, Orquesta De La Luz, Lola Flores y Antonio González, Gracia Montes, Marta Gómez, Françoise Hardy, Gelu, Rita Pavone, Cocki Mazzetti, Louis Jordan, Georgia Gibbs, Billie Davis, Lambert, Hendricks, And Ross, Crazy Horse, Rod Stewart, Everything but the Girl y Max Raabe & Palast Orchester.

Support Breaking Walls at https://www.patreon.com/thewallbreakers At 10PM eastern time on Friday December 22nd, 1944, Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore signed on over CBS with Georgia Gibbs and Roy Bargy's orchestra. The show pulled a rating of 11.8 opposite Amos ‘n' Andy on NBC. Roughly eight million people tuned in.

Sintonía: "Love for Sale" - Barney Kessel"There´s Going To The Devil to Pay" - Fats Waller & His Rhythm; "Walkin´ Slow Behind You" (feat. Jimmy Rushing) - Count Basie Orchestra; "Tiger Moan" - The State Street Ramblers; "Don´t Fall Asleep" (feat. Helen Forrest) - Artie Shaw Orchestra; "Tain´d a Fit Night For A Man Or Beast" (feat. Noble Sissle´s Swingsters) - Sidney Bechet; "Skeleton In The Cupboard" - Teddy Foster And His Kings Of Swing; "Dr. Heckle and Mister Jibe" - Benny Goodman with Jack Teagarden; "Who Dat Up Dere" - Woody Herman Orchestra; "Wake Up Sinners" (feat. Jabbo Smith) - Lloyd Smith´s Gut Bucketeers; "Old Man Mose" - Georgia GibbsTodas las músicas (menos la sintonía) extraídas de la recopilación (1x10") "Hells Bells - Swing Candies for Doomsday 1928-49" (Stag-O-Lee, 2018)"16 toneladas (Sixteen Tones)" - Noriel Vilela; "The Carioca" - Fred Astaire; "Brazilian Baion" - Betty Reilly & Les Baxter Orchestra; "Voce e eu" - Milton Banana e o Conjunto de Oscar Castro Neves Todas las músicas (incluída la sintonía) extraídas de la recopilacion (1x10") "Samba do Brazil" (Doghouse & Bone, 2018)Escuchar audio

Welcome to Episode 62 of Sounds Like Radio as we get to dancin' at the hop.   Marjorie wants to dance and so does Georgia Gibbs, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Little Eva, Madeleine Peyroux, Frankie & Martha Reeves and her Vandellas.   It's all happening in today's show which features the Great Gildersleeve 5/18/49 episode as we dance before and after with Your Humble Host toe tappin' all the way. AND NEXT WEEK ALL NEW SOUNDS LIKE RADIO shows RETURN!!!

Georgia Gibbs is a Traditional Chinese Herbalist, cycle awareness educator, and entrepreneur. Her journey into holistic wellness began after dealing with chronic health issues. Initially a model, her health struggles led her to discover Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), where she found healing and purpose. She now focuses on women's health, integrating TCM, mineral balance, and nutritional coaching. Gibbs is passionate about guiding women back to their bodies through her clinic, educational resources, and contributions to cycle awareness tools. In this episode we chat about... -what is abundance? is it being financially wealthy?  -overconsumption and materialism -finding mold in her house and being gaslit by landlord -Georgia's health journey with chronic illness -from opportunities with Sports Illustrated and Victoria's Secret to turning it down for her health -aluminum toxicity -& more Resources: Follow Georgia on Instagram Georgia's website Shop Puori grass-fed protein powder + supplements (Clean Label Certified and third-party tested!!!) discount code: HEALINGTHESOURCE Follow Claudia, the host, on instagram Check out her website here

Time for Sounds Like Radio Volume 170 as school's almost out for Leroy and now he wants to go camping. But he and Great Gildersleeve had a bargain, IF Leroy got good grades he'd go, BUT Leroy has failed a class. Now what's going to happen? Well, some shenanigans for one and some great camping style music for another including Your Humble Host's pie adventure. Along with us are Louis Jordan, Astrud Gilberto (that's her album cover picture shown with this episode), Bing Crosby, Laurie Anders, Burl Ives, Georgia Gibbs & Allan Sherman.

Episode 58: On this episode of The Shift, Christie (@quotesbychristie) speaks with Georgia Gibbs (@georgiagibbs_), a clinical herbalist and model. Georgia talks about how she was thrust into modeling, has now found her true passion connected to her desire to help women heal inside and out. Take a listen and feel Georgia's beauty.... inside and out. ----- Links: * Georgia Gibbs * I Feel That by Christina Scotch ----- Want to watch The Shift? Check us out on our YouTube channel here. ------ What is the best piece of advice you've ever received? That's what we ask on The Shift. Christina Scotch, creator of the popular Instagram account Quotes by Christie, asks celebrities, entrepreneurs, influencers, and other successful people about the words that inspired them. She finds out the quotes, mottos, mantras, and affirmations that inspired and motivated them to achieve more. Tune in to find the quote that might just shift your mindset and change your life.

When I was first going through my PCOS journey, my mom sent me a link to a YouTube video of a girl who was struggling with similar symptoms as I was. Fast forward to now, that same person is joining us on today's episode! Georgia Gibbs is a traditional Chinese herbalist, holistic doula, and cycle awareness activist. In this episode, Georgia opens us to the world of Chinese herbal medicine. She explains how these herbs are used to promote hormone health, detox your liver, combat candida overgrowth, help with PMS symptoms, and so much more. She dives into cycle syncing for everyone, whether you are on or off birth control, have a regular cycle, or have no cycle at all. We also explore new topics on the podcast, like pregnancy priming. If you feel like you have been trying everything and are still not seeing the results you would like, give this episode a listen! You can learn more about Georgia by following her on Instagram HEREWork with Georgia 1 on 1 by setting up a consultation HEREAccess Georgia's Ebooks HERECONNECT WITH ME:Follow Wellness Her Way on Instagram for podcast updates: HERE Connect with me on TikTok: HEREConnect with me on Instagram: HEREProduced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Time for Sounds Like Radio Volume 161 with Your Humble Host. Today the Great Gildersleeve from February 20, 1952 has lined up with the mayor an important job for himself. Or so he thinks, till this young college gal comes along and now the mayor has her in mind for the job, of course. Gildersleeve is now worried this new gal may find him inefficient, she's the efficiency expert don't you know. Well, I have some folks with me to calm Gildy's nerves. On hand today are Fred Astaire, Leanne Rimes, Eddy Arnold, Betty Boop, Bing Crosby, Georgia Gibbs, Nat King Cole & Kay Starr. We'll also get a bit of yodeling in with Elton Britt and a fantastic yodel song. Well, all this may not help Gildy but it sure sounds great to listen to.

The Big Show 1951-12-30 (041) Tallulah Bankhead, Fred Allen, Gertrude Berg, Joan Davis, Georgia Gibbs, Portland Hoffa, Johnny Johnston, Jackie Miles (Mindi)

Welcome to Season 03 Episode 09 - the "Frozen Pipes" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include Mr. Tim Kennedy, founder and Artistic Director Emeritus of Buffalo Opera Unlimited, discussing the Live at the Met production of Carmen; Mr. Barry Kilpatrick offering an overview of the spring semester offerings from the SUNY Fredonia School of Music; and Dr. Tom Janik, whose photography exhibit "Scenes from Where You Live" is now on display at the Darwin R. Barker Library in Fredonia. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, including Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and Amazon Prime Music, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps: Tim Kennedy/Carmen - 2:30 Barry Kilpatrick/School of Music - 20:40 Arts Calendar - 38:45 Tom Janik/"Scenes from Where You Live" - 41:08 Media: "Looks Like A Cold, Cold Winter", written by Jack Fulton, Al Goering, Caeser Petrillo; performed by Georgia Gibbs, September 1950 "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle", from the opera Carmen; George Bizet, composer; Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halvéy, libretto; performed by Aigul Akhmetshina, mezzo-soprano; from the Metropolitan production of January, 2024 "Toréador, en garde!", from the opera Carmen; George Bizet, composer; Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halvéy, libretto; performed by Kyle Ketelsen, baritone; from the Metropolitan production of January, 2024 Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream; Frederick Mendelssohn, composer; performed by Seraph Brass, from the album Asteria, April 2018. Toccata in D Minor; J.S. Bach, composer; performed by the United States Naval Academy Band Trombone Quartet, October 2019 Carmen Overture, composed by George Bizet, 1875; performed by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Myung-Whun Chung, December 2017 Artist Links: Tim Kennedy Metropolitan Opera House Barry Kilpatrick Visual and Performing Arts Calendar SUNY Fredonia Tom Janik Darwin R. Barker Library BECOME A MEMBER!    

Audio introduces the Armed Forces Radio rebroadcast of an April 6, 1945 "Comedy Caravan" starring Garry Moore and Jimmy Duranted with guest vocalist Georgia Gibbs.

Songs include: A Kiss To Build a Dream On, We Kiss In a Shadow, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, I Still Love To Kiss You Goodnight and Kiss Of Fire. Perfomers include: Georgia Gibbs, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Louis Armstrong, Freddie Slack and Dinah Shore.

It's time for Sounds Like Radio Volume 131 and the Great Gildersleeve is in a quandary. On the one hand the captivating singer Katy Lee is in town and at the same time he's supposed to go to a Jollyboys meeting. What to do, what to do? I know, well, let's see what Gildy decides. Your Humble Host was mystified himself when he first heard the song Remember Me, The Girl In The Woods as you will be too when Katy Lee starts warbling. It really is a bewitching song. By the way, that is Katy Lee herself that Gildersleeve is kissing in the picture with this show. But not to be outdone we have on hand some of our favorites too, the Ink Spots in a great stereo recording made in 1959, a rare Peggy Lee stereo classic from 1950's, Burl Ives, Connie Stevens, Bing Crosby, Georgia Gibbs, Jimmy Durante and how about the theme from Connie Stevens' TV show Hawaiian Eye! Oh, we're jam packed with goodies today.

Mail Call was an American radio program that entertained American soldiers from 1942 until 1945, during World War II. Lt. Col. Thomas A.H. Lewis (commander of the Armed Forces Radio Service) wrote in 1944, "The initial production of the Armed Forces Radio Service was 'Mail Call,' a morale-building half hour which brought famed performers to the microphone to sing and gag in the best American manner." The program featured popular entertainers of that day, such as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and Dinah Shore, performing musical numbers and comedy skits to boost the morale of soldiers stationed far from their homes. Lewis added, "To a fellow who has spent months guarding an outpost in the South Seas, Iceland or Africa a cheery greeting from a favorite comedian, a song hit direct from Broadway, or the beating rhythm of a hot band, mean a tie with the home to which he hopes soon to return Listen to our radio station Old Time Radio https://link.radioking.com/otradio Listen to other Shows at My Classic Radio https://www.myclassicradio.net/ Remember that times have changed, and some shows might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Entertainment Radio

Features vintage recordings by Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw and Georgia Gibbs.  We also listen to a Soundie by The Three Peppers and hear an old radio ad from Gulf Spray. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

It's Sounds Like Radio Volume 117 as The Great Gildersleeve is rethinking all about former flame Eve Goodwin. She's looking mighty fine in GIldy's memory and he tries to rekindle that old flame. Now Eve was never the most fun filled date even when she liked him, so, well, Good Luck Gildy. But Your Humble Host never gives up hope so we'll do all we can to help out. That means today it'll be time for Miss Nibbs, herself Georgia Gibbs (who's pictured here with our show), Bing Crosby is here for a 2 fer, in one of his songs he'll even be singing with himself!!, Jo Stafford lends her dulcet tones, Johnny Hartman describes Gildy to a tee, Jimmy Durante flies in for a word and Billie Holiday takes Eve's side in this whole fandango. From September 10, 1947 Harold Peary is back for the mean time as The Great Gildersleeve.

Re-brodcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), this is Comedy Caravan with Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore, with guest Marion Hutton. This episode aired Friday, April 6, 1945. Sponsored by Rexall Drug Products (originally a U.S. pharmacy/drug store). Cast: Howard Petrie (announcer); Jimmy Durante, singer Georgia Gibbs, Garry Moore, and with music by the Roy Bargy Orchestra. My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLES. You can subscribe to my channels to receive new post notifications, it's 100% free to join. If inclined, please leave a positive rating or review on your podcast service. Instagram @duane.otr Thank you for your support. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason, sérfræðingur í fjármálum um efnahagsmál í heiminum. M.a. rætt um verðbólgu, vexti og hergagnastuðning Vesturlanda við Úkraínumenn. Lundúnaspjallið með Sigrúnu Davíðsdóttur. Úrslitin í sveitarstjórnarkosningunum í Bretlandi í síðustu viku og dómsmál tveggja eiginkvenna fótboltamanna, þeirra Coleen Rooney og Rebekuh Vardy, þar sem önnur sakar hina um að hafa lekið fréttum af lokuðum Instagram-reikningi sínum í bresku pressuna. Róbert Arnar Stefánsson, forstöðumaður Náttúrustofu Vesturlands, um fuglarannsóknir náttúrustofunnar. Hann gengur fjörur á þriggja daga fresti þessi misserin og telur svokallaða fargesti, farfugla sem staldra við á Íslandi á leið sinni til Grændlands. Í sumar verður ráðist í auknar rannsóknir á kríu en einnig er fylgst með arnarstofninum og ýmsum bjargfuglum. Tónlist: Seven lonely days, Georgia Gibbs. Ó, blessuð vertu sumarsól, GÓSS. Lóan er komin, Magnús Eiríksson og KK Umsjón: Björn Þór Sigbjörnsson og Sigríður Halldórsdóttir.

Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason, sérfræðingur í fjármálum um efnahagsmál í heiminum. M.a. rætt um verðbólgu, vexti og hergagnastuðning Vesturlanda við Úkraínumenn. Lundúnaspjallið með Sigrúnu Davíðsdóttur. Úrslitin í sveitarstjórnarkosningunum í Bretlandi í síðustu viku og dómsmál tveggja eiginkvenna fótboltamanna, þeirra Coleen Rooney og Rebekuh Vardy, þar sem önnur sakar hina um að hafa lekið fréttum af lokuðum Instagram-reikningi sínum í bresku pressuna. Róbert Arnar Stefánsson, forstöðumaður Náttúrustofu Vesturlands, um fuglarannsóknir náttúrustofunnar. Hann gengur fjörur á þriggja daga fresti þessi misserin og telur svokallaða fargesti, farfugla sem staldra við á Íslandi á leið sinni til Grændlands. Í sumar verður ráðist í auknar rannsóknir á kríu en einnig er fylgst með arnarstofninum og ýmsum bjargfuglum. Tónlist: Seven lonely days, Georgia Gibbs. Ó, blessuð vertu sumarsól, GÓSS. Lóan er komin, Magnús Eiríksson og KK Umsjón: Björn Þór Sigbjörnsson og Sigríður Halldórsdóttir.

Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason, sérfræðingur í fjármálum um efnahagsmál í heiminum. M.a. rætt um verðbólgu, vexti og hergagnastuðning Vesturlanda við Úkraínumenn. Lundúnaspjallið með Sigrúnu Davíðsdóttur. Úrslitin í sveitarstjórnarkosningunum í Bretlandi í síðustu viku og dómsmál tveggja eiginkvenna fótboltamanna, þeirra Coleen Rooney og Rebekuh Vardy, þar sem önnur sakar hina um að hafa lekið fréttum af lokuðum Instagram-reikningi sínum í bresku pressuna. Róbert Arnar Stefánsson, forstöðumaður Náttúrustofu Vesturlands, um fuglarannsóknir náttúrustofunnar. Hann gengur fjörur á þriggja daga fresti þessi misserin og telur svokallaða fargesti, farfugla sem staldra við á Íslandi á leið sinni til Grændlands. Í sumar verður ráðist í auknar rannsóknir á kríu en einnig er fylgst með arnarstofninum og ýmsum bjargfuglum. Tónlist: Seven lonely days, Georgia Gibbs. Ó, blessuð vertu sumarsól, GÓSS. Lóan er komin, Magnús Eiríksson og KK Umsjón: Björn Þór Sigbjörnsson og Sigríður Halldórsdóttir.

Shellac Stack No. 264 rides a wild roller coaster with Henri Rene's Orchestra and visits the Alps with the McGuire Sisters. We hear fine piano from Art Tatum, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Billy Mayerl, dance with George Olsen and Sam Lanin, and enjoy some novelties with Tony Pastor and Georgia Gibbs. More too!

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/black-music-gets-whitewashed-as-georgia-gibbs-hits-the-pop-charts-with-the-wallflower-dance-with-me-henrySupport the show on Patreon

Episode 15 aired October 13, 1956 on NBC Radio. Featuring The Pickens Sisters, Joe Cook, Janette MacDonald with Allan Jones, commentary by Dorothy Thompson, The Melody Puzzle game show with Georgia Gibbs and Harry Salter Orchestra "Boo Hoo" and Kiss In The Dark by the Richard Himber Orchestra.

Shellac Stack No. 257 passes time with Phil Spitalny, Artie Shaw, Fats Waller, Georgia Gibbs, Ted Weems, Aileen Stanley, and many others. Don't miss the 1910 recording by the Carl Nebe Quartett! Thanks for supporting the Shellac Stack on Patreon: patreon.com/shellacstack

The biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway recorded for AFRS during the war years, The American Forces Network can trace its origins back to May 26, 1942, when the War Department established the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). The U.S. Army began broadcasting from London during World War II, using equipment and studio facilities borrowed from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The first transmission to U.S. troops began at 5:45 p.m. on July 4, 1943, and included less than five hours of recorded shows, a BBC news and sports broadcast. That day, Corporal Syl Binkin became the first U.S. Military broadcasters heard over the air. The signal was sent from London via telephone lines to five regional transmitters to reach U.S. troops in the United Kingdom as they prepared for the inevitable invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Fearing competition for civilian audiences the BBC initially tried to impose restrictions on AFN broadcasts within Britain (transmissions were only allowed from American Bases outside London and were limited to 50 watts of transmission power) and a minimum quota of British produced programming had to be carried. Nevertheless AFN programmes were widely enjoyed by the British civilian listeners who could receive them and once AFN operations transferred to continental Europe (shortly after D-Day) AFN were able to broadcast with little restriction with programmes available to civilian audiences across most of Europe (including Britain) after dark. As D-Day approached, the network joined with the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to develop programs especially for the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Mobile stations, complete with personnel, broadcasting equipment, and a record library were deployed to broadcast music and news to troops in the field. The mobile stations reported on front line activities and fed the news reports back to studio locations in London. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entertainment Radio Stations Live 24/7 Sherlock Holmes/CBS Radio Mystery Theater https://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441 https://live365.com/station/CBS-Radio-Mystery-Theater-a57491 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sintonía: "El gato" - Gatos Bizcos "Seven Lonely Days" - Patsy Cline; "The Rockin´ Lady" - Penny Candy; "All Right Baby" - Janis Martin; "Welcome to the Club" - Charline Arthur; "Rock The Bop" - Brenda Lee; "Star Light, Star Bright" - Jackie Johnson; "Rockin´ Robert" - The La Dell Sisters; "Silent Lips" - Georgia Gibbs; "Sweet Talk" - Bunny Paul; "I Need A Man" - Barbara Pittman; "I Just Don´t Like This Kind Of Livin´ " - Laura Lee Perkins; "Jack Pot" - Dolores Fredericks & The Rockin´ Horses"; "Hoy Hoy" - The Collins Kids; "Pepper Hot Baby" - Jaye P. Morgan; "Rock, Baby, Rock" - Barbara Tennant; "Long Sideburns" - Bolean Barry; "My Man Called Me" - Big Mama Thornton; "Big Rock In" - Dolly Cooper; "Lucky Lips" - Ruth Brown; "Hard Hearted Woman" - Wanda Jackson La 1ª parte (1/3) se emitió el pasado 6 de Julio: 06/07/2021 La 2ª parte (2/3) se emitió el pasado 2 de Septiembre: 02/09/2021 Escuchar audio

October 5, 1952 - Jack Benny plays a newspaperman. References include game 5 of the World Series with ballplayers like Phill Rezzuto and Jackie Robinson, Albert Einstein, Milton Berle, Rocky Marciano, Ty Cobb, The New Follies at the Burbank Theater, and the songs "Cry" by Johnny Ray, "Kiss of Fire" by Georgia Gibbs, and "Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po Po)" by Guy Mitchell.  

In today's 5/25/49 Great Gildersleeve he's finally had it with bad neighbor Bullard and seeks to get even. Even our favorite singers are keeping it low to avoid the Gildy wrath. But then who cares about Gildy's wrath when you gotta sing you gotta sing and Sounds Like Radio's gotta let ‘em. Your Humble Host will hold back Gildy as we bring on Gogi Grant, Sophie Tucker (with her all time classic!), Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Georgia Gibbs, Bobby Darin and everyone's favorite Grandpa with a song that really shows how much energy Grandpa has when he needs it. It's all in good fun and all for you. Let's listen!

Welcome to Episode 62 of Sounds Like Radio as we get to dancin' at the hop. Marjorie wants to dance and so does Georgia Gibbs, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Little Eva, Madeleine Peyroux, Frankie & Martha Reeves and her Vandellas. It's all happening in today's show which features the Great Gildersleeve 5/18/49 episode as we dance before and after. Will Marjorie get her shy boyfriend to go steppin'? Will he change his name to Henry? Find out this and more in this exciting episode with Your Humble Host toe tappin' all the way.

Episode 122 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a double-length (over an hour) look at “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, at Cooke's political and artistic growth, and at the circumstances around his death. This one has a long list of content warnings at the beginning of the episode, for good reason... 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 "My Guy" by Mary Wells.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. For this episode, he also did the re-edit of the closing theme. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by one artist. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick's work, it's an essential book if you're even slightly interested in the subject. Information on Allen Klein comes from Fred Goodman's book on Klein. The Netflix documentary I mention can be found here. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke's music for the beginner, and the only one to contain recordings from all four labels (Specialty, Keen, RCA, and Tracey) he recorded for. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, a brief acknowledgement --  Lloyd Price plays a minor role in this story, and I heard as I was in the middle of writing it that he had died on May the third, aged eighty-eight. Price was one of the great pioneers of rock and roll -- I first looked at him more than a hundred episodes ago, back in episode twelve -- and he continued performing live right up until the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March last year. He'll be missed. Today we're going to look at one of the great soul protest records of all time, a record that was the high point in the career of its singer and songwriter, and which became a great anthem of the Civil Rights movement. But we're also going to look at the dark side of its creator, and the events that led to his untimely death. More than most episodes of the podcast, this requires a content warning. Indeed, it requires more than just content warnings. Those warnings are necessary -- this episode will deal with not only a murder, but also sexual violence, racialised violence, spousal abuse, child sexual abuse, drug use and the death of a child, as well as being about a song which is in itself about the racism that pervaded American society in the 1960s as it does today. This is a story from which absolutely nobody comes out well, which features very few decent human beings, and which I find truly unpleasant to write about. But there is something else that I want to say, before getting into the episode -- more than any other episode I have done, and I think more than any other episode that I am *going* to do, this is an episode where my position as a white British man born fourteen years after Sam Cooke's death might mean that my perspective is flawed in ways that might actually make it impossible for me to tell the story properly, and in ways that might mean that my telling of the story is doing a grave, racialised, injustice. Were this song and this story not so important to the ongoing narrative, I would simply avoid telling it altogether, but there is simply no way for me to avoid it and tell the rest of the story without doing equally grave injustices. So I will say this upfront. There are two narratives about Sam Cooke's death -- the official one, and a more conspiratorial one. Everything I know about the case tells me that the official account is the one that is actually correct, and *as far as I can tell*, I have good reason for thinking that way. But here's the thing. The other narrative is one that is held by a lot of people who knew Cooke, and they claim that the reason their narrative is not the officially-accepted one is because of racism. I do not think that is the case myself. In fact, all the facts I have seen about the case lead to the conclusion that the official narrative is correct. But I am deeply, deeply, uncomfortable with saying that. Because I have an obligation to be honest, but I also have an obligation not to talk over Black people about their experiences of racism. So what I want to say now, before even starting the episode, is this. Listen to what I have to say, by all means, but then watch the Netflix documentary Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, and *listen* to what the people saying otherwise have to say. I can only give my own perspective, and my perspective is far more likely to be flawed here than in any other episode of this podcast. I am truly uncomfortable writing and recording this episode, and were this any other record at all, I would have just skipped it. But that was not an option. Anyway, all that said, let's get on with the episode proper, which is on one of the most important records of the sixties -- "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] It's been almost eighteen months since we last looked properly at Sam Cooke, way back in episode sixty, and a lot has happened in the story since then, so a brief recap -- Sam Cooke started out as a gospel singer, first with a group called the Highway QCs, and then joining the Soul Stirrers, the most popular gospel group on the circuit, replacing their lead singer.  The Soul Stirrers had signed to Specialty Records, and released records like "Touch the Hem of His Garment", written by Cooke in the studio: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of His Garment"] Cooke had eventually moved away from gospel music to secular, starting with a rewrite of a gospel song he'd written, changing "My God is so wonderful" to "My girl is so lovable", but he'd released that under the name Dale Cook, rather than his own name, in case of a backlash from gospel fans: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, "Lovable"] No-one was fooled, and he started recording under his own name. Shortly after this, Cooke had written his big breakthrough hit, "You Send Me", and when Art Rupe at Specialty Records was unimpressed with it, Cooke and his producer Bumps Blackwell had both moved from Specialty to a new label, Keen Records. Cooke's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was a disaster -- cutting him off half way through the song -- but his second was a triumph, and "You Send Me" went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts, and sold over a million copies, while Specialty put out unreleased earlier recordings and sold over half a million copies of some of those. Sam Cooke was now one of the biggest things in the music business. And he had the potential to become even bigger. He had the looks of a teen idol, and was easily among the two or three best-looking male singing stars of the period. He had a huge amount of personal charm, he was fiercely intelligent, and had an arrogant selfishness that came over as self-confidence -- he believed he deserved everything the world could offer to him, and he was charming enough that everyone he met believed it too. He had an astonishing singing voice, and he was also prodigiously talented as a songwriter -- he'd written "Touch the Hem of His Garment" on the spot in the studio after coming in with no material prepared for the session. Not everything was going entirely smoothly for him, though -- he was in the middle of getting divorced from his first wife, and he was arrested backstage after a gig for non-payment of child support for a child he'd fathered with another woman he'd abandoned. This was a regular occurrence – he was as self-centred in his relationships with women as in other aspects of his life -- though as in those other aspects, the women in question were generally so smitten with him that they forgave him everything. Cooke wanted more than to be a pop star. He had his sights set on being another Harry Belafonte. At this point Belafonte was probably the most popular Black all-round entertainer in the world, with his performances of pop arrangements of calypso and folk songs: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell"] Belafonte had nothing like Cooke's chart success, but he was playing prestigious dates in Las Vegas and at high-class clubs, and Cooke wanted to follow his example. Most notably, at a time when almost all notable Black performers straightened their hair, Belafonte left his hair natural and cut it short. Cooke thought that this was very, very shrewd on Belafonte's part, copying him and saying to his brother L.C. that this would make him less threatening to the white public -- he believed that if a Black man slicked his hair back and processed it, he would come across as slick and dishonest, white people wouldn't trust him around their daughters. But if he just kept his natural hair but cut it short, then he'd come across as more honest and trustworthy, just an all-American boy. Oddly, the biggest effect of this decision wasn't on white audiences, but on Black people watching his appearances on TV. People like Smokey Robinson have often talked about how seeing Cooke perform on TV with his natural hair made a huge impression on them -- showing them that it was possible to be a Black man and not be ashamed of it. It was a move to appeal to the white audience that also had the effect of encouraging Black pride. But Cooke's first attempt at appealing to the mainstream white audience that loved Belafonte didn't go down well. He was booked in for a three-week appearance at the Copacabana, one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the country, and right from the start it was a failure. Bumps Blackwell had written the arrangements for the show on the basis that there would be a small band, and when they discovered Cooke would be backed by a sixteen-piece orchestra he and his assistant Lou Adler had to frantically spend a couple of days copying out sheet music for a bigger group. And Cooke's repertoire for those shows stuck mostly to old standards like "Begin the Beguine", "Ol' Man River", and "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", with the only new song being "Mary, Mary Lou", a song written by a Catholic priest which had recently been a flop single for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mary, Mary Lou"] Cooke didn't put over those old standards with anything like the passion he had dedicated to his gospel and rock and roll recordings, and audiences were largely unimpressed. Cooke gave up for the moment on trying to win over the supper-club audiences and returned to touring on rock and roll package tours, becoming so close with Clyde McPhatter and LaVern Baker on one tour that they seriously considered trying to get their record labels to agree to allow them to record an album of gospel songs together as a trio, although that never worked out. Cooke looked up immensely to McPhatter in particular, and listened attentively as McPhatter explained his views of the world -- ones that were very different to the ones Cooke had grown up with. McPhatter was an outspoken atheist who saw religion as a con, and who also had been a lifelong member of the NAACP and was a vocal supporter of civil rights. Cooke listened closely to what McPhatter had to say, and thought long and hard about it. Cooke was also dealing with lawsuits from Art Rupe at Specialty Records. When Cooke had left Specialty, he'd agreed that Rupe would own the publishing on any future songs he'd written, but he had got round this by crediting "You Send Me" to his brother, L.C.  Rupe was incensed, and obviously sued, but he had no hard evidence that Cooke had himself written the song. Indeed, Rupe at one point even tried to turn the tables on Cooke, by getting Lloyd Price's brother Leo, a songwriter himself who had written "Send Me Some Lovin'", to claim that *he* had written "You Send Me", but Leo Price quickly backed down from the claim, and Rupe was left unable to prove anything. It didn't hurt Cooke's case that L.C., while not a talent of his brother's stature, was at least a professional singer and songwriter himself, who was releasing records on Checker Records that sounded very like Sam's work: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Do You Remember?"] For much of the late 1950s, Sam Cooke seemed to be trying to fit into two worlds simultaneously. He was insistent  that he wanted to move into the type of showbusiness that was represented by the Rat Pack -- he cut an album of Billie Holiday songs, and he got rid of Bumps Blackwell as his manager, replacing him with a white man who had previously been Sammy Davis Jr.'s publicist. But on the other hand, he was hanging out with the Central Avenue music scene in LA, with Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Eugene Church, Jesse Belvin, and Alex and Gaynel Hodge. While his aspirations towards Rat Packdom faltered, he carried on having hits -- his own "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha", and he recorded, but didn't release yet, a song that Lou Adler had written with his friend Herb Alpert, and whose lyrics Sam revised, "Wonderful World". Cooke was also starting a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Barbara. He'd actually had an affair with her some years earlier, and they'd had a daughter, Linda, who Cooke had initially not acknowledged as his own -- he had many children with other women -- but they got together in 1958, around the time of Cooke's divorce from his first wife. Tragically, that first wife then died in a car crash in 1959 -- Cooke paid her funeral expenses. He was also getting dissatisfied with Keen Records, which had been growing too fast to keep up with its expenses -- Bumps Blackwell, Lou Adler, and Herb Alpert, who had all started at the label with him, all started to move away from it to do other things, and Cooke was sure that Keen weren't paying him the money they owed as fast as they should.  He also wanted to help some of his old friends out -- while Cooke was an incredibly selfish man, he was also someone who believed in not leaving anyone behind, so long as they paid him what he thought was the proper respect, and so he started his own record label, with his friends J.W. Alexander and Roy Crain, called SAR Records (standing for Sam, Alex, and Roy), to put out records by his old group The Soul Stirrers, for whom he wrote "Stand By Me, Father", a song inspired by an old gospel song by Charles Tindley, and with a lead sung by Johnnie Taylor, the Sam Cooke soundalike who had replaced Cooke as the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] Of course, that became, as we heard a few months back, the basis for Ben E. King's big hit "Stand By Me". Cooke and Alexander had already started up their own publishing company, and were collaborating on songs for other artists, too. They wrote "I Know I'll Always Be In Love With You", which was recorded first by the Hollywood Flames and then by Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "I Know I'll Always Be in Love With You"] And "I'm Alright", which Little Anthony and the Imperials released as a single: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "I'm Alright"] But while he was working on rock and roll and gospel records, he was also learning to tap-dance for his performances at the exclusive white nightclubs he wanted to play -- though when he played Black venues he didn't include those bits in the act. He did, though, perform seated on a stool in imitation of Perry Como, having decided that if he couldn't match the energetic performances of people like Jackie Wilson (who had been his support act at a run of shows where Wilson had gone down better than Cooke) he would go in a more casual direction.  He was also looking to move into the pop market when it came to his records, and he eventually signed up with RCA Records, and specifically with Hugo and Luigi. We've talked about Hugo and Luigi before, a couple of times -- they were the people who had produced Georgia Gibbs' soundalike records that had ripped off Black performers, and we talked about their production of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", though at this point they hadn't yet made that record. They had occasionally produced records that were more R&B flavoured -- they produced "Shout!" for the Isley Brothers, for example -- but they were in general about as bland and middle-of-the-road a duo as one could imagine working in the music industry. The first record that Hugo and Luigi produced for Cooke was a song that the then-unknown Jeff Barry had written, "Teenage Sonata". That record did nothing, and the label were especially annoyed when a recording Cooke had done while he was still at Keen, "Wonderful World", was released on his old label and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi would soon turn into one that bore a strong resemblance to their collaboration with the Isley Brothers -- they would release great singles, but albums that fundamentally misunderstood Cooke's artistry; though some of that misunderstanding may have come from Cooke himself, who never seemed to be sure which direction to go in. Many of the album tracks they released have Cooke sounding unsure of himself, and hesitant, but that's not something that you can say about the first real success that Cooke came out with on RCA, a song he wrote after driving past a group of prisoners working on a chain gang. He'd originally intended that song to be performed by his brother Charles, but he'd half-heartedly played it for Hugo and Luigi when they'd not seen much potential in any of his other recent originals, and they'd decided that that was the hit: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Chain Gang"] That made number two on the charts, becoming his biggest hit since "You Send Me". Meanwhile Cooke was also still recording other artists for SAR -- though by this point Roy Crain had been eased out and SAR now stood for Sam and Alex Records. He got a group of Central Avenue singers including Alex and Gaynel Hodge to sing backing vocals on a song he gave to a friend of his named Johnny Morisette, who was known professionally as "Johnny Two-Voice" because of the way he could sound totally different in his different ranges, but who was known to his acquaintances as "the singing pimp", because of his other occupation: [Excerpt: Johnny Morisette, "I'll Never Come Running Back to You"] They also thought seriously about signing up a young gospel singer they knew called Aretha Franklin, who was such an admirer of Sam's that she would try to copy him -- she changed her brand of cigarettes to match the ones he smoked, and when she saw him on tour reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- Cooke was an obsessive reader, especially of history -- she bought her own copy. She never read it, but she thought she should have a copy if Cooke had one.  But they decided that Franklin's father, the civil rights leader Rev. C.L. Franklin, was too intimidating, and so it would probably not be a good idea to get involved. The tour on which Franklin saw Cooke read Shirer's book was also the one on which Cooke made his first public stance in favour of civil rights -- that tour, which was one of the big package tours of the time, was meant to play a segregated venue, but the artists hadn't been informed just how segregated it was. While obviously none of them supported segregation, they would mostly accept playing to segregated crowds, because there was no alternative, if at least Black people were allowed in in roughly equal numbers. But in this case, Black people were confined to a tiny proportion of the seats, in areas with extremely restricted views, and both Cooke and Clyde McPhatter refused to go on stage, though the rest of the acts didn't join in their boycott. Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi remained hit and miss, and produced a few more flop singles, but then Cooke persuaded them to allow him to work in California, with the musicians he'd worked with at Keen, and with René Hall arranging rather than the arrangers they'd employed previously. While the production on Cooke's California sessions was still credited to Hugo and Luigi, Luigi was the only one actually attending those sessions -- Hugo was afraid of flying and wouldn't come out to the West Coast. The first record that came out under this new arrangement was another big hit, "Cupid", which had vocal sound effects supplied by a gospel act Cooke knew, the Sims twins -- Kenneth Sims made the sound of an arrow flying through the air, and Bobbie Sims made the thwacking noise of it hitting a target: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Cupid"] Cooke became RCA's second-biggest artist, at least in terms of singles sales, and had a string of hits like "Twistin' the Night Away", "Another Saturday Night", and "Bring it On Home to Me", though he was finding it difficult to break the album market. He was frustrated that he wasn't having number one records, but Luigi reassured him that that was actually the best position to be in: “We're getting number four, number six on the Billboard charts, and as long as we get that, nobody's gonna bother you. But if you get two or three number ones in a row, then you got no place to go but down. Then you're competition, and they're just going to do everything they can to knock you off.” But Cooke's personal life had started to unravel. After having two daughters, his wife gave birth to a son. Cooke had desperately wanted a male heir, but he didn't bond with his son, Vincent, who he insisted didn't look like him. He became emotionally and physically abusive towards his wife, beating her up on more than one occasion, and while she had been a regular drug user already, her use increased to try to dull the pain of being married to someone who she loved but who was abusing her so appallingly. Things became much, much worse, when the most tragic thing imaginable happened. Cooke had a swim in his private pool and then went out, leaving the cover off. His wife, Barbara, then let the children play outside, thinking that their three-year-old daughter Tracey would be able to look after the baby for a few minutes. Baby Vincent fell into the pool and drowned. Both parents blamed the other, and Sam was devastated at the death of the child he only truly accepted as his son once the child was dead. You can hear some of that devastation in a recording he made a few months later of an old Appalachian folk song: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "The Riddle Song"] Friends worried that Cooke was suicidal, but Cooke held it together, in part because of the intervention of his new manager, Allen Klein. Klein had had a hard life growing up -- his mother had died when he was young, and his father had sent him to an orphanage for a while. Eventually, his father remarried, and young Allen came back to the family home, but his father was still always distant. He grew close to his stepmother, but then she died as well.  Klein turned up at Cooke's house two days after the baby's funeral with his own daughter, and insisted on taking Cooke and his surviving children to Disneyland, telling him "You always had your mother and father, but I lost my mother when I was nine months old. You've got two other children. Those two girls need you even more now. You're their only father, and you've got to take care of them." Klein was very similar to Cooke in many ways. He had decided from a very early age that he couldn't trust anyone but himself, and that he had to make his own way in the world. He became hugely ambitious, and wanted to reach the very top. Klein had become an accountant, and gone to work for Joe Fenton, an accountant who specialised in the entertainment industry.  One of the first jobs Klein did in his role with Fenton was to assist him with an audit of Dot Records in 1957, called for by the Harry Fox Agency. We've not talked about Harry Fox before, but they're one of the most important organisations in the American music industry -- they're a collection agency like ASCAP or BMI, who collect songwriting royalties for publishing companies and songwriters. But while ASCAP and BMI collect performance royalties -- they collect payments for music played on the radio or TV, or in live performance -- Harry Fox collect the money for mechanical reproduction, the use of songs on records. It's a gigantic organisation, and it has the backing of all the major music publishers. To do this audit, Klein and Fenton had to travel from New York to LA, and as they were being paid by a major entertainment industry organisation, they were put up in the Roosevelt Hotel, where at the time the other guests included Elvis, Claude Rains, and Sidney Poitier. Klein, who had grown up in comparative poverty, couldn't help but be impressed at the money that you could make by working in entertainment. The audit of Dot Records found some serious discrepancies -- they were severely underpaying publishers and songwriters. While they were in LA, Klein and Fenton also audited several other labels, like Liberty, and they found the same thing at all of them. The record labels were systematically conning publishing companies out of money they were owed. Klein immediately realised that if they were doing this to the major publishing companies that Harry Fox represented, they must be doing the same kind of thing to small songwriters and artists, the kind of people who didn't have a huge organisation to back them up.  Unfortunately for Klein, soon after he started working for Fenton, he was fired -- he was someone who was chronically unable to get to work on time in the morning, and while he didn't mind working ridiculously long hours, he could not, no matter how hard he tried, get himself into the office for nine in the morning. He was fired after only four months, and Fenton even recommended to the State of New Jersey that they not allow Klein to become a Certified Public Accountant -- a qualification which, as a result, Klein never ended up getting. He set up his own company to perform audits of record companies for performers, and he got lucky by bumping in to someone he'd been at school with -- Don Kirshner. Kirshner agreed to start passing clients Klein's way, and his first client was Ersel Hickey (no relation), the rockabilly singer we briefly discussed in the episode on "Twist and Shout", who had a hit with "Bluebirds Over the Mountain": [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain"] Klein audited Hickey's record label, but was rather surprised to find out that they didn't actually owe Hickey a penny. It turned out that record contracts were written so much in the company's favour that they didn't have to use any dodgy accounting to get out of paying the artists anything.  But sometimes, the companies would rip the artists off anyway, if they were particularly unscrupulous. Kirshner had also referred the rockabilly singer/songwriter duo Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen to Klein. Their big hit, "Party Doll", had come out on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox, "Party Doll"] Klein found out that in the case of Roulette, the label *were* actually not paying the artists what they were contractually owed, largely because Morris Levy didn't like paying people money. After the audit, Levy did actually agree to pay Knox and Bowen what they were owed, but he insisted that he would only pay it over four years, at a rate of seventy dollars a week -- if Klein wanted it any sooner, he'd have to sue, and the money would all be eaten up in lawyers' fees. That was still better than nothing, and Klein made enough from his cut that he was able to buy himself a car.  Klein and Levy actually became friends -- the two men were very similar in many ways -- and Klein learned a big lesson from negotiating with him. That lesson was that you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing. If you discover a company owes your client a hundred thousand dollars that your client didn't know about, and they offer you fifty thousand to settle, you take the fifty thousand. Your client still ends up much better off than they would have been, you've not burned any bridges with the company, and you get your cut. And Klein's cut was substantial -- his standard was to take fifty percent of any extra money he got for the artist. And he prided himself on always finding something -- though rarely as much as he would suggest to his clients before getting together with them. One particularly telling anecdote about Klein's attitude is that when he was at Don Kirshner's wedding he went up to Kirshner's friend Bobby Darin and told him he could get him a hundred thousand dollars. Darin signed, but according to Darin's manager, Klein only actually found one underpayment, for ten thousand copies of Darin's hit "Splish Splash" which Atlantic hadn't paid for: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] However, at the time singles sold for a dollar, Darin was on a five percent royalty, and he only got paid for ninety percent of the records sold (because of a standard clause in contracts at that time to allow for breakages). The result was that Klein found an underpayment of just four hundred and fifty dollars, a little less than the hundred thousand he'd promised the unimpressed Darin. But Klein used the connection to Darin to get a lot more clients, and he did significantly better for some of them. For Lloyd Price, for example, he managed to get an extra sixty thousand dollars from ABC/Paramount, and Price and Klein became lifelong friends. And Price sang Klein's praises to Sam Cooke, who became eager to meet him.  He got the chance when Klein started up a new business with a DJ named Jocko Henderson. Henderson was one of the most prominent DJs in Philadelphia, and was very involved in all aspects of the music industry. He had much the same kind of relationship with Scepter Records that Alan Freed had with Chess, and was cut in on most of the label's publishing on its big hits -- rights he would later sell to Klein in order to avoid the kind of investigation that destroyed Freed's career. Henderson had also been the DJ who had first promoted "You Send Me" on the radio, and Cooke owed him a favour. Cooke was also at the time being courted by Scepter Records, who had offered him a job as the Shirelles' writer and producer once Florence Greenberg had split up with Luther Dixon. He'd written them one song, which referenced many of their earlier hits: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Only Time Will Tell"] However, Cooke didn't stick with Scepter -- he figured out that Greenberg wasn't interested in him as a writer/producer, but as a singer, and he wasn't going to record for an indie like them when he could work with RCA. But when Henderson and Klein started running a theatre together, putting on R&B shows, those shows obviously featured a lot of Scepter acts like the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, but they also featured Sam Cooke on the top of the bill, and towards the bottom of the bill were the Valentinos, a band featuring Cooke's touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who were signed to SAR Records: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] Klein was absolutely overawed with Cooke's talent when he first saw him on stage, realising straight away that this was one of the major artists of his generation. Whereas most of the time, Klein would push himself forward straight away and try to dominate artists, here he didn't even approach Cooke at all, just chatted to Cooke's road manager and found out what Cooke was like as a person. This is something one sees time and again when it comes to Cooke -- otherwise unflappable people just being absolutely blown away by his charisma, talent, and personality, and behaving towards him in ways that they behaved to nobody else. At the end of the residency, Cooke had approached Klein, having heard good things about him from Price, Henderson, and his road manager. The two had several meetings over the next few months, so Klein could get an idea of what it was that was bothering Cooke about his business arrangements. Eventually, after a few months, Cooke asked Klein for his honest opinion. Klein was blunt. "I think they're treating you like a " -- and here he used the single most offensive anti-Black slur there is -- "and you shouldn't let them." Cooke agreed, and said he wanted Klein to take control of his business arrangements. The first thing Klein did was to get Cooke a big advance from BMI against his future royalties as a songwriter and publisher, giving him seventy-nine thousand dollars up front to ease his immediate cash problems. He then started working on getting Cooke a better recording contract. The first thing he did was go to Columbia records, who he thought would be a better fit for Cooke than RCA were, and with whom Cooke already had a relationship, as he was at that time working with his friend, the boxer Muhammad Ali, on an album that Ali was recording for Columbia: [Excerpt: Muhammad Ali, "The Gang's All Here"] Cooke was very friendly with Ali, and also with Ali's spiritual mentor, the activist Malcolm X, and both men tried to get him to convert to the Nation of Islam. Cooke declined -- while he respected both men, he had less respect for Elijah Mohammed, who he saw as a con artist, and he was becoming increasingly suspicious of religion in general. He did, though, share the Nation of Islam's commitment to Black people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and presenting themselves in a clean-cut way, having the same vision of Black capitalism that many of his contemporaries like James Brown shared. Unfortunately, negotiations with Columbia quickly failed. Klein believed, probably correctly, that record labels didn't have to do anything to sell Sam Cooke's records, and that Cooke was in a unique position as one of the very few artists at that time who could write, perform, and produce hit records without any outside assistance. Klein therefore thought that Cooke deserved a higher royalty rate than the five percent industry standard, and said that Cooke wouldn't sign with anyone for that rate. The problem was that Columbia had most-favoured-nations clauses written into many other artists' contracts. These clauses meant that if any artist signed with Columbia for a higher royalty rate, those other artists would also have to get that royalty rate, so if Cooke got the ten percent that Klein was demanding, a bunch of other performers like Tony Bennett would also have to get the ten percent, and Columbia were simply not willing to do that. So Klein decided that Cooke was going to stay with RCA, but he found a way to make sure that Cooke would get a much better deal from RCA, and in a way which didn't affect any of RCA's own favoured-nations contracts.  Klein had had some involvement in filmmaking, and knew that independent production companies were making films without the studios, and just letting the studios distribute them. He also knew that in the music business plenty of songwriters and producers like Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector owned their own record labels. But up to that point, no performers did, that Klein was aware of, because it was the producers who generally made the records, and the contracts were set up with the assumption that the performer would just do what the producer said. That didn't apply to Sam Cooke, and so Klein didn't see why Cooke couldn't have his own label. Klein set up a new company, called Tracey Records, which was named after Cooke's daughter, and whose president was Cooke's old friend J.W. Alexander. Tracey Records would, supposedly to reduce Cooke's tax burden, be totally owned by Klein, but it would be Cooke's company, and Cooke would be paid in preferred stock in the company, though Cooke would get the bulk of the money -- it would be a mere formality that the company was owned by Klein. While this did indeed have the effect of limiting the amount of tax Cooke had to pay, it also fulfilled a rule that Klein would later state -- "never take twenty percent of an artist's earnings. Instead give them eighty percent of yours". What mattered wasn't the short-term income, but the long-term ownership. And that's what Klein worked out with RCA. Tracey Records would record and manufacture all Cooke's records from that point on, but RCA would have exclusive distribution rights for thirty years, and would pay Tracey a dollar per album. After thirty years, Tracey records would get all the rights to Cooke's recordings back, and in the meantime, Cooke would effectively be on a much higher royalty rate than he'd received before, in return for taking a much larger share of the risk. There were also changes at SAR. Zelda Sands, who basically ran the company for Sam and J.W., was shocked to receive a phone call from Sam and Barbara, telling her to immediately come to Chicago, where Sam was staying while he was on tour. She went up to their hotel room, where Barbara angrily confronted her, saying that she knew that Sam had always been attracted to Zelda -- despite Zelda apparently being one of the few women Cooke met who he never slept with -- and heavily implied that the best way to sort this would be for them to have a threesome. Zelda left and immediately flew back to LA. A few days later, Barbara turned up at the SAR records offices and marched Zelda out at gunpoint. Through all of this turmoil, though, Cooke managed to somehow keep creating music. And indeed he soon came up with the song that would be his most important legacy. J.W. Alexander had given Cooke a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and Cooke had been amazed at "Blowin' in the Wind": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] But more than being amazed at the song, Cooke was feeling challenged. This was a song that should have been written by a Black man. More than that, it was a song that should have been written by *him*. Black performers needed to be making music about their own situation. He added "Blowin' in the Wind" to his own live set, but he also started thinking about how he could write a song like that himself. As is often the case with Cooke's writing, he took inspiration from another song, this time "Ol' Man River", the song from the musical Showboat that had been made famous by the actor, singer, and most importantly civil rights activist Paul Robeson: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River"] Cooke had recorded his own version of that in 1958, but now in early 1964 he took the general pace, some melodic touches, the mention of the river, and particularly the lines "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'", and used them to create something new. Oddly for a song that would inspire a civil rights anthem -- or possibly just appropriately, in the circumstances, "Ol' Man River" in its original form featured several racial slurs included by the white lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein, and indeed Robeson himself in later live performances changed the very lines that Cooke would later appropriate, changing them as he thought they were too defeatist for a Black activist to sing: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River (alternative lyrics)"] Cooke's song would keep the original sense, in his lines "It's been too hard livin' but I'm afraid to die", but the most important thing was the message -- "a change is gonna come". The session at which he recorded it was to be his last with Luigi, whose contract with RCA was coming to an end, and Cooke knew it had to be something special. Rene Hall came up with an arrangement for a full orchestra, which so overawed Cooke's regular musicians that his drummer found himself too nervous to play on the session. Luckily, Earl Palmer was recording next door, and was persuaded to come and fill in for him.  Hall's arrangement starts with an overture played by the whole orchestra: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] And then each verse features different instrumentation, with the instruments changing at the last line of each verse -- "a change is gonna come". The first verse is dominated by the rhythm section: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Then for the second verse, the strings come in, for the third the strings back down and are replaced by horns, and then at the end the whole orchestra swells up behind Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Cooke was surprised when Luigi, at the end of the session, told him how much he liked the song, which Cooke thought wouldn't have been to Luigi's taste, as Luigi made simple pop confections, not protest songs. But as Luigi later explained, "But I did like it. It was a serious piece, but still it was him. Some of the other stuff was throwaway, but this was very deep. He was really digging into himself for this one." Cooke was proud of his new record, but also had something of a bad feeling about it, something that was confirmed when he played the record for Bobby Womack, who told him "it sounds like death". Cooke agreed, there was something premonitory about the record, something ominous. Allen Klein, on the other hand, was absolutely ecstatic. The track was intended to be used only as an album track -- they were going in a more R&B direction with Cooke's singles at this point. His previous single was a cover version of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] And his next two singles were already recorded -- a secularised version of the old spiritual "Ain't That Good News", and a rewrite of an old Louis Jordan song. Cooke was booked on to the Johnny Carson show, where he was meant to perform both sides of his new single, but Allen Klein was so overwhelmed by "A Change is Gonna Come" that he insisted that Cooke drop "Ain't That Good News" and perform his new song instead. Cooke said that he was meant to be on there to promote his new record. Klein insisted that he was meant to be promoting *himself*, and that the best promotion for himself would be this great song. Cooke then said that the Tonight Show band didn't have all the instruments needed to reproduce the orchestration. Klein said that if RCA wouldn't pay for the additional eighteen musicians, he would pay for them out of his own pocket. Cooke eventually agreed. Unfortunately, there seems to exist no recording of that performance, the only time Cooke would ever perform "A Change is Gonna Come" live, but reports from people who watched it at the time suggest that it made as much of an impact on Black people watching as the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later made on white America. "A Change is Gonna Come" became a standard of the soul repertoire, recorded by Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "A Change is Gonna Come"] The Supremes and more. Cooke licensed it to a compilation album released as a fundraiser for Martin Luther King's campaigning, and when King was shot in 1968, Rosa Parks spent the night crying in her mother's arms, and they listened to "A Change is Gonna Come". She said ”Sam's smooth voice was like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” After his Tonight Show appearance, Cooke was in the perfect position to move into the real big time. Allen Klein had visited Brian Epstein on RCA's behalf to see if Epstein would sign the Beatles to RCA for a million-dollar advance. Epstein wasn't interested, but he did suggest to Klein that possibly Cooke could open for the Beatles when they toured the US in 1965.  And Cooke was genuinely excited about the British Invasion and the possibilities it offered for the younger musicians he was mentoring. When Bobby Womack complained that the Rolling Stones had covered his song "It's All Over Now" and deprived his band of a hit, Cooke explained to Womack first that he'd be making a ton of money from the songwriting royalties, but also that Womack and his brothers were in a perfect position -- they were young men with long hair who played guitars and drums. If the Valentinos jumped on the bandwagon they could make a lot of money from this new style. But Cooke was going to make a lot of money from older styles. He'd been booked into the Copacabana again, and this time he was going to be a smash hit, not the failure he had been the first time. His residency at the club was advertised with a billboard in Times Square, and he came on stage every night to a taped introduction from Sammy Davis Jr.: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr. introducing Sam Cooke] Listening to the live album from that residency and comparing it to the live recordings in front of a Black audience from a year earlier is astonishing proof of Cooke's flexibility as a performer. The live album from the Harlem Square Club in Florida is gritty and gospel-fuelled, while the Copacabana show has Cooke as a smooth crooner in the style of Nat "King" Cole -- still with a soulful edge to his vocals, but completely controlled and relaxed. The repertoire is almost entirely different as well -- other than "Twistin' the Night Away" and a ballad medley that included "You Send Me", the material was a mixture of old standards like "Bill Bailey" and "When I Fall In Love" and new folk protest songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind", the song that had inspired "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Blowin' in the Wind"] What's astonishing is that both live albums, as different as they are, are equally good performances. Cooke by this point was an artist who could perform in any style, and for any audience, and do it well. In November 1964, Cooke recorded a dance song, “Shake”, and he prepared a shortened edit of “A Change is Gonna Come” to release as its B-side. The single was scheduled for release on December 22nd. Both sides charted, but by the time the single came out, Sam Cooke was dead. And from this point on, the story gets even more depressing and upsetting than it has been. On December the eleventh, 1964, Sam Cooke drove a woman he'd picked up to an out-of the-way motel. According to the woman, he tore off most of her clothes against her will, as well as getting undressed himself, and she was afraid he was going to rape her. When he went to the toilet, she gathered up all of her clothes and ran out, and in her hurry she gathered up his clothes as well. Some of Cooke's friends have suggested that she was in fact known for doing this and stealing men's money, and that Cooke had been carrying a large sum of money which disappeared, but this seems unlikely on the face of it, given that she ran to a phone box and called the police, telling them that she had been kidnapped and didn't know where she was, and could they please help her? Someone else was on the phone at the same time. Bertha Lee Franklin, the motel's manager, was on the phone to the owner of the motel when Sam Cooke found out that his clothes were gone, and the owner heard everything that followed. Cooke turned up at the manager's office naked except for a sports jacket and shoes, drunk, and furious. He demanded to know where the girl was. Franklin told him she didn't know anything about any girl. Cooke broke down the door to the manager's office, believing that she must be hiding in there with his clothes. Franklin grabbed the gun she had to protect herself. Cooke struggled with her, trying to get the gun off her. The gun went off three times. The first bullet went into the ceiling, the next two into Cooke. Cooke's last words were a shocked "Lady, you shot me".  Cooke's death shocked everyone, and immediately many of his family and friends started questioning the accepted version of the story. And it has to be said that they had good reason to question it. Several people stood to benefit from Cooke's death -- he was talking about getting a divorce from his wife, who would inherit his money; he was apparently questioning his relationship with Klein, who gained complete ownership of his catalogue after his death, and Klein after all had mob connections in the person of Morris Levy;  he had remained friendly with Malcolm X after X's split from the Nation of Islam and it was conceivable that Elijah Muhammad saw Cooke as a threat; while both Elvis and James Brown thought that Cooke setting up his own label had been seen as a threat by RCA, and that *they* had had something to do with it. And you have to understand that while false rape accusations basically never happen -- and I have to emphasise that here, women just *do not* make false rape accusations in any real numbers -- false rape accusations *had* historically been weaponised against Black men in large numbers in the early and mid twentieth century. Almost all lynchings followed a pattern -- a Black man owned a bit of land a white man wanted, a white woman connected to the white man accused the Black man of rape, the Black man was lynched, and his property was sold off at far less than cost to the white man who wanted it. The few lynchings that didn't follow that precise pattern still usually involved an element of sexualising the murdered Black men, as when only a few years earlier Emmett Till, a teenager, had been beaten to death, supposedly for whistling at a white woman. So Cooke's death very much followed the pattern of a lynching. Not exactly -- for a start, the woman he attacked was Black, and so was the woman who shot him -- but it was close enough that it rang alarm bells, completely understandably. But I think we have to set against that Cooke's history of arrogant entitlement to women's bodies, and his history of violence, both against his wife and, more rarely, against strangers who caught him in the wrong mood. Fundamentally, if you read enough about his life and behaviour, the official story just rings absolutely true. He seems like someone who would behave exactly in the way described. Or at least, he seems that way to me. But of course, I didn't know him, and I have never had to live with the threat of murder because of my race. And many people who did know him and have had to live with that threat have a different opinion, and that needs to be respected. The story of Cooke's family after his death is not one from which anyone comes out looking very good. His brother, L.C., pretty much immediately recorded a memorial album and went out on a tribute tour, performing his brother's hits: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's best friend, J.W. Alexander, also recorded a tribute album. Bertha Franklin sued the family of the man she had killed, because her own life had been ruined and she'd had to go into hiding, thanks to threats from his fans. Cooke's widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack less than three months after Cooke's death -- and the only reason it wasn't sooner was that Womack had not yet turned twenty-one, and so they were not able to get married without Womack's parents' permission. They married the day after Womack's twenty-first birthday, and Womack was wearing one of Sam's suits at the ceremony. Womack was heard regularly talking about how much he looked like Sam. Two of Cooke's brothers were so incensed at the way that they thought Womack was stepping into their brother's life that they broke Womack's jaw -- and Barbara Cooke pulled a gun on them and tried to shoot them. Luckily for them, Womack had guessed that a confrontation was coming, and had removed the bullets from Barbara's gun, so there would be no more deaths in his mentor's family. Within a few months, Barbara was pregnant, and the baby, when he was born, was named Vincent, the same name as Sam and Barbara's dead son.  Five years later, Barbara discovered that Womack had for some time been sexually abusing Linda, her and Sam's oldest child, who was seventeen at the time Barbara discovered this. She kicked Womack out, but Linda sided with Womack and never spoke to her mother again. Linda carried on a consensual relationship with Bobby Womack for some time, and then married Bobby's brother Cecil (or maybe it's pronounced Cee-cil in his case? I've never heard him spoken about), who also became her performing and songwriting partner. They wrote many songs for other artists, as well as having hits themselves as Womack and Womack: [Excerpt: Womack and Womack, "Teardrops"] The duo later changed their names to Zek and Zeriiya Zekkariyas, in recognition of their African heritage. Sam Cooke left behind a complicated legacy. He hurt almost everyone who was ever involved in his life, and yet all of them seem not only to have forgiven him but to have loved him in part because of the things he did that hurt them the most. What effect that has on one's view of his art must in the end be a matter for individual judgement, and I never, ever, want to suggest that great art in any way mitigates appalling personal behaviour. But at the same time, "A Change is Gonna Come" stands as perhaps the most important single record we'll look at in this history, one that marked the entry into the pop mainstream of Black artists making political statements on their own behalf, rather than being spoken for and spoken over by well-meaning white liberals like me. There's no neat conclusion I can come to here,  no great lesson that can be learned and no pat answer that will make everything make sense. There's just some transcendent, inspiring, music, a bunch of horribly hurt people, and a young man dying, almost naked, in the most squalid circumstances imaginable.

Happy Easter.

One last Bing and Judy from her longest stint on the show ever 4 episodes.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/black-music-gets-whitewashed-as-georgia-gibbs-hits-the-pop-charts-with-the-wallflower-dance-with-me-henrySupport the show on Patreon

Pure Harvest's new range of delicious nut milks' are available in three dairy-free flavours: Nut Bliss, Lust Almond, and Creamy Cashew, you'll never have to worry about having ordinary milk again.This episode is a snippet into the best takeaways from the top downloaded episodes of season two. It is designed to give you a boost of health enthusiasm and features some words of wisdom and nuggets of goal to fuel your health and wellbeing goals.In this episode you'll heard from YouTube's holistic health princess, Sarah's Day, Plant-Based Mama, Loni Jane, model, presenter and entrepreneur Rachael Finch, fitness instructor, author and creator of TiffXO, Tiffany Hall, model Georgia Gibbs and model and mother, Megan Gale.New episodes of The Healthy Hustlers podcast will be dropping from Thursday 4th March, I can't to be back in your ears with new healthy, and thought-provoking conversations.Until then, please feel free to follow along on instagram @madelyncarafa or take a trip down memory lane with abundance of episodes currently available.Thanks to Pure Harvest for making this episode possible. NOM Milks are available from selected leading independent supermarkets and health food stores Australia-wide.Checkout Pure Harvest full range of natural and organic products: https://pureharvest.com.au/Follow your host, Madelyn: https://www.instagram.com/madelyncarafaFor all podcast updates and guest announcements follow: https://www.instagram.com/thehealthyhustlersJoin me and other hustling females in our supportive Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/288287145154102Download your FREE HEALTHY GUIDES: https://www.thehealthyhustlers.com/healthy-guide

Episode 145, “Seven Stories,” focuses on the lives and music of six important performers (plus one group) from the 1940s and 1950s: Georgia Gibbs, The Mills Brothers, Doris Day, Matt Monro, Giselle MacKenzie, Bobby Darin,... Read More The post Episode 145, “Seven Stories,” appeared first on Sam Waldron.

The whole episode is from a charity/ thrift shop haul. Some familiar artists amongst them- Georgia Gibbs, Mugsy Spanier, Eve Boswell, Billy Banks and Teresa Brewer. Otherwise some great discoveries. Shirley Abicair sings the title song from the 1956 film, 'Smiley.' She was Australian, played the zither and came to Britain in 1952. Still with us at the age of 92. Harry James is hardly forgotten but this is a pared back sound from the trumpeter and band leader, Feet dragging blues. Josh White, folk singer and political activist sings I'm gonna move to the outskirts of town. Another of the recordings in did in London in 1950. Tino Rossi, despite his Italian sounding name was a hugely successful French singer of the 1940s and 50s and sold 30 million records world wide.  Roberto Murolo, champion high diver, sings La Mogliera. He specialised in Neopolitan songs. Love this one. The Four bright sparks sing about dreaming in 1930. Orchestras and bands next. John Kirkby with Fifi's Rhapsody from 1941. He was a double bass player and champion of the chamber jazz style. Early 1950s R&B big band sound from Earl Bostick, Lou Preager Orchestra, from the Hammersmith Palais. with The night the floor fell in. Vocals by Paul Rich. My record of the day is the Roy Fox band from The Kit Kat Restaurant, London in 1933. The Denver born bandleader directs Sid Buckman singing My Wild Oats and the vocals of Peggy Dell on We're all riding riding on a rainbow. Peggy Dell was born in Ireland as Margaret Tisdall. Its an unusual voice for a British big band of the time. Happy listening. Stay safe.  

Intro has details about Danny Kaye... some of the highlights of this extremely talented man's life. Special guests on this show include the vocalist Georgia Gibbs and actor Orson Welles. There are several good comedic skits with Orson and Danny. Danny tries to teach Orson how to sing "scat" music... to no avail, but he tries! This program will live in the playlist entitled "Variety -Comical-Musicals"

Good Morning, This is Louise. Episode 75 - only you featuring music byThe Creatures, The Platters, Frank Ocean, Summer Walker, King Tubby & Scientist, The Four Aces, Georgia Gibbs, Serena Isioma, Sevyn Streeter, Jackie Gleason, François de Roubaix, Dimitri Tiomkin, Arlo Parks, TeaMarrr, Jo Boyer, Monica & Lil Baby, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Shigeru Umebayashi with ambient field recordings by Rambalac programmed and produced by @small_ernst Thank you for listening Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa

Camel Caravan was a musical variety radio program, sponsored by Camel cigarettes, that aired on NBC Radio and CBS Radio from 1933 to 1954. Various vocalists, musicians and comedy acts were heard during the 21 years this show was on the air, including such talents as Benny Goodman, Georgia Gibbs, Anita O'Day and Vaughn Monroe. It debuted December 7, 1933, on CBS as a showcase for Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra. Deane Janis was the vocalist and Walter O'Keefe supplied the comedy along with Stoopnagle and Budd. Broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it continued until June 25, 1936. On June 30, 1936 the show was reformatted, featuring Nathaniel Shilkret and his orchestra and Benny Goodman and his swing band, with novelist Ruppert Hughes as Master of Ceremonies and vocalists Martha Tilton and Johnny Mercer. A Los Angeles Times picture caption notes that Gladys Swarthout was the guest artist on the initial broadcast. Shilkret left the show on September 22, 1936. Jack Oakie's College was added to the hour on December 29, 1936. While this aired on Tuesdays on CBS until June 20, 1939, another Benny Goodman Camel Caravan (often subtitled The Camel Hot Club) was heard Saturdays on NBC during 1939. Eddie Cantor starred in another CBS Camel Caravan broadcast from March 28, 1938 to June 26, 1939. The CBS show was taken over by Bob Crosby on June 27, 1939. Others who starred on this series during the years were Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra, comedian Herb Shriner, Abbott and Costello, Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore (when it was known as Camel Comedy Caravan), Jack Carson, Mel Blanc, and Bob Hawk (emcee of the quiz program Thanks to the Yanks, later known as The Bob Hawk Show).

Squid ink pasta on the menu today, as my culinary homage to the Black Lives Matter protest.In the mix: linguine, squid+ink, tomato paste, garlic, olive oil, pepper, parsley. Paired with the freshest music selection from yours truly. EnjoyEpisode #215 - video link here Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′18″ Rara (unreleased) by Italic Disco 10′02″ My Native Land by Mike Kounou on Africa Airways Six (Mile High Funk 1974 - 1981) (Africa Seven) 13′19″ You by Vicky Edimo on Africa Airways Six (Mile High Funk 1974 - 1981) (Africa Seven) 22′00″ Njonjo Mukambe by François Misse Ngoh on Africa Airways Six (Mile High Funk 1974 - 1981) (Africa Seven) 26′55″ Ndomo by Jude Bondeze on Africa Airways Six (Mile High Funk 1974 - 1981) (Africa Seven) 30′52″ Tishiki by Paso Doble & MasterShine ft. Idd Aziz on single (Compost Records) 36′06″ Tango Del Fuego (feat. Georgia Gibbs) by Parov Stelar on single (Etage Noir Recordings) 39′03″ Lady (feat. Nino Msk) by Sonamó on single 43′59″ Full Moon by Dele Sosimi x Medlar on single (Wah Wah 45s) 50′15″ Day Dream (Fish Factory Session) by Bryony Jarman-Pinto on single (Tru Thoughts) 53′48″ Acting For Liberation Pt 1 by Vibration Black Finger on Can You See What I’m Trying to Say (Jazzman Records) 63′57″ Sof Layla (Ba Hoodna) by Hoodna Orchestra on single (Agogo) 68′01″ Rascal Republic (feat. Lariman) by Biggabush Presents Lightning Head on 13 Faces Of Lightning Head (Tru Thoughts) 74′16″ Dashiki (Version Instrumentale) by Mulamba on Africa Airways Five (Brace Brace Boogie 1976 - 1982) (Africa Seven) 76′59″ The Higher Love by Nicola Conte & Gianluca Petrella on single (Schema Records) 81′43″ The Lone Patrol by Ancient Astronauts & Ian Urbina on We Stand Our Ground (Switchstance Recordings) 83′36″ More Or Less (feat. Marlon Craft) by Sly5thAve on single (Tru Thoughts) 88′04″ Wither Report by Gadget & SmokedBeat on single (Millennium Jazz Music) 91′23″ Fly High (feat. Hindi Zahra) by Blundetto on single (Heavenly Sweetness) 94′21″ Welcome To London (J.Sparrow Remix) by Flowdan on single (Tru Thoughts) 97′51″ Luftkraft (Airforce Wandt) by Niklas Wandt on Erdtöne (Kryptox) 102′59″ Draw Me by Nelson Of The East on Kybele (Tartelet Records) 107′52″ Mulato Ferriera by Bandé-Gamboa on Horizonte (Heavenly Sweetness) 111′06″ Back Home by Sun Aura on Back Home (Sun Aura Records) 112′52″ Ninth Row Of The Fifth Floor by JAF Trio on JAF Trio (We Jazz Records) 116′43″ Siyabulela by Asher Gamedze on single (On The Corner Records)

Sintonía: ""Let´s Mambo" - Betty Reilly with Denny Farnon´s Music Publicada en el 2019 en vinilo (que te regala el CD!) por Juke Box y compilada por El Vidocq, aquí tienes la Banda Sonora para un guateque tan exótico como glamuroso... Buen provecho !!! "Christine" - Miss X; "Night and Day" - Francis Faye; "Daddy, Daddy" - Ella Mae Morse; "He Cha Cha´d in" - Kay Starr; "It´s so Fine" - Lavern Baker; "Hollywood Calypso" - Josephine Premice; "Mambo Baby" - Georgia Gibbs; "Hot Tamale Blues" - Ruby Dandridge; "Love Charms" - Diane Maxwell; "Anything Can Happen - Mambo" - Dolores Hawkins; "My Mama Likes You" - Dolores Gray; "Calypso Parakeet" - Patti Brandon; "New Kind of Mambo" - Big Maybelle; "Calypso Joe" - Anna Valentino; "Otra vez (Pepito)" - Elena Madera Bonus Tracks: "Too Experienced", "You Call My Name", "I´ve Got To Get Back" y "Do You Wanna Dance", extraídas del álbum "Reggae with Soul", del cantante Owen Gray (Trojan Records, 1969) Bonus track 05: "Reggae is Tight" (Booker T & The M.G.´s) - Lloyd Charmers Escuchar audio

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-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-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.  

Today in history: Mike Tyson sentenced. Georgia Gibbs hits the pop charts. Heavens Gate Cult members found dead. U.S. launches Explorer 3 Satellite.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/black-music-gets-whitewashed-as-georgia-gibbs-hits-the-pop-charts-with-the-wallflower-dance-with-me-henrySupport the show on Patreon

Melvin Jerome Blanc, the man of a thousands voices- Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Barney Rubble and Bugs. So many Looney Tunes favourites.  Three from Bob Crosby, including a Shakespearian sonnet. Les Compagnions De La Chanson and The Three Bells. Lovely Gallic harmony. A 'B' side, In the Light of the Silvery Moon but what is the big hit on the other side? Nat King Cole and The Four Knights, more Winifred Atwell,  Georgia Gibbs, Jean Goldkette and Gary Miller, the singing voice of Troy Tempest in Stingray. A pioneering Rock and Roll star, who last year was touring Britain at the age of 82, Charlie Gracie.  Early country and Western Swing from The Hill Billies and Hoosiers Hot Shots. Two songs in Scots. The pre 1st World War, 'We'll hae just Anither.' Its from Hector Gordon, he's a bit of a mystery. More up to date and no mystery Joe Gordon and The Folk Four, A regular in The White Heather Club on TV in the 60s. In amongst all this the magnificent Harry Parry(pictured) and his Radio Rhyhm Sextet, vocals by Doreen Villiers. What a title ' Bounch me, brother, with a solid four.'  

Episode sixty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Fujiyama Mama" by Wanda Jackson, and the first rock and roller to become "big in Japan" 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 "Purple People Eater" by Sheb Wooley.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I have two main sources for this eposode. One is Wanda Jackson's autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. The other is this article on "Fujiyama Mama", which I urge everyone to read, as it goes into far more detail about the reasons why the song had the reception it did in Japan.   And this compilation collects most of Jackson's important early work.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin this episode, a minor content note. I am going to be looking at a song that is, unfortunately, unthinkingly offensive towards Japanese people and culture. If that – or flippant lyrics about the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – are likely to upset you, be warned. When we left Wanda Jackson six months ago, it looked very much like she might end up being a one-hit wonder. "I Gotta Know" had been a hit, but there hadn't been a successful follow-up. In part this was because she was straddling two different genres -- she was trying to find a way to be successful in both the rock and roll and country markets, and neither was taking to her especially well. In later years, it would be recognised that the music she was making combined some of the best of both worlds -- she was working with a lot of the musicians on the West Coast who would later go on to become famous for creating the Bakersfield Sound, and changing the whole face of country music, and her records have a lot of that sound about them. And at the same time she was also making some extremely hot rockabilly music, but she was just a little bit too country for the rock market, and a little bit too rock for the country market. Possibly the place where she fit in best was among the Sun records acts, and so it's not surprising that she ended up towards the bottom of the bill on the long tour that Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash did over much of North America in early 1957 -- the tour on which Jerry Lee Lewis moved from third billed to top of the bill by sheer force of personality. But it says quite a bit about Jackson that while everyone else talking about that tour discusses the way that some of the men did things like throwing cherry bombs at each other's cars, and living off nothing but whisky, Wanda's principal recollection of the tour in her autobiography is of going to church and inviting all the men along, but Jerry Lee being the only one who would come with her. To a great extent she was shielded from the worst aspects of the men's behaviour by her father, who was still looking after her on the road, and acted as a buffer between her and the worst excesses of her tourmates, but she seems to have been happy with that situation -- she didn't seem to have much desire to become one of the boys, the way many other female rock and roll stars have. She enjoyed making wild-sounding music, but she saw that mostly as a kind of acting -- she didn't think that her onstage persona had to match her offstage behaviour at all. And one of the wildest records she made was "Fujiyama Mama": [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Fujiyama Mama"] "Fujiyama Mama" was written by the rockabilly and R&B songwriter Jack Hammer (whose birth name was the more prosaic Earl Burroughs), who is best known as having been the credited co-writer of "Great Balls of Fire". We didn't talk about him in the episode on that song, because apparently Hammer's only contribution to the song was the title -- he wrote a totally different song with the same title, which Paul Case, who was the music consultant on the film "Jamboree", liked enough to commission Otis Blackwell to write another song of the same name, giving Hammer half the credit. But Hammer did write some songs on his own that became at least moderate successes. For example, he wrote "Rock and Roll Call", which was recorded by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Rock and Roll Call"] And "Milkshake Mademoiselle" for Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt, Jerry Lee Lewis, "Milkshake Mademoiselle"] And in 1954, when Hammer was only fourteen, he wrote "Fujiyama Mama", which was originally recorded by Annisteen Allen: [Excerpt: Annisteen Allen, "Fujiyama Mama"] This was a song in a long line of songs about black women's sexuality which lie at the base of rock and roll, though of course, as with several of those songs, it's written by a man, and it's mostly the woman boasting about how much pleasure she's going to give the man -- while it's a sexually aggressive record, this is very much a male fantasy as performed by a woman. Allen was yet another singer in the early days of R&B and rock and roll to have come out of Lucky Millinder's orchestra -- she had been his female singer in the late forties, just after Rosetta Tharpe had left the group, and while Wynonie Harris was their male singer. She'd sung lead on what turned out to be Millinder's last big hit, "I'm Waiting Just For You": [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder and his orchestra, "I'm Waiting Just For You"] After she left Millinder's band, Allen recorded for a variety of labels, with little success, and when she recorded "Fujiyama Mama" in 1954 she was on Capitol -- this was almost unique at the time, as her kind of R&B would normally have come out on King or Apollo or Savoy or a similar small label. In its original version, "Fujiyama Mama" wasn't a particularly successful record, but Wanda Jackson heard it on a jukebox and fell in love with the record. She quickly learned the song and added it to her own act. In 1957, Jackson was in the studio recording a country song called "No Wedding Bells for Joe", written by a friend of hers called Marijohn Wilkin, who would later go on to write country classics like "Long Black Veil": [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "No Wedding Bells For Joe"] For the B-side, Jackson wanted to record "Fujiyama Mama", but Ken Nelson was very concerned -- the lyrics about drinking, smoking, and shooting were bad enough for a girl who was not yet quite twenty, the blatant female sexuality was not something that would go down well at all in the country market, and lyrics like "I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too/The things I did to them I can do to you" were horribly tasteless -- and remember, this was little more than a decade after the bombs were dropped on those cities. Nelson really, really, disliked the song, and didn't want Jackson to record it, and while I've been critical of Nelson for making poor repertoire choices for his artists -- Nelson was someone with a great instinct for performers, but a terrible instinct for material -- I can't say I entirely blame him in this instance. But Wanda overruled him -- and then, when he tried to tone down her performance in the studio, she rebelled against that, with the encouragement of her father, who told her "You're the one who wanted to do it, so you need to do it your way". In the last episode about Jackson, we talked about how she'd tried to do her normal growling roar on "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!" but was let down by having drunk milk before recording the song. This time, she had no problem, and for the first time in the studio she sang in the voice that she used for her rock and roll songs on stage: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Fujiyama Mama"] To my ears, Jackson's version of the song is still notably inferior to Allen's version, but it's important to note that this isn't a Georgia Gibbs style white person covering a black artist for commercial success at the instigation of her producer, and copying the arrangement precisely, this is a young woman covering a record she loved, and doing it as a B-side. There's still the racial dynamic at play there, but this is closer to Elvis doing "That's All Right" than to Georgia Gibbs ripping off LaVern Baker or Etta James. It's also closer to Elvis than it is to Eileen Barton, who was the second person to have recorded the song. Barton was a novelty singer, whose biggest hit was "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake" from 1950: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake"] Barton's version of "Fujiyama Mama" was the B-side to a 1955 remake of "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake", redone as a blues. I've not actually been able to track down a copy of that remake, so I can't play an excerpt -- I'm sure you're all devastated by that. Barton's version, far more than Jackson's, was a straight copy of the original, though the arranger on her version gets rid of most of the Orientalisms in Allen's original recording: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, "Fujiyama Mama"] I think the difference between Barton's and Jackson's versions simply comes down to their sincerity. Barton hated the song, and thought of it as a terrible novelty tune she was being forced to sing. She did a competent professional job, because she was a professional vocalist, but she would talk later in interviews about how much she disliked the record. Jackson, on the other hand, pushed to do the song because she loved it so much, and she performed the song as she wanted it to be done, and against the wishes of her producer. For all the many, many problematic aspects of the song, which I won't defend at all, that passion does show through in Jackson's performance of it. Jackson's single was released, and did absolutely nothing sales-wise, as was normal for her records at this point. Around this time, she also cut her first album, and included on it a cover version of a song Elvis had recently recorded, "Party", which in her version was retitled "Let's Have a Party": [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Let's Have a Party"] That album also did essentially nothing, and while Jackson continued releasing singles throughout 1958, none of them charted. Ken Nelson didn't even book her in for a single recording session in 1959 -- by that point they'd got enough stuff already recorded that they could keep releasing records by her until her contract ran out, and they didn't need to throw good money after bad by paying for more studio sessions to make records that nobody was going to buy. And then something really strange happened. "Fujiyama Mama" became hugely successful in Japan. Now, nobody seems to have adequately explained quite how this happened. After all, this record was... not exactly flattering about Japanese people, and its first couple of lines seem to celebrate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it's not as if they didn't know what was being sung. While obviously Jackson was singing in English and most listeners in Japan couldn't speak English, there was a Japanese translation of the lyrics printed on the back sleeve of the single, so most people would at least have had some idea what she was singing about. Yet somehow, the record made number one in Japan. In part, this may just have been simply because any recognition of Japanese culture from an American artist at all might have been seen as a novelty. But also, while in the USA pretty much all the rock and roll hits were sung by men, Japan was developing its own rock and roll culture, and in Japan, most of the big rock and roll stars were teenage girls, of around the same age as Wanda Jackson. Now, I am very far from being an expert on post-war Japanese culture, so please don't take anything I say on the subject as being any kind of definitive statement, but from the stuff I've read (and in particular from a very good, long, article on this particular song that I'm going to link in the liner notes and which I urge you all to read, which goes into the cultural background a lot more than I can here) it seems as if these girls were, for the most part, groomed as manufactured pop stars, and that many of them were recording cover versions of songs in English, which they learned phonetically from the American recordings. For example, here's Izumi Yukimura's version of "Ko Ko Mo": [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, "Ko Ko Mo"] In many of these versions, they would sing a verse in the original English, and then a verse in Japanese translation, as you can again hear in that recording: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, "Ko Ko Mo"] Izumi Yuklmura also recorded a version of "Fujiyama Mama", patterned after Jackson's: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, "Fujiyama Mama"] There are many, many things that can be said about these recordings, but the thing that strikes me about them, just as a music listener, and separate from everything else, is how comparatively convincing a rock and roll recording that version of "Fujiyama Mama" actually is. When you compare it to the music that was coming out of places like the UK or Australia or France, it's far more energetic, and shows a far better understanding of the idiom. It's important to note though that part of the reason for this is the peculiar circumstances in Japan at the time. Much of the Japanese entertainment industry in the late forties and fifties had grown up around the US occupying troops who were stationed there after the end of World War II, and those servicemen were more interested in seeing pretty young girls than in seeing male performers. But this meant two things -- it firstly meant that young women were far more likely to be musical performers in Japan than in the US, and it also meant that the Japanese music industry was geared to performers who were performing in American styles -- and so Japanese listeners were accustomed to hearing things like this: [Excerpt: Chiemi Eri, "Rock Around the Clock"] So when a recording by a young woman singing about Japan, however offensively, in a rock and roll style, was released in Japan, the market was ready for it. While in America rock and roll was largely viewed as a male music, in Japan, they were ready for Wanda Jackson. And Jackson, in turn, was ready for Japan. In her autobiography she makes clear that she was the kind of person who would nowadays be called a weeb -- having a fascination with Japanese culture, albeit the stereotyped version she had learned from pop culture. She had always wanted to visit Japan growing up, and when she got there she was amazed to find that they were organising a press conference for her, and that wherever she went there were fans wanting her autograph. Jackson, of course, had no idea about the complex relationship that Japan was having at the time with American culture -- though in her autobiography she talks about visiting a bar over there where Japanese singers were performing country songs -- she just knew that they had latched on, for whatever reason, to an obscure B-side and given her a second chance at success. When Jackson got back from Japan, she put together her own band for the first time -- and unusually for country music at the time, it was an integrated band, with a black pianist. She had to deal with some resistance from her mother, who was an older Southern white woman, but eventually managed to win her round. That pianist, Big Al Downing, later went on to have his own successful career, including a hit single duetting with Esther Phillips: [Excerpt Big Al Downing and Little Esther Phillips, "You'll Never Miss Your Water Until The Well Runs Dry"] Downing also had disco hits in the early seventies, and later had a run of hits on the country charts. Jackson also took on a young guitarist named Roy Clark, who would go on to have a great deal of success himself, as one of the most important instrumentalists in country music, and Clark would later co-star in the hit TV show Hee-Haw, with Buck Owens (who had played on many of Jackson's earlier records). In 1960, Jackson returned to the studio. While she'd not had much commercial success in the US yet, her records were now selling well enough to justify recording more songs with her. But Ken Nelson had a specific condition for any future recordings -- he pointed out that while she'd been recording both rock and roll and country music in her previous sessions, she had only ever charted in the US as a country artist, and she'd been signed as a country artist to Capitol. All her future sessions were going to be purely country, to avoid diluting her brand. Jackson agreed, and so she went into the studio and recorded a country shuffle, "Please Call Today": [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Please Call Today"] But a few weeks later she got a call from Ken Nelson, telling her that she was in the charts -- not with "Please Call Today", but with "Party", the album track she'd recorded three years earlier. She was obviously confused by this, but Nelson explained that a DJ in Iowa had taken up the song and used it as the theme song for his radio show. So many people had called the DJ asking about it that he in turn had called Ken Nelson at Capitol and convinced him to put the track out as a single, and it had made the pop top forty. As a result, Capitol rushed out an album of her previous rockabilly singles, and then got her back into the studio, with her touring band, to record her first proper rock and roll album -- as opposed to her first album, which was a mixture of country and rock, and her second, which was a compilation of previously-released singles. This album was full of cover versions of rock and roll hits from the previous few years, like Elvis' "Hard-Headed Woman", LaVern Baker's "Tweedle Dee", and Buddy Holly's "It Doesn't Matter Any More". And she also recorded a few rock and roll singles, like a cover version of the Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9". Those sessions also produced what became Jackson's biggest hit single to that point. At the time, Brenda Lee was a big star, and a friend of Jackson. The two had had parallel careers, and Lee was someone else who straddled the boundaries between rockabilly and country, but at the time she had just had a big hit with "I'm Sorry": [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "I'm Sorry"] That was one of the first recordings in what would become known as "the Nashville Sound", a style of music that was somewhere between country music and middle-of-the-road pop. Wanda had written a song in that style, and since she was now once again being pushed in a rock and roll direction, she thought she would give it to Lee to record. However, she mentioned the song to Ken Nelson when she was in the studio, and he insisted that she let him hear it -- and once he heard it, he insisted on recording it with her, saying that Brenda Lee had enough hits of her own, and she didn't need Wanda Jackson giving her hers. The result was "Right or Wrong", which became her first solo country top ten hit, and all of a sudden she had once again switched styles -- she was now no longer Wanda Jackson the rock and roller, but she was Wanda Jackson the Nashville Sound pop-country singer: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Right or Wrong"] Unfortunately, Jackson ended up having to give up the songwriting royalties on that record, as she was sued by the company that owned "Wake the Town and Tell the People", which had been a hit in 1955 and had an undeniably similar melody: [Excerpt: Mindy Carson, "Wake the Town and Tell the People"] Even so, her switch to pure country music ended up being good for Jackson. While she would have peaks and troughs in her career, she managed to score another fifteen country top forty hits over the next decade -- although her biggest hit was as a writer rather than a performer, when she wrote "Kickin' Our Hearts Around" for Buck Owens, who had played on many of her sessions early in his career before he went on to become the biggest star in country music: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "Kickin' Our Hearts Around"] Like almost everything Owens released in the sixties, that went top ten on the country charts. Jackson was a fairly major star in the country field through the sixties, even having her own TV show, but she was becoming increasingly unhappy, and suffering from alcoholism. In the early seventies she and her husband had a religious awakening, and became born-again Christians, and she once again switched her musical style, this time from country music to gospel -- though she would still sing her old secular hits along with the gospel songs on stage. Unfortunately, Capitol weren't interested in putting out gospel material by her, and she ended up moving to smaller and smaller labels, and by the end of the seventies she was reduced to rerecording her old hits for mail-order compilations put out by K-Tel records. But then her career got a second wind. In Europe in the early 1980s there was something of a rockabilly revival, and a Swedish label, Tab Records, got in touch with Jackson and asked her to record a new album of rockabilly music, which led to her touring all over Europe playing to crowds of rockabilly fans. By the nineties, American rockabilly revivalists were taking notice of her as well, and Rosie Flores, a rockabilly artist who would later produce Janis Martin's last sessions, invited Jackson to duet with her on a few songs and tour North America with her: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson and Rosie Flores, "His Rockin' Little Angel"] In 2003, she recorded her first new album of secular music for the American market for several decades, featuring several of her younger admirers, like the Cramps and Lee Rocker of the Stray Cats. But the most prominent guest star was Elvis Costello, who duetted with her on a song by her old friend Buck Owens: [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and Wanda Jackson, "Crying Time"] After duetting with her, Costello discovered that she wasn't yet in the rock and roll hall of fame, and started lobbying for her inclusion, writing an open letter that says in part: "For heaven's sake, the whole thing risks ridicule and having the appearance of being a little boy's club unless it acknowledges the contribution of one of the first women of rock and roll. “It might be hard to admit, but the musical influence of several male pioneers is somewhat obscure today. Even though their records will always be thrilling, their sound is not really heard in echo. Look around today and you can hear lots of rocking girl singers who owe an unconscious debt to the mere idea of a girl like Wanda. She was standing up on stage with a guitar in her hands and making a sound that was as wild as any rocker, man or woman, while other gals were still asking 'How much is that doggy in the window'" Thanks in large part to Costello's advocacy, Jackson finally made it into the hall of fame in 2009, and that seems to have spurred another minor boost to her career, as she released two albums in the early part of last decade, produced by young admirers -- one produced by Justin Townes Earle, and the other by Jack White. Jackson has been having some health problems recently, and her husband and manager of fifty-six years died in 2017, so she finally retired from live performance in March last year, but she's apparently still working on a new album, produced by Joan Jett, which should be out soon. With luck, she will have a long and happy retirement.  

Episode sixty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Fujiyama Mama” by Wanda Jackson, and the first rock and roller to become “big in Japan” 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 “Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I have two main sources for this eposode. One is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. The other is this article on “Fujiyama Mama”, which I urge everyone to read, as it goes into far more detail about the reasons why the song had the reception it did in Japan.   And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin this episode, a minor content note. I am going to be looking at a song that is, unfortunately, unthinkingly offensive towards Japanese people and culture. If that – or flippant lyrics about the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – are likely to upset you, be warned. When we left Wanda Jackson six months ago, it looked very much like she might end up being a one-hit wonder. “I Gotta Know” had been a hit, but there hadn’t been a successful follow-up. In part this was because she was straddling two different genres — she was trying to find a way to be successful in both the rock and roll and country markets, and neither was taking to her especially well. In later years, it would be recognised that the music she was making combined some of the best of both worlds — she was working with a lot of the musicians on the West Coast who would later go on to become famous for creating the Bakersfield Sound, and changing the whole face of country music, and her records have a lot of that sound about them. And at the same time she was also making some extremely hot rockabilly music, but she was just a little bit too country for the rock market, and a little bit too rock for the country market. Possibly the place where she fit in best was among the Sun records acts, and so it’s not surprising that she ended up towards the bottom of the bill on the long tour that Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash did over much of North America in early 1957 — the tour on which Jerry Lee Lewis moved from third billed to top of the bill by sheer force of personality. But it says quite a bit about Jackson that while everyone else talking about that tour discusses the way that some of the men did things like throwing cherry bombs at each other’s cars, and living off nothing but whisky, Wanda’s principal recollection of the tour in her autobiography is of going to church and inviting all the men along, but Jerry Lee being the only one who would come with her. To a great extent she was shielded from the worst aspects of the men’s behaviour by her father, who was still looking after her on the road, and acted as a buffer between her and the worst excesses of her tourmates, but she seems to have been happy with that situation — she didn’t seem to have much desire to become one of the boys, the way many other female rock and roll stars have. She enjoyed making wild-sounding music, but she saw that mostly as a kind of acting — she didn’t think that her onstage persona had to match her offstage behaviour at all. And one of the wildest records she made was “Fujiyama Mama”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Fujiyama Mama”] “Fujiyama Mama” was written by the rockabilly and R&B songwriter Jack Hammer (whose birth name was the more prosaic Earl Burroughs), who is best known as having been the credited co-writer of “Great Balls of Fire”. We didn’t talk about him in the episode on that song, because apparently Hammer’s only contribution to the song was the title — he wrote a totally different song with the same title, which Paul Case, who was the music consultant on the film “Jamboree”, liked enough to commission Otis Blackwell to write another song of the same name, giving Hammer half the credit. But Hammer did write some songs on his own that became at least moderate successes. For example, he wrote “Rock and Roll Call”, which was recorded by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Rock and Roll Call”] And “Milkshake Mademoiselle” for Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt, Jerry Lee Lewis, “Milkshake Mademoiselle”] And in 1954, when Hammer was only fourteen, he wrote “Fujiyama Mama”, which was originally recorded by Annisteen Allen: [Excerpt: Annisteen Allen, “Fujiyama Mama”] This was a song in a long line of songs about black women’s sexuality which lie at the base of rock and roll, though of course, as with several of those songs, it’s written by a man, and it’s mostly the woman boasting about how much pleasure she’s going to give the man — while it’s a sexually aggressive record, this is very much a male fantasy as performed by a woman. Allen was yet another singer in the early days of R&B and rock and roll to have come out of Lucky Millinder’s orchestra — she had been his female singer in the late forties, just after Rosetta Tharpe had left the group, and while Wynonie Harris was their male singer. She’d sung lead on what turned out to be Millinder’s last big hit, “I’m Waiting Just For You”: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder and his orchestra, “I’m Waiting Just For You”] After she left Millinder’s band, Allen recorded for a variety of labels, with little success, and when she recorded “Fujiyama Mama” in 1954 she was on Capitol — this was almost unique at the time, as her kind of R&B would normally have come out on King or Apollo or Savoy or a similar small label. In its original version, “Fujiyama Mama” wasn’t a particularly successful record, but Wanda Jackson heard it on a jukebox and fell in love with the record. She quickly learned the song and added it to her own act. In 1957, Jackson was in the studio recording a country song called “No Wedding Bells for Joe”, written by a friend of hers called Marijohn Wilkin, who would later go on to write country classics like “Long Black Veil”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “No Wedding Bells For Joe”] For the B-side, Jackson wanted to record “Fujiyama Mama”, but Ken Nelson was very concerned — the lyrics about drinking, smoking, and shooting were bad enough for a girl who was not yet quite twenty, the blatant female sexuality was not something that would go down well at all in the country market, and lyrics like “I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too/The things I did to them I can do to you” were horribly tasteless — and remember, this was little more than a decade after the bombs were dropped on those cities. Nelson really, really, disliked the song, and didn’t want Jackson to record it, and while I’ve been critical of Nelson for making poor repertoire choices for his artists — Nelson was someone with a great instinct for performers, but a terrible instinct for material — I can’t say I entirely blame him in this instance. But Wanda overruled him — and then, when he tried to tone down her performance in the studio, she rebelled against that, with the encouragement of her father, who told her “You’re the one who wanted to do it, so you need to do it your way”. In the last episode about Jackson, we talked about how she’d tried to do her normal growling roar on “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” but was let down by having drunk milk before recording the song. This time, she had no problem, and for the first time in the studio she sang in the voice that she used for her rock and roll songs on stage: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Fujiyama Mama”] To my ears, Jackson’s version of the song is still notably inferior to Allen’s version, but it’s important to note that this isn’t a Georgia Gibbs style white person covering a black artist for commercial success at the instigation of her producer, and copying the arrangement precisely, this is a young woman covering a record she loved, and doing it as a B-side. There’s still the racial dynamic at play there, but this is closer to Elvis doing “That’s All Right” than to Georgia Gibbs ripping off LaVern Baker or Etta James. It’s also closer to Elvis than it is to Eileen Barton, who was the second person to have recorded the song. Barton was a novelty singer, whose biggest hit was “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” from 1950: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake”] Barton’s version of “Fujiyama Mama” was the B-side to a 1955 remake of “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake”, redone as a blues. I’ve not actually been able to track down a copy of that remake, so I can’t play an excerpt — I’m sure you’re all devastated by that. Barton’s version, far more than Jackson’s, was a straight copy of the original, though the arranger on her version gets rid of most of the Orientalisms in Allen’s original recording: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, “Fujiyama Mama”] I think the difference between Barton’s and Jackson’s versions simply comes down to their sincerity. Barton hated the song, and thought of it as a terrible novelty tune she was being forced to sing. She did a competent professional job, because she was a professional vocalist, but she would talk later in interviews about how much she disliked the record. Jackson, on the other hand, pushed to do the song because she loved it so much, and she performed the song as she wanted it to be done, and against the wishes of her producer. For all the many, many problematic aspects of the song, which I won’t defend at all, that passion does show through in Jackson’s performance of it. Jackson’s single was released, and did absolutely nothing sales-wise, as was normal for her records at this point. Around this time, she also cut her first album, and included on it a cover version of a song Elvis had recently recorded, “Party”, which in her version was retitled “Let’s Have a Party”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Let’s Have a Party”] That album also did essentially nothing, and while Jackson continued releasing singles throughout 1958, none of them charted. Ken Nelson didn’t even book her in for a single recording session in 1959 — by that point they’d got enough stuff already recorded that they could keep releasing records by her until her contract ran out, and they didn’t need to throw good money after bad by paying for more studio sessions to make records that nobody was going to buy. And then something really strange happened. “Fujiyama Mama” became hugely successful in Japan. Now, nobody seems to have adequately explained quite how this happened. After all, this record was… not exactly flattering about Japanese people, and its first couple of lines seem to celebrate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it’s not as if they didn’t know what was being sung. While obviously Jackson was singing in English and most listeners in Japan couldn’t speak English, there was a Japanese translation of the lyrics printed on the back sleeve of the single, so most people would at least have had some idea what she was singing about. Yet somehow, the record made number one in Japan. In part, this may just have been simply because any recognition of Japanese culture from an American artist at all might have been seen as a novelty. But also, while in the USA pretty much all the rock and roll hits were sung by men, Japan was developing its own rock and roll culture, and in Japan, most of the big rock and roll stars were teenage girls, of around the same age as Wanda Jackson. Now, I am very far from being an expert on post-war Japanese culture, so please don’t take anything I say on the subject as being any kind of definitive statement, but from the stuff I’ve read (and in particular from a very good, long, article on this particular song that I’m going to link in the liner notes and which I urge you all to read, which goes into the cultural background a lot more than I can here) it seems as if these girls were, for the most part, groomed as manufactured pop stars, and that many of them were recording cover versions of songs in English, which they learned phonetically from the American recordings. For example, here’s Izumi Yukimura’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Ko Ko Mo”] In many of these versions, they would sing a verse in the original English, and then a verse in Japanese translation, as you can again hear in that recording: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Ko Ko Mo”] Izumi Yuklmura also recorded a version of “Fujiyama Mama”, patterned after Jackson’s: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Fujiyama Mama”] There are many, many things that can be said about these recordings, but the thing that strikes me about them, just as a music listener, and separate from everything else, is how comparatively convincing a rock and roll recording that version of “Fujiyama Mama” actually is. When you compare it to the music that was coming out of places like the UK or Australia or France, it’s far more energetic, and shows a far better understanding of the idiom. It’s important to note though that part of the reason for this is the peculiar circumstances in Japan at the time. Much of the Japanese entertainment industry in the late forties and fifties had grown up around the US occupying troops who were stationed there after the end of World War II, and those servicemen were more interested in seeing pretty young girls than in seeing male performers. But this meant two things — it firstly meant that young women were far more likely to be musical performers in Japan than in the US, and it also meant that the Japanese music industry was geared to performers who were performing in American styles — and so Japanese listeners were accustomed to hearing things like this: [Excerpt: Chiemi Eri, “Rock Around the Clock”] So when a recording by a young woman singing about Japan, however offensively, in a rock and roll style, was released in Japan, the market was ready for it. While in America rock and roll was largely viewed as a male music, in Japan, they were ready for Wanda Jackson. And Jackson, in turn, was ready for Japan. In her autobiography she makes clear that she was the kind of person who would nowadays be called a weeb — having a fascination with Japanese culture, albeit the stereotyped version she had learned from pop culture. She had always wanted to visit Japan growing up, and when she got there she was amazed to find that they were organising a press conference for her, and that wherever she went there were fans wanting her autograph. Jackson, of course, had no idea about the complex relationship that Japan was having at the time with American culture — though in her autobiography she talks about visiting a bar over there where Japanese singers were performing country songs — she just knew that they had latched on, for whatever reason, to an obscure B-side and given her a second chance at success. When Jackson got back from Japan, she put together her own band for the first time — and unusually for country music at the time, it was an integrated band, with a black pianist. She had to deal with some resistance from her mother, who was an older Southern white woman, but eventually managed to win her round. That pianist, Big Al Downing, later went on to have his own successful career, including a hit single duetting with Esther Phillips: [Excerpt Big Al Downing and Little Esther Phillips, “You’ll Never Miss Your Water Until The Well Runs Dry”] Downing also had disco hits in the early seventies, and later had a run of hits on the country charts. Jackson also took on a young guitarist named Roy Clark, who would go on to have a great deal of success himself, as one of the most important instrumentalists in country music, and Clark would later co-star in the hit TV show Hee-Haw, with Buck Owens (who had played on many of Jackson’s earlier records). In 1960, Jackson returned to the studio. While she’d not had much commercial success in the US yet, her records were now selling well enough to justify recording more songs with her. But Ken Nelson had a specific condition for any future recordings — he pointed out that while she’d been recording both rock and roll and country music in her previous sessions, she had only ever charted in the US as a country artist, and she’d been signed as a country artist to Capitol. All her future sessions were going to be purely country, to avoid diluting her brand. Jackson agreed, and so she went into the studio and recorded a country shuffle, “Please Call Today”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Please Call Today”] But a few weeks later she got a call from Ken Nelson, telling her that she was in the charts — not with “Please Call Today”, but with “Party”, the album track she’d recorded three years earlier. She was obviously confused by this, but Nelson explained that a DJ in Iowa had taken up the song and used it as the theme song for his radio show. So many people had called the DJ asking about it that he in turn had called Ken Nelson at Capitol and convinced him to put the track out as a single, and it had made the pop top forty. As a result, Capitol rushed out an album of her previous rockabilly singles, and then got her back into the studio, with her touring band, to record her first proper rock and roll album — as opposed to her first album, which was a mixture of country and rock, and her second, which was a compilation of previously-released singles. This album was full of cover versions of rock and roll hits from the previous few years, like Elvis’ “Hard-Headed Woman”, LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee”, and Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”. And she also recorded a few rock and roll singles, like a cover version of the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9”. Those sessions also produced what became Jackson’s biggest hit single to that point. At the time, Brenda Lee was a big star, and a friend of Jackson. The two had had parallel careers, and Lee was someone else who straddled the boundaries between rockabilly and country, but at the time she had just had a big hit with “I’m Sorry”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] That was one of the first recordings in what would become known as “the Nashville Sound”, a style of music that was somewhere between country music and middle-of-the-road pop. Wanda had written a song in that style, and since she was now once again being pushed in a rock and roll direction, she thought she would give it to Lee to record. However, she mentioned the song to Ken Nelson when she was in the studio, and he insisted that she let him hear it — and once he heard it, he insisted on recording it with her, saying that Brenda Lee had enough hits of her own, and she didn’t need Wanda Jackson giving her hers. The result was “Right or Wrong”, which became her first solo country top ten hit, and all of a sudden she had once again switched styles — she was now no longer Wanda Jackson the rock and roller, but she was Wanda Jackson the Nashville Sound pop-country singer: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Right or Wrong”] Unfortunately, Jackson ended up having to give up the songwriting royalties on that record, as she was sued by the company that owned “Wake the Town and Tell the People”, which had been a hit in 1955 and had an undeniably similar melody: [Excerpt: Mindy Carson, “Wake the Town and Tell the People”] Even so, her switch to pure country music ended up being good for Jackson. While she would have peaks and troughs in her career, she managed to score another fifteen country top forty hits over the next decade — although her biggest hit was as a writer rather than a performer, when she wrote “Kickin’ Our Hearts Around” for Buck Owens, who had played on many of her sessions early in his career before he went on to become the biggest star in country music: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, “Kickin’ Our Hearts Around”] Like almost everything Owens released in the sixties, that went top ten on the country charts. Jackson was a fairly major star in the country field through the sixties, even having her own TV show, but she was becoming increasingly unhappy, and suffering from alcoholism. In the early seventies she and her husband had a religious awakening, and became born-again Christians, and she once again switched her musical style, this time from country music to gospel — though she would still sing her old secular hits along with the gospel songs on stage. Unfortunately, Capitol weren’t interested in putting out gospel material by her, and she ended up moving to smaller and smaller labels, and by the end of the seventies she was reduced to rerecording her old hits for mail-order compilations put out by K-Tel records. But then her career got a second wind. In Europe in the early 1980s there was something of a rockabilly revival, and a Swedish label, Tab Records, got in touch with Jackson and asked her to record a new album of rockabilly music, which led to her touring all over Europe playing to crowds of rockabilly fans. By the nineties, American rockabilly revivalists were taking notice of her as well, and Rosie Flores, a rockabilly artist who would later produce Janis Martin’s last sessions, invited Jackson to duet with her on a few songs and tour North America with her: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson and Rosie Flores, “His Rockin’ Little Angel”] In 2003, she recorded her first new album of secular music for the American market for several decades, featuring several of her younger admirers, like the Cramps and Lee Rocker of the Stray Cats. But the most prominent guest star was Elvis Costello, who duetted with her on a song by her old friend Buck Owens: [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and Wanda Jackson, “Crying Time”] After duetting with her, Costello discovered that she wasn’t yet in the rock and roll hall of fame, and started lobbying for her inclusion, writing an open letter that says in part: “For heaven’s sake, the whole thing risks ridicule and having the appearance of being a little boy’s club unless it acknowledges the contribution of one of the first women of rock and roll. “It might be hard to admit, but the musical influence of several male pioneers is somewhat obscure today. Even though their records will always be thrilling, their sound is not really heard in echo. Look around today and you can hear lots of rocking girl singers who owe an unconscious debt to the mere idea of a girl like Wanda. She was standing up on stage with a guitar in her hands and making a sound that was as wild as any rocker, man or woman, while other gals were still asking ‘How much is that doggy in the window'” Thanks in large part to Costello’s advocacy, Jackson finally made it into the hall of fame in 2009, and that seems to have spurred another minor boost to her career, as she released two albums in the early part of last decade, produced by young admirers — one produced by Justin Townes Earle, and the other by Jack White. Jackson has been having some health problems recently, and her husband and manager of fifty-six years died in 2017, so she finally retired from live performance in March last year, but she’s apparently still working on a new album, produced by Joan Jett, which should be out soon. With luck, she will have a long and happy retirement.  

Episode sixty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Fujiyama Mama” by Wanda Jackson, and the first rock and roller to become “big in Japan” 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 “Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I have two main sources for this eposode. One is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. The other is this article on “Fujiyama Mama”, which I urge everyone to read, as it goes into far more detail about the reasons why the song had the reception it did in Japan.   And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin this episode, a minor content note. I am going to be looking at a song that is, unfortunately, unthinkingly offensive towards Japanese people and culture. If that – or flippant lyrics about the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – are likely to upset you, be warned. When we left Wanda Jackson six months ago, it looked very much like she might end up being a one-hit wonder. “I Gotta Know” had been a hit, but there hadn’t been a successful follow-up. In part this was because she was straddling two different genres — she was trying to find a way to be successful in both the rock and roll and country markets, and neither was taking to her especially well. In later years, it would be recognised that the music she was making combined some of the best of both worlds — she was working with a lot of the musicians on the West Coast who would later go on to become famous for creating the Bakersfield Sound, and changing the whole face of country music, and her records have a lot of that sound about them. And at the same time she was also making some extremely hot rockabilly music, but she was just a little bit too country for the rock market, and a little bit too rock for the country market. Possibly the place where she fit in best was among the Sun records acts, and so it’s not surprising that she ended up towards the bottom of the bill on the long tour that Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash did over much of North America in early 1957 — the tour on which Jerry Lee Lewis moved from third billed to top of the bill by sheer force of personality. But it says quite a bit about Jackson that while everyone else talking about that tour discusses the way that some of the men did things like throwing cherry bombs at each other’s cars, and living off nothing but whisky, Wanda’s principal recollection of the tour in her autobiography is of going to church and inviting all the men along, but Jerry Lee being the only one who would come with her. To a great extent she was shielded from the worst aspects of the men’s behaviour by her father, who was still looking after her on the road, and acted as a buffer between her and the worst excesses of her tourmates, but she seems to have been happy with that situation — she didn’t seem to have much desire to become one of the boys, the way many other female rock and roll stars have. She enjoyed making wild-sounding music, but she saw that mostly as a kind of acting — she didn’t think that her onstage persona had to match her offstage behaviour at all. And one of the wildest records she made was “Fujiyama Mama”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Fujiyama Mama”] “Fujiyama Mama” was written by the rockabilly and R&B songwriter Jack Hammer (whose birth name was the more prosaic Earl Burroughs), who is best known as having been the credited co-writer of “Great Balls of Fire”. We didn’t talk about him in the episode on that song, because apparently Hammer’s only contribution to the song was the title — he wrote a totally different song with the same title, which Paul Case, who was the music consultant on the film “Jamboree”, liked enough to commission Otis Blackwell to write another song of the same name, giving Hammer half the credit. But Hammer did write some songs on his own that became at least moderate successes. For example, he wrote “Rock and Roll Call”, which was recorded by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Rock and Roll Call”] And “Milkshake Mademoiselle” for Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt, Jerry Lee Lewis, “Milkshake Mademoiselle”] And in 1954, when Hammer was only fourteen, he wrote “Fujiyama Mama”, which was originally recorded by Annisteen Allen: [Excerpt: Annisteen Allen, “Fujiyama Mama”] This was a song in a long line of songs about black women’s sexuality which lie at the base of rock and roll, though of course, as with several of those songs, it’s written by a man, and it’s mostly the woman boasting about how much pleasure she’s going to give the man — while it’s a sexually aggressive record, this is very much a male fantasy as performed by a woman. Allen was yet another singer in the early days of R&B and rock and roll to have come out of Lucky Millinder’s orchestra — she had been his female singer in the late forties, just after Rosetta Tharpe had left the group, and while Wynonie Harris was their male singer. She’d sung lead on what turned out to be Millinder’s last big hit, “I’m Waiting Just For You”: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder and his orchestra, “I’m Waiting Just For You”] After she left Millinder’s band, Allen recorded for a variety of labels, with little success, and when she recorded “Fujiyama Mama” in 1954 she was on Capitol — this was almost unique at the time, as her kind of R&B would normally have come out on King or Apollo or Savoy or a similar small label. In its original version, “Fujiyama Mama” wasn’t a particularly successful record, but Wanda Jackson heard it on a jukebox and fell in love with the record. She quickly learned the song and added it to her own act. In 1957, Jackson was in the studio recording a country song called “No Wedding Bells for Joe”, written by a friend of hers called Marijohn Wilkin, who would later go on to write country classics like “Long Black Veil”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “No Wedding Bells For Joe”] For the B-side, Jackson wanted to record “Fujiyama Mama”, but Ken Nelson was very concerned — the lyrics about drinking, smoking, and shooting were bad enough for a girl who was not yet quite twenty, the blatant female sexuality was not something that would go down well at all in the country market, and lyrics like “I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too/The things I did to them I can do to you” were horribly tasteless — and remember, this was little more than a decade after the bombs were dropped on those cities. Nelson really, really, disliked the song, and didn’t want Jackson to record it, and while I’ve been critical of Nelson for making poor repertoire choices for his artists — Nelson was someone with a great instinct for performers, but a terrible instinct for material — I can’t say I entirely blame him in this instance. But Wanda overruled him — and then, when he tried to tone down her performance in the studio, she rebelled against that, with the encouragement of her father, who told her “You’re the one who wanted to do it, so you need to do it your way”. In the last episode about Jackson, we talked about how she’d tried to do her normal growling roar on “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” but was let down by having drunk milk before recording the song. This time, she had no problem, and for the first time in the studio she sang in the voice that she used for her rock and roll songs on stage: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Fujiyama Mama”] To my ears, Jackson’s version of the song is still notably inferior to Allen’s version, but it’s important to note that this isn’t a Georgia Gibbs style white person covering a black artist for commercial success at the instigation of her producer, and copying the arrangement precisely, this is a young woman covering a record she loved, and doing it as a B-side. There’s still the racial dynamic at play there, but this is closer to Elvis doing “That’s All Right” than to Georgia Gibbs ripping off LaVern Baker or Etta James. It’s also closer to Elvis than it is to Eileen Barton, who was the second person to have recorded the song. Barton was a novelty singer, whose biggest hit was “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” from 1950: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake”] Barton’s version of “Fujiyama Mama” was the B-side to a 1955 remake of “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake”, redone as a blues. I’ve not actually been able to track down a copy of that remake, so I can’t play an excerpt — I’m sure you’re all devastated by that. Barton’s version, far more than Jackson’s, was a straight copy of the original, though the arranger on her version gets rid of most of the Orientalisms in Allen’s original recording: [Excerpt: Eileen Barton, “Fujiyama Mama”] I think the difference between Barton’s and Jackson’s versions simply comes down to their sincerity. Barton hated the song, and thought of it as a terrible novelty tune she was being forced to sing. She did a competent professional job, because she was a professional vocalist, but she would talk later in interviews about how much she disliked the record. Jackson, on the other hand, pushed to do the song because she loved it so much, and she performed the song as she wanted it to be done, and against the wishes of her producer. For all the many, many problematic aspects of the song, which I won’t defend at all, that passion does show through in Jackson’s performance of it. Jackson’s single was released, and did absolutely nothing sales-wise, as was normal for her records at this point. Around this time, she also cut her first album, and included on it a cover version of a song Elvis had recently recorded, “Party”, which in her version was retitled “Let’s Have a Party”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Let’s Have a Party”] That album also did essentially nothing, and while Jackson continued releasing singles throughout 1958, none of them charted. Ken Nelson didn’t even book her in for a single recording session in 1959 — by that point they’d got enough stuff already recorded that they could keep releasing records by her until her contract ran out, and they didn’t need to throw good money after bad by paying for more studio sessions to make records that nobody was going to buy. And then something really strange happened. “Fujiyama Mama” became hugely successful in Japan. Now, nobody seems to have adequately explained quite how this happened. After all, this record was… not exactly flattering about Japanese people, and its first couple of lines seem to celebrate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it’s not as if they didn’t know what was being sung. While obviously Jackson was singing in English and most listeners in Japan couldn’t speak English, there was a Japanese translation of the lyrics printed on the back sleeve of the single, so most people would at least have had some idea what she was singing about. Yet somehow, the record made number one in Japan. In part, this may just have been simply because any recognition of Japanese culture from an American artist at all might have been seen as a novelty. But also, while in the USA pretty much all the rock and roll hits were sung by men, Japan was developing its own rock and roll culture, and in Japan, most of the big rock and roll stars were teenage girls, of around the same age as Wanda Jackson. Now, I am very far from being an expert on post-war Japanese culture, so please don’t take anything I say on the subject as being any kind of definitive statement, but from the stuff I’ve read (and in particular from a very good, long, article on this particular song that I’m going to link in the liner notes and which I urge you all to read, which goes into the cultural background a lot more than I can here) it seems as if these girls were, for the most part, groomed as manufactured pop stars, and that many of them were recording cover versions of songs in English, which they learned phonetically from the American recordings. For example, here’s Izumi Yukimura’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Ko Ko Mo”] In many of these versions, they would sing a verse in the original English, and then a verse in Japanese translation, as you can again hear in that recording: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Ko Ko Mo”] Izumi Yuklmura also recorded a version of “Fujiyama Mama”, patterned after Jackson’s: [Excerpt: Izumi Yukimura, “Fujiyama Mama”] There are many, many things that can be said about these recordings, but the thing that strikes me about them, just as a music listener, and separate from everything else, is how comparatively convincing a rock and roll recording that version of “Fujiyama Mama” actually is. When you compare it to the music that was coming out of places like the UK or Australia or France, it’s far more energetic, and shows a far better understanding of the idiom. It’s important to note though that part of the reason for this is the peculiar circumstances in Japan at the time. Much of the Japanese entertainment industry in the late forties and fifties had grown up around the US occupying troops who were stationed there after the end of World War II, and those servicemen were more interested in seeing pretty young girls than in seeing male performers. But this meant two things — it firstly meant that young women were far more likely to be musical performers in Japan than in the US, and it also meant that the Japanese music industry was geared to performers who were performing in American styles — and so Japanese listeners were accustomed to hearing things like this: [Excerpt: Chiemi Eri, “Rock Around the Clock”] So when a recording by a young woman singing about Japan, however offensively, in a rock and roll style, was released in Japan, the market was ready for it. While in America rock and roll was largely viewed as a male music, in Japan, they were ready for Wanda Jackson. And Jackson, in turn, was ready for Japan. In her autobiography she makes clear that she was the kind of person who would nowadays be called a weeb — having a fascination with Japanese culture, albeit the stereotyped version she had learned from pop culture. She had always wanted to visit Japan growing up, and when she got there she was amazed to find that they were organising a press conference for her, and that wherever she went there were fans wanting her autograph. Jackson, of course, had no idea about the complex relationship that Japan was having at the time with American culture — though in her autobiography she talks about visiting a bar over there where Japanese singers were performing country songs — she just knew that they had latched on, for whatever reason, to an obscure B-side and given her a second chance at success. When Jackson got back from Japan, she put together her own band for the first time — and unusually for country music at the time, it was an integrated band, with a black pianist. She had to deal with some resistance from her mother, who was an older Southern white woman, but eventually managed to win her round. That pianist, Big Al Downing, later went on to have his own successful career, including a hit single duetting with Esther Phillips: [Excerpt Big Al Downing and Little Esther Phillips, “You’ll Never Miss Your Water Until The Well Runs Dry”] Downing also had disco hits in the early seventies, and later had a run of hits on the country charts. Jackson also took on a young guitarist named Roy Clark, who would go on to have a great deal of success himself, as one of the most important instrumentalists in country music, and Clark would later co-star in the hit TV show Hee-Haw, with Buck Owens (who had played on many of Jackson’s earlier records). In 1960, Jackson returned to the studio. While she’d not had much commercial success in the US yet, her records were now selling well enough to justify recording more songs with her. But Ken Nelson had a specific condition for any future recordings — he pointed out that while she’d been recording both rock and roll and country music in her previous sessions, she had only ever charted in the US as a country artist, and she’d been signed as a country artist to Capitol. All her future sessions were going to be purely country, to avoid diluting her brand. Jackson agreed, and so she went into the studio and recorded a country shuffle, “Please Call Today”: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Please Call Today”] But a few weeks later she got a call from Ken Nelson, telling her that she was in the charts — not with “Please Call Today”, but with “Party”, the album track she’d recorded three years earlier. She was obviously confused by this, but Nelson explained that a DJ in Iowa had taken up the song and used it as the theme song for his radio show. So many people had called the DJ asking about it that he in turn had called Ken Nelson at Capitol and convinced him to put the track out as a single, and it had made the pop top forty. As a result, Capitol rushed out an album of her previous rockabilly singles, and then got her back into the studio, with her touring band, to record her first proper rock and roll album — as opposed to her first album, which was a mixture of country and rock, and her second, which was a compilation of previously-released singles. This album was full of cover versions of rock and roll hits from the previous few years, like Elvis’ “Hard-Headed Woman”, LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee”, and Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”. And she also recorded a few rock and roll singles, like a cover version of the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9”. Those sessions also produced what became Jackson’s biggest hit single to that point. At the time, Brenda Lee was a big star, and a friend of Jackson. The two had had parallel careers, and Lee was someone else who straddled the boundaries between rockabilly and country, but at the time she had just had a big hit with “I’m Sorry”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] That was one of the first recordings in what would become known as “the Nashville Sound”, a style of music that was somewhere between country music and middle-of-the-road pop. Wanda had written a song in that style, and since she was now once again being pushed in a rock and roll direction, she thought she would give it to Lee to record. However, she mentioned the song to Ken Nelson when she was in the studio, and he insisted that she let him hear it — and once he heard it, he insisted on recording it with her, saying that Brenda Lee had enough hits of her own, and she didn’t need Wanda Jackson giving her hers. The result was “Right or Wrong”, which became her first solo country top ten hit, and all of a sudden she had once again switched styles — she was now no longer Wanda Jackson the rock and roller, but she was Wanda Jackson the Nashville Sound pop-country singer: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Right or Wrong”] Unfortunately, Jackson ended up having to give up the songwriting royalties on that record, as she was sued by the company that owned “Wake the Town and Tell the People”, which had been a hit in 1955 and had an undeniably similar melody: [Excerpt: Mindy Carson, “Wake the Town and Tell the People”] Even so, her switch to pure country music ended up being good for Jackson. While she would have peaks and troughs in her career, she managed to score another fifteen country top forty hits over the next decade — although her biggest hit was as a writer rather than a performer, when she wrote “Kickin’ Our Hearts Around” for Buck Owens, who had played on many of her sessions early in his career before he went on to become the biggest star in country music: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, “Kickin’ Our Hearts Around”] Like almost everything Owens released in the sixties, that went top ten on the country charts. Jackson was a fairly major star in the country field through the sixties, even having her own TV show, but she was becoming increasingly unhappy, and suffering from alcoholism. In the early seventies she and her husband had a religious awakening, and became born-again Christians, and she once again switched her musical style, this time from country music to gospel — though she would still sing her old secular hits along with the gospel songs on stage. Unfortunately, Capitol weren’t interested in putting out gospel material by her, and she ended up moving to smaller and smaller labels, and by the end of the seventies she was reduced to rerecording her old hits for mail-order compilations put out by K-Tel records. But then her career got a second wind. In Europe in the early 1980s there was something of a rockabilly revival, and a Swedish label, Tab Records, got in touch with Jackson and asked her to record a new album of rockabilly music, which led to her touring all over Europe playing to crowds of rockabilly fans. By the nineties, American rockabilly revivalists were taking notice of her as well, and Rosie Flores, a rockabilly artist who would later produce Janis Martin’s last sessions, invited Jackson to duet with her on a few songs and tour North America with her: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson and Rosie Flores, “His Rockin’ Little Angel”] In 2003, she recorded her first new album of secular music for the American market for several decades, featuring several of her younger admirers, like the Cramps and Lee Rocker of the Stray Cats. But the most prominent guest star was Elvis Costello, who duetted with her on a song by her old friend Buck Owens: [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and Wanda Jackson, “Crying Time”] After duetting with her, Costello discovered that she wasn’t yet in the rock and roll hall of fame, and started lobbying for her inclusion, writing an open letter that says in part: “For heaven’s sake, the whole thing risks ridicule and having the appearance of being a little boy’s club unless it acknowledges the contribution of one of the first women of rock and roll. “It might be hard to admit, but the musical influence of several male pioneers is somewhat obscure today. Even though their records will always be thrilling, their sound is not really heard in echo. Look around today and you can hear lots of rocking girl singers who owe an unconscious debt to the mere idea of a girl like Wanda. She was standing up on stage with a guitar in her hands and making a sound that was as wild as any rocker, man or woman, while other gals were still asking ‘How much is that doggy in the window'” Thanks in large part to Costello’s advocacy, Jackson finally made it into the hall of fame in 2009, and that seems to have spurred another minor boost to her career, as she released two albums in the early part of last decade, produced by young admirers — one produced by Justin Townes Earle, and the other by Jack White. Jackson has been having some health problems recently, and her husband and manager of fifty-six years died in 2017, so she finally retired from live performance in March last year, but she’s apparently still working on a new album, produced by Joan Jett, which should be out soon. With luck, she will have a long and happy retirement.  

  Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. 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 Santa Claus is Back in Town, also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode.  —-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 Jailhouse Rock 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 Colonel Tom Parker, from the very first, had wanted Elvis to move into films. Indeed, even before he met Elvis, he had tried grooming the other stars he’d managed — and non-stars like Tommy Sands — for film roles. In particular, he wanted to work with Hal Wallis at MGM, who had become something of an idee fixe for him after the first time he saw a film being made and was told that Wallis was the man in charge of it all. In particular, Parker was interested in film as a mass medium that nonetheless required people to pay. While Elvis had become famous by taking advantage of television’s newfound ubiquity, Colonel Parker didn’t like the idea that people could just watch Elvis for free. If they could watch him for nothing in their own home, why would they pay to see his shows, or pay for his records? But the cinema was different. People paid to go to the cinema, and you could get millions of people paying money to see the same performance. For the Colonel, that was the key — a way to maximise paying customers. Even if you made more money from the TV than from the cinema in the short term, cultivating a paying audience was clearly the best thing to do in the medium term. And so, from late 1956, Elvis’ career had started to be focussed on films, which were themselves focussed on his music. His first film, a Western originally titled The Reno Brothers, had been intended to have him in a small part, trying to be a straight actor, without any singing at all, and that was how Elvis had been persuaded to do it. Instead, at the last minute, four songs had been added to the film, and it had been retitled from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender. Elvis’ part — which was originally a relatively minor part — had been beefed up, though in terms of actual plot involvement he was still not the main star, and the film became an uneasy compromise between being a serious Western drama and a rock and roll vehicle, not really managing to do either well. The film after that, “Loving You”, had been different: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Loving You”] That one had been a more straight ahead rock and roll film — it was basically a fictionalised version of Elvis’ own life to that point, with him playing Deke Rivers, a singer who is discovered by the manager of a fading country star. The manager in this case is a woman, and she also becomes the love interest in the film, but the broad outlines are about what you’d expect from a fictionalised biopic — Elvis was  clearly playing himself. But the soundtrack to “Loving You” had been a huge improvement on the soundtrack to “Love Me Tender”, and had included some of Elvis’ very best songs, including a title song written for him by Leiber and Stoller. The pair had been called on almost straight away after their “Hound Dog” had become a hit for Elvis, to see if they had any more songs for him. At the time, they hadn’t been hugely impressed by Elvis’ version of “Hound Dog”, and so rather than give him anything new, they suggested he record a song they had written for the duo Willy and Ruth: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Love Me”] That song had been written as a parody of country songs, and they hadn’t taken it seriously at all, but there had been all sorts of cover versions of it, by everyone from Georgia Gibbs to Hank Snow’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. None of them had been hits, but the song obviously had some commercial potential. So Leiber and Stoller suggested that Elvis try it, and they were very impressed with his performance of the song, which unlike them he *did* take seriously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Love Me”] From that point on, they had a certain amount of respect for Elvis as a performer, and so they were happy to write “Loving You” for the film. But at this point they still hadn’t even met him, and regarded him as, in their words, “an idiot savant” — someone who just happened to have a marketable talent, rather than an actual artist like the people they worked with. But Elvis was so impressed with the songs that Leiber and Stoller were writing that they soon got the call to write more songs for his next film. The original plan was that they were to write all of the songs for the film, but there was a snag. They’d been flown back to New York from LA, and they had a suite at an expensive hotel, and Miles Davis and Count Basie and Thelonius Monk all had gigs in the city that week, and there were a few good plays on at the theatre, and they had some friends who wanted to take them out for meals, and… well, there’s a lot of stuff to do in New York that’s more interesting than work. Eventually, Jean Aberbach from Hill and Range publishing came round to see them in their hotel suite, and ask them where his songs were. They told him he would have them soon, and he replied that he knew he would, because he wasn’t going to let them leave until he did. He pushed the sofa in front of the door so they couldn’t get out, and went to sleep on it. In the next five hours, Leiber and Stoller wrote four songs together, which was just about enough for the film, which was padded out with two other songs by other writers — both of them co-written by Aaron Schroeder. There was “Don’t Leave Me Now”, which had been recorded but not used for “Loving You”,  but which had still already appeared on that film’s soundtrack album, and a new ballad called “Young and Beautiful”. But neither of those songs were particularly strong, and so it was the Leiber and Stoller songs that would be the musical spine of the film — the credits at the beginning of the film said “songs mostly by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber”, clearly showing that they knew which songs it was that people would actually care about. It was only in April 1957 that Leiber and Stoller actually met the man who had already had hits with two of their songs and used a third as the title song for one of his films. Coincidentally, they met him in Radio Recorders Annex, the same studio where five years earlier they had recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” with Big Mama Thornton. They went in not knowing what to expect, but were struck, in order, by three different things. The first was that Elvis was extremely physically beautiful, far more so in person than in photos. The second was how shy and quiet he was — but how these things actually gave him an extra presence. And the third was how much he knew about R&B music, and how much he loved it. Leiber and Stoller had believed themselves to be the only white people of their own generation to really know or care about R&B or the blues, and here was someone enthusing to them about B.B. King, Big Bill Broonzy, and Arthur Crudup, and also about their own songs. He particularly liked one they’d written for Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”] He ended up sitting at the piano playing a four-handed blues with Mike Stoller. The three men were getting on well enough that even though Leiber and Stoller had only intended to visit the sessions for a short while to meet Elvis, they ended up essentially producing the session — Leiber was in the control room, and would show Elvis how he wanted the songs to be phrased, while Stoller was on the studio floor, working with the musicians, and playing piano on one track. The two were particularly impressed by Elvis’ determination in the studio. They were having to record multiple versions of almost every song, because the plot of the film would have Elvis’ character, Vince Everett, learning songs, trying them out in different arrangements, trying different vocal styles on them, and so on. As well as recording the songs properly, the way he’d like to sing them, Elvis had to do tentative versions, versions with wrong notes, and so forth. And Elvis happily worked, take after take, to get all these different versions of the songs done exactly right.  In fact, he ended up not just singing on the tracks, but playing bass on one of them.  Up until these sessions, Bill Black had been playing double bass on all Elvis’ sessions — the double bass was the standard bass instrument in country music, and had become so in rockabilly as well. But around this time it became clear that the new Fender bass guitars, which had been introduced to the market a couple of years earlier and had quickly taken off in the jazz and blues worlds, were going to become the standard instrument for studio work for everyone. Black was far from being the most accomplished musician in the world — what he brought to Elvis’ sessions was more about his enthusiasm and attitude than his ability to play — and the switch to the bass guitar was an uncomfortable one. If you don’t know, a double bass is played standing up, like a cello, and has no frets, while a bass guitar is played like a guitar. They’re very different instruments, and Black had trouble switching from one to the other. He was also getting annoyed with the whole Presley organisation. Tom Parker was determined to isolate Elvis from anyone else in the business, including his band members. And not only that, Bill and Scotty were on what they both considered was a miserably low salary. So when Bill messed up the intro to “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” repeatedly, he threw the bass across the room and stormed out of the session. Elvis just picked up the bass and played the part himself, and it’s him you can hear playing it on the finished record, doing a rather decent job of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”] While Bill had left the session, it didn’t stop him appearing in the film — “Jailhouse Rock” featured Scotty, Bill, and D.J., miming their instruments. They didn’t have any lines — they weren’t members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, so they couldn’t — but they appeared throughout the last half of the film, as did Mike Stoller on the piano. It was actually meant to be Jerry Leiber miming the piano parts — someone from the film studio had come into the recording studio while they were making the records, and had said that Leiber looked like a piano player. Elvis had said that no, it was Stoller who was the piano player, and the filmmaker had said it didn’t matter — Leiber looked like a piano player, and so if he wanted to be in the film miming the piano parts he could. Leiber agreed, but then on the day he was meant to go into the studio, he developed a terrible toothache. He called up Stoller and said “I can’t go, you go instead”.  Stoller pointed out that they were expecting Leiber, and Leiber told him that they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. So Stoller went along, and the only thing he was told was that he would have to shave off his goatee beard, as it would be a scene-stealer and distract people from Elvis. So Mike Stoller was there with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. as they filmed most of what is generally considered to be Elvis’ best film.  The film almost got stopped before it was started, though. The first thing to be filmed was the big dance sequence to one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written, “Jailhouse Rock”: [excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] That was going to be the centrepiece of the whole film, and the dance sequence involved dozens of men dressed as convicts. Some have argued that the song and the sequence were inspired by the bit in The Girl Can’t Help It in which a parody of rock and roll is sung by a group dressed as convicts. There might even be some truth to that as far as the version in the film goes, as the film has extra orchestration and an intro section added which isn’t on the record, and which doesn’t really fit very well. Compare the film version of “Jailhouse Rock”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”, film version] With “Rock Around the Rockpile”: [Excerpt: “Jerri Jordan”, “Rock Around the Rockpile”] But the thing is, that’s only a partial explanation. The song itself is clearly in a long line of Leiber and Stoller songs about the judicial system, like “Framed”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] and “Riot in Cell Block #9”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] It also contains a lot of the humour that Leiber and Stoller were noted for. Many comedians have made fun of this section: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] and pointed out the homoerotic implications of those lines. Given Leiber and Stoller’s other work, I think it’s fairly clear they were perfectly aware of those implications — and given that this is a film that also features shots of Elvis shirtless, tied up, being whipped by another man, I suspect they weren’t the only ones who were dropping little coded hints to gay fans at that time. But, as I said, the dance sequence nearly ended the film — and nearly ended Elvis’ singing career along with it. Elvis had some trouble learning to dance with a choreographed troupe, at first — he was a natural mover, and not used to the way trained dancers moved. Luckily, the choreographer, Alex Romero, came up with a solution to that problem. He got Elvis to just perform in front of him, miming to his own records, moving like he would on stage.  Romero then took Elvis’ normal stage movements and worked them into the dance routine, choreographing it so it still worked with the large dance troupe, but Elvis was able to move in ways that were comfortable for him. (The claim on Wikipedia that Elvis himself choreographed the dance sequence is absolutely mythical, incidentally. It was Alex Romero.) That solved the immediate problem, but there was a larger problem when, on the first day of shooting, Elvis hit his mouth and dislodged a crown. Elvis insisted that it had gone into his chest. At first, people thought he was being overly dramatic, but after a few more takes of bits of the sequence, they noticed a whistling sound when he was breathing. He had inhaled his crown.  It required major surgery to remove the crown from his lung, and to do it they had to separate his vocal cords to get into his lungs. This was a weird case of life imitating art, as a crucial plot point in the film was Elvis’ character having to have throat surgery and worrying whether he would be able to sing again. Fortunately, just as in the film, he made a full recovery and was able to carry on. The film itself was surprisingly good, given the depths to which Elvis would sink in some of his later films. Elvis plays a very unsympathetic character, with a chip on his shoulder after being imprisoned after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, who (of course) becomes a famous singer. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a very decent film of its type. The film sadly had a tragic coda — just days after the film finished shooting, Judy Tyler, Elvis’ love interest in the film, died in a car accident. As a result, Elvis refused to ever watch the film in full — he couldn’t bear to. But in the short term, the film’s main effect was to draw Elvis and Mike Stoller closer together. As Stoller was on the set all the time, he had a chance to get close to Elvis, and at one point they were having a game of pool, and one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written for the Drifters came on: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Ruby Baby”] Elvis started singing along, and asking Stoller how he and Leiber wrote so many great songs together. But then, a few minutes later, Elvis was dragged out of the room, and came back in telling Stoller that he had to leave — the Colonel didn’t want Elvis hanging round with people who were in the music industry, unless those people worked for the Colonel. Indeed, at one point around this time, the Colonel tried to become Leiber and Stoller’s manager. He sent them blank pieces of paper for them to sign, with a promise that he would fill out the rest later and give them a very good deal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their response was not one I could repeat on a podcast that isn’t in the adult section. But Elvis had still taken to Leiber and Stoller. He started calling them his “good luck charms”, and decided that he wanted them at every recording session. The Colonel agreed to have them involved in everything. For the moment. But Leiber and Stoller weren’t dependent on Elvis and the Colonel. During 1957, while they were working with Elvis, they also wrote hits for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, “Dancin'”] Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] The Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] And of course those Coasters records we looked at a few weeks ago — and will be looking at again in a month or so. And that independence was bothering people in the Colonel’s group of business people. In particular, Freddy Bienstock, who worked at Hill and Range and controlled what songs Elvis performed, became apoplectic when the duo gave the song “Don’t” directly to Elvis: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t”] Stoller explained to Bienstock that the song had been commissioned directly *by* Elvis. Elvis had said, “I want you to write a real pretty ballad for me,” they’d gone away and written him a real pretty ballad, he’d liked it, what was the problem? The problem, Bienstock explained, was that you don’t just give songs to Elvis. There was no contract for the song. What if they couldn’t come to a contract agreement, but Elvis wanted to record the song anyway? What if all the money ended up just going to Leiber and Stoller because they refused to cut Hill and Range, Elvis, and the Colonel in on the royalties? That wasn’t a problem, they said. They’d written songs for Elvis before. They knew the drill. They assumed that the contract would be the same one they always had to sign when writing for Elvis. Bienstock insisted that none of that mattered. You brought the song to Bienstock, or to Jean Aberbach. If they liked it for Elvis, *then* they got the contracts sorted, and *then* Elvis got to hear it. That was the way things worked around here. You don’t just go bringing Elvis a song. That was going behind the Colonel’s back, and the Colonel didn’t like people going behind his back. As far as Leiber and Stoller were concerned, they weren’t going behind anyone’s back.  So by September 1957, when Jailhouse Rock came out, things were a lot more precarious for Elvis than they looked from the outside. The Colonel had weakened the bonds between him and his backing musicians, by insisting that they get paid a small salary rather than a percentage; he had control over what songs Elvis could sing; Sam Phillips was no longer in the picture; and so Leiber and Stoller were the only people involved in Elvis’ life who had any real independence — everyone at Hill and Range, the film studios, and RCA was involved in a complex network of kickbacks which meant that they all stood or fell together with the Colonel.  If the Colonel could just get those good luck charms out of Elvis’ life again, he’d be all set to make sure Elvis’ career was run exactly as he wanted it. And as luck would have it, Elvis was going to become eligible for the draft in January 1958. All the Colonel had to do was wait a few months…  

  Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Jailhouse Rock" by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. 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 Santa Claus is Back in Town, also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode.  ----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 Jailhouse Rock 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 Colonel Tom Parker, from the very first, had wanted Elvis to move into films. Indeed, even before he met Elvis, he had tried grooming the other stars he'd managed -- and non-stars like Tommy Sands -- for film roles. In particular, he wanted to work with Hal Wallis at MGM, who had become something of an idee fixe for him after the first time he saw a film being made and was told that Wallis was the man in charge of it all. In particular, Parker was interested in film as a mass medium that nonetheless required people to pay. While Elvis had become famous by taking advantage of television's newfound ubiquity, Colonel Parker didn't like the idea that people could just watch Elvis for free. If they could watch him for nothing in their own home, why would they pay to see his shows, or pay for his records? But the cinema was different. People paid to go to the cinema, and you could get millions of people paying money to see the same performance. For the Colonel, that was the key -- a way to maximise paying customers. Even if you made more money from the TV than from the cinema in the short term, cultivating a paying audience was clearly the best thing to do in the medium term. And so, from late 1956, Elvis' career had started to be focussed on films, which were themselves focussed on his music. His first film, a Western originally titled The Reno Brothers, had been intended to have him in a small part, trying to be a straight actor, without any singing at all, and that was how Elvis had been persuaded to do it. Instead, at the last minute, four songs had been added to the film, and it had been retitled from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender. Elvis' part -- which was originally a relatively minor part -- had been beefed up, though in terms of actual plot involvement he was still not the main star, and the film became an uneasy compromise between being a serious Western drama and a rock and roll vehicle, not really managing to do either well. The film after that, "Loving You", had been different: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Loving You"] That one had been a more straight ahead rock and roll film -- it was basically a fictionalised version of Elvis' own life to that point, with him playing Deke Rivers, a singer who is discovered by the manager of a fading country star. The manager in this case is a woman, and she also becomes the love interest in the film, but the broad outlines are about what you'd expect from a fictionalised biopic -- Elvis was  clearly playing himself. But the soundtrack to "Loving You" had been a huge improvement on the soundtrack to "Love Me Tender", and had included some of Elvis' very best songs, including a title song written for him by Leiber and Stoller. The pair had been called on almost straight away after their "Hound Dog" had become a hit for Elvis, to see if they had any more songs for him. At the time, they hadn't been hugely impressed by Elvis' version of "Hound Dog", and so rather than give him anything new, they suggested he record a song they had written for the duo Willy and Ruth: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, "Love Me"] That song had been written as a parody of country songs, and they hadn't taken it seriously at all, but there had been all sorts of cover versions of it, by everyone from Georgia Gibbs to Hank Snow's son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. None of them had been hits, but the song obviously had some commercial potential. So Leiber and Stoller suggested that Elvis try it, and they were very impressed with his performance of the song, which unlike them he *did* take seriously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Love Me"] From that point on, they had a certain amount of respect for Elvis as a performer, and so they were happy to write "Loving You" for the film. But at this point they still hadn't even met him, and regarded him as, in their words, "an idiot savant" -- someone who just happened to have a marketable talent, rather than an actual artist like the people they worked with. But Elvis was so impressed with the songs that Leiber and Stoller were writing that they soon got the call to write more songs for his next film. The original plan was that they were to write all of the songs for the film, but there was a snag. They'd been flown back to New York from LA, and they had a suite at an expensive hotel, and Miles Davis and Count Basie and Thelonius Monk all had gigs in the city that week, and there were a few good plays on at the theatre, and they had some friends who wanted to take them out for meals, and... well, there's a lot of stuff to do in New York that's more interesting than work. Eventually, Jean Aberbach from Hill and Range publishing came round to see them in their hotel suite, and ask them where his songs were. They told him he would have them soon, and he replied that he knew he would, because he wasn't going to let them leave until he did. He pushed the sofa in front of the door so they couldn't get out, and went to sleep on it. In the next five hours, Leiber and Stoller wrote four songs together, which was just about enough for the film, which was padded out with two other songs by other writers -- both of them co-written by Aaron Schroeder. There was "Don't Leave Me Now", which had been recorded but not used for "Loving You",  but which had still already appeared on that film's soundtrack album, and a new ballad called "Young and Beautiful". But neither of those songs were particularly strong, and so it was the Leiber and Stoller songs that would be the musical spine of the film -- the credits at the beginning of the film said "songs mostly by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber", clearly showing that they knew which songs it was that people would actually care about. It was only in April 1957 that Leiber and Stoller actually met the man who had already had hits with two of their songs and used a third as the title song for one of his films. Coincidentally, they met him in Radio Recorders Annex, the same studio where five years earlier they had recorded the original version of "Hound Dog" with Big Mama Thornton. They went in not knowing what to expect, but were struck, in order, by three different things. The first was that Elvis was extremely physically beautiful, far more so in person than in photos. The second was how shy and quiet he was -- but how these things actually gave him an extra presence. And the third was how much he knew about R&B music, and how much he loved it. Leiber and Stoller had believed themselves to be the only white people of their own generation to really know or care about R&B or the blues, and here was someone enthusing to them about B.B. King, Big Bill Broonzy, and Arthur Crudup, and also about their own songs. He particularly liked one they'd written for Ray Charles, "The Snow is Falling": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "The Snow is Falling"] He ended up sitting at the piano playing a four-handed blues with Mike Stoller. The three men were getting on well enough that even though Leiber and Stoller had only intended to visit the sessions for a short while to meet Elvis, they ended up essentially producing the session -- Leiber was in the control room, and would show Elvis how he wanted the songs to be phrased, while Stoller was on the studio floor, working with the musicians, and playing piano on one track. The two were particularly impressed by Elvis' determination in the studio. They were having to record multiple versions of almost every song, because the plot of the film would have Elvis' character, Vince Everett, learning songs, trying them out in different arrangements, trying different vocal styles on them, and so on. As well as recording the songs properly, the way he'd like to sing them, Elvis had to do tentative versions, versions with wrong notes, and so forth. And Elvis happily worked, take after take, to get all these different versions of the songs done exactly right.  In fact, he ended up not just singing on the tracks, but playing bass on one of them.  Up until these sessions, Bill Black had been playing double bass on all Elvis' sessions -- the double bass was the standard bass instrument in country music, and had become so in rockabilly as well. But around this time it became clear that the new Fender bass guitars, which had been introduced to the market a couple of years earlier and had quickly taken off in the jazz and blues worlds, were going to become the standard instrument for studio work for everyone. Black was far from being the most accomplished musician in the world -- what he brought to Elvis' sessions was more about his enthusiasm and attitude than his ability to play -- and the switch to the bass guitar was an uncomfortable one. If you don't know, a double bass is played standing up, like a cello, and has no frets, while a bass guitar is played like a guitar. They're very different instruments, and Black had trouble switching from one to the other. He was also getting annoyed with the whole Presley organisation. Tom Parker was determined to isolate Elvis from anyone else in the business, including his band members. And not only that, Bill and Scotty were on what they both considered was a miserably low salary. So when Bill messed up the intro to "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" repeatedly, he threw the bass across the room and stormed out of the session. Elvis just picked up the bass and played the part himself, and it's him you can hear playing it on the finished record, doing a rather decent job of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care"] While Bill had left the session, it didn't stop him appearing in the film -- "Jailhouse Rock" featured Scotty, Bill, and D.J., miming their instruments. They didn't have any lines -- they weren't members of the Screen Actors' Guild, so they couldn't -- but they appeared throughout the last half of the film, as did Mike Stoller on the piano. It was actually meant to be Jerry Leiber miming the piano parts -- someone from the film studio had come into the recording studio while they were making the records, and had said that Leiber looked like a piano player. Elvis had said that no, it was Stoller who was the piano player, and the filmmaker had said it didn't matter -- Leiber looked like a piano player, and so if he wanted to be in the film miming the piano parts he could. Leiber agreed, but then on the day he was meant to go into the studio, he developed a terrible toothache. He called up Stoller and said "I can't go, you go instead".  Stoller pointed out that they were expecting Leiber, and Leiber told him that they wouldn't know the difference anyway. So Stoller went along, and the only thing he was told was that he would have to shave off his goatee beard, as it would be a scene-stealer and distract people from Elvis. So Mike Stoller was there with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. as they filmed most of what is generally considered to be Elvis' best film.  The film almost got stopped before it was started, though. The first thing to be filmed was the big dance sequence to one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written, "Jailhouse Rock": [excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Jailhouse Rock"] That was going to be the centrepiece of the whole film, and the dance sequence involved dozens of men dressed as convicts. Some have argued that the song and the sequence were inspired by the bit in The Girl Can't Help It in which a parody of rock and roll is sung by a group dressed as convicts. There might even be some truth to that as far as the version in the film goes, as the film has extra orchestration and an intro section added which isn't on the record, and which doesn't really fit very well. Compare the film version of "Jailhouse Rock": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Jailhouse Rock", film version] With "Rock Around the Rockpile": [Excerpt: "Jerri Jordan", "Rock Around the Rockpile"] But the thing is, that's only a partial explanation. The song itself is clearly in a long line of Leiber and Stoller songs about the judicial system, like "Framed": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Framed"] and "Riot in Cell Block #9": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Riot in Cell Block #9"] It also contains a lot of the humour that Leiber and Stoller were noted for. Many comedians have made fun of this section: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Jailhouse Rock"] and pointed out the homoerotic implications of those lines. Given Leiber and Stoller's other work, I think it's fairly clear they were perfectly aware of those implications -- and given that this is a film that also features shots of Elvis shirtless, tied up, being whipped by another man, I suspect they weren't the only ones who were dropping little coded hints to gay fans at that time. But, as I said, the dance sequence nearly ended the film -- and nearly ended Elvis' singing career along with it. Elvis had some trouble learning to dance with a choreographed troupe, at first -- he was a natural mover, and not used to the way trained dancers moved. Luckily, the choreographer, Alex Romero, came up with a solution to that problem. He got Elvis to just perform in front of him, miming to his own records, moving like he would on stage.  Romero then took Elvis' normal stage movements and worked them into the dance routine, choreographing it so it still worked with the large dance troupe, but Elvis was able to move in ways that were comfortable for him. (The claim on Wikipedia that Elvis himself choreographed the dance sequence is absolutely mythical, incidentally. It was Alex Romero.) That solved the immediate problem, but there was a larger problem when, on the first day of shooting, Elvis hit his mouth and dislodged a crown. Elvis insisted that it had gone into his chest. At first, people thought he was being overly dramatic, but after a few more takes of bits of the sequence, they noticed a whistling sound when he was breathing. He had inhaled his crown.  It required major surgery to remove the crown from his lung, and to do it they had to separate his vocal cords to get into his lungs. This was a weird case of life imitating art, as a crucial plot point in the film was Elvis' character having to have throat surgery and worrying whether he would be able to sing again. Fortunately, just as in the film, he made a full recovery and was able to carry on. The film itself was surprisingly good, given the depths to which Elvis would sink in some of his later films. Elvis plays a very unsympathetic character, with a chip on his shoulder after being imprisoned after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, who (of course) becomes a famous singer. It's no cinematic masterpiece, but it's a very decent film of its type. The film sadly had a tragic coda -- just days after the film finished shooting, Judy Tyler, Elvis' love interest in the film, died in a car accident. As a result, Elvis refused to ever watch the film in full -- he couldn't bear to. But in the short term, the film's main effect was to draw Elvis and Mike Stoller closer together. As Stoller was on the set all the time, he had a chance to get close to Elvis, and at one point they were having a game of pool, and one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written for the Drifters came on: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Ruby Baby"] Elvis started singing along, and asking Stoller how he and Leiber wrote so many great songs together. But then, a few minutes later, Elvis was dragged out of the room, and came back in telling Stoller that he had to leave -- the Colonel didn't want Elvis hanging round with people who were in the music industry, unless those people worked for the Colonel. Indeed, at one point around this time, the Colonel tried to become Leiber and Stoller's manager. He sent them blank pieces of paper for them to sign, with a promise that he would fill out the rest later and give them a very good deal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their response was not one I could repeat on a podcast that isn't in the adult section. But Elvis had still taken to Leiber and Stoller. He started calling them his "good luck charms", and decided that he wanted them at every recording session. The Colonel agreed to have them involved in everything. For the moment. But Leiber and Stoller weren't dependent on Elvis and the Colonel. During 1957, while they were working with Elvis, they also wrote hits for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Dancin'"] Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Lucky Lips"] The Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall in Love"] And of course those Coasters records we looked at a few weeks ago -- and will be looking at again in a month or so. And that independence was bothering people in the Colonel's group of business people. In particular, Freddy Bienstock, who worked at Hill and Range and controlled what songs Elvis performed, became apoplectic when the duo gave the song "Don't" directly to Elvis: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Don't"] Stoller explained to Bienstock that the song had been commissioned directly *by* Elvis. Elvis had said, "I want you to write a real pretty ballad for me," they'd gone away and written him a real pretty ballad, he'd liked it, what was the problem? The problem, Bienstock explained, was that you don't just give songs to Elvis. There was no contract for the song. What if they couldn't come to a contract agreement, but Elvis wanted to record the song anyway? What if all the money ended up just going to Leiber and Stoller because they refused to cut Hill and Range, Elvis, and the Colonel in on the royalties? That wasn't a problem, they said. They'd written songs for Elvis before. They knew the drill. They assumed that the contract would be the same one they always had to sign when writing for Elvis. Bienstock insisted that none of that mattered. You brought the song to Bienstock, or to Jean Aberbach. If they liked it for Elvis, *then* they got the contracts sorted, and *then* Elvis got to hear it. That was the way things worked around here. You don't just go bringing Elvis a song. That was going behind the Colonel's back, and the Colonel didn't like people going behind his back. As far as Leiber and Stoller were concerned, they weren't going behind anyone's back.  So by September 1957, when Jailhouse Rock came out, things were a lot more precarious for Elvis than they looked from the outside. The Colonel had weakened the bonds between him and his backing musicians, by insisting that they get paid a small salary rather than a percentage; he had control over what songs Elvis could sing; Sam Phillips was no longer in the picture; and so Leiber and Stoller were the only people involved in Elvis' life who had any real independence -- everyone at Hill and Range, the film studios, and RCA was involved in a complex network of kickbacks which meant that they all stood or fell together with the Colonel.  If the Colonel could just get those good luck charms out of Elvis' life again, he'd be all set to make sure Elvis' career was run exactly as he wanted it. And as luck would have it, Elvis was going to become eligible for the draft in January 1958. All the Colonel had to do was wait a few months...  

  Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. 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 Santa Claus is Back in Town, also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode.  —-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 Jailhouse Rock 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 Colonel Tom Parker, from the very first, had wanted Elvis to move into films. Indeed, even before he met Elvis, he had tried grooming the other stars he’d managed — and non-stars like Tommy Sands — for film roles. In particular, he wanted to work with Hal Wallis at MGM, who had become something of an idee fixe for him after the first time he saw a film being made and was told that Wallis was the man in charge of it all. In particular, Parker was interested in film as a mass medium that nonetheless required people to pay. While Elvis had become famous by taking advantage of television’s newfound ubiquity, Colonel Parker didn’t like the idea that people could just watch Elvis for free. If they could watch him for nothing in their own home, why would they pay to see his shows, or pay for his records? But the cinema was different. People paid to go to the cinema, and you could get millions of people paying money to see the same performance. For the Colonel, that was the key — a way to maximise paying customers. Even if you made more money from the TV than from the cinema in the short term, cultivating a paying audience was clearly the best thing to do in the medium term. And so, from late 1956, Elvis’ career had started to be focussed on films, which were themselves focussed on his music. His first film, a Western originally titled The Reno Brothers, had been intended to have him in a small part, trying to be a straight actor, without any singing at all, and that was how Elvis had been persuaded to do it. Instead, at the last minute, four songs had been added to the film, and it had been retitled from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender. Elvis’ part — which was originally a relatively minor part — had been beefed up, though in terms of actual plot involvement he was still not the main star, and the film became an uneasy compromise between being a serious Western drama and a rock and roll vehicle, not really managing to do either well. The film after that, “Loving You”, had been different: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Loving You”] That one had been a more straight ahead rock and roll film — it was basically a fictionalised version of Elvis’ own life to that point, with him playing Deke Rivers, a singer who is discovered by the manager of a fading country star. The manager in this case is a woman, and she also becomes the love interest in the film, but the broad outlines are about what you’d expect from a fictionalised biopic — Elvis was  clearly playing himself. But the soundtrack to “Loving You” had been a huge improvement on the soundtrack to “Love Me Tender”, and had included some of Elvis’ very best songs, including a title song written for him by Leiber and Stoller. The pair had been called on almost straight away after their “Hound Dog” had become a hit for Elvis, to see if they had any more songs for him. At the time, they hadn’t been hugely impressed by Elvis’ version of “Hound Dog”, and so rather than give him anything new, they suggested he record a song they had written for the duo Willy and Ruth: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Love Me”] That song had been written as a parody of country songs, and they hadn’t taken it seriously at all, but there had been all sorts of cover versions of it, by everyone from Georgia Gibbs to Hank Snow’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. None of them had been hits, but the song obviously had some commercial potential. So Leiber and Stoller suggested that Elvis try it, and they were very impressed with his performance of the song, which unlike them he *did* take seriously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Love Me”] From that point on, they had a certain amount of respect for Elvis as a performer, and so they were happy to write “Loving You” for the film. But at this point they still hadn’t even met him, and regarded him as, in their words, “an idiot savant” — someone who just happened to have a marketable talent, rather than an actual artist like the people they worked with. But Elvis was so impressed with the songs that Leiber and Stoller were writing that they soon got the call to write more songs for his next film. The original plan was that they were to write all of the songs for the film, but there was a snag. They’d been flown back to New York from LA, and they had a suite at an expensive hotel, and Miles Davis and Count Basie and Thelonius Monk all had gigs in the city that week, and there were a few good plays on at the theatre, and they had some friends who wanted to take them out for meals, and… well, there’s a lot of stuff to do in New York that’s more interesting than work. Eventually, Jean Aberbach from Hill and Range publishing came round to see them in their hotel suite, and ask them where his songs were. They told him he would have them soon, and he replied that he knew he would, because he wasn’t going to let them leave until he did. He pushed the sofa in front of the door so they couldn’t get out, and went to sleep on it. In the next five hours, Leiber and Stoller wrote four songs together, which was just about enough for the film, which was padded out with two other songs by other writers — both of them co-written by Aaron Schroeder. There was “Don’t Leave Me Now”, which had been recorded but not used for “Loving You”,  but which had still already appeared on that film’s soundtrack album, and a new ballad called “Young and Beautiful”. But neither of those songs were particularly strong, and so it was the Leiber and Stoller songs that would be the musical spine of the film — the credits at the beginning of the film said “songs mostly by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber”, clearly showing that they knew which songs it was that people would actually care about. It was only in April 1957 that Leiber and Stoller actually met the man who had already had hits with two of their songs and used a third as the title song for one of his films. Coincidentally, they met him in Radio Recorders Annex, the same studio where five years earlier they had recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” with Big Mama Thornton. They went in not knowing what to expect, but were struck, in order, by three different things. The first was that Elvis was extremely physically beautiful, far more so in person than in photos. The second was how shy and quiet he was — but how these things actually gave him an extra presence. And the third was how much he knew about R&B music, and how much he loved it. Leiber and Stoller had believed themselves to be the only white people of their own generation to really know or care about R&B or the blues, and here was someone enthusing to them about B.B. King, Big Bill Broonzy, and Arthur Crudup, and also about their own songs. He particularly liked one they’d written for Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”] He ended up sitting at the piano playing a four-handed blues with Mike Stoller. The three men were getting on well enough that even though Leiber and Stoller had only intended to visit the sessions for a short while to meet Elvis, they ended up essentially producing the session — Leiber was in the control room, and would show Elvis how he wanted the songs to be phrased, while Stoller was on the studio floor, working with the musicians, and playing piano on one track. The two were particularly impressed by Elvis’ determination in the studio. They were having to record multiple versions of almost every song, because the plot of the film would have Elvis’ character, Vince Everett, learning songs, trying them out in different arrangements, trying different vocal styles on them, and so on. As well as recording the songs properly, the way he’d like to sing them, Elvis had to do tentative versions, versions with wrong notes, and so forth. And Elvis happily worked, take after take, to get all these different versions of the songs done exactly right.  In fact, he ended up not just singing on the tracks, but playing bass on one of them.  Up until these sessions, Bill Black had been playing double bass on all Elvis’ sessions — the double bass was the standard bass instrument in country music, and had become so in rockabilly as well. But around this time it became clear that the new Fender bass guitars, which had been introduced to the market a couple of years earlier and had quickly taken off in the jazz and blues worlds, were going to become the standard instrument for studio work for everyone. Black was far from being the most accomplished musician in the world — what he brought to Elvis’ sessions was more about his enthusiasm and attitude than his ability to play — and the switch to the bass guitar was an uncomfortable one. If you don’t know, a double bass is played standing up, like a cello, and has no frets, while a bass guitar is played like a guitar. They’re very different instruments, and Black had trouble switching from one to the other. He was also getting annoyed with the whole Presley organisation. Tom Parker was determined to isolate Elvis from anyone else in the business, including his band members. And not only that, Bill and Scotty were on what they both considered was a miserably low salary. So when Bill messed up the intro to “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” repeatedly, he threw the bass across the room and stormed out of the session. Elvis just picked up the bass and played the part himself, and it’s him you can hear playing it on the finished record, doing a rather decent job of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”] While Bill had left the session, it didn’t stop him appearing in the film — “Jailhouse Rock” featured Scotty, Bill, and D.J., miming their instruments. They didn’t have any lines — they weren’t members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, so they couldn’t — but they appeared throughout the last half of the film, as did Mike Stoller on the piano. It was actually meant to be Jerry Leiber miming the piano parts — someone from the film studio had come into the recording studio while they were making the records, and had said that Leiber looked like a piano player. Elvis had said that no, it was Stoller who was the piano player, and the filmmaker had said it didn’t matter — Leiber looked like a piano player, and so if he wanted to be in the film miming the piano parts he could. Leiber agreed, but then on the day he was meant to go into the studio, he developed a terrible toothache. He called up Stoller and said “I can’t go, you go instead”.  Stoller pointed out that they were expecting Leiber, and Leiber told him that they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. So Stoller went along, and the only thing he was told was that he would have to shave off his goatee beard, as it would be a scene-stealer and distract people from Elvis. So Mike Stoller was there with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. as they filmed most of what is generally considered to be Elvis’ best film.  The film almost got stopped before it was started, though. The first thing to be filmed was the big dance sequence to one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written, “Jailhouse Rock”: [excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] That was going to be the centrepiece of the whole film, and the dance sequence involved dozens of men dressed as convicts. Some have argued that the song and the sequence were inspired by the bit in The Girl Can’t Help It in which a parody of rock and roll is sung by a group dressed as convicts. There might even be some truth to that as far as the version in the film goes, as the film has extra orchestration and an intro section added which isn’t on the record, and which doesn’t really fit very well. Compare the film version of “Jailhouse Rock”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”, film version] With “Rock Around the Rockpile”: [Excerpt: “Jerri Jordan”, “Rock Around the Rockpile”] But the thing is, that’s only a partial explanation. The song itself is clearly in a long line of Leiber and Stoller songs about the judicial system, like “Framed”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] and “Riot in Cell Block #9”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] It also contains a lot of the humour that Leiber and Stoller were noted for. Many comedians have made fun of this section: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] and pointed out the homoerotic implications of those lines. Given Leiber and Stoller’s other work, I think it’s fairly clear they were perfectly aware of those implications — and given that this is a film that also features shots of Elvis shirtless, tied up, being whipped by another man, I suspect they weren’t the only ones who were dropping little coded hints to gay fans at that time. But, as I said, the dance sequence nearly ended the film — and nearly ended Elvis’ singing career along with it. Elvis had some trouble learning to dance with a choreographed troupe, at first — he was a natural mover, and not used to the way trained dancers moved. Luckily, the choreographer, Alex Romero, came up with a solution to that problem. He got Elvis to just perform in front of him, miming to his own records, moving like he would on stage.  Romero then took Elvis’ normal stage movements and worked them into the dance routine, choreographing it so it still worked with the large dance troupe, but Elvis was able to move in ways that were comfortable for him. (The claim on Wikipedia that Elvis himself choreographed the dance sequence is absolutely mythical, incidentally. It was Alex Romero.) That solved the immediate problem, but there was a larger problem when, on the first day of shooting, Elvis hit his mouth and dislodged a crown. Elvis insisted that it had gone into his chest. At first, people thought he was being overly dramatic, but after a few more takes of bits of the sequence, they noticed a whistling sound when he was breathing. He had inhaled his crown.  It required major surgery to remove the crown from his lung, and to do it they had to separate his vocal cords to get into his lungs. This was a weird case of life imitating art, as a crucial plot point in the film was Elvis’ character having to have throat surgery and worrying whether he would be able to sing again. Fortunately, just as in the film, he made a full recovery and was able to carry on. The film itself was surprisingly good, given the depths to which Elvis would sink in some of his later films. Elvis plays a very unsympathetic character, with a chip on his shoulder after being imprisoned after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, who (of course) becomes a famous singer. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a very decent film of its type. The film sadly had a tragic coda — just days after the film finished shooting, Judy Tyler, Elvis’ love interest in the film, died in a car accident. As a result, Elvis refused to ever watch the film in full — he couldn’t bear to. But in the short term, the film’s main effect was to draw Elvis and Mike Stoller closer together. As Stoller was on the set all the time, he had a chance to get close to Elvis, and at one point they were having a game of pool, and one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written for the Drifters came on: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Ruby Baby”] Elvis started singing along, and asking Stoller how he and Leiber wrote so many great songs together. But then, a few minutes later, Elvis was dragged out of the room, and came back in telling Stoller that he had to leave — the Colonel didn’t want Elvis hanging round with people who were in the music industry, unless those people worked for the Colonel. Indeed, at one point around this time, the Colonel tried to become Leiber and Stoller’s manager. He sent them blank pieces of paper for them to sign, with a promise that he would fill out the rest later and give them a very good deal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their response was not one I could repeat on a podcast that isn’t in the adult section. But Elvis had still taken to Leiber and Stoller. He started calling them his “good luck charms”, and decided that he wanted them at every recording session. The Colonel agreed to have them involved in everything. For the moment. But Leiber and Stoller weren’t dependent on Elvis and the Colonel. During 1957, while they were working with Elvis, they also wrote hits for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, “Dancin'”] Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] The Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] And of course those Coasters records we looked at a few weeks ago — and will be looking at again in a month or so. And that independence was bothering people in the Colonel’s group of business people. In particular, Freddy Bienstock, who worked at Hill and Range and controlled what songs Elvis performed, became apoplectic when the duo gave the song “Don’t” directly to Elvis: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t”] Stoller explained to Bienstock that the song had been commissioned directly *by* Elvis. Elvis had said, “I want you to write a real pretty ballad for me,” they’d gone away and written him a real pretty ballad, he’d liked it, what was the problem? The problem, Bienstock explained, was that you don’t just give songs to Elvis. There was no contract for the song. What if they couldn’t come to a contract agreement, but Elvis wanted to record the song anyway? What if all the money ended up just going to Leiber and Stoller because they refused to cut Hill and Range, Elvis, and the Colonel in on the royalties? That wasn’t a problem, they said. They’d written songs for Elvis before. They knew the drill. They assumed that the contract would be the same one they always had to sign when writing for Elvis. Bienstock insisted that none of that mattered. You brought the song to Bienstock, or to Jean Aberbach. If they liked it for Elvis, *then* they got the contracts sorted, and *then* Elvis got to hear it. That was the way things worked around here. You don’t just go bringing Elvis a song. That was going behind the Colonel’s back, and the Colonel didn’t like people going behind his back. As far as Leiber and Stoller were concerned, they weren’t going behind anyone’s back.  So by September 1957, when Jailhouse Rock came out, things were a lot more precarious for Elvis than they looked from the outside. The Colonel had weakened the bonds between him and his backing musicians, by insisting that they get paid a small salary rather than a percentage; he had control over what songs Elvis could sing; Sam Phillips was no longer in the picture; and so Leiber and Stoller were the only people involved in Elvis’ life who had any real independence — everyone at Hill and Range, the film studios, and RCA was involved in a complex network of kickbacks which meant that they all stood or fell together with the Colonel.  If the Colonel could just get those good luck charms out of Elvis’ life again, he’d be all set to make sure Elvis’ career was run exactly as he wanted it. And as luck would have it, Elvis was going to become eligible for the draft in January 1958. All the Colonel had to do was wait a few months…  

Track has brief background on the series which was a summer replacement on CBS radio in the summer of 1946. The co-hosts/stars were Georgia Gibbs (Photo) and Tony Martin. However, on this track, Tony Martin is absent due to an emergency appendectomy and Georgia Gibbs is the host with special guest Victor Borge. Track combines some popular music from the time and a "timeless" Victor Borge comedy routine. Playlist: Musical/Variety

The Fairfax Art Walk is this Friday, you guys! We chat with two of the organizers, Stephanie Mohan of Creative Portraiture (https://www.creativeportraiture.com/) and Georgia Gibbs (https://www.georgiagibbs.com/) about what you can expect this Friday, the history of the art walk, and the importance of the arts in Fairfax. The Art Walk is from 5-8pm, Sept. 27, and will include a scavenger hunt with prizes from local merchants. Come check it out! Fairfax Art Walk: https://fairfaxartwalk.com/ Stephanie Mohan: https://www.creativeportraiture.com/ Georgia Gibbs: https://www.georgiagibbs.com/ Susan Pascal Beran: http://pascalberan.com/  

In this episode, DLS co-founder Katy Derbyshire — who is a translator, publisher, and avid blues dancer — brings us the story of R&B, blues, and rock legend LaVern Baker, a performer with strong charisma, an unforgettable voice, and a rather naughty sense of humor. She got her first singing job at the age of ten, cut her first record at 12 or 14, and lived her whole life in music. When LaVern's songs were copied note-for-note by white singer Georgia Gibbs, Baker responded by writing Gibbs into her flight insurance policy, as both careers would have been ended in the event of a plane crash. LaVern Baker was the second woman ever to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (after Aretha Franklin). See pictures of LAVERN and hear some of her wonderful songs at: https://deadladiesshow.com/2019/09/19/podcast-25-lavern-baker/ And check out Katy's LaVern Baker Dead Lady Deluxe playlist on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/70PcWxYdmDbhbhIiQloFZQ?si=rZ36Lb_JS_aGyL3UUt2YTA&fbclid=IwAR3qmXs6st0ts8lnUPlOWFutikIf99x_d4w5hD1FVIAE3BTeZPDtlseva1o Follow us on social media @deadladiesshow and please share, rate, and review the show as it helps others to find our feminist women's history podcast! *** The Dead Ladies Show is a series of entertaining and inspiring talks about women who achieved amazing things against all odds, presented live in Berlin. This podcast is based on that series. Because women's history is everyone's history. The Dead Ladies Show was founded by Florian Duijsens and Katy Derbyshire. The podcast is created, produced, edited, and presented by Susan Stone. We now have a Patreon! Please consider supporting our transcripts project and our ongoing work: www.patreon.com/deadladiesshowpodcast If you prefer to make a one-time donation, here’s the link: paypal.me/dlspodcast

Show 83, “Margie’s Mom,” traces the wide-ranging musical tastes of a woman who grew up in Panama in the 1940s and 50s. Performers include Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Georgia Gibbs, Elvis Presley, The... Read More The post Show 83, “Margie’s Mom,” appeared first on Sam Waldron.

Songs include: You Belong to Me, Tenderly, Flamingo, Wild Side of Life, Oh Happy Day, Kiss of Fire and Caravan. Performers include: Georgia Gibbs, Earl Bostic, Karen Chandler, Guy Mitchell, Winifred Atwell, Don Howard and Hank Thompson.

Welcome to episode #2 of the PFWC Podcast. This is a very special episode because it is our first interview episode. I am so excited to be sitting down and chatting with Georgia Gibbs today. Georgia is a badass entrepreneur, model, self-love advocate, and founder of both Anybody Co. and Joy by Georgia. We discuss all things self-love, modeling, inclusivity, finding a lifestyle that you love, and so much more. Get ready for an amazing episode! 

Today's guest is an Aussie born model who is leading the charge on conversations around body positivity and self love.Launching AnyBody Co several years ago, Georgia Gibbs skyrocketed to fame and quickly became the girl that everyone wanted to know. A Sports Illustrated model, Georgia continues to spread good vibes with all she does recently launching her online program, Joy By Georgia Gibbs that is designed to nourish your body and mind.Georgia doesn't shy away from keeping it real with her dedicated Instagram following openly sharing her raw and honest struggles with acne and also ensuring her audience is well aware when a photos has been filter.There is not much you couldn't love about this beauty, she is warm, kind and absolutely gorgeous inside and out. Chatting to us on a recent trip to Melbourne I was completely in awe of Georgia's determination to make a positive impact on women's lives and change the way society defines ‘beautiful'.Co-Hosted with my darling friend, model and presenter, Tegan Martin.Find Georgia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgiagibbs_/Find Tegan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tegan.martin/

Welcome to the Episode #8 of The Female Boss Podcast! What you will learn: -Why it’s important to use Social Media for business -Behind Instagram’s new test to improve our usage -How to test people’s engagement without seeing the likes they get -Social Media affecting our mental health -How to overcome Social Media Addiction -My “Instagram Influencer” journey, how it affected me and my insecurities. -How to overcome your insecurity. -How to share real value on Social Media Important Moments: 6:20: My own journey of being an “Instagram Influencer” and my insecurities 8:10: Georgia Gibbs and her Plus-size models support 9:38: SaschaFitness’ effect over me and her audience 14:40: Making money off social media 16:20: Tips to get rid off Social Media Addiction The Best Quotes From This Podcast: “I don’t think that the likes are the problem, I think the problem is the lack of authenticity, the distortion of the reality and the fact that we all spend so many hours using Instagram” “Love yourself, but understand that part of loving yourself involves improving all the areas of your life that make you feel miserable” “Instagram draws young women to compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and photoshopped versions of reality” “Don’t believe everything that you see on social media, if you feel bad when you see another instagram influencer, you need to work on your insecurity.” ————

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.I accidentally used a later rerecording of “I Wish You Would” by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven’t already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley’s own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley’s first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you’re likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we’re going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law — and something that we’ll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series — is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture — particularly *rich* white musical culture — has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement — think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin — it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else — you’ll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we’ve talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That’s not, of course, to say that black musicians can’t be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically — I’m not here saying “black people have a great sense of rhythm” or any of that racist nonsense. I’m just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it’s not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can’t steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo… or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel’s distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn’t gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can’t cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He’d then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion — at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend’s neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on “Maybellene”, but he’s someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and you’ll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley’s classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry’s, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows… yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome’s job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome’s maracas weren’t the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel’s music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called “Uncle John”, which had lyrics that went “Uncle John’s got corn ain’t never been shucked/Uncle John’s got daughters ain’t never been… to school”; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song “Hambone”, which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: “Hambone”, Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I’m talking about something that’s from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, “Hambone” seems to be a unified thing that’s part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don’t want to pretend to knowledge I don’t have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. “Hambone”, like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the “ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague” kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there’s a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that’s the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song “Bo Diddley”. There’s a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying “the Bo Diddley beat is just the ‘Hambone’ beat”, and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist — to the point that when I first heard “Hambone” I was shocked, because I’d assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There’s no similarity at all. And that’s not the only song where I’ve seen claims that there’s a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here’s the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley’s, mostly by people we’ve discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here’s a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: “Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here’s “That’s Your Last Boogie”, by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, “That’s Your Last Boogie”] As you can hear, they both have something that’s *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It’s most notable at the very start of “That’s Your Last Boogie” [Intro: “That’s Your Last Boogie”] That’s what’s called a clave beat — it’s sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That’s not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it’s generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it’s not them, and nor is it the “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters’ version of Lord Invader’s great calypso song, “Rum and Coca Cola”, has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: “Rum and Coca Cola”, the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that’s about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for “the Yankee dollar”. But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley’s beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We’ve talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn’t expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry’s “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”. [excerpt, Gene Autry, “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle”] No, I don’t see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called “Have Guitar Will Travel” (named after the Western TV show “Have Gun Will Travel”) and “Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger”. Diddley’s work is rooted in black folklore — things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey — but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It’s also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again — and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat — but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in “I’m A Man” he took on another artist’s style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. “I’m A Man” was a response to Waters’ earlier “Hoochie Coochie Man”: [Excerpt: “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Muddy Waters] “Hoochie Coochie Man” had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. “Hoochie Coochie Man” had managed to sum up everything about Waters’ persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore — the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to “make pretty women jump and shout”. He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you’ve got a great riff, you don’t *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon’s song, and called it “I’m a Man”. In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “I’m a Man”] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn’t felt that Diddley’s own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio — as Diddley put it later: “They wanted me to spell ‘man’, but they weren’t explaining it right. They couldn’t get me to spell ‘man’. I didn’t understand what they were talking about!” But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of “I’m a Man”, didn’t. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] And then there was Etta James’ answer record, “W.O.M.A.N.”, which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, “W.O.M.A.N.”] And that… “inspired” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, “I’m A Woman”] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters’, gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn’t credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley’s harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. “I’m Sweet on you Baby” wasn’t released at the time, but it’s a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess’ normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we’ll see that that didn’t turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I’m Sweet on you Baby”] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song — enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Sixteen Tons”] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing “Dr Jive”, with all the confusion about what words he’s using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying “Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons”, assumed it meant the song “Bo Diddley” followed by the song “Sixteen Tons”, and so he launched into “Bo Diddley”. After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else’s record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it’s the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan’s show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley’s second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn’t even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn’t have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn’t getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley’s first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of “Diddley Daddy” dates back to one of the white cover versions of “Bo Diddley”. Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets’ first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, “Bo Diddley”] And, as with Georgia Gibbs’ version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn’t get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley’s drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn’t the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in “Live and Let Die” and “Superman II”, though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn’t like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn’t happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he’d written, “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”, to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it “I Wish You Would”: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I Wish You Would”] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley’s second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley’s session — where Diddley started playing “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”. Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said “I can’t — I just recorded that for VeeJay”, and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn’t want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he’d just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters’ harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled “Diddley Daddy”, became another of Diddley’s signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] but the B-side, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”, was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, “You Don’t Love Me”] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties — the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper… the list goes on. But Cobbs’ song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs’ song, based on Bo Diddley’s song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)”] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that’s how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years’ worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn’t credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive — his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we’re going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people — a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.I accidentally used a later rerecording of “I Wish You Would” by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven’t already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley’s own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley’s first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you’re likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we’re going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law — and something that we’ll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series — is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture — particularly *rich* white musical culture — has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement — think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin — it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else — you’ll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we’ve talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That’s not, of course, to say that black musicians can’t be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically — I’m not here saying “black people have a great sense of rhythm” or any of that racist nonsense. I’m just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it’s not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can’t steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo… or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel’s distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn’t gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can’t cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He’d then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion — at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend’s neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on “Maybellene”, but he’s someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and you’ll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley’s classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry’s, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows… yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome’s job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome’s maracas weren’t the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel’s music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called “Uncle John”, which had lyrics that went “Uncle John’s got corn ain’t never been shucked/Uncle John’s got daughters ain’t never been… to school”; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song “Hambone”, which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: “Hambone”, Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I’m talking about something that’s from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, “Hambone” seems to be a unified thing that’s part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don’t want to pretend to knowledge I don’t have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. “Hambone”, like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the “ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague” kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there’s a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that’s the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song “Bo Diddley”. There’s a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying “the Bo Diddley beat is just the ‘Hambone’ beat”, and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist — to the point that when I first heard “Hambone” I was shocked, because I’d assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There’s no similarity at all. And that’s not the only song where I’ve seen claims that there’s a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here’s the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley’s, mostly by people we’ve discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here’s a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: “Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here’s “That’s Your Last Boogie”, by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, “That’s Your Last Boogie”] As you can hear, they both have something that’s *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It’s most notable at the very start of “That’s Your Last Boogie” [Intro: “That’s Your Last Boogie”] That’s what’s called a clave beat — it’s sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That’s not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it’s generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it’s not them, and nor is it the “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters’ version of Lord Invader’s great calypso song, “Rum and Coca Cola”, has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: “Rum and Coca Cola”, the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that’s about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for “the Yankee dollar”. But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley’s beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We’ve talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn’t expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry’s “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”. [excerpt, Gene Autry, “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle”] No, I don’t see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called “Have Guitar Will Travel” (named after the Western TV show “Have Gun Will Travel”) and “Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger”. Diddley’s work is rooted in black folklore — things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey — but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It’s also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again — and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat — but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in “I’m A Man” he took on another artist’s style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. “I’m A Man” was a response to Waters’ earlier “Hoochie Coochie Man”: [Excerpt: “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Muddy Waters] “Hoochie Coochie Man” had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. “Hoochie Coochie Man” had managed to sum up everything about Waters’ persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore — the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to “make pretty women jump and shout”. He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you’ve got a great riff, you don’t *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon’s song, and called it “I’m a Man”. In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “I’m a Man”] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn’t felt that Diddley’s own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio — as Diddley put it later: “They wanted me to spell ‘man’, but they weren’t explaining it right. They couldn’t get me to spell ‘man’. I didn’t understand what they were talking about!” But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of “I’m a Man”, didn’t. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] And then there was Etta James’ answer record, “W.O.M.A.N.”, which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, “W.O.M.A.N.”] And that… “inspired” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, “I’m A Woman”] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters’, gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn’t credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley’s harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. “I’m Sweet on you Baby” wasn’t released at the time, but it’s a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess’ normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we’ll see that that didn’t turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I’m Sweet on you Baby”] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song — enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Sixteen Tons”] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing “Dr Jive”, with all the confusion about what words he’s using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying “Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons”, assumed it meant the song “Bo Diddley” followed by the song “Sixteen Tons”, and so he launched into “Bo Diddley”. After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else’s record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it’s the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan’s show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley’s second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn’t even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn’t have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn’t getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley’s first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of “Diddley Daddy” dates back to one of the white cover versions of “Bo Diddley”. Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets’ first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, “Bo Diddley”] And, as with Georgia Gibbs’ version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn’t get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley’s drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn’t the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in “Live and Let Die” and “Superman II”, though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn’t like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn’t happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he’d written, “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”, to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it “I Wish You Would”: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I Wish You Would”] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley’s second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley’s session — where Diddley started playing “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”. Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said “I can’t — I just recorded that for VeeJay”, and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn’t want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he’d just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters’ harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled “Diddley Daddy”, became another of Diddley’s signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] but the B-side, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”, was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, “You Don’t Love Me”] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties — the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper… the list goes on. But Cobbs’ song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs’ song, based on Bo Diddley’s song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)”] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that’s how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years’ worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn’t credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive — his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we’re going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people — a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Bo Diddley" by Bo Diddley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.I accidentally used a later rerecording of "I Wish You Would" by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven't already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley's own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley's first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you're likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we're going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law -- and something that we'll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series -- is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture -- particularly *rich* white musical culture -- has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement -- think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin -- it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else -- you'll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we've talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That's not, of course, to say that black musicians can't be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically -- I'm not here saying "black people have a great sense of rhythm" or any of that racist nonsense. I'm just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it's not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can't steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo... or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel's distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn't gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can't cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He'd then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion -- at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend's neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on "Maybellene", but he's someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and you'll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley's classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry's, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows... yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome's job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome's maracas weren't the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel's music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called "Uncle John", which had lyrics that went "Uncle John's got corn ain't never been shucked/Uncle John's got daughters ain't never been... to school"; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song "Hambone", which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: "Hambone", Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I'm talking about something that's from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, "Hambone" seems to be a unified thing that's part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don't want to pretend to knowledge I don't have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. "Hambone", like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the "ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague" kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there's a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that's the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song "Bo Diddley". There's a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying "the Bo Diddley beat is just the 'Hambone' beat", and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist -- to the point that when I first heard "Hambone" I was shocked, because I'd assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There's no similarity at all. And that's not the only song where I've seen claims that there's a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here's the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley's, mostly by people we've discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here's a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: "Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here's "That's Your Last Boogie", by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, "That's Your Last Boogie"] As you can hear, they both have something that's *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It's most notable at the very start of "That's Your Last Boogie" [Intro: "That's Your Last Boogie"] That's what's called a clave beat -- it's sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That's not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it's generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it's not them, and nor is it the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters' version of Lord Invader's great calypso song, "Rum and Coca Cola", has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: "Rum and Coca Cola", the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that's about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for "the Yankee dollar". But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley's beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We've talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn't expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle". [excerpt, Gene Autry, "I've Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle"] No, I don't see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called "Have Guitar Will Travel" (named after the Western TV show "Have Gun Will Travel") and "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger". Diddley's work is rooted in black folklore -- things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey -- but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It's also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again -- and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat -- but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in "I'm A Man" he took on another artist's style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. "I'm A Man" was a response to Waters' earlier "Hoochie Coochie Man": [Excerpt: "Hoochie Coochie Man", Muddy Waters] "Hoochie Coochie Man" had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. "Hoochie Coochie Man" had managed to sum up everything about Waters' persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore -- the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to "make pretty women jump and shout". He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you've got a great riff, you don't *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon's song, and called it "I'm a Man". In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn't felt that Diddley's own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio -- as Diddley put it later: "They wanted me to spell 'man', but they weren't explaining it right. They couldn't get me to spell 'man'. I didn't understand what they were talking about!" But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of "I'm a Man", didn't. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] And then there was Etta James' answer record, "W.O.M.A.N.", which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "W.O.M.A.N."] And that… "inspired" Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I'm A Woman"] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters', gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn't credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley's harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. "I'm Sweet on you Baby" wasn't released at the time, but it's a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess' normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we'll see that that didn't turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I'm Sweet on you Baby"] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song -- enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Sixteen Tons"] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing "Dr Jive", with all the confusion about what words he's using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying "Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons", assumed it meant the song "Bo Diddley" followed by the song "Sixteen Tons", and so he launched into "Bo Diddley". After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else's record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it's the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan's show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley's second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn't even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn't have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn't getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley's first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of "Diddley Daddy" dates back to one of the white cover versions of "Bo Diddley". Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets' first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, "Bo Diddley"] And, as with Georgia Gibbs' version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn't get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley's drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn't the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in "Live and Let Die" and "Superman II", though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn't like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn't happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he'd written, "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum", to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I Wish You Would"] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley's second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley's session -- where Diddley started playing "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum". Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said "I can't -- I just recorded that for VeeJay", and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn't want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he'd just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters' harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled "Diddley Daddy", became another of Diddley's signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] but the B-side, "She's Fine, She's Mine", was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "She's Fine, She's Mine"] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, "You Don't Love Me"] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties -- the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper... the list goes on. But Cobbs' song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs' song, based on Bo Diddley's song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)"] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that's how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years' worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn't credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive -- his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we're going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people -- a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode twenty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at LaVern Baker and "Tweedle Dee". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Patreon-only episode on Johnnie Ray I mention is here. There are no full biographies of LaVern Baker that I know of, but Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Deffaa devotes forty-three pages to her, and also has similar-length essays on five more important R&B pioneers. There are many compilations of Baker's early work available. This set contains her first four albums in full, and is probably your best bet. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a while back about how the copyright law in the 1950s didn't protect arrangements, and how that disproportionately affected black artists. But that doesn't mean that the black artists didn't fight back. Today we're going to talk about LaVern Baker, who led the fight for black artists' rights in the 1950s, But she was also one of the most successful female R&B artists of the fifties, and would deserve recognition even had she never been a campaigner. LaVern Baker was born Delores Evans, but she took her father's surname, Baker, as a stage name -- although she took on many different names in the early stages of her career. Music ran in her family. Her aunt, for example, was Merline Johnson, the "Yas Yas Girl", who had been a mildly successful blues singer in the thirties and forties, and had performed with musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Blind John Davis: [excerpt: "Sold it to the Devil", Merline Johnson] Young Delores idolised her aunt, as well as her more distant relative, the blues singer Memphis Minnie, and by the time she was twelve she was recording with Lester Melrose, the producer at RCA who also worked with Baker's relatives. However, those early recordings only produced one single, under another name, which sold so poorly that when she was interviewed in the 1990s Baker would say that she only knew of one person who owned a copy, and that person wouldn't even make a cassette copy for Baker. When Baker became a full time singer in her late teens, she wasn't performing as LaVern Baker, but as "Little Miss Sharecropper". She was, in fact, basically a tribute act to "Little Miss Cornshucks", a novelty blues singer whose act had her dressed as an innocent, unsophisticated, farm-girl: [excerpt: Little Miss Cornshucks "Waiting In Vain"] Little Miss Cornshucks seems to have had personal problems that limited her success -- she was an alcoholic and married to a drug dealer -- but she was hugely influential on a lot of the rhythm and blues artists who recorded for Atlantic in the early 1950s, as she was a favourite of the label's owner, Ahmet Ertegun. In particular, Ruth Brown's first hit single on Atlantic, "So Long", was a cover version of Cornshucks' local hit version of the song from the forties. Little Miss Cornshucks never did particularly well on the national scene, but she was popular enough in Chicago that the club owners wanted to put on an act who could capitalise on that popularity. And so, like Little Miss Cornshucks, Little Miss Sharecropper would go on stage carrying a straw basket, barefoot, in ragged clothes and a straw hat. She was not exactly happy about this act, but she still gave her all in her performances, and quickly established a reputation as an excellent blues singer around the midwest -- first in Chicago and later in Detroit. She also recorded at least a few singles as Little Miss Sharecropper, including this early attempt at jumping on the rock bandwagon: [Excerpt: Little Miss Sharecropper, "I Want To Rock"] While in Detroit, she also played a big part in teaching a young singer named Johnnie Ray how to sing the blues. Ray went on to be the biggest teen idol of the early 1950s, and most of the gimmicks the young singer used to make his audience of teenage girls swoon for him were things that Lavern Baker had taught him how to do. Those of you who have heard the Patreon-only bonus episode on Johnnie Ray will know all about her connection with him already, of course, but for those who haven't, the main thing she did for Ray was get him copying Al Jolson. Ray was a singer who many listeners thought at first was himself a black woman, and so there are a *lot* of racial dynamics at play there, in a black woman who had to perform as a caricature of ignorant black femininity teaching a white man who sang like a black woman how to perform by getting him to copy the stage presence of a blackface minstrel act. Both Ray and Baker were hugely influenced by another singer, Dinah Washington, as almost all R&B singers, especially women, were at this time. Washington is one of those people we need to discuss in this series, but who was only an indirect influence on rock and roll. She worked on the borders of jazz and R&B, but slightly over to the jazz side rather than to the R&B one, and so while she didn't make rock and roll music herself, or even proto-rock and roll, without her we would have no Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin, no Etta James or Lavern Baker. Washington was the consummate blues stylist, but the music she sang was a combination of traditional pop, jazz, blues, R&B, and torch songs. Like so many of the early stars of R&B, she started out as a member of Lionel Hampton's band, singing with him for a couple of years in the late 1940s, before she went solo and started performing her own music. Washington didn't hit the pop charts with any regularity until 1959, but she was a regular at the top of the R&B charts right from the beginning of her career, and one thing you'll notice if you read the biographies of any singer at all from this time period is them saying how much they wanted to sound like Washington specifically. Washington's commercial peak came rather later than her peak in influence, and she only played a very indirect part in the history of rock and roll, but it was a very *large* indirect part. You can hear the influence that Washington had on Baker by comparing their performances of the song "Harbor Lights". Here's Washington: [excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Harbor Lights"] And here's Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "Harbor Lights"] While Baker was performing as Little Miss Sharecropper, she also recorded for a lot of different labels, under a variety of different names. But none of these records sold outside the cities Baker was playing in, and she remained unknown elsewhere until 1953, when she signed with Atlantic Records. Her first single for Atlantic had a song credited to Baker plus one of Ahmet Ertegun's pseudonyms. "Soul on Fire" was, for the time, a remarkably intense record. [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "Soul on Fire"] Before "Soul on Fire" was released, she got the chance to go overseas for the first time. She joined a touring show called The Harlem Melody in late 1953, and travelled to Europe with that tour. The rest of the acts eventually moved on, and moved back to the USA, but Baker decided to stay on performing in Milan, and occasionally also performing in France. She didn't learn to speak the language, but was successful there until she got a telegram from her agent telling her to get back home because she had a hit record. "Soul On Fire" wasn't actually a hit, but it *was* a successful enough single that Atlantic were convinced that Baker was someone worth investing in, and so they had called her back for another session. This time it was for a bit of pop fluff called "Tweedle Dee": [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "Tweedle Dee"] "Tweedle Dee" was a clear attempt at another "Ko Ko Mo" -- an R&B record with a vaguely Latin beat, and with lyrics consisting of platitudes about love and gibberish nonsense syllables. And early 1955 was the very best possible time to release something like that. Baker turned in a great vocal on a song that didn't really deserve it, but her conviction alone gave the record enough power that it rose to number fourteen on the pop charts. But Baker's hit was another one to fall foul of Georgia Gibbs. We talked about Gibbs previously, in the episode on "The Wallflower", when we heard about her remaking that song as "Dance With Me Henry". But that wasn't the only time she profited off a song originally performed by a black woman. Indeed, Gibbs' version of "the Wallflower" came after the events we're talking about. Gibbs was a popular singer from the big band era, who'd had hit records with things like "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked A Cake": [Excerpt: "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake", Georgia Gibbs] When musical fashions changed, Gibbs took to recording hits by black artists in soundalike versions. In the case of "Tweedle Dee", Gibbs and her producers hired the same arranger and musicians who'd played on Baker's record, and even tried to hire the same engineer, (Tom Dowd, of Atlantic Records, who turned them down) just in case they had a single scrap of originality left in their sound somewhere. They were attempting, as far as possible, to make the exact same record, just with a white woman as the credited artist. It's a distinction I've made before, but it's one that continues to need to be made -- there is a continuum of cover versions, and not all are created equal. In the case of white artists in the fifties covering black artists, there is always a power imbalance there -- there are always opportunities the white artist can take that the black artist can't -- but there is a huge, clear, distinction between on the one hand a transformative cover like Elvis Presley doing "That's All Right Mama", where the artist totally recasts it into his own style, and on the other hand... well, on the other hand hiring the same arranger and musicians to rerecord a track note-for-note. [Excerpt: “Tweedle Dee”, Georgia Gibbs] And Baker certainly thought there was a difference. She had nothing against white singers performing in black idioms or singing other people's songs – again, she had helped make Johnnie Ray into the star that he became – but someone just straight out copying every single element of one of her records and having a bigger hit with it was a step too far. And unlike many of the other artists of the time, Baker decided she was going to do something about it. The thing you need to understand here is that while Baker later estimated that she had lost as much as fifteen thousand dollars -- in 1955 dollars -- on lost sales because of Gibbs, she was not particularly interested in the money. What she was interested in was the exposure that radio play, in particular, would bring her. And it was the radio play, more than anything else, that was the big problem for her, and for other black artists. Audiences weren't finding out about Baker's record as much as they should have, because the radio was playing Gibbs' record and not Baker's. Without that radio exposure, Baker lost out on sales, and lost out on new fans who might like her other records. Baker decided that she had to fight back against this. One thing she did was a simple publicity stunt -- Baker had to travel on a long-distance flight, and before she did so, she took out a life insurance policy, putting Gibbs down as the beneficiary, because if Baker died then Gibbs would no longer have a career without having anyone to copy. But she did more than that. She also lobbied Congressman Charles Diggs Jr, for help. Diggs was the first black Congressman from Michigan, and he was a pioneer in civil rights in US electoral politics. He had only just been elected when Baker contacted him, but he would soon rise to national attention with his publicising of the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black child who had been brutally murdered because he had been accused of whistling at a white woman. In her open letter to Diggs, Baker said "After an investigation of the facts, you might see some wisdom in introducing a law to make it illegal to duplicate another's work. It's not that I mind someone singing a song that I wrote or have written for me by someone, but I bitterly resent their arrogance in thefting my music note-for-note". Now, I have to admit that here I've hit a bit of a wall in my researches, because I have found three different, contradictory, stories about what resulted from this, and I can't find any evidence to distinguish between them in any of the books I've consulted or on the Internet. One version is that nothing followed from this as far as legislation goes, and that Diggs did nothing. Another, which I've only been able to find in the book "Blue Rhythms", was that Congress passed a bill which stated that on any record released, sixteen to twenty-four bars of the arrangement had to be different from any other version. Now, frankly, I find this rather difficult to believe -- it doesn't fit with anything else I know about the history of the record industry and copyright law, and I can't find any evidence of it anywhere else, but the article in that book quotes Baker as saying this, and as also saying that she kept a copy of the bill in her house for a long time after it passed. And the third story, which seems the most plausible, but which again I've been unable to confirm, is that Diggs set up a Congressional committee to look into changes to the copyright law, that it investigated what changes could be made, but that it ultimately didn't lead to any laws being passed. But what definitely happened, largely as a result of the publicity campaign by Baker and the unwelcome attention it drew to the racism of the music industry, is that the practice of making white note-for-note cover versions began to fall out of favour. Georgia Gibbs' record label announced that after "Dance With Me Henry" she wasn't going to cover any more R&B songs (they claimed that this was because R&B was falling out of favour with the public and nobody liked it anyway, and anyway those grapes were sour), while WINS radio in New York decided it was going to ban copy records altogether. They said that they were going to continue to play cover versions – where an artist recorded someone else's song in their own style, changing the arrangement – but that they weren't going to play straight copies any more. Other stations followed suit. While Georgia Gibbs' label had said after the "Tweedle-Dee" controversy that Gibbs would not be cutting any more material from this R&B fad, two years on things had changed, and they tried the same trick again, taking Baker's new single "Tra La La" and having Gibbs record a cover version of that. "Tra La La" was a success, but Gibbs' producers had rather missed the point. "Tra La La" wasn't the side of Baker's record that people were listening to. Instead, everyone was listening to "Jim Dandy" on the other side. While "Tra La La" was another song in the style of "Tweedle Dee", Jim Dandy was something altogether rawer, and more... rock and roll: [excerpt: Lavern Baker, "Jim Dandy"] And this is, I think, the ultimate reason that the white copycats of black music stopped, at least in this form. They could see that people were buying the black musicians' records, but they couldn't see *why* they were buying them. None of the people who were making what amounted to photocopies of the black musicians' records could actually understand the music that they were parasites on. They had no creativity themselves, and relied merely on being able to duplicate someone else's work without understanding it. That's no basis on which to build a career. "Tra La La" went to number twenty-four on the pop charts for Gibbs, but "Jim Dandy" went to number seventeen for Baker. Gibbs would never have another top thirty hit again. And so, as this story goes on, we will occasionally have reason to note a white cover version of a black record, but they will become less and less relevant. The dominance of acts like the Crew Cuts and Georgia Gibbs was a brief one, and while they were able to hold back the careers of people like LaVern Baker, they weren't able to be anything themselves other than dead ends, both artistically and commercially. Gibbs' version wasn't the only cover version of Tweedle-Dee by a white person. Elvis Presley was regularly performing the song live as he started his touring career. He never cut the song in the studio, but he would perform it on the radio on occasion: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Tweedle Dee"] Indeed, Baker's influence on Presley seems to be rather underrated -- as well as performing "Tweedle Dee" live in 1955, he also recorded two other songs that year which Baker also recorded -- "Tomorrow Night" and "Harbor Lights". While neither of those songs were original to Baker, it's probably more than just coincidence that he would record so many songs that she sang. LaVern Baker had a whole run of hits in the late fifties, but she became dissatisfied herself with the material she was given by Atlantic. While she gave great performances on "Tweedle Dee", "Tra La La", "Ting A Ling", "Humpty Dumpty Heart" and the rest of the songs she was ordered to sing, they were not really the kind of songs that she'd always wanted to perform. She'd wanted to be a torch song singer, and while some of the material she was given, like "Whipper Snapper" by Leiber and Stoller, was superior early rock and roll, a lot of it was novelty gibberish. You can hear what she could do with something a bit more substantial on "I Cried A Tear", which went to number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-one on the pop charts. "I Cried A Tear" is still ultra-simplistic in its conception, but it's structured more like the songs that Baker had grown up on, and she gives a performance that is more suited to a torch song than to fifties rock and roll: [Excerpt, LaVern Baker: "I Cried A Tear"] Having a hit with a track like that -- a waltz ballad -- gave Baker and her producers the confidence to branch out with her material. In 1958 she would record an entire album of old Bessie Smith tracks, which doesn't quite match up perhaps to the quality of Smith's recordings of the songs, but isn't an embarrassment in comparison with them, which says something. Baker would have ten years of moderate chart success, never hitting the heights but making the hot one hundred with everything from the Leiber and Stoller gospel song "Saved" (another song which Elvis later covered) to "Fly Me to the Moon" to this great soul duet with Jackie Wilson, her last R&B top forty hit, from 1965: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker and Jackie Wilson, "Think Twice"] The hits dried up after 1965, and even a novelty song about Batman in 1966 couldn't get her back into the charts, and even before that she had moved more into performing jazz and blues rather than her old rock and roll hits. After her second marriage, to the comedian Slappy White, broke up, she went on a USO tour to perform for troops in Vietnam, where she fell ill. A doctor advised her to stay in a warm climate for her health, and so she got a permanent position as a troop entertainer in the Philippines, where she stayed for twenty-two years. After the revolution which brought democracy to the Philippines and the subsequent closure of the base where she was working, Baker returned to the US. Much as she'd taken over from Ruth Brown as Atlantic Records' biggest female star of the 1950s, now she took over from Brown in her role in the Broadway revue "Black and Blue", singing blues songs from the twenties and thirties, and had something of a career renaissance. Her health problems got worse, and by the mid nineties she was performing from a wheelchair -- both her legs had been amputated due to complications from diabetes. She never made as much money as she should have, but she was one of the first recipients of a lifetime achievement award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation (which she had helped Ruth Brown set up, though Baker was never as antagonistic towards the record companies as Brown), and she was the second female solo artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, after Aretha Franklin. For someone who prized recognition over money, maybe that was enough. She died in 1997, aged 67.