Podcasts about i gotta know

00:00 – 11:43– Kevin pays off his snack debt to Marc, the Colts made some moves late in the day with signing running back Khalil Herbert and defensive tackle Neville Gallimore, are there any more significant moves coming or are the Colts basically done?, the Daniel Jones signing 11:44 – 16:32 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 16:33 – 41:37 – The Colts sign former Bears running back Khalil Herbert and Marc gives some insight into what Colts fans are getting in him, what he can do to help Jonathan Taylor and Anthony Richardson, the signing of defensive tackle Neville Gallimore, can he be more than a depth piece?, recapping the Colts free agency signings to this point, Grant Stuard signs with the Lions, Jonathan Taylor’s workload the last couple of seasons, can Indiana win today against Oregon and will they make the tournament, Purdue/USC 41:38 – 1:06:36 – Indiana taking on Oregon today, Pacers getting ready for the Sixers, Jim Irsay sends out a thank you to Ryan Kelly following his departure, we recall our interview with Ryan Kelly back at training camp where he talked about the impact the Irsay family and community has had on them, Morning Checkdown 1:06:37 – 1:17:10 – Scott Agness of Fieldhouse Files joins us and discusses that incredible finish to Pacers/Bucks the other night, keeping Giannis scoreless in the 4th, how Carlisle coaches Mathurin, Sophie Cunninham officially joins the Fever, more Fever road games will be featured in NBA arenas next season 1:17:11 – 1:23:37 – Thoughts on the new Colts signed yesterday, Cam Bynum wants to wear #24 for the Colts but it’s retired by Lenny Moore so should he just move on from it or get permission? 1:23:38 – 1:47:46 – The signing of Daniel Jones and what it means for the Colts, choosing the Colts over the Vikings, James’ article about Daniel Jones and what went wrong in New York, we play I GOTTA KNOW: over/under Daniel Jones starts, an in-flight toilet disaster question, Duke/Auburn or the field in the tournament and what are we watching, Morning Checkdown 1:47:47 – 1:54:57 – The departure of Grant Stuard, what happens with EJ Speed?, the remaining in-house free agents and the most likely to return 1:54:58 – 2:04:11– Jeff called Kevin “Kevvy” in the last segment and we confirm that is indeed what he said, our Jiffy Lube Stat of the Day, IU/Oregon at noon and Purdue/USC tonightSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 12:25 – Off and running on a Tuesday as we have a busy night in hoops to preview, Rockets/Pacers, IU/Oregon, Rutgers/Purdue, Jarace Walker’s triple-double with the Mad Ants 12:26 – 17:00 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 17:01 – 42:27– Pacers/Rockets tonight, comparing the John Cena heel turn in sports terms, Colts’ needs in free agency, in-house free agents that could return and could be on the way out, the latest all-Indiana parlay, Jarace Walker getting a triple-double with the Mad Ants yesterday 42:28 – 1:07:43 – Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle joins us and discusses his trip to Iowa for Tyrese Haliburton, getting through a busy weekend, Haliburton’s self-awareness, Jarace Walker going to the G-League, asking Walker vs. assigning him to the G-League, Bennedict Mathurin’s status, his favorite March Madness moment, Morning Checkdown 1:07:44 – 1:19:11– The position with the least amount of need for the Colts, the comfort level of the wide receiver group 1:19:12 – 1:26:56 – Dane Brugler’s latest mock draft has the Colts drafting Michigan TE Colston Loveland and what the Colts could be looking at come draft time, NFL franchise tag deadline day 1:26:57 – 1:52:09 – College hoops tonight, IndyStar high school reporter Kyle Neddenriep joins us to discuss the tragic loss of Mason Alexander over the weekend, sectional boys basketball matchups tonight, a big one in Fishers tonight, any teams flying under the radar, best sectional moment he’s covered, Morning Checkdown 1:52:10 – 2:03:25 – A big game for the Hoosiers tonight out in Oregon, We play I GOTTA KNOW with James and Jeff 2:03:26 – 2:09:21 - Multi-screen viewing habits when watching sportsSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 21:54 – Brendan’s time with Butler and missing the Brad Stevens era by a year, going down a Butler rabbit hole, the timing of the Chris Ballard announcement for the Colts at the end of the season, could Lou Anarumo be bringing a Bengals linebacker with him to Indy? 21:55 – 33:12 – Scott Agness of Fieldhouse Files joins us and discusses the lineup change to the Pacers that saw Mathurin go to the bench, a rough February for the Pacers, missing Myles Turner, how would he save the NBA All-Star Game?, Fever off-season acquisitions 33:13 – 46:20 - Rick Bozich of WDRB-Louisville joins us and discusses if he thinks the Indiana job is still viewed as a great job from a national perspective, legit candidates to replace Woodson, Dusty May’s future 46:21 – 55:40 - We play I GOTTA KNOW: the Colts position group you feel most confident in, Fever expectations, Valentine’s Day gifts, last great night out, what are we watching?Support the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 16:12– Brendan King co-hosts with Kevin and Marc today, Pacers hold off the Wizards in overtime as they hit the All-Star break on a high 16:13 – 22:08 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 22:09 – 44:01 – Brendan’s time with Butler and missing the Brad Stevens era by a year, going down a Butler rabbit hole, the timing of the Chris Ballard announcement for the Colts at the end of the season, could Lou Anarumo be bringing a Bengals linebacker with him to Indy? 44:02 – 1:07:28 – Notre Dame basketball, Pacers survive in overtime against the Wizards, Kevin shares a story about Purdue’s Braden Smith, Morning Checkdown 1:07:29 – 1:19:00 – Scott Agness of Fieldhouse Files joins us and discusses the lineup change to the Pacers that saw Mathurin go to the bench, a rough February for the Pacers, missing Myles Turner, how would he save the NBA All-Star Game?, Fever off-season acquisitions 1:19:01 – 1:29:59 – Alex Bregman lands with the Red Sox in a mega-deal, Zaire Franklin says the Colts defense is only one player away from being an elite unit, Lou Anarumo’s impact on roster decisions going forward 1:30:00 – 1:55:33 –The Pacers avoiding disaster against the Wizards last night, Rick Bozich of WDRB-Louisville joins us and discusses if he thinks the Indiana job is still viewed as a great job from a national perspective, legit candidates to replace Woodson, Dusty May’s future, Morning Checkdown 1:55:34 – 2:08:52 – Ball State’s win over Eastern Michigan, Kevin’s jury duty experience, we play I GOTTA KNOW: the Colts position group you feel most confident in, Fever expectations, Valentine’s Day gifts, last great night out, what are we watching? 2:08:53 – 2:17:24 - POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 - 14:02– WWE Night at the Pacers/Pistons game tonight, Myles Turner and the NBA Trade Deadline, Micah Shrewsberry reading mean tweets last night 14:03 – 18:50 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 18:51 – 41:52 – Kevin criticizes the late tip time for the national championship game, Anthony Davis injured last night and is Myles Turner on the trade block?, Pacers trade pieces?, Slam Dunk contestants 41:53 – 1:07:44 – Kevin has a wild Chiefs stat, Andy thinks Kelce is going to propose to Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl, Greg Kampe gets suspended, Colts backup quarterback options in the offseason, the tough truth about Anthony Richardson, Morning Checkdown 1:07:45 – 1:21:42 – Tony East of Locked On Pacers joins us and weighs in on what his Vikings should do with Sam Darnold, he discusses what the Pacers have done through this point of the season, will they make a move at the trade deadline?, luxury tax, Pacers/Pistons tonight, Fever free agency 1:21:43 – 1:32:28 – Matt Eberflus goes back to Dallas to be the Cowboys DC, Texans fire OC Bobby Slowik and apparently he and CJ Stroud got into it at the combine, Kevin’s latest WWE lesson is about chants he will hear on Saturday 1:32:29 – 1:57:09 – IndyStar Colts reporter Joel A. Erickson joins us and discusses Chuck Pagnao going back to the Ravens, the hiring of Lou Anarumo, why he thinks Justin Fields could be the quarterback they target in free agency, in-house free agents for the Colts, thoughts on Lou Anarumo’s press conference, Pro Bowl skills, Morning Checkdown 1:57:10 – 2:11:02 – A college basketball fight in St. Louis, we play I GOTTA KNOW 2:11:03 – 2:20:06 - POP QUIZ, Pacers/PistonsSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 13:15 – A loaded guest lineup today, Bennedict Mathurin gets a one-game suspension, Pacers/Pistons tonight, Butler gets a much-needed well 13:16 – 19:54 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 19:55 – 44:51– The future of Mike Woodson, former Colts offensive lineman Joe Reitz joins us to discuss why he’s pulling for the Irish in the national title, locker room culture, his thoughts on Richardson going forward, the heightened sense of urgency, Jerry Goldsmith and Kevin’s Notre Dame Speedo bet 44:52 – 1:06:13 – Karl Anthony Towns had a bad moment last night, Curt Cignetti’s power rankings tweet, NFL mock drafts, Penn State tight end Tyler Warren being mocked to the Colts at No. 14, AD Mitchell’s disappointing rookie season, Morning Checkdown 1:06:14 – 1:17:31 – Scott Agness of Fieldhouse Files joins us to discuss the breaking news of the Fever breaking ground on a standalone practice facility, Tyrese Haliburton’s injury, Bennedict Mathurin’s suspension, trade deadline rumors, Pacers/Pistons 1:17:32 – 1:29:22 – Thomas Bryant acquisition, will Pacers be active at the trade deadline?, Lou Holtz on Ohio State and Ryan Day 1:29:23 – 1:55:13 – ESPN’s Tom Crean joins us and discusses the passing of Aaron Etherington, Thomas Bryant’s impact on the Pacers, the issues at Indiana and Mike Woodson, why does IU underachieve with so much invested in the program, Morning Checkdown 1:55:14 – 2:06:12 – Pacers notes ahead of tonight’s game against the Pistons, we play I GOTTA KNOW 2:06:13 – 2:17:20 - POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 15:04 – No press conference for Chris Ballard today due to him being sick, Pacers/Bulls tonight, Tyrese Haliburton’s status for tonight is up in the air, the critical nature of Anthony Richardson’s off-season 15:05 – 21:40 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 21:41 – 42:07 – Zaire Franklin apologizes to fans on Twitter, Ballard’s press conference being postponed, the venom towards Ballard from fans, Anthony Richardson big picture thoughts 42:08 – 1:04:40 – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us and discusses the thing he wanted to ask Chris Ballard the most today, the biggest place Ballard needs to improve, the fan base being pissed about Ballard remaining, AR’s off-season mentality, backup QB options, Gus Bradley out and who could take over?, the Colts missing big swings, Morning Checkdown 1:04:41 – 1:17:35 – Jim Irsay’s message to the team after the season finale, Shane Steichen’s answer to if they played Anthony Richardson too early in his NFL career, 1:17:36 – 1:28:19 – Kevin got nervous seeing the Northern Illinois logo last night, IU basketball thoughts, Titans fire their GM 1:28:20 – 1:52:47– Pacers sideline reporter Jeremiah Johnson joins us to discuss Tyrese Haliburton’s status for tonight against Chicago, Bennedict Mathurin’s demeanor in interviews, Mad Ants, the loudest mom on the Mom’s Trip, Mathurin’s lineup role, Sound of the Day: Justin Herbert is asked when he knew Jim Harbaugh was different, NFL playoff thoughts, Morning Checkdown 1:52:48 – 2:05:41 – Paul Skenes stop in Indy, We play I GOTTA KNOW 2:05:42 – 2:14:13 – POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 19:53 – Mike Epps is banging the anvil for the Colts-Lions game, Kevin gives a wild Lions stat, Colts wearing their Indiana Nights jerseys on Sunday, Joey Galloway said IU should sit Kurtis Rourke against Ohio State and Kevin's brain breaks 19:54 – 34:08 – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us to discuss Anthony Richardson's performance on Sunday and showing progress, Richardson's mental clock in the pocket, how the offensive line stacked up considering the injuries, Dan Campbell being in the Colts coaching search after the Josh McDaniels bumble 34:09 – 43:55 –  We play I GOTTA KNOW 43:56 -58:04 - Recalling Rick Carlisle's comments on the Malice At The Palace 20th anniversary, Locked on Pacers host Tony East joins us and discusses who Moses Brown is, what is the Pacers' health status, why is Haliburton struggling so mightily on the road, what has most impressed him with Bennedict Mathurin's game?, is the playing style causing injuries, how did Dalton Knecht fall so far in the draft, Tyrese Maxey calls out Joel EmbiidSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 15:06 – Kevin is playing a dangerous game with the gas in his car, Purdue gets blasted by Marquette, Pacers/Rockets tonight, latest college football playoff rankings has Indiana at No. 5 15:07 – 22:15 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 22:16 – 42:06 – Mike Epps is banging the anvil for the Colts-Lions game, Kevin gives a wild Lions stat, Colts wearing their Indiana Nights jerseys on Sunday, Joey Galloway said IU should sit Kurtis Rourke against Ohio State and Kevin's brain breaks 42:07 – 1:07:35 – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us to discuss Anthony Richardson's performance on Sunday and showing progress, Richardson's mental clock in the pocket, how the offensive line stacked up considering the injuries, Dan Campbell being in the Colts coaching search after the Josh McDaniels bumble, Ben Johnson's head coaching candidacy, the woeful Colts tight end stats, Jets fire GM Joe Douglas, Morning Checkdown 1:07:36 – 1:20:19 – Ohio State/Indiana this weekend, we play I GOTTA KNOW 1:20:20 – 1:27:53 – Colts injuries to keep an eye on, Jonathan Taylor's poor game against the Jets, Tommy Tuberville takes a shot at IU saying they bought their football team 1:27:54 – 1:55:36 –Recalling Rick Carlisle's comments on the Malice At The Palace 20th anniversary, Locked on Pacers host Tony East joins us and discusses who Moses Brown is, what is the Pacers' health status, why is Haliburton struggling so mightily on the road, what has most impressed him with Bennedict Mathurin's game?, is the playing style causing injuries, how did Dalton Knecht fall so far in the draft, Tyrese Maxey calls out Joel Embiid, first wave of Pro Football Hall of Famers released, will Adam Vinatieri or any other Colts get in?, Matt Gay note, Jazz coach Will Hardy rips his team for not knowing Dalton Knecht was going to take the final shot last night, Morning Checkdown 1:55:37 – 2:05:26 – Andy's Misery Index 2:05:27 – 2:15:32-  POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 17:12 – Eagles/Commanders Thursday night, Colts/Jets getting flexed out of SNF means there are some big games in Week 11, have we “lost the plot” on Anthony Richardson, rather be the Colts or Bears right now, Gus Bradley on Kenny Moore's comments, Spencer Schrader returns this weekend 17:13 – 35:12 – Nate Atkins of the IndyStar joins us and discusses his undefeated Cavaliers, bigger issue: Kenny Moore's comments or quarterback situation?, what has surprised him the most the last couple of weeks, will the Colts start Anthony Richardson again this season 35:13 – 45:22 - , we play I GOTTA KNOW: best-case scenario for the Colts if they stay the course with Flacco, dream destination, interest in Tyson/Paul 45:23 – 49:03 - A positive vibes only Colts segment 49:04 – 1:01:36 - Setting the Pace's Alex Golden joins us to discuss his upcoming parenthood, the Pacers as they get ready for the Magic tonight, where is he most worried about depth on the roster, Bennedict Mathurin's start to the season, undermanned at times, the NBA CupSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 12:58 – Andy played hoops last night, college football playoff rankings from last night, IU lands at No. 5, Big Ten love, Caitlin Clark playing in a Pro-Am today in Florida 12:59 – 21:59 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 22:00 – 40:53 – Eagles/Commanders Thursday night, Colts/Jets getting flexed out of SNF means there are some big games in Week 11, have we “lost the plot” on Anthony Richardson, rather be the Colts or Bears right now, Gus Bradley on Kenny Moore's comments, Spencer Schrader returns this weekend 40:54 – 1:06:51 – Nate Atkins of the IndyStar joins us and discusses his undefeated Cavaliers, bigger issue: Kenny Moore's comments or quarterback situation?, what has surprised him the most the last couple of weeks, will the Colts start Anthony Richardson again this season, Laiatu Latu/AD Mitchell rookie seasons, college football playoff rankings were once again very good for Indiana, Morning Checkdown 1:06:52 – 1:17:21 – Joe Flacco optimism?, Pacers/Magic tonight, Myles Turner's minutes, we play I GOTTA KNOW: best-case scenario for the Colts if they stay the course with Flacco, dream destination, interest in Tyson/Paul 1:17:22 – 1:25:53– A positive vibes only Colts segment 1:25:54 – 1:55:17 – Setting the Pace's Alex Golden joins us to discuss his upcoming parenthood, the Pacers as they get ready for the Magic tonight, where is he most worried about depth on the roster, Bennedict Mathurin's start to the season, undermanned at times, the NBA Cup, FanDuel Sports Network's rumored per game plan, Kevin goes negative on the Colts, IU/CFB playoff ranking thoughts, Morning Checkdown 1:55:18 – 2:04:06– National Signing Day, Andy's Misery Index 2:04:07 – 2:14:11 -  POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 16:26 – IU is #8 on the college football playoff rankings, Colts stand pat at the NFL trade deadline 16:27 – 22:44 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 22:45 – 43:04 – What would it take for the Colts to make another QB change?, IU lands at 8 on the CFP rankings, Mike Woodson and crew open their season tonight against SIU Edwardsville, Colts/Bills 43:05 – 1:08:47 – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us and discusses what a trade package for Anthony Richardson would have even looked like if they wanted to move him, Anthony Richardson/Joe Flacco, what does AR need to do to get his job back?, why does Shane Steichen keep saying “right now” when he talks about Flacco and the starting job, Ryan Kelly's future, what's the best thing the Colts do offensively, Morning Checkdown 1:08:47 – 1:18:24 – Colts in-house free agents, the Colts TE group, we play I GOTTA KNOW 1:18:25 – 1:28:34 – Bills Mafia coming to town, Josh Allen's risk/reward, Andy has a Dad Dilemma, CFP rankings 1:28:35 – 1:54:00 – Tony East joins us and discusses his Vikings getting the win over the Colts, Obi Toppin/Myles Turner, Bennedict Mathurin/Ben Sheppard, Notre Dame's season opener, Morning Checkdown 1:54:01 – 2:08:16 – IndyStar's Zach Ostermann joins us and discusses where his numbers for football are ranking with his basketball stories, IU landing at No. 8 on the CFP rankings, Curt Cignetti's impact, Mike Woodson's fourth year starts tonight, IU basketball season projections 2:08:17 – 2:15:00 – POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 13:15 – The Pacers played their first preseason game last night, Jets fire Robert Saleh, Hurricane Milton and Florida, notes from the Pacers game 13:16 – 20:09 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 20:10 – 44:11 – Gus Bradley says the defense needs to play tighter coverage going forward, how critical is Sunday's game for Gus Bradley's defense, James Wiseman and the Pacers preseason opener 44:12 – 1:08:18– ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us and weighs in on his home state of Florida and Hurricane Milton, the most disappointing part of the Colts to this point in his eyes, is Gus Bradley's defensive philosophy the same as Chris Ballard's?, gut feels on Anthony Richardson and Jonathan Taylor, is Joe Flacco “too good” of a backup QB, Alec Pierce and what he brings to the Colts, Morning Checkdown 1:08:19 – 1:18:07 – Anthony Richardson's status this week for the Titans game, Will Carroll's note about AR's oblique injury from last week, frustrations mounting with his availability?, does the talk of him being injury prone get AR fired up? 1:18:08 – 1:28:53 – Colts “legend” Colt Anderson, who was part of the infamous fake punt, is on the Titans coaching staff, Bill Belichick says the Colts piped in crowd noise at the RCA Dome and Jim Irsay responds, would Belichick take the Jets job, Robert Saleh and his job opportunities into next season, 1:28:54 – 1:56:27 – Scott Agness of Fieldhouse Files joins us to discuss the Pacers preseason opener, Isiah Jackson/James Wiseman roles this season, what would be considered solid defensive improvement?, Tyrese Haliburton's Puma shoe deal, Fever re-introduce Kelly Krauskopf, Fever off-season priorities, Colts secondary going forward, Andy proposes a fake trade involving Mo Alie Cox and a Raiders running back, Morning Checkdown 1:56:28 – 2:07:14 – The college football slate this weekend, we play I GOTTA KNOW: a season prediction do-over for the Colts season 2:07:15 – 2:18:04 -  POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 20:09 – Colts turn the page to the Bears, Shane Steichen's lack of an answer for Jonathan Taylor's usage against the Packers, what was the logic of Jonathan Taylor being “benched”, a wild finish to last night's Falcons/Eagles game 20:10 – 27:15 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 27:16 – 41:03 – Shane Steichen's answers about why Jonathan Taylor did not see any playing time in the 4th quarter, the 3rd and 1 call, the “wanting to get Trey Sermon reps” excuse 41:04 – 1:13:21 – Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle joins us to discuss how he spent his summer vacation, when he mentally turns the page to the next season, roster construction, Tyrese Haliburton's Olympic experience, Jarace Walker's summer league and how he sees him being utilized in-season, where Bennedict Mathurin is in development and how he can improve, his thoughts on the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark, the best thing he did this off-season, Morning Checkdown 1:13:22 – 1:26:45 – Rick Venturi's comments on Colts Roundtable Live last night: calls the Colts defense awful 1:26:46 -1:29:32 – IU alum Joe Buck brags about the Hoosiers win over UCLA (and alum Troy Aikman) 1:29:33 – 1:58:25 – ESPN NFL analyst Mike Tannenbaum, who was on the national radio call for Colts-Packers, joins us and discusses what he saw from the Colts, how is Gus Bradley's scheme viewed nationally, his thoughts on Jonathan Taylor not being out there on the critical 3rd and 1 call, evaluating Anthony Richardson, Bryce Young's future, most surprising 0-2 team, Texans/Vikings this weekend and what he's looking forward to, Andy debuts his misery index, Morning Checkdown 1:58:26 – 2:11:16 – Shane Steichen says Trey Sermon was used over Jonathan Taylor to get reps, we play I GOTTA KNOW 2:11:17 – 2:15:00 -  IU/Purdue basketball, Jason Kelce overexposure is already occurring two weeks into the NFL seasonSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 23:23 – The 49ers manhandle Aaron Rodgers and the Jets last night, Malik Willis will start for the Packers in all likelihood, Kevin doesn't understand why Juju Brents' interception didn't count on Sunday, Lambeau Field experience, Notre Dame/Purdue 23:24 – 30:00 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 30:01 – 42:42 – Anthony Richardson's performance on Sunday and how to evaluate him going forward 42:43 – 1:16:47 – IndyStar Colts reporter Joel A. Erickson joins us and talks about his evening with Frank Reich last night, his biggest takeaways (both good and bad) from Sunday's Colts game, his thoughts on AR's bomb to Alec Pierce, concerns for the defense?, Laiatu Latu's debut, Kevin asks why Juju Brents' interception didn't count, Joel still doesn't understand what a catch is, Morning Checkdown, RIP James Earl Jones 1:16:48 – 1:28:29 – Notre Dame/Purdue this weekend, Malik Willis likely starting the Colts, the upcoming stretch for the Colts, we play I GOTTA KNOW 1:28:30 – 1:59:40 – Purdue hosting Notre Dame this weekend, Ryan Walters says this game has been circled on his schedule for a while now, is Purdue/Notre Dame a marquee matchup?, Riley Leonard, NIL in Big Ten, Andy asks about Shane Steichen's in-game strategy, Morning Checkdown 1:59:41 – 2:14:28 – ESPN's Kalyn Kahler joins us to discuss her podcast “Spiraled” about the controversial Straight Way Ministry involving former NFL players, including Robert Mathis, the background of the “church”, some of the NFL players involved, the David Muir situation, her biggest takeaways from Week 1 2:14:29 – 2:15:41 – Final thoughtsSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 23:27 – The 49ers manhandle Aaron Rodgers and the Jets last night, Malik Willis will start for the Packers in all likelihood, Kevin doesn't understand why Juju Brents' interception didn't count on Sunday, Lambeau Field experience, Notre Dame/Purdue 23:28 – 44:04 - IndyStar Colts reporter Joel A. Erickson joins us and talks about his evening with Frank Reich last night, his biggest takeaways (both good and bad) from Sunday's Colts game, his thoughts on AR's bomb to Alec Pierce, concerns for the defense?, Laiatu Latu's debut, Kevin asks why Juju Brents' interception didn't count, Joel still doesn't understand what a catch is 44:05 – 53:20 – We play I GOTTA KNOW 53:21 – 1:08:04 - ESPN's Kalyn Kahler joins us to discuss her podcast “Spiraled” about the controversial Straight Way Ministry involving former NFL players, including Robert Mathis, the background of the “church”, some of the NFL players involved, the David Muir situation, her biggest takeaways from Week 1Support the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 21:55 – James Boyd is in for Andy the next three days, the Colts trim their roster down to 53, Jelani Woods will miss his second straight season, RB Evan Hull cut by Colts with Colts rolling with three, Colts practice schedule, Sampson Ebukam timeline for a potential return, the tough luck of Jelani Woods, Fever/Sun tonight, Kevin and Marc watched the Connor Stalions documentary last night 21:56 – 29:26 – MORNING CHECKDOWN 29:27 – 47:19 – RB Dalvin Cook rumored to be visiting with the Cowboys and Colts(?!?), Jelani Woods out for the season with a toe injury and we recall our conversation with him earlier in training camp about his health and missing last season, Kevin's checkboxes for the Colts secondary 47:20 – 1:22:21  – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us and discusses what he thinks we'll hear from Chris Ballard today, the Colts 53-man roster and the concerns in the secondary, where could waiver claims come from and what positions need to be addressed, Dalvin Cook rumors, Jonathan Taylor and potentially wearing the Guardian cap in-season, Jelani Woods out for the season again and his future, Fever/Sun tonight at Gainbridge, Morning Checkdown 1:22:22 – 1:32:40 – We give away a fantasy team in our show league, the Kansas City Chiefs have an insane amount of Indiana ties on their roster, the Bally Sports app sucks 1:32:41 – 1:35:08 – Chief Keef, Notre Dame's version of Hard Knocks, head coach most likely to be fired first odds 1:35:09 – 2:02:23  Biggest surprises on the Colts cut list: James says Evan Hull was his biggest surprise, Sam Ehlinger stays, Dalvin Cook rumors, we play I GOTTA KNOW, Morning Checkdown 2:02:24 – 2:17:52 – IndyStar Purdue reporter Nathan Baird joins us to preview the Boilermakers season, his return to the Purdue beat, thoughts on Purdue being picked last in the Big Ten, biggest strength and weakness on the team, the Georgia transfers, the difficulty of the schedule, success for Ryan Walters not including wins and losses, Matt Painter and Purdue basketball expectations 2:17:53 – 2:23:47 -  POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 15:22 – Colts safety position battles, Anthony Richardson's rough day against the Bengals, tight end room with the Jelani Woods injury, Kevin's Top 10 Colts questions 15:23 – 31:03- ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us to recap joint practices with the Cincinnati Bengals, the sights and sounds of yesterday's practice, the loss of Jelani Woods and what it means for the tight end room, what position is going to have the toughest cut, concern over Juju Brents' injury?, Irsay's “blue chip GM” comments on Ballard 31:04 – 47:01 – IndyStar high school sports reporter Kyle Neddenriep joins us and recalls how long he's been covering high school sports, the hardest prediction he had to make in his end of season football picks, the big games in Week 1, Copper Kettle game, high school NIL deals? 47:02 – 57:34 – Indiana Fever GM Lin Dunn joins us and gives us the latest book update, the 2-0 start to the Fever's return from the Olympic break, Lexie Hull's big game, how she played as a player, Kelsey Mitchell, Indy hosting the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game, the interaction between Christie Sides and Seattle head coach 57:35 – 1:09:06 - We dust off I GOTTA KNOW!Support the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 – 20:37 – It's chilly outside this morning, Colts/Bengals practice reports: the Colts offense struggles mightily and the Bengals were chirping quite a bit, Jelani Woods injured and out awhile, Andy thinks the Bengals are always going to be the Bengals 20:38 – 28:35 – Morning Checkdown 28:36 – 43:57 – Colts safety position battles, Anthony Richardson's rough day against the Bengals, tight end room with the Jelani Woods injury, Kevin's Top 10 Colts questions 43:58 – 1:11:59 – ESPN Colts reporter Stephen Holder joins us to recap joint practices with the Cincinnati Bengals, the sights and sounds of yesterday's practice, the loss of Jelani Woods and what it means for the tight end room, what position is going to have the toughest cut, concern over Juju Brents' injury?, Irsay's “blue chip GM” comments on Ballard, Morning Checkdown 1:12:00 – 1:30:40 – IndyStar high school sports reporter Kyle Neddenriep joins us and recalls how long he's been covering high school sports, the hardest prediction he had to make in his end of season football picks, the big games in Week 1, Copper Kettle game, high school NIL deals?, Abercrombie & Fitch 1:30:41 – 1:33:45 – Fever ratings out of the Olympic break 1:33:46 – 2:02:48  – Indiana Fever GM Lin Dunn joins us and gives us the latest book update, the 2-0 start to the Fever's return from the Olympic break, Lexie Hull's big game, how she played as a player, Kelsey Mitchell, Indy hosting the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game, the interaction between Christie Sides and Seattle head coach, what do you want to see from the Colts in tomorrow's preseason finale?, Jelani Woods injury, Morning Checkdown 2:02:49 – 2:15:31 – We dust off I GOTTA KNOW! 2:15:32 – 2:20:36 – POP QUIZSupport the show: https://1075thefan.com/the-wake-up-call-1075-the-fan/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

And welcoming Bruna Strait and Elisa Amaral to the Flash Forward Presents label.Discover 'I Gotta Know': https://bit.ly/igottaknowTRACKLIST /// Scroll Down MAJOR K SOCIALS, MUSIC & OTHER PODCAST Spotify /// https://spoti.fi/3AyvvJY Facebook /// http://facebook.com/officialmajork Instagram /// http://instagram.com/officialmajork Twitter /// http://twitter.com/officialmajork Back To The Clubs podcast /// http://backtotheclubs.buzzsprout.comFLASH FORWARD PRESENTS LABEL Spotify /// https://spoti.fi/31LUICi YouTube /// https://youtube.flashforwardpresents.com/ Mixcloud /// https://www.mixcloud.com/flashforwardpresents/ Merch /// http://ffp.flashinghotshop.com/  /// TRACKLIST ///I Gotta Know (Original Mix) - Bruna Strait & Elisa AmaralLike A Freak (Extended Mix) - MAKONEDon't Look Back (Club Mix) - Castaman & Luca Vanelli & Mario PercaliJomolungma - INTAKIAll For One - PACCISister Dex - Chez de MiloRaining Day (Original Mix) - DJ Da HouseShe Tingles (Original Mix) - major KStrahlemann - Music P & Marque AurelTribal (Radio Edit) - Jeremie HerremanOnly Me (Original Mix) - Jaqk & Tali FreaksFeel It (Original Mix) - AnAmStyleOh Baby (Don't You) (Original Mix) - RobinVPMinimum  (Original Mix) - Felix NovaYou Know What I Need (Shadow Child vs. Dave Spoon Superdub) - PNAU, Troye SivanWhat You Wanna Do (Original Mix) - Anton Bykov, OdeumMental Letal - Iñigo VontierTo The Ground (Original Mix) - FlashmobOctopus (original mix) - CellarAre You Ready for the Rave [Arviebeats Records] - Bram HeldensModule - INITTurn 12 (Original Mix) - Rick DynoSupport the show

In which we compare midcentury Bakersfield to Paris in the 1920s, discuss how to build a music scene, and hear a song sung by a truck. See everyrecordeverrecorded.com for more Bakersfield Sound resources! + George Rich, "Drivin' Away My Blues" + Nathan Judd, "The Answer to the Greenback Dollar" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Get Along Home, Cindy" + Captain Sacto theme song + Cousin Herb Henson, "You'all Come" + Patsy Cline, "Crazy" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Act Naturally" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Love's Gonna Live Here" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "My Heart Skips a Beat" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Together Again" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I Don't Care (Just As Long As You Love Me)" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + "Before You Go" + "Only You (Can Break My Heart)" + "Buckaroo" + "Waitin' In Your Welfare Line" + "Think of Me" + "Open Up Your Heart" + "Where Does the Good Times Go" + "Sam's Place" + "Your Tender Loving Care" + "It Takes People Like You (To Make People Like Me)" + "How Long Will My Baby Be Gone" + "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + The Carter Family, "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" + William McEwan, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Silver Leaf Quartette, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Carter Family, "Little Darlin' Pal of Mine" + The Carter Family, "Sad and Lonesome Day" + Lesley Riddle, "One Kind Favor" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Ain't It Amazing, Gracie" + The Ventures, "Walk, Don't Run" + The Lemon Pipers, "Green Tambourine" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "George's Playhouse" + "The Nightingale Song" + "I'll Make Sweet Love to You" + "Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown" + "New Step It Up and Go" + "Philadelphia Lawyer" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Sugar Moon" + Bud Hobbs, "Louisiana Swing" + Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, "Takin' Off" + Lefty Frizzell, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time" + Bill Woods and His Orange Blossom Playboys, "Have I Got a Chance With You?" + Jean Shepherd and Ferlin Husky, "A Dear John Letter" + Ferlin Husky, "Gone" + Merle Haggard, "Sing a Sad Song" + Merle Haggard, "Swinging Doors" + Bonnie Owens, "Lie a Little" + Merle Haggard, "Today I Started Loving You Again" + Mamie Smith "Crazy Blues" + Saul Ho'opi'i Trio, "Lehua" + Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #9" + DeFord Bailey, "John Henry" + Ruth Brown, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Rose Maddox, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Hank Penny, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Patsy Cline, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Ray Charles, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Antonio Aguilar, "El Ojo de Vidrio" + Woody Guthrie, "Billy the Kid" + Linda Ronstadt, "Palomita de Ojos Negros" + Ernest Tubb, "Thanks a Lot" + Jose Alfredo Jimenez, "El Rey" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Shimmy Shakin' Daddy" + Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, "Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age" + Luis Perez Meza, "Cuando Salgo a Los Campos" + Tommy Collins, "You Better Not Do That" + Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know" + Wanda Jackson, "Honey Bop" + Billy Mize, "Who Will Buy the Wine" + Red Simpson, "I'm a Truck" + The Derailers, "The Right Place" + Dale Watson, "I Lie When I Drink" + Dave Alvin, "Black Rose of Texas" + The Mavericks, "All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down" + The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Sin City" + JT Kanehira, "Country Music Makes Me So Happy" + Sturgill Simpson, "Life of Sin" + Albion Country Band, "Hanged I Shall Be" + A.L. Lloyd, "The Oxford Tragedy" + Shirley and Dolly Collins, "The Oxford Girl" + Phoebe Smith "Wexport Girl" + Harry Cox, "Ekefield Town" + Marybird McAllister, "The Bloody Miller" + Fields Ward, "The Lexington Murder" + Arthur and Gid Tanner, "The Knoxville Girl" + Fred Ross, "The Waco Girl" + The Outlaws, "Knoxville Girl" + Merle Haggard, "Kern River"

In this episode, the boys talk about the future of the podcast, JT's birthday, depression, and TtLee's new song "I Gotta Know."

This 75th Episode of the LTN Pod begins with me, your man Louie Tee still running Cover 3 vs. COVID-19, next we dive into potential Life Without Football which serves as an elongated Gem Droppin' Session, from their we transition to "I Gotta Know" before wrapping up the show with more Billy O tomfoolery. Episode Timestamp  (14:47) Droppin' A Gem On Ya Melon: "Can You Imagine Life Without Football" (35:02) I Gotta Know (1:04:04) Garbage Time Donate via PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/LouieTeeNetwork ​Cash App: $LouieTeeNetwork PayPal: paypal.me/LouieTeeNetwork   Affiliate Links: AMAZON: http://bit.ly/louieteenetwork                      TUBEBUDDY: www.tubebuddy.com/LouieTeeNetwork   Check out the website www.louieteenetwork.net   Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the show!   

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

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

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

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Gotta Know” by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 “Bacon Fat” by Andre Williams.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on “Okie From Muskogee”. Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too — the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda’s records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work. Errata I say Jackson’s career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson’s career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn’t cover anything prior to 1948. 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 talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we’ve dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she’s a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don’t have the space to explain in this podcast — if you’re interested in it, I’d recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on “Okie From Muskogee”, which I’ll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as “Okies”. But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass — and as we’ve seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie’s “Oakie Boogie”, for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The “Western” in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers’ hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn’t afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley’s records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won’t play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “George’s Playhouse Boogie”] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who’d moved to California, though in their case they’d travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They’re another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we’ve often discussed that’s a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence — the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be “a girl singer”, as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They’d sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda’s mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was “Chime Bells” by Elton Britt, “Country Music’s Yodelling Cowboy Crooner”: [Excerpt: Elton Britt, “Chime Bells”] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #6” for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #6”] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson’s music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson’s music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like “The Wild Side of Life”: [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, “The Wild Side of Life”] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she’d have to ask her mother, he laughed at first — he hadn’t realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist — there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson’s show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn’t very good when she guested with Thompson’s band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn’t take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he’d invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she’d not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson’s band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson’s band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn’t have a problem with the song itself, but she didn’t want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, “You Can’t Have My Love”] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn’t go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene — at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl — and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn’t going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda’s father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, “You’ve got to come see this”. The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis’ performance, saying “That boy’s got to get his show in order… He’s all over the stage messin’ around. And he’s got to stop slurrin’ his words, too.” Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured — on a bill which also included Bob Neal’s other big act of the time, Johnny Cash — he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging — she hadn’t had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called “Without Your Love”, which she’d written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, “Without Your Love”] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord’s only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn’t having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn’t know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called “I Gotta Know”, which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he’d liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field — Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But “I Gotta Know” was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] Now, I’m indebted to the website “Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave”, which I’ll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”, female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz”: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she’s doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons’ style parodying the old persons’ music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn’t quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line “I gotta know, I gotta know”, she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn’t fail, however, and “I Gotta Know” became Jackson’s biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts — rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn’t cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn’t realised what milk does to a singer’s throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn’t get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn’t the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!”] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she’d picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called “Don’a Wanna”, which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn’t have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson’s suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Don’a Wanna”] Much better was “Cool Love”, which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon’s daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Cool Love”] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis’ recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it’s fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since “I Wanna Know”, “Cool Love” did nothing on the charts — and indeed it wouldn’t be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she’d made years earlier, during the time period we’re talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true — even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that’s a story for a few weeks’ time…

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Gotta Know" by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 "Bacon Fat" by Andre Williams.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson's autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll's First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on "Okie From Muskogee". Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too -- the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda's records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson's important early work. Errata I say Jackson's career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson's career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn't cover anything prior to 1948. 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 talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we've dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she's a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don't have the space to explain in this podcast -- if you're interested in it, I'd recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on "Okie From Muskogee", which I'll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as "Okies". But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass -- and as we've seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie's "Oakie Boogie", for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The "Western" in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers' hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn't afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley's records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won't play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "George's Playhouse Boogie"] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who'd moved to California, though in their case they'd travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They're another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we've often discussed that's a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence -- the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be "a girl singer", as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They'd sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda's mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was "Chime Bells" by Elton Britt, "Country Music's Yodelling Cowboy Crooner": [Excerpt: Elton Britt, "Chime Bells"] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel #6" for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #6"] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson's music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson's music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like "The Wild Side of Life": [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, "The Wild Side of Life"] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she'd have to ask her mother, he laughed at first -- he hadn't realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist -- there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson's show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn't very good when she guested with Thompson's band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn't take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he'd invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she'd not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson's band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson's band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn't have a problem with the song itself, but she didn't want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, "You Can't Have My Love"] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn't go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene -- at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl -- and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn't going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda's father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, "You've got to come see this". The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis' performance, saying "That boy's got to get his show in order... He's all over the stage messin' around. And he's got to stop slurrin' his words, too." Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured -- on a bill which also included Bob Neal's other big act of the time, Johnny Cash -- he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging -- she hadn't had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called "Without Your Love", which she'd written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, "Without Your Love"] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord's only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn't having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn't know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called "I Gotta Know", which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he'd liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field -- Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But "I Gotta Know" was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know"] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know"] Now, I'm indebted to the website "Women in Rock & Roll's First Wave", which I'll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como's version of "Ko Ko Mo", female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr's "Rock and Roll Waltz": [Excerpt: Kay Starr, "Rock and Roll Waltz"] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she's doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons' style parodying the old persons' music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn't quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line "I gotta know, I gotta know", she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn't fail, however, and "I Gotta Know" became Jackson's biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts -- rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn't cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!" had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn't realised what milk does to a singer's throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn't get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn't the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!"] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she'd picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called "Don'a Wanna", which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn't have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson's suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Don'a Wanna"] Much better was "Cool Love", which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon's daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, "Cool Love"] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis' recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it's fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since "I Wanna Know", "Cool Love" did nothing on the charts -- and indeed it wouldn't be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she'd made years earlier, during the time period we're talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true -- even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that's a story for a few weeks' time...

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Gotta Know” by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. 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 “Bacon Fat” by Andre Williams.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson’s autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night. I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others. I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on “Okie From Muskogee”. Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too — the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episodes on Ralph Mooney and the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda’s records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well. And this compilation collects most of Jackson’s important early work. Errata I say Jackson’s career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson’s career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn’t cover anything prior to 1948. 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 talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we’ve dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them. Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she’s a towering figure in the genre. Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California. The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don’t have the space to explain in this podcast — if you’re interested in it, I’d recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on “Okie From Muskogee”, which I’ll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as “Okies”. But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass — and as we’ve seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music. The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie’s “Oakie Boogie”, for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western music. The “Western” in that music came from the wild west, but it also referred to the west coast and the migrants from the Dust Bowl. Of the two biggest names in Western Swing, one, Bob Wills, was from Texas but moved to Oklahoma, while the other, Spade Cooley, was from Oklahoma but moved to California. It was the Western Swing that was being made by Dust Bowl migrants in California in the 1940s that, when it made its way eastwards to Tennessee, transmuted itself into rockabilly. And that is the music that young Wanda Jackson was listening to when she was tiny. Her father, who she absolutely adored, was a fan of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and Tex Williams, as well as of Jimmie Rodgers’ hillbilly music and the blues. They lived in Greenfield, a town a few miles away from Bakersfield, where her father worked, and if any of you know anything at all about country music that will tell you a lot in itself. Bakersfield would become, in the 1950s, the place where musicians like Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart, most of them from Dust Bowl migrant families themselves, developed a tough form of honky-tonk country and western that was influenced by hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. Wanda Jackson spent the formative years of her childhood in the same musical and social environment as those musicians, and while she and her family moved back to Oklahoma a few years later, she had already been exposed to that style of music. At the time, when anyone went out to dance, it was to live music, and since her parents couldn’t afford babysitters, when they went out, as they did most weekends, they took Wanda with them, so between the ages of five and ten she seems to have seen almost every great Western band of the forties. Her first favourite as a kid was Spade Cooley, who was, along with Bob Wills, considered the greatest Western Swing bandleader of all. However, this podcast has a policy of not playing Cooley’s records (the balance of musical importance to outright evil is tipped too far in his case, and I advise you not to look for details as to why), so I won’t play an excerpt of him here, as I normally would. The other artist she loved though was a sibling group called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were a group that bridged the gap between Western Swing and the newer Bakersfield Sound: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “George’s Playhouse Boogie”] The Maddox Brothers and Rose were also poor migrants who’d moved to California, though in their case they’d travelled just *before* the inrush of Okies rather than at the tail end of it. They’re another of those groups who are often given the credit for having made the first rock and roll record, although as we’ve often discussed that’s a largely meaningless claim. They were, however, one of the big influences both on the Bakersfield Sound and on the music that became rockabilly. Wanda loved the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and in particular she loved their stage presence — the shiny costumes they wore, and the feistiness of Rose, in particular. She decided before she was even in school that she wanted to be “a girl singer”, as she put it, just like Rose Maddox. When she was six, her father bought her a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and started teaching her chords. He played a little guitar and fiddle, and the two of them would play together every night. They’d sit together and try to work out the chords for songs they knew from the radio or records, and Wanda’s mother would write down the chords in a notebook for them. She also taught herself to yodel, since that was something that all the country and western singers at the time would do, and had done ever since the days of Jimmie Rodgers in the late twenties and early thirties. The record she copied to learn to yodel was “Chime Bells” by Elton Britt, “Country Music’s Yodelling Cowboy Crooner”: [Excerpt: Elton Britt, “Chime Bells”] By the time she was in her early teens, she was regularly performing for her friends at parties, and her friends dared her to audition for a local radio show that played country music and had a local talent section. Her friends all went with her to the station, and she played Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #6” for the DJ who ran the show. [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #6”] To her shock, but not the shock of her friends, the DJ loved her sound, and gave her a regular spot on the local talent section of his show, which in turn led to her getting her own fifteen-minute radio show, in which she would sing popular country hits of the time period. One of the people whose songs she would perform on a regular basis was Hank Thompson. Thompson was a honky-tonk singer who performed a pared-down version of the Bob Wills style of Western Swing. Thompson’s music was using the same rhythms and instrumentation as Wills, but with much more focus on the vocals and the song than on instrumental solos. Thonpson’s music was one of several precursors to the music that became rockabilly, though he was most successful with mid-tempo ballads like “The Wild Side of Life”: [Excerpt: Hank Thompson, “The Wild Side of Life”] Thompson, like Wanda, lived in Oklahoma, and he happened to be driving one day and hear her show on the radio. He phoned her up at the station and asked her if she would come and perform with his band that Saturday night. When she told him she’d have to ask her mother, he laughed at first — he hadn’t realised she was only fourteen, because her voice made her sound so much older. At this time, it was normal for bands that toured to have multiple featured singers and to perform in a revue style, rather than to have a single lead vocalist — there were basically two types of tour that happened: package tours featuring multiple different acts doing their own things, and revues, where one main act would introduce several featured guests to join them on stage. Johnny Otis and James Brown, for example, both ran revue shows at various points, and Hank Thompson’s show seems also to have been in this style. Jackson had never played with a band before, and by her own account she wasn’t very good when she guested with Thompson’s band for the first time. But Thompson had faith in her. He couldn’t take her on the road, because she was still so young she had to go to school, but every time he played Oklahoma he’d invite her to do a few numbers with his band, mentoring her and teaching her on stage how to perform with other musicians. Thompson also invited Jackson to appear on his local TV show, which led to her getting a TV show of her own in the Oklahoma area, and she became part of a loose group of locally-popular musicians, including the future homophobic campaigner against human rights Anita Bryant. While she was still in high school, Thompson recorded demos of her singing and took them to his producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol Records. Nelson liked her voice, but when he found out she was under eighteen he decided to pass on recording her, just due to the legal complications and the fact that she’d not yet finished school. Instead, Jackson was signed to Decca Records, where she cut her first recordings with members of Thompson’s band. Her first single was a duet with another featured singer from Thompson’s band, Billy Gray. Thompson, who was running the session, basically forced Jackson to sing it against her objections. She didn’t have a problem with the song itself, but she didn’t want to make her name from a duet, rather than as a solo artist. [Excerpt: Billy Gray and Wanda Jackson, “You Can’t Have My Love”] She might not have been happy with the recording at first, but she was feeling better about it by the time she started her senior year in High School with a top ten country single. Her followups were less successful, and she became unhappy with the way her career was going. In particular she was horrified when she first played the Grand Ole Opry. She was told she couldn’t go onstage in the dress she was wearing, because her shoulders were uncovered and that was obscene — at this time, Jackson was basically the only country singer in the business who was trying to look glamorous rather than like a farmgirl — and then, when she did get on stage, wearing a jacket, she was mocked by a couple of the comedy acts, who stood behind her making fun of her throughout her entire set. Clearly the country establishment wasn’t going to get along with her at all. But then she left school, and became a full-time musician, and she made a decision which would have an enormous effect on her. Her father was her manager, but if she was going to get more gigs and perform as a solo artist rather than just doing the occasional show with Hank Thompson, she needed a booking agent, and neither she nor her father had an idea how to get one. So they did what seemed like the most obvious thing to them, and bought a copy of Billboard and started looking through the ads. They eventually found an ad from a booking agent named Bob Neal, in Memphis, and phoned him up, explaining that Wanda was a recording artist for Decca records. Neal had heard her records, which had been locally popular in Memphis, and was particularly looking for a girl singer to fill out the bill on a tour he was promoting with a new young singer he managed, named Elvis Presley. Backstage after her support slot on the first show of the tour, she and her father heard a terrible screaming coming from the auditorium. They thought at first that there must have been a fire, and Wanda’s father went out to investigate, telling her not to come with him. He came back a minute later telling her, “You’ve got to come see this”. The screaming was, of course, at Elvis, and immediately Wanda knew that he was not any ordinary country singer. The two of them started dating, and Elvis even gave Wanda his ring, which is still in her possession, and while they eventually drifted apart, he had a profound influence on her. Her father was not impressed with Elvis’ performance, saying “That boy’s got to get his show in order… He’s all over the stage messin’ around. And he’s got to stop slurrin’ his words, too.” Wanda, on the other hand, was incredibly impressed with him, and as the two of them toured — on a bill which also included Bob Neal’s other big act of the time, Johnny Cash — he would teach her how to be more of a rock and roller like him. In particular, he taught her to strum the acoustic guitar with a single strum, rather than to hit each string individually, which was the style of country players at the time. Meanwhile, her recording career was flagging — she hadn’t had another hit with any of her solo recordings, and she was starting to wonder if Decca was the right place for her. She did, though, have a hit as a songwriter, with a song called “Without Your Love”, which she’d written for Bobby Lord, a singer who appeared with her on the radio show Ozark Jubilee. [Excerpt: Bobby Lord, “Without Your Love”] That song had gone to the top ten in the country charts, and turned out to be Lord’s only hit single. But while she could come up with a hit for him, she wasn’t having hits herself, and she decided that she wanted to leave Decca. Her contract was up, and while they did have the option to extend it for another year and were initially interested in exercising the option, Decca agreed to let her go. Meanwhile, Wanda was also thinking about what kind of music she wanted to make in the future. Elvis had convinced her that she should move into rockabilly, but she didn’t know how to do it. She talked about this to Thelma Blackmon, the mother of one of her schoolfriends, who had written a couple of songs for her previously, and Blackmon came back with a song called “I Gotta Know”, which Jackson decided would be perfect to restart her career. At this point Hank Thompson went to Ken Nelson, and told him that that underage singer he’d liked was no longer underage, and would he be interested in signing her? He definitely was interested, and he took her into the Capitol tower to record with a group of session musicians who he employed for as many of his West Coast sessions as possible, and who were at that point just beginning to create what later became the Bakersfield Sound. The musicians on that session were some of the best in the country music field — Jelly Sanders on fiddle, Joe Maphis on guitar, and the legendary Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, and they were perfect for recording what would become a big country hit. But “I Gotta Know” was both country and rock and roll. While the choruses are definitely country: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] the verses are firmly in the rock and roll genre: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know”] Now, I’m indebted to the website “Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave”, which I’ll link in the shownotes, for this observation, but this kind of genre-mixing was very common particularly with women, and particularly with women who had previously had careers outside rock and roll and were trying to transition into it. While male performers in that situation would generally jump in head first and come up with an embarrassment like Perry Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo”, female performers would do something rather different. They would, in fact, tend to do what Jackson did here, and combine the two genres, either by having a verse in one style and a chorus in the other, as Wanda does, or in other ways, as in for example Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz”: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] Starr is a particularly good example here, because she’s doing what a lot of female performers were doing at the time, which is trying to lace the recording with enough irony and humour that it could be taken as either a record in the young persons’ style parodying the old persons’ music, or a record in the older style mocking the new styles. By sitting on the fence in this way and being ambiguous enough, the established stars could back down if this rock and roll music turned out to be just another temporary fad. Jackson isn’t quite doing that, but with her Elvis-style hiccups on the line “I gotta know, I gotta know”, she comes very close to parody, in a way that could easily be written off if the experiment had failed. The experiment didn’t fail, however, and “I Gotta Know” became Jackson’s biggest hit of the fifties, making its way to number fifteen on the country charts — rather oddly, given that she was clearly repositioning herself for the rockabilly market, it seemed to sell almost solely to the country market, and didn’t cross over the way that Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent did. Her next single could have been the one that cemented her reputation as the greatest female rockabilly star of all, had it not been for one simple mistake. The song “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!” had been a favourite in her stage act for years, and she would let out a tremendous growl on the title line when she got to it, which would always get audiences worked up. Unfortunately, she horrified Ken Nelson in the studio by taking a big drink of milk while all the session musicians were on a coffee break. She hadn’t realised what milk does to a singer’s throat, and when they came to record the song she couldn’t get her voice to do the growl that had always worked on stage. The result was still a good record, but it wasn’t the massive success it would otherwise have been: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad!”] After that failed, Ken Nelson floundered around for quite a while trying to find something else that could work for Jackson. She kept cutting rockabilly tracks, but they never quite had the power of her stage performances, and meanwhile Nelson was making mistakes in what material he brought in, just as he was doing at the same time with Gene Vincent. Just like with Vincent, whenever Wanda brought in her own material, or material she’d picked to cover by other people, it worked fine, but when Nelson brought in something it would go down like a lead balloon. Probably the worst example was a terrible attempt to capitalise on the current calypso craze, a song called “Don’a Wanna”, which was written by Boudleaux Bryant, one of the great songwriters of the fifties, but which wouldn’t have been his best effort even before it was given a racist accent at Nelson’s suggestion (and which Jackson cringed at doing even at the time, let alone sixty years later): [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Don’a Wanna”] Much better was “Cool Love”, which Jackson co-wrote herself, with her friend Vicki Countryman, Thelma Blackmon’s daughter: [Excerpt: Wanda Jackson, “Cool Love”] That one is possibly too closely modelled after Elvis’ recent hits, right down to the backing vocals, but it features a great Buck Owens guitar solo, it’s fun, and Jackson is clearly engaged with the material. But just like all the other records since “I Wanna Know”, “Cool Love” did nothing on the charts — and indeed it wouldn’t be until 1960 that Jackson would reach the charts again in the USA. But when she did, it would be with recordings she’d made years earlier, during the time period we’re talking about now. And before she did, she would have her biggest success of all, and become the first rock and roll star about whom the cliche really was true — even though she was having no success in her home country, she was big in Japan. But that’s a story for a few weeks’ time…

The BIG 5-0 Episode of the LTN Pod starts with a Gem Droppin' Session hypothetical: What if the NFL removed the franchise tag? Then we switch gears as "I Gotta Know" on several topics such as GMs losing power to Head Coaches?, What happened to June 1st on the NFL Calendar, Tyreek Hill and more. Finally, we wrap up the episode with GARBAGE TIME (Jets find a GM, Texans fire theirs, Alex Smith Wants to Play Football Again, Peyton Manning finally gives a reason why he won't do MNF, Zeke Elliott meets with the league office just to name a few topics discussed). Episode Timestamp (8:15) Droppin' A Gem On Ya Melon: Hypothetical: What if the NFL Did Away with the Franchise Tag? (23:25) I Gotta Know (1:13:46) GARBAGE TIME    Donate via PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/LouieTeeNetwork ​ Affiliate Links: AMAZON: http://bit.ly/louieteenetwork                      TUBEBUDDY: www.tubebuddy.com/LouieTeeNetwork   Check out the website www.louieteenetwork.net   Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the show!   

Justin & Gurdip look to the silver screen for some of their favorite or most interesting sightings of Elvis songs in major feature films. Then, Gurdip says "I Gotta Know" everything about a 1960 B-side and Justin picks a movie title tune Gurdip would never have guessed in a million years, then follows up with a fascinating "what if" scenario highlighting a poppy alternate song that Elvis could have cut. Featured Songs of the Week: Gurdip: I Gotta Know Justin: Clambake

LTN Pod Episode 49 starts with a Gem Droppin' Session regarding league news such as the alteration of the new instant replay rule and progress on a new CBA, then we switch gears as "I Gotta Know" on several topics such as Baker Mayfield and his dismissive comments towards teammate Duke Johnson and the new trend of players avoiding Mandatory Minis looking for new deals. Finally, we wrap up the episode with GARBAGE TIME (Wentz New Deal, Joe Staley Extension, What's Up with Todd Gurley, Jets GM Search and more). Episode Timestamp (6:22) Droppin' A Gem On Ya Melon: League News Update (23:16) I Gotta Know (50:03) GARBAGE TIME    Donate via PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/LouieTeeNetwork ​ Affiliate Links: AMAZON: http://bit.ly/louieteenetwork                      TUBEBUDDY: www.tubebuddy.com/LouieTeeNetwork   Check out the website www.louieteenetwork.net   Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the show!   

Show 212, Big Band Blues! Intro Song James Boogaloo Bolden Blues Band, “Big Boss Man”, No News, Jus' The Blues, 2013 Real Records               First Set Otis Grand, “In Your Backyard”, Blues ‘65,Main Gate Records Roomful of Blues, “Just Keep On Rockin'”, 45 Live, Alligator Records Bobby “Blue” Bland, “Time Out”, Brothers of Soul,  R&B Records Second Set   B.B. King, “Every Day I Have The Blues”, How Blue Can You Get, Retro Music, Glad to hear BB is well! Mark May Band, “I Gotta Know”, Release My Soul, Bad Fork Records Mighty Lester, “Swingin' at Lesters”, We Are Mighty Lester, Mighty Lester Productions Third Set  FROM THE VINYL VAULT!!! Bobby Rush, “Two Eyes Full of Tears'”, Upstairs at United, Vol. 11, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, “Okie Dokie Stomp”, Real Life, Rounder Records, 1986 Earl King & Roomful of Blues, “Mardi Gras In The City”, Glazed, 1986 Black Top Records Fourth Set                 Eddie Shaw & The 757 AllStars, “Sack Full of Blues”, Still Hiding High Big James and the Chicago Playboys, “The Blues Will Never Die”, The Big Payback, Blind Pig Records Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker, “Lonesome Train”, Bosses of the Blues- Vol. 1, BMG Music Thanks as always to Michael Allen Engstrom for allowing me to use his fantastic artwork on my web site and social media. Check him out at Crossroadsbluesgallery.com

Singer songwriter Paul Evans who wrote Roses are Red for Bobby Vinton and I Gotta Know for Elvis as well as hits he sang Like & Little Girls in the Backseat is Lee's guest for this 90 minute special.