Podcasts about hoochie coochie man

Justin and Bec forego a typical main topic this week, opting instead for effectively two main topics with absolutely massive, iconic Songs of the Week! Bec's Song of the Week is "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" and she explores the roots of it from the 1965 Italian ballad "Io che non vive (senza te)" through to Dusty Springfield's hugely successful English adaptation and eventually to Elvis's famous performances of it in the 1970s, across his 1970 Nashville sessions, the concerts filmed for "That's The Way It Is," and even much later and deeper into the decade. Justin then traces the lineage of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's legendary "Trouble," originally featured in the 1958 film "King Creole," but increasingly recognized over the years as one of Elvis's most enduring recordings, symbolizing the myth of him as a rebellious rocker, most prominently recently featured in Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis." We go deeper, though, touching on the history of stop-time in Dixieland jazz and, most influentially on Leiber/Stoller, in Muddy Waters's "Hoochie Coochie Man." Understanding the history behind that song, the hoochie coochie itself, and the way Trouble has become representative of expressions of both masculinity and femininity unlocks a deeper sense of the song's significance as one of the all-time masterpieces of Elvis's entire recorded works. Oh yeah, and the duo react to the first trailer for Disney's live action remake of Lilo & Stitch! If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.

Key To The Highway 0:38 Reptile 3:41 Got You On My Mind 10:25 Tears In Heaven 14:21 Layla (acoustic) 18:51 Bell Bottom Blues 23:33 Change The World 28:37 River Of Tears 35:15 Goin' Down Slow 44:04 She's Gone 49:28 I Want A Little Girl 57:01 Badge 1:01:36 Hoochie Coochie Man 1:07:42 Five Long Years 1:12:39 Cocaine 1:20:57 Wonderful Tonight 1:25:44 Layla (electric) 1:32:58 Sunshine Of Your Love 1:43:05 Somewhere Over The Rainbow 1:50:00 All uploads on this channel are for promotional purposes only! The music has been converted before uploading to prevent ripping and to protect the artist(s) and label(s). If you don't want your content here  please contact us immediately via email: allmusiclive@outlook.com and WE WILL REMOVE THE EPISODE IMMEDIATELY

Deuxième Partie: The Cream. PLAYLIST  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"  The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"  Winston G, "Please Don't Say"   Graham Bond organisation, "Baby Can it Be True ?"  The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"  John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"  Jimmy Page et Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"  John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"  Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"  Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"  Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"  Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"  John Mayall et Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"  John Mayall avec Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"  John Mayall avec Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"  The Who, "Substitute"  The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"  The Hollies avec Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"  The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"  Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"  Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"  Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"  The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"  John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"  Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"  Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"  Cream, "NSU"  Cream, "Wrapping Paper"  The Merseys, "Sorrow"  The Who, "I'm a Boy"  Jimi Hendrix, "Killing Floor"  The Cream, "I Feel Free"  Billy J Kramer - 'Town of Tuxley Toymaker ".  The Bee Gees, "New York Mining Disaster 1941"  The Youngbloods, "Get Together"  Cream, "Strange Brew"  Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"  Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"  Crazy Blue, "Stone Crazy"  Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I Am to You"  The Mothers of Invention, "Are You Hung Up ?"  Cream, "Crossroads"  Cream, "Crossroads"  Bob Dylan and the Band, "The Mighty Quinn"  Bob Dylan and the Band, "This Wheel's on Fire"  The Band, "The Weight"  Cream, "Anyone For Tennis"  Cream, "White Room"  Cream, "Badge"  Cream, "Sittin' on Top of the World (live Albert Hall)"

Episode 150! In this episode I'm taking you through this blues classic! Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters. This is one of my absolute favourite 'zone out' songs and we go through the main riff and lead parts to this awesome live version of the 1955 standard.Mannish Boy" (or "Manish Boy" as it was first labeled) is a blues standard written by Muddy Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley (with Waters and Diddley being credited under their birth names). First recorded in 1955 by Waters, it serves as an "answer song" to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", which was in turn inspired by Waters' and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man. Mannish Boy" features a repeating stop-time figure on one chord throughout the song.Grab your guitar and join me in learning the whole of this fantastic Beatles tune. An absolute classic riff and really fun solo to play. This is one I always reccomend my students to learn.If you find this stuff useful leave me a review on Spotify or Apple PodcastsBecome a Blues Guitar Show Member: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950998/subscribeShoot me a question to cover in the upcoming episodes by emailing ben@thebluesguitarshow.comFollow me on instagram @bluesguitarshowpodcastSupport the show

Singles Going Around- Moanin' At Midnight (Halloween Mix)Here's this years Halloween Mix!The Vettes- "Devil Driver's Theme"The Frantics- "The Werewolf"Howlin Wolf- "Evil"Dr John- "Zu Zu Man"The Munsters- "The Munster Creep"Gibby Haynes- "Paul's Not Home"Ronnie Cook & The Gaylads- "Goo Goo Muck"The Ramones- "I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement"Robert Johnson- "Hell Hound On My Trail"Sam The Sham & The Pharoahs- "Little Red Riding Hood"The UK Subs- "I Walked With A Zombie"Jack Nitzsche- "The Last Race"Bo Diddley- "Aztec"The Phantom- "Love Me"The White Stripes- "Jack The Ripper"Muddy Waters- "Hoochie Coochie Man"The Flying Burrito Brothers- "Christine's Tune"The Vettes- "Devil Driver"Mildred & The Mice- "Spider Bite"The Novas- "The Crusher"Link Wray- "Fatback"Kenny Neal- "Swamp Creature"Junior Wells- "Hoodoo Man Blues"Harry Choates- "Devil In The Bayou"Borris Pickett- "Monster Mash"The Black Belles- "Honky Tonk Horror"Howlin Wolf- "Moanin At Midnight"(The devil doesn't understand moaning)

The Band was a Canadian-American rock group formed in the mid 60's as the backing band for Bob Dylan when he made his controversial switch from acoustic to electric.  Originally called “The Hawks,” when they toured as the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins, they toured as “Bob Dylan and the Band” when they joined Dylan.  After leaving Bob Dylan to do their own work, they stuck with the generic name “The Band.”  They combined rock, folks, Americana, and other genres of music to create their own influential sound.The Last Waltz is a triple album which documents The Band's farewell concert held on Thanksgiving Day in 1976 at Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom where The Band debuted back in 1969.  The concert itself was a 5 hour affair for 5,000 spectators and included a Thanksgiving dinner and ballroom dancing.  Over a dozen special guests were involved in the concert including Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Joni Mitchell.  Martin Scorsese filmed the concert and turned it into what is considered one of the greatest documentary concert films ever produced. The Band influenced many artists in the rock and folk genre including George Harrison, Elton John, and the Grateful Dead.  They were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.  Though the original quintet did not tour after this concert, they did produce a seventh studio album entitled “Islands” to fulfill their record contract.  Wayne brings us this iconic live album for the podcast. The Night They Drove Old Dixie DownThis anti-war song written by Robbie Robertson (and perhaps by Levon Helm as well, though uncredited) hearkens back to the Civil War and the devastation inflicted on the American South.  It would be difficult to make this song today, because the subject is a poor white Southerner suffering during the last year of the Civil War. Nevertheless, a number of artists have covered it including Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, John Denver, and the Black Crowes.  Baby Let Me Follow You DownBob Dylan joins The Band onstage on this traditional folk song.  It appeared on Dylan's debut album and was made electric in 1966 with The Band behind him.  In a farewell concert with special guests it would be expected that Bob Dylan would make an appearance due to the connection between him and The Band.Mannish Boy The Band is joined by blues legend Muddy Waters on this classic blues track.  This standard was an "answer song" to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," which was in turn inspired by Waters' and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie-Coochie Man."  Muddy Waters is known as the "father of modern Chicago blues," and inspired much of what we know as Rock and Roll today.Up on Cripple CreekOne of the best known songs by The Band, this one reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Drummer Levon Helm is on lead vocals for this track about a long-haul trucker who gambles, drinks, listens to music, and spends time with "little Bessie" in Lake Charles, Louisiana. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Theme from the prime time drama series “Dallas”We were introduced to J.R. Ewing and the other members of the oil family on this prime time soap opera which debuted as a mini-series in 1978. STAFF PICKS:Lay Down Sally by Eric ClaptonLynch starts of the staff picks with a hit that went to number 3 in the US and number 39 in the UK.  Marcy Levy, one of Clapton's backup singers, wrote this song with Clapton and sings on it.  It is about staying in bed in the morning rather than leaving quickly.  Thank You for Being a Friend by Andrew GoldBruce's staff pick was a hit for Andrew Gold at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 long before Cynthia Fee covered it in her re-recording as the theme song for “The Golden Girls.”  Gold referred to this song as “just this little throwaway thing” that took “about an hour to write.”Count on Me by Jefferson Starship Rob brings us the next iteration of Jefferson Airplane, which made it to number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Marty Balin is on lead for this song written by composer and flutist Jesse Barish.  It is off Jefferson Starship's fourth album, “Earth.”Every Kinda People by Robert PalmerWayne features  Robert Palmer from Yorkshire, England, who lived for a time in Malta where his father worked in British naval intelligence.  This reggae-infused song was Palmer's first top 40 hit in the United States, reaching number 16 on the charts.  The upbeat and positive lyrics remind us that everyone is the same inside regardless of skin color. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Jam #1 by The BandWe do a little double-dipping on the instrumental this week as we go back to The Last Waltz for this jam.

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

La banda sonora de Casino rebosa temazos clásicos como House Of The Rising Sun, Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa, Nights In White Satin, Working In A Coalmine, Hoochie Coochie Man, Slippin' And Slidin' y un largo etcetera. A disfrutarlos!!! Presenta y edita Ismael Rubio. Síguenos y no olvidéis compartir, comentar y darle al LIKE, gracias. ➡️ IVOOX https://cutt.ly/hAgt2qi ➡️ SPOTIFY https://cutt.ly/lAgylLF ➡️ APPLE https://cutt.ly/OLDSRzK ➡️ RRSS https://allmylinks.com/tdvideoclub Descarga nuestra APP ➡️ VIDEOCLUB RADIO https://cutt.ly/RKXIA02

NEW FOR OCTOBER 15, 2022 Born with or learned . . . ? Character Flaw - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 445 1. Blue Wind (live) - Jeff Beck 2. Eight Miles High (live) - Roxy Music 3. People Have The Power - U2 w/ Patti Smith 4. Lightning In A Dress - Push Puppets 5. 96 Tears (live) - Richard Thompson w/ David Byrne 6. Space Oddity - Brandi Carlile 7. Sheep - Pink Floyd 8. Hoochie Coochie Man (live) - The Allman Brothers Band 9. Boom Boom (live) - John Lee Hooker 10. Eddie - Red Hot Chili Peppers 11. White Room (live) - Cream 12. Watcher Of The Skies - Genesis 13. Idiot Bastard's Son (live) - Sting 14. Camarillo Brillo / The Muffin Man - Frank Zappa 15. High Voltage (live) - AC/DC 16. Keep On Chooglin' (live) - Creedence Clearwater Revival 17. Kitty's Back (live) - Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Good character. Bad attitude. Accept No Substitute. Click to join the conversation on the Facebook page.

ON TODAYS EPISODE, HOOCHIE DADDY SEASON IS UPON US, I GET TO LIVE OUT A MEME, I TALK ABOUT THE BRAVEST IN AMERICA ALONG WITH GENTRIFICATION ( (1:50-30:00) WE GET INTO CURRENT EVENTS ON THE COOL REPORT ( 30-51) THAN JUMP RIGHT INTO PTL (52-1:07) AND FROM THEIR ON WE GET INTO SCIENCE FICTION. TUNE IN THANK YOU

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |  | The Pawn Shop Saints  | Stop Breaking Your Heart  | Ride My Galaxy  |   |  | Markey Blue Ric Latina Project  | Little Betty  | Jumpin' The Broom  |   |  | Ian Siegal  | Gathering Deep  | Stone By Stone  |   |  | Eliza Neals  | King Kong  | Badder to the Bone  |   |  | Blue Touch  | Save Me From Myself  | Old, New, Borrowed & Blue  |  | Ben Hemming  | Living on Death Row  | Living on Death Row  |   |  | Born Healer  | Grievin'  | Herbs, Roots, Barks, Etc.  |  | Mariëlla Tirotto & the Blues Federation  | The blues don't bother me  | Mariëlla Tirotto & the Blues Federation | Ben Waters with PJ Harvey  | Lonely Avenue  | Boogie 4 Stu - A Tribute To Ian Stewart | Charlie Musselwhite  | In Your Darkest Hour  | Mississippi Son  | Alligator  |   |  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Let Me Fly  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Sister Rosetta Tharpe  | Trouble In Mind  | Blue Ladies  |   |  | Chuck Berry  | Hoochie Coochie Man  | Chuck Berry  |   |  | Mitch Laddie Band  | So Excited  | Live In Concert  |   | 

Have you ever heard a band but couldn't work out where their sound came from? We're saying: only once. What connects the Sweet's Blockbuster! to Willie Dixon's Hoochie Coochie Man? How can Noel Gallagher complain that musicians can't afford instruments when instruments have never been cheaper? Why is songwriting now like VAR? Has anyone had more preposterous names than the offspring of Grimes and Elon Musk? How did Nile Rodgers transform Let's Dance? … plus literary theft, smoking in films, Eno's Music For Airports, Dylan's new book, NordVPN and the movies you can watch endless times and why (Master And Commander and Brief Encounter among them).Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to nordvpn.com/yourear or use the code yourear to get a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 1 additional month for free + a bonus gift! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee! And it's our anniversary! We started our Word In Your Attic Zoomcasts exactly two years ago and we've now done 159 of them. Here's a little taste of what you might have been missing …   Edgar Wrighthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUePw4TUvEY Andy Partridgehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQiDJ3vwi0 Shamira Ahmedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6nLk50vR6Y Bob Geldofhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ssIPRMrYzU Ian Rankinhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawySOxKUAk Stewart Leehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lOJUYSY9c&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=141 Laura Bartonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7815zq9yc&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=93 Alexis Petridishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsKuIjlMBrs Jon Ronsonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqiMN2QKVZE&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=159Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Have you ever heard a band but couldn't work out where their sound came from? We're saying: only once. What connects the Sweet's Blockbuster! to Willie Dixon's Hoochie Coochie Man? How can Noel Gallagher complain that musicians can't afford instruments when instruments have never been cheaper? Why is songwriting now like VAR? Has anyone had more preposterous names than the offspring of Grimes and Elon Musk? How did Nile Rodgers transform Let's Dance? … plus literary theft, smoking in films, Eno's Music For Airports, Dylan's new book, NordVPN and the movies you can watch endless times and why (Master And Commander and Brief Encounter among them).Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to nordvpn.com/yourear or use the code yourear to get a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 1 additional month for free + a bonus gift! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee! And it's our anniversary! We started our Word In Your Attic Zoomcasts exactly two years ago and we've now done 159 of them. Here's a little taste of what you might have been missing …   Edgar Wrighthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUePw4TUvEY Andy Partridgehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQiDJ3vwi0 Shamira Ahmedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6nLk50vR6Y Bob Geldofhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ssIPRMrYzU Ian Rankinhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawySOxKUAk Stewart Leehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lOJUYSY9c&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=141 Laura Bartonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7815zq9yc&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=93 Alexis Petridishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsKuIjlMBrs Jon Ronsonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqiMN2QKVZE&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=159Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Have you ever heard a band but couldn't work out where their sound came from? We're saying: only once. What connects the Sweet's Blockbuster! to Willie Dixon's Hoochie Coochie Man? How can Noel Gallagher complain that musicians can't afford instruments when instruments have never been cheaper? Why is songwriting now like VAR? Has anyone had more preposterous names than the offspring of Grimes and Elon Musk? How did Nile Rodgers transform Let's Dance? … plus literary theft, smoking in films, Eno's Music For Airports, Dylan's new book, NordVPN and the movies you can watch endless times and why (Master And Commander and Brief Encounter among them).Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to nordvpn.com/yourear or use the code yourear to get a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 1 additional month for free + a bonus gift! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee! And it's our anniversary! We started our Word In Your Attic Zoomcasts exactly two years ago and we've now done 159 of them. Here's a little taste of what you might have been missing …   Edgar Wrighthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUePw4TUvEY Andy Partridgehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQiDJ3vwi0 Shamira Ahmedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6nLk50vR6Y Bob Geldofhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ssIPRMrYzU Ian Rankinhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawySOxKUAk Stewart Leehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lOJUYSY9c&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=141 Laura Bartonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7815zq9yc&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=93 Alexis Petridishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsKuIjlMBrs Jon Ronsonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqiMN2QKVZE&list=PL4BuS5rDGKiPB8-eIUxSPTbajC-l2FyuE&index=159Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Which blues standard did Hoochie Coochie Man give birth to? Which song did David Bowie steal the riff from and use on Jean Genie? Where did John Lee Hooker get the title to Boom Boom from? Join Stevie Nix as he answers all of these questions and more on this episode that explores the blues. WARNING: This episode contains traces of Huey Lewis & The News.Featured songs [in chronological order]:Boom Boom [Tony Joe White]Going Down South [The Black Keys]Good Morning Little Schoolgirl [Muddy Waters, Rod Stewart, Huey Lewis & The News]Smokestack Lightning [Manfred Mann, Soul Coughing, The Cramps, Creedence Clearwater Revival]I'm A Man [The Who, David Bowie, Iggy & The Stooges]Buzz Fledderjohn [John Hammond]Turn Your Lamp Down Low [Mose Allison, Them, AC/DC]Love In Vain [The Rolling Stones, Madeleine Peyroux]Little Red Rooster [Sam Cooke]I Just Want To Make Love To You [Example, Bob Dylan]Bring It On Home [Led Zeppelin]This Train [The Seekers, Bob Marley]You're The Devil In Disguise [Larkin Poe]20 Songs Painted Red, White & BluesJoin Stevie on Spotify and Instagramwww.songsungnew.com

Fabuloso Concierto tesoro de Muddy Waters en el Festival de jazz de San Sebastián. Muddy tenía 64 años y nos visitó con una banda de lujo, donde había tres guitarristas y varias leyendas vivas del blues. Plaza de la Trinidad, San Sebastián, 20 de julio de 1977. Producción propia de RNE Digitalizado para su emisión por José Miguel López, que estuvo presente en aquel concierto. MUDDY WATERS: XII FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE JAZZ DE SAN SEBASTIÁN. 1977 Contenido dado por el artista, cuyo orden no se corresponde: 01.- KANSAS CITY 02.- HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN 03.- HONEY BEE 04.- CALDONIA 05.- WALKING AND TUMBLING 06.- I CAN'T BE SATISFIED 07.- HONKY TONK 08.- SCREAMING AND CRYING Intérpretes: Muddy Waters Blues Band: Muddy Waters (guitarra, voz) Bob Margolin (guitarra) Luther Johnson Jr. (guitarra) Jerry Portnoy (armónica) Este hombre se salió aquel día, ¡vaya recital! Pinetop Perkins (piano) Calvin Jones (bajo) Willie Smith (batería) Aquel año también tocaron en San Sebastián: Charles Mingus, Cab Calloway's Harlem Parade, Wallace Davenport New Orleans Band, Dolores, Nucleus y Clarence Gatemouth Brown, aparte de los grupos aficionados. Yo asistí acreditado por el vedpertino "Informaciones" donde firmaba como José Miguel López de Haro (JMLH). Mañana celebraremos el Día Internacional del Jazz. Escuchar audio

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "The Monkey Time" by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes -- The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner's pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I've used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what "rock music" means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as "rock and roll". We're going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We're going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at "I Wanna Be Your Man": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Rolling Stones' story doesn't actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won't be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn't cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in the early episodes -- after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn't, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We've seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine -- his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more -- records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, "Milk Cow Blues"] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain's pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist -- a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine -- but he wasn't just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he'd ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on "Rock Island Line". If that had been Barber's only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important -- after all, without "Rock Island Line", it's likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn't have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released "Petit Fleur", engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, "Petit Fleur"] And Barber didn't even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead -- a band who aren't releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz -- a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano -- unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene -- people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax -- who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism -- and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax's friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson's early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close -- the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn't a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we'll see -- but it's generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British "blues scene" was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate -- and more importantly play -- music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he'd found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?"] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That's because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn't the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we've looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, "Tain't Nobody's Business"] And we're lucky enough that many of the Barber band's shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we'll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, "Peace in the Valley"] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, "This Little Light of Mine"] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians' unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you'd reach Muddy Waters -- did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber's confusion was fairly straightfoward -- Barber was thinking of Waters' early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He'd travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress -- apparently he didn't know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn't find Johnson, he'd found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to -- Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever -- but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson's biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Be's Troubled"] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes -- Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy's record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he'd been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] But soon he'd partnered with Chess' great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess' other big star Howlin' Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great "Hoochie Coochie Man", which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters' current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn't really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of "Hoochie Coochie Man" to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann's faces lit up -- they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber's band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though -- the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters' first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they'd played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn't like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group's version of "Midnight Special": [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, "Midnight Special"] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, "This Train"] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed -- they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan's singing -- he'd even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band -- and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined "Skiffle is Piffle", in which he said in part: "It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement...British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment". Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn't skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, "Skip to My Lou"] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group's name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, "Death Letter"] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin' Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele's lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer -- his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould -- and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber's trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous -- the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn't actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "How Long How Long Blues"] But Burbridge wasn't their regular drummer -- that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn't yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn't bring his guitar, he'd just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them -- "Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger". Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group -- he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ -- it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two -- they'd play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies' disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they'd bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger's arm -- one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he'd ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren't out in the UK yet. They'd bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, "Beautiful Delilah"] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin' Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones -- Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant -- Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed -- though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart's piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically "and you must be the Chuck Berry artist". Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn't make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "You Can't Judge a Book By its Cover"] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player -- they didn't like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it -- he had a really good amplifier that they wanted -- but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner's wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style -- Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin' Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer's club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group's manager, though he didn't have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "Diddley Daddy"] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off -- even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn't have any money to heat the flat. The group's live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine's editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he'd already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He'd worked for Mary Quant, the designer who'd popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he'd taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles' London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he'd found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn't like it, and didn't care -- he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain's answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings -- at the time in Britain you needed an agent's license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them -- even though he'd not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise -- though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group's leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group's leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he'd taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that's what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called "Come On" -- though they changed Berry's line about a "stupid jerk" to being about a "stupid guy", in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Come On"] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn't include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record -- the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn't poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it's usually told -- that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say -- are false, and so it's likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death -- he just wasn't allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn't the only change Oldham made -- he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin'. He also changed Keith Richards' surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. "Come On" made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs -- nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones' second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing -- as Lennon said of the song, "We weren't going to give them anything great, were we?": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] For a B-side, the group did a song called "Stoned", which was clearly "inspired" by "Green Onions": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Stoned"] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge -- Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton's time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation -- if you're going to make records you need songs, and you can't just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We'll see how that went in a few weeks' time, when we pick up on their career.  

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I’ve used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I’ve also used Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards’ Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner’s pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I’ve used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones’ singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what “rock music” means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as “rock and roll”. We’re going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We’re going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at “I Wanna Be Your Man”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Rolling Stones’ story doesn’t actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won’t be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn’t cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in the early episodes — after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn’t, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We’ve seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine — his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more — records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, “Milk Cow Blues”] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain’s pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist — a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine — but he wasn’t just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he’d ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on “Rock Island Line”. If that had been Barber’s only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important — after all, without “Rock Island Line”, it’s likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn’t have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released “Petit Fleur”, engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, “Petit Fleur”] And Barber didn’t even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead — a band who aren’t releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz — a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano — unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene — people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax — who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism — and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax’s friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson’s early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close — the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn’t a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we’ll see — but it’s generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British “blues scene” was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate — and more importantly play — music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he’d found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?”] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That’s because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn’t the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we’ve looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, “Tain’t Nobody’s Business”] And we’re lucky enough that many of the Barber band’s shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we’ll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, “Peace in the Valley”] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, “This Little Light of Mine”] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians’ unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you’d reach Muddy Waters — did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber’s confusion was fairly straightfoward — Barber was thinking of Waters’ early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He’d travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress — apparently he didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn’t find Johnson, he’d found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to — Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever — but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson’s biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Be’s Troubled”] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes — Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy’s record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he’d been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Can’t Be Satisfied”] But soon he’d partnered with Chess’ great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess’ other big star Howlin’ Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters’ current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn’t really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of “Hoochie Coochie Man” to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann’s faces lit up — they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber’s band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though — the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters’ first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they’d played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn’t like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group’s version of “Midnight Special”: [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, “Midnight Special”] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, “This Train”] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed — they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan’s singing — he’d even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band — and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined “Skiffle is Piffle”, in which he said in part: “It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement…British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment”. Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn’t skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, “Skip to My Lou”] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group’s name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, “Death Letter”] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele’s lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, “3/4 AD”] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer — his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould — and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber’s trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous — the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn’t actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, “How Long How Long Blues”] But Burbridge wasn’t their regular drummer — that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn’t yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn’t bring his guitar, he’d just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them — “Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger”. Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group — he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ — it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two — they’d play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies’ disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they’d bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger’s arm — one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he’d ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren’t out in the UK yet. They’d bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, “Beautiful Delilah”] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin’ Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones — Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant — Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed — though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart’s piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically “and you must be the Chuck Berry artist”. Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn’t make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “You Can’t Judge a Book By its Cover”] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player — they didn’t like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it — he had a really good amplifier that they wanted — but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner’s wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style — Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin’ Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer’s club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group’s manager, though he didn’t have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “Diddley Daddy”] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off — even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn’t have any money to heat the flat. The group’s live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine’s editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he’d already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He’d worked for Mary Quant, the designer who’d popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he’d taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles’ London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he’d found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn’t like it, and didn’t care — he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain’s answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings — at the time in Britain you needed an agent’s license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them — even though he’d not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise — though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group’s leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group’s leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he’d taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that’s what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called “Come On” — though they changed Berry’s line about a “stupid jerk” to being about a “stupid guy”, in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Come On”] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn’t include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record — the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn’t poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it’s usually told — that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say — are false, and so it’s likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death — he just wasn’t allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn’t the only change Oldham made — he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin’. He also changed Keith Richards’ surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. “Come On” made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs — nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones’ second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing — as Lennon said of the song, “We weren’t going to give them anything great, were we?”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] For a B-side, the group did a song called “Stoned”, which was clearly “inspired” by “Green Onions”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Stoned”] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge — Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton’s time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation — if you’re going to make records you need songs, and you can’t just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We’ll see how that went in a few weeks’ time, when we pick up on their career.  

An artist uses his music to narrate the American experience, and a 14 year old gets hooked on the Blues. This is episode 52 of Caffe Lena : 60 years of song. Thank you to Sarah for the list of songs and artists for the feature. Pokey LaFarge uses his music and songwriting to narrate the American experience. Minutes away from his front door in St. Louis, night after night the streets erupted in social unrest. In the face of a sociological tinderbox, he took to his studio and began writing and soon, his latest album appeared. Jontavious Willis came across a YouTube video of Muddy Waters playing “Hoochie Coochie Man” when he was 14 years old and was instantly hooked on the blues. His big break came in 2015 when Taj Mahal asked him to play together on stage. That appearance led to Willis opening select shows on the TajMo tour for his musical mentors Taj Mahal and Keb ‘Mo’. Caffe Lena: 60 Years of Song, a production of WEXT Radio.

It all starts with Eric Clapton this week, with his take on Hoochie Coochie Man, and then we take a journey through some truly amazing blues and soul music... There's Tony O, Giles Robson and Chris Corcoran, Paul Lamb and the Kingsnakes, Bill Withers, Dr John, Frank Collins, Lisa Mann, Dave Thomas, Kaz Hawkins, Lurrie Bell, John D'Amato, Whitney Shay, Kirk Fletcher and Dave Ferra... What more can you ask for? I don't know! Tune in and enjoy!

0:01 - Еду, еду (из альбома Нечего терять, 1999) 5:01 - Ша-ла-ла (из альбома 1992, Разные люди, 1992) 9:35 - Такие дела (из альбома Чиж, 1993) 17:05 - Мама (из альбома О любви..., 1995) 24:12 - Дополнительный 38-й (из альбома Перекрёсток, 1994) 31:59 - 18 берёз ( из альбома Гайдном буду!, 2001) 38:25 - Есть! ( из альбома Бомбардировщики, 1997) 44:01 - Hoochie Coochie Man (из альбома Чиж, 1993) 48:31 - Фантом (из альбома Эрогенная зона, 1996) 55:05 - О.К. (из альбома О любви..., 1995) 1:00:55 - Вот пуля просвистела...(из альбома О любви..., 1995) 1:07:03 - Вечная молодость (из альбома Чиж, 1993) 1:10:52 - Пароль ( из альбома Нечего терять, 1999) --- В гости к Евгению Маргулису пришла легендарная российская рок-группа «Чиж & Co». Коллектив был создан в начале 1990-х годов гитаристом, вокалистом и автором песен Сергеем Чиграковым по прозвищу Чиж. Хозяин «Квартирника» рассказал о традиции лидера группы выходить на сцену в клетчатых рубашках, вспомнил историю о том, как придумалось название группы и рассказал, как узнал о ней сам. Ведущий и его гость поделились совместными воспоминаниями о том, как они играли концерт на рынке в Дзержинске и как готовились к нему. Чиж рассказал, как побывал в составе жюри одного из конкурсов и как комментировал выступления участников. Евгений Маргулис вместе со известным музыкантом обсудили манеру исполнения гостя и различные названия аккордов. --- Слушать радиостанцию KEXXX.Rocks можно на нашем сайте http://kexxx.rocks/ Subscribe to our podcast RSS (Подписывайтесь на наш подкаст): http://feeds.feedburner.com/KEXXX-Rocks or Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/kexxx-rocks/id1517329825 or Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cbB2VV53o6t9ZzDdZlHm9 Весь архив станции KEXXX.Rocks тут https://hearthis.at/kexxx.rocks/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kexxx.rocks/ INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/keksfm.rock

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

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

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

About This Episode Every generation or so, a young bluesman bursts onto the scene and sends a jolt through the blues community. Jontavious Willis may just have that effect on people. Hailing from Greenville, Georgia, Willis grew up singing Gospel music at the Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church with his grandfather. Since an early age, he had the talent and passion for the music and the ability to sharpen his skills fast. At the age of 14, he came across a YouTube video of Muddy Waters playing “Hoochie Coochie Man” and was instantly hooked on the blues. He got his much-needed break from the living legend Taj Mahal, who described him as the “Wonderboy” and “the Wunderkind.” In 2015, Mahal asked Willis to play on stage with him. That appearance resulted in a roaring response from the audience and led Willis to bigger stages and broader opportunities, including an opening slot at select shows along the TajMo tour, featuring his musical mentors Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’. Many fans of Willis regard him as an old soul. His style of playing the instruments and his voice touches the very roots of country blues. He brings back the true soul of the music. A newspaper headline once called him a “70-year-old bluesman in a 20-year-old body.” Spectacular Class is the follow-up release to his debut album, Blue Metamorphosis, which was released in 2016 and garnered him rave reviews from such notable magazines as Living Blues and Blues & Rhythm. In 2018, the album earned recognition by the Blues Foundation through their International Blues Challenge, where he was honored with the Best Self-Produced CD Award. About Michael Perry Michael Perry is a New York Times bestselling author, humorist and radio show host from New Auburn, Wisconsin. Perry’s bestselling memoirs include Population 485, Truck: A Love Story, Coop, and Visiting Tom, and his latest, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy. His first book for young readers, The Scavengers, was published in 2014 and first novel for adult readers, The Jesus Cow, was published in May of 2015. Raised on a small Midwestern dairy farm, Perry put himself through nursing school while working on a ranch in Wyoming, then wandered into writing. He lives with his wife and two daughters in rural Wisconsin, where he serves on the local volunteer fire and rescue service and is an intermittent pig farmer. He hosts the nationally-syndicated “Tent Show Radio,” performs widely as a humorist, and tours with his band the Long Beds (currently recording their third album for Amble Down Records). He has recorded three live humor albums including Never Stand Behind A Sneezing Cow and The Clodhopper Monologues. Learn more about Michael and where to get his publications at www.sneezingcow.com. Follow Michael Perry www.sneezingcow.com Twitter Facebook Instagram Other Ways to Stream Public Radio Exchange: www.prx.org/tentshowradio Podcast: www.libsyn.com/tentshowradio iTunes: www.itunes/tentshowradio Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/tentshowradio Player.FM: www.player.FM/tentshowradio iHeart Radio: www.iheart.com

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-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “The Wallflower” by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast, most of which I’ve mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James’ early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* “The Wallflower”.  “The Wallflower”, though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we’ve already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning — there’s some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I’d mention it. If you’re worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We’ve talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about “Hound Dog” and “Bear Cat”, but we didn’t really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” is an answer song to Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man”, partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But “I’m A Man” was, in itself, a response to Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”. And, the “Bear Cat” debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric — you’d do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. “Bear Cat” might have gone to number three, but “Hound Dog” went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons — this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band’s members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn’t become the lead singer straight away — Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton’s old backing vocal parts — but he slowly became more important to the band’s sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways — particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn’t sound like anyone else’s before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard — most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes — but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out — a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band’s manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear… [excerpt The Royals “Every Beat of My Heart”] That’s a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there’s nothing about that track that really stands out — it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with “Get It” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Get It”] “Get It” was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it’s the band’s second hit that we’re most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit “Sixty Minute Man”, which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. “Get It” had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to “Sixty Minute Man”, and so he came up with a song that he initially titled “Sock It To Me, Mary”. Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer’s wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called “Work With Me Annie” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Work With Me Annie”] That’s certainly suggestive, but it wouldn’t set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. “Give me all my meat?” That’s… well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct — “Sexy Ways” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Sexy Ways”] That, too, went right up the charts. But “Work With Me Annie” had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups — “Annie Had A Baby” and “Annie’s Aunt Fanny”. And they weren’t the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them — even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how “Annie’s been working on the midnight shift”. But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of “Annie” herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn’t singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn’t want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her — so long as she got her parents’ permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn’t know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call — “calling her mother” while keeping a finger on the phone’s button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis’ former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they’d ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”. Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative — this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song “Jailhouse Rock” — with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You’ve undoubtedly heard it before if you’ve heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters’ “Mannish Boy” [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] The Robins’ record came out in May 1954. So it’s likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem — Bobby Nunn, the Robins’ bass singer, simply couldn’t get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed — he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn’t do that scary growl. Or at least, that’s the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said “We didn’t understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn’t do it.” But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they’d recorded a single called “She Wants to Rock”, which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller’s work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. “Riot in Cell Block #9” became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry’s life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that “Riot in Cell Block #9” did was cement Berry’s reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else’s record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for “Work With Me Annie”, and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of “Work With Me Annie”, but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: “The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)”] The record was called “The Wallflower”, but everyone knew it as “Roll With Me Henry”. The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible — Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It’s also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn’t go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. “The Wallflower” went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn’t become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we’re looking at a white person copying a black person’s record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs’ version is one of those ones which we can’t possibly justify as being a creative response. It’s closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley — it’s a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from “Roll With Me Henry” to the much less interesting “Dance With Me Henry”. [excerpt Georgia Gibbs “Dance With Me Henry”] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations — the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James’ version — “The Wallflower” may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women’s sexuality, and most especially *black* women’s sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn’t the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman’s record — her cover version of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” also outsold Baker’s original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn’t write her record. And again, this is something we’ve talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more — it’s people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we’ll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of “That’s All Right, Mama”, or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle’s original “Whole Lotta Shakin'” but it’s an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren’t just white people cashing in on black musicians’ talent, they’re part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians — a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person’s. You can’t say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn’t an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one — at least no-one who isn’t so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase “roll with me” — listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren’t. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James “Dance With Me Henry”] If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I suppose. After all, “Dance With Me Henry” was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs’ version, not Etta James’ – when they recorded “Henry’s Got Flat Feet, Can’t Dance No More” [excerpt “Henry’s Got Flat Feet”, The Midnighters] And “Dance With Me Henry” got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello’s last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we’re going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn’t properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and “Dance With Me Henry” was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians — though there wouldn’t be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons — but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times – – and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons’ love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single — Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing “Unchained Melody”, which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt “Unchained Melody” by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn’t see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of “Unchained Melody” wouldn’t allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren’t released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin’s old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to “Unchained Melody”. And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was… well… this… [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan “Dance With Me Henry”] Whether that’s a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs’, I’ll let you decide… Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of “Dance With Me Henry” would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn’t record for two years, but “Louie Louie” didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] We’ll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years’ time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to “the Wallflower”, “Hey Henry”, but that wasn’t a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, “Hey Henry”] But her third single, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”, was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn’t happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we’re unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on — her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis — she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

    Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "The Wallflower" by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I'm halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast, most of which I've mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James' early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* "The Wallflower".  "The Wallflower", though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we've already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning -- there's some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I'd mention it. If you're worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We've talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about "Hound Dog" and "Bear Cat", but we didn't really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" is an answer song to Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man", partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But "I'm A Man" was, in itself, a response to Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man". And, the "Bear Cat" debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric -- you'd do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. "Bear Cat" might have gone to number three, but "Hound Dog" went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons -- this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band's members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn't become the lead singer straight away -- Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton's old backing vocal parts -- but he slowly became more important to the band's sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways -- particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn't sound like anyone else's before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard -- most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes -- but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out -- a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band's manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear... [excerpt The Royals "Every Beat of My Heart"] That's a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there's nothing about that track that really stands out -- it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with "Get It" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Get It"] "Get It" was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it's the band's second hit that we're most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit "Sixty Minute Man", which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. "Get It" had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to "Sixty Minute Man", and so he came up with a song that he initially titled "Sock It To Me, Mary". Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer's wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called "Work With Me Annie" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Work With Me Annie"] That's certainly suggestive, but it wouldn't set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. "Give me all my meat?" That's... well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct -- "Sexy Ways" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Sexy Ways"] That, too, went right up the charts. But "Work With Me Annie" had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups -- "Annie Had A Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fanny". And they weren't the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them -- even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how "Annie's been working on the midnight shift". But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of "Annie" herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn't singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn't want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her -- so long as she got her parents' permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn't know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call -- "calling her mother" while keeping a finger on the phone's button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis' former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they'd ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine". Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative -- this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song "Jailhouse Rock" -- with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You've undoubtedly heard it before if you've heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters' "Mannish Boy" [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man", which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] The Robins' record came out in May 1954. So it's likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem -- Bobby Nunn, the Robins' bass singer, simply couldn't get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed -- he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn't do that scary growl. Or at least, that's the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said "We didn't understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn't do it." But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they'd recorded a single called "She Wants to Rock", which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller's work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. "Riot in Cell Block #9" became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry's life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that "Riot in Cell Block #9" did was cement Berry's reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else's record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for "Work With Me Annie", and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of "Work With Me Annie", but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: "The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)"] The record was called "The Wallflower", but everyone knew it as "Roll With Me Henry". The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible -- Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It's also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn't go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. "The Wallflower" went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn't become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we're looking at a white person copying a black person's record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs' version is one of those ones which we can't possibly justify as being a creative response. It's closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley -- it's a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from "Roll With Me Henry" to the much less interesting "Dance With Me Henry". [excerpt Georgia Gibbs "Dance With Me Henry"] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations -- the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James' version -- "The Wallflower" may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women's sexuality, and most especially *black* women's sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn't the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman's record -- her cover version of LaVern Baker's "Tweedle Dee" also outsold Baker's original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn't write her record. And again, this is something we've talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more -- it's people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we'll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of "That's All Right, Mama", or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle's original "Whole Lotta Shakin'" but it's an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren't just white people cashing in on black musicians' talent, they're part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians -- a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person's. You can't say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn't an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one -- at least no-one who isn't so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase "roll with me" -- listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren't. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James "Dance With Me Henry"] If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I suppose. After all, "Dance With Me Henry" was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs' version, not Etta James' – when they recorded "Henry's Got Flat Feet, Can't Dance No More" [excerpt "Henry's Got Flat Feet", The Midnighters] And "Dance With Me Henry" got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello's last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we're going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn't properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and "Dance With Me Henry" was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians -- though there wouldn't be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons -- but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times - - and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons' love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single -- Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing "Unchained Melody", which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt "Unchained Melody" by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn't see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of "Unchained Melody" wouldn't allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren't released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin's old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to "Unchained Melody". And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was... well... this... [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan "Dance With Me Henry"] Whether that's a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs', I'll let you decide... Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of "Dance With Me Henry" would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn't record for two years, but "Louie Louie" didn't seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] We'll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years' time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to "the Wallflower", "Hey Henry", but that wasn't a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, "Hey Henry"] But her third single, "Good Rockin' Daddy", was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn't happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, "Spoonful"] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we're unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on -- her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis -- she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

Golpeamos de nuevo y lo hacemos duro, asidos a una jarra repleta de rock y metal nos adentramos en la segunda parte de nuestro Especial Versiones, prepárense que prendemos fuego al paraíso….. Raúl Gallego y Gervi Navío nos aferramos a esta reluciente nave del Rock, en su viaje sin escalas hacia la muerte y la verdad, a través de Radiopolis, desde Sevilla, en la 92.3 de la FM, desplegamos nuestro amor por el Heavy, el Rock and Roll, el Metal, el Blues….con los homenajes de Nazareth, Still Life, The Cramps, Pentagram, Paul Gilbert, Ramones…..a bandas míticas, a Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Gary Moore, Thin Lizzy…sin música.... la vida no tiene sentido. Lista de Temas: 01-Morning Dew. Nazareth (Grateful Dead Cover) 02-Metal thrashing Mad. Still Life (Anthrax Cover) 03-Substitute. Ramones (The Who Cover) 04-Don´t believe a word. Def Leppard (Thin Lizzy Cover) 05-The times they are changin´. Micah P. Hinson (Bob Dylan Cover) 06-The real me. Wasp (The Who Cover) 07-High Hopes. Nightwish (Pink Floyd Cover) 08-Ride like the Wind. Saxon (Christopher Cross Cover) 09-Doctor Please. Pentagram (Blue Cheer Cover) 10-Deceiver. Reverend Bizarre (Judas Priest Cover) 11-Se alza el trueno. Los Suaves (Gary Moore Cover) 12-Lonesome town. The Cramps (Ricky Nelson Cover) 13-Hoochie Coochie Man. The Allman Brothers (Muddy Waters Cover) 14-Mr Crowley. Moonspell (Ozzy Osbourne Cover) 15-Purple Haze. Paul Gilbert (Jimi Hendrix Cover) 16-Turn the page. Metallica (Bob Seger Cover) 17-Stairway to Heaven. Frank Zappa (Led Zeppelin Cover) 18-Needles and pins. Ramones (The Searchers Cover) 19-Thousand days of yesterdays. Five Fifteen with Nik (Captain Beyond Cover) 20-Fight fire with fire. Vader (Metallica Cover) 19-Me & Bobby McGee. Grateful Dead (Janis Joplin Cover) 20-Holiday in Cambodia. Lääz Rockit (Dead Kennedys Cover) Nos vamos con una sonrisa de satisfacción y los ojos vidriosos por el alcohol y la buena compañía, volvemos cuando el dogal del verdugo nos acaricie el pescuezo, menos mal que Dios es Suave…

Lögin í þættinum tengjast söngvaranum Long John Baldry: She Broke My Heart með Stuðmönnum, How Lond, How Long Blues með Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, Hoochie Coochie Man með Hoochie Coochie Men, Roll 'em Pete með Hoochie Coochie Men, Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You með Steam Packet, Cuckoo með Long John Baldry, Come Back Baby með Bluesology, Let The Heartache Begin með Long John Baldry og (Under The Sun In) Mexico með Long John Baldry.

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1. Say What – Stevie Ray Vaughan and DT – Soul to Soul 19852. Hard Drinkin' Woman – Blue Room – Everything But The Blues 20053. Taking My Chances – Clarence Gatemouth brown – Just Got Lucky 19934. The Loniest Hour – Craig Erickson – Roadhouse Stomp! 19925. Who Do you Love – various – Hey Bo Didley – a Tribute 20026. Hipshake – Bluesjeans – A night at the Saloon 19917. Do what you want to do – Coco Monyoya – The essential Coco Montoya 20098. you Hear that Ramblin' – Collard Green & Gravy – juke Joint Boogie 20109. Satisfy Suzie – Lonnie Mack – Strike like Lightning 198510. I'll Be waiting – Blue cousins – Hoochie Coochie Man 200111. Evil -Climax Blues Band – Blues From The Attic 1993

Intro SongThe Vaughan Brothers, “Hard To Be”, Family Style, Capital Records First Set Johnny Copeland, “Don't Stop By The Creek, Son”, Texas Twister, 1983 Rounder Records VINYL Has SRV playing guitar!Shemekia Copeland, “Who Stole My Radio”, The Soul Truth, 2006 Alligator Records Carey Bell, “Too Late”, Living Chicago Blues Vol. 2, Alligator Records VINYLLurrie Bell & Carey, “Wrapped Up In Love”, Second Nature, Alligator RecordsSecond Set John Lee Hooker, “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”, The Very Best of John Lee Hooker, John Lee Hooker Jr, “Dear John”, All Odds Against Me,Muddy Waters, “You're Gonna Miss Me (When I'm Dead and Gone)”, Hoochie Coochie Man, VINYLBig Bill Morganfield, “Anything Just for You”, Blues In The Blood, Third SetLonnie Brooks , “Don't Answer The Door”, Living Chicago Blues Vol 3, 1978 Alligator Records VINYLRonnie Baker Brooks, “Drama Queen”, Take Me WitchaGuitar Shorty, “Texas Women”, Bare Knuckle, Alligator Records Jimi Hendrix, “Bleeding Heart”, Blues, Fourth Short SetRaful Neal, “Luberta”, Louisiana Legend, Kenny Neal, “Blues Stew”, Favorites,  

NEW FOR JANUARY 1, 2015 Floor 2015 - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard - Vol. 249 A new year of music near the top of the world . . . 1. Auld Lang Syne / Born To Run (live) - Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band Buy From Live Springsteen 2. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (live) Joe Cocker w/ Mad Dogs and Englishmen Buy From iTunes 3. London Calling (live) - The Clash Buy From iTunes* 4. Southern Man (live) - Neil Young w/ Booker T and the MGs Buy From iTunes* 5. Hoochie Coochie Man (live) - Eric Clapton Buy From iTunes* 6. Trouble No More (live) Muddy WatersBuy From iTunes* 7. Blind Willie McTell (live) - The Allman Brothers Band 8. Dixie Chicken / Triple Face Boogie (live) - Little Feat w/ Al Kooper Buy From iTunes* 9. We Used To Know - Jethro Tull Buy From iTunes 10. Hotel California (live) Eagles Buy From iTunes* 11. Theme For An Imaginary Western (live) Jack Bruce And The Cuicoland Express Buy From iTunes* 12. To Be Over (early) - Yes Buy From iTunes* The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Knocking them back one year at a time . . . Accept No Substitute Click to join the conversation on the Facebook page.

More musicians born 100 years ago this year, including: Judy Canova, Woody Herman, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Van Heusen, Ella Logan and Muddy Waters.  Songs include: Swinging On a Star, Woodchopper's Ball, Hoochie Coochie Man and Honky Tonk Train.

1. Godfather Theme 2. Love featuring Jill Scott 3. Jock It In 4. 2001 (That’ll Work) 5. Playing Your Game Baby 6. Hoochie Coochie Man 7. All For You 8. Stormy Monday 9. The Party Roll 10. Day-O 11. Harlem Nocturne 12. Funky Funky 13. Chuck Baby 14. Midnight Sun [Read More]

Felipe y Diego nos traen un repaso a la carrera del genial bluesman, con paradas en algunos de sus éxitos, como 'Rolling Stone', 'Hoochie Coochie Man' o 'Mannish Boy'.

How I feel about the Tea Party and the Second Amendment March. The disrespect and the side show.  One of the music pieces used by Kenn Robarge, "Rough and Ready".   Zombie Strike #25Question of the Week- What would you do if you didn't have to do what you do now?Shoot Don’t Shoot You Decide

This week's playlist: • The Lonely Traveller by Fruteland Jackson, from Blues 2.0 (2005), available direct from the store at his site, Electro-Fi Records and the iTunes Music Store. Visit Fruteland.com for more information. • 5-0 Blues by Corey Harris, from Fish Ain't Bitin' (1997), available from Alligator Records and the iTMS. Visit Corey's Alligator Records bio page for more information. • Wrapped Up In Love by Carey & Lurrie Bell, from Second Nature (2004), available from Alligator Records and the iTMS. Visit Carey's Alligator Records bio page for more information. • Hoochie Coochie Man by Muddy Water, from The Lost Tapes (1999), available from BlindPigRecords.com and the iTMS. Visit this page at the Blind Pig site, which provides excellent background information about The Lost Tapes and the players who appear on the album. • I Called My Baby Long Distance by Archie Edwards, from The Toronto Sessions (2001), available from NorthernBlues.com and the iTMS. Visit the biographies page at AcousticBlues.com for more information. • One Thin Dime Blues by Archie Edwards, also from The Toronto Sessions (2001). • Doncha Know I Love You by Harpdog Brown, from Once In A Howlin' Moon (1999), available from HarpdogBrown.com. Visit Harpdog's Garageband page or his MySpace page to hear some other tracks. • Two Plays For A Quarter by Detroit Women, from Rattle Your Cage (2005), available from the store at their site, CD Baby and the iTMS. Visit DetroitWomen.org for more information. • The Player by The Chicago Thieves, from The Player (2001), available by emailing Craig Giles at info@chichagothieves.co.uk. Visit ChicagoThieves.co.uk for more information. • Gonna Send You Back to Georgia by Hound Dog Taylor, from Release The Hound (2004), available from Alligator Records and the iTunes Music Store. Mentioned during this show: Get Your Blues Name Here (courtesy of Fruteland Jackson), The Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation and Chicago's Venetian Night. Excellent online resources for more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; and be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #84 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, the PROMONET program of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Download.com or Garageband.com)