Podcasts about if i didn

Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood, "If I Didn't Love You" [TRASH OR FIRE?] [REVIEW!] TAGS: jason aldean and carrie underwood, jason aldean heaven, jason aldean got what i got, jason aldean songs, jason aldean new song, jason aldean rearview town, jason aldean you make it easy, jason aldean fly over states, jason aldean amarillo sky, jason aldean asphalt cowboy, jason aldean album, jason aldean any ol barstool, jason aldean and bob seger, jason aldean acoustic, jason aldean and bryan adams, jason aldean blame it on you, jason aldean big green tractor, jason aldean burnin it down, jason aldean bob seger, jason aldean blame it on the whiskey, jason aldean black tears, jason aldean barstool, jason aldean blame it on you lyrics, jason aldean b, jason aldean carrie underwood, jason aldean cowboy lady,jason aldean country girl,jason aldean concert,jason aldean crazy town,jason aldean cowboy killer,jason aldean camouflage hat,jason aldean cover,jason aldean dirt road anthem,jason aldean drowns the whiskey,jason aldean dirt road,jason aldean don't give up on me,jason aldean do you wish it was me,jason aldean don't you wanna stay,jason aldean dirt we were raised on,jason aldean dirt road anthem lyrics,jason aldean easy,jason aldean even if i wanted to,jason aldean even if i wanted to lyrics,jason aldean eric church,jason aldean early songs,jason aldean ellen,jason aldean eric church luke bryan,jason aldean easy lyrics,kelly clarkson e jason aldean,bryan adams e jason aldean,jason aldean full album,jason aldean fast,jason aldean first album,jason aldean ft carrie underwood,jason aldean first time again,jason aldean fly over states live,jason aldean full throttle,jason aldean girl like you,jason aldean greatest hits,jason aldean got what i got lyrics,jason aldean gonna know we were here,jason aldean green tractor,jason aldean girl like you lyrics,jason aldean got what i got live,jason aldean g,jason aldean hicktown,jason aldean hits,jason aldean heaven lyrics,jason aldean heaven cover,jason aldean high noon neon,jason aldean hicktown live,jason aldean highway,jason aldean if i didn't love you,jason aldean i got what i got,jason aldean i don't drink anymore,jason aldean interview,jason aldean i ain't ready to quit,jason aldean if my truck could talk,jason aldean if i didn't love you lyrics,jason aldean i'll wait for you,i don't jason aldean,i do jason aldean,jason aldean johnny cash,jason aldean just getting started,jason aldean joe diffie,jason aldean jimmy kimmel,jason aldean just passing through,jason aldean just a man,jason aldean just getting warmed up,jason aldean jason aldean,jason aldean karaoke,jason aldean kelly clarkson,jason aldean keep the girl,jason aldean know we were here,jason aldean keeping it small town,jason aldean kelly clarkson don't you want to stay,jason aldean king ranch,jason aldean karaoke songs,jason aldean live,jason aldean lyrics,jason aldean lights come on,jason aldean love me or don't,jason aldean las vegas,jason aldean laughed until we cried,jason aldean love songs,jason aldean las vegas shooting,jason aldean l,jason aldean my kinda party,jason aldean mix,jason aldean music,jason aldean make it easy,jason aldean my kinda party album,jason aldean music videos,jason aldean midnight train,jason aldean my highway,jason aldean 3 a.m,jason aldean night train,jason aldean new,jason aldean new album,jason aldean night train album,jason aldean never met a girl like you,jason aldean night train lyrics,jason aldean no,jason n aldean,jason aldean guns n roses,jason aldean old songs,jason aldean old boots new dirt,jason aldean only way i know,jason aldean on my highway,jason aldean old boots new dirt full album,jason aldean once in your life,jason aldean over states,jason aldean on las vegas,jason aldean playlist,jason aldean party,jason aldean pretty cowboy lady,jason aldean playlist all songs,jason aldean passing through,jason aldean perfect for me,jason aldean prisoner of the highway,jason aldean performance,jason

It's Jason Aldean Day as we celebrate the release of his new single "If I Didn't Love You". It's a duet with Carrie Underwood, but that was never a guarantee. Check out the interview to hear how it happened, what his go-to at Chick Fil-A is, The waterslide and more.

Get ready for a scare this week as Ken and Gar review Pixar's 4th animated feature, Monsters, Inc. first released in 2001. The brother's unpack why Pete Docter's directorial debut is one of the most interesting and challenging animated films of its time. Featuring  a cover "If I Didn't Have You" from Monsters, Inc. by Magic by Design's resident singer, Nicole McDonagh. We hereby declare that we do not own the rights to this music/song(s). All rights belong to the owner. No copyright infringement intended.Follow Nicole @NicoleMcD_PR on Twitter and @n.mcdonagh on Instagram for more magical musical contentWatch along on Disney Plus and join the conversation on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MagicByDesignPodTwitter: @MagicDesignPodInstagram: @magicbydesignpod

Today's Best & your All Time Favorites From the US, Texas & Canada 1st for Weekly neo-traditonal & classic Country program Fred's Country 2021 w # 26 : Part 1: - Josh Turner, Your Man (Live in Kansas City, MO) - Your Man Deluxe - 2021/MCA - Casey Donahew, Queen For A Night - S – 2021/Almost Country - Ben McPeak, Fix You Up - Better Off – 2020/396 Entertainment - Bellamy Brothers feat John Anderson, No Country Music For Old Man - Bucket List – 2020/BBR Part 2: - Creed Fisher, People Like Me - S – 2021/JHM - Mike Ryan, Can Down - S – 2020/MRM - Chad Cooke Band, Señorita Sky - S – 2021/CCB - Jon Pardi, Tequila Little Time - Heartache Medication Deluxe - 2019/Capitol - Travis Tritt, Country Club - Country Club – 1990/Warner Part 3: - Thomas Rhett, Country Again - Country Again – 2021/Valory - Gord Bamford, Hag on the Jukebox - Diamonds in a Whiskey - 2021/Black Mountain Music & Media - Jake Bush, If You Ever Get Lonely - 7 - 2020/JBM - Sammy Sadler feat Larry Stewart, Bluest Eyes in Texas - 1989 - 2021/BFD Part 4: - Clay Walker, Texas to Tennessee - You Look Good EP – 2021/Show Dog - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - Meant to Be – 2021/MFM - Drew Baldridge, Stay At Home Dad - S - 2021/Pakota - Johnny Cash w Waylon Jennings, The Night Hank Williams Came to Town - Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town – 1987/Mercury

program Fred's Country 2021 w # 15 : since october 1983 Part 1: - The Grascals, feat Darryl Worley White Lightning - Country Calllic with a Bluegrass Spin - 211/Cracel Barrrel - Wynn Williams, F.M. 1885- Wynn Williams – 2020/WWM - Terry McBride, Callin' All Hearts- Rebels and Angels – 2020/MM - Brandi Behlen, Rodeo Man - Brandi Behlen – 2020/BBM - Cody Johnson feat Reba Mc Entire, Dear Rodeo - Ain' Nothin to it – 2019/CoJo-Warner Part 2: - Matt Mercado, Leaving Brownsville Tonight - S – 2020/MMM - Brian Callihan, Broke It Down - Brian Callihan – 2020/BCM - David Adam Byrnes, I Can Give You One - Neon Town – 2020/DABM - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2020/MFM - Tyler Booth, Palomino Princess - S – 2020/TBM Part 3: - Jaden Hamilton, Bad Spot - S – 2021/JHM - Hayden Haddock, Honky Tonk On - Red Dirt Texas – 2020/Hayden Haddock Music,LLC - David Adam Byrnes, Old School - Neon Town – 2020/DABM - James Dupré, City Of Single Girls - Home and Away – 2020/Fleur de Magnolia Music Part 4: - Darin Morris Band, Wrap You Up In Love - S – 2021/MCA - Mich Rossel feat Thrisa Yearwood, - Ran into to You - S - 2021/ - Casey Chesnutt, Even Texas Couldn't Hold Her - S – 2021/ - Casey Baker, When The Party's All Over - S – 2020/CSBM

From the US, Texas & Canada 1st for Weekly neo-traditonal & classic Country program Fred's Country 2021 w # 11 : since october 1983 Part 1: - Wynonna, Girls With Guitars - Tell Me Why - 1994/MCA-Curb - Jon Pardi, Shame - Numbers on the Jukebox – 2020/No Dinero - Kaleb McIntire, Plano Texas - In These Shadowns – 2012/KMM - JoshTurner, I'll Fly Away - Country State Of Mind – 2020/MCA Part 2: - Hayden Haddock, Honky Tonk On - Red Dirt Texas – 2020/Hayden Haddock Music,LLC - Dustin Sonnier Misssin' You, Mississippi - Between the Stones and Jones – 2020/DSM - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2020/MFM - Tyler Booth, Palomino Princess - S – 2020/TBM Part 3: - Jon Pardi, Tequila Little Time - Heartache Medication (Deluxe Version) – 2021/Capitol - Mo Pitney, Boy Gets The Girl - Ain't Lookin' Back – 2020/ - Eddie Rabbitt, Two Dollars In The Jukebox - Mountain Music – 1976/Elektra - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2021/MMM - Tyler Booth, Palomino Princess - S – 2020/JBM Part 4: - David Adam Byrnes, I Can Give You One - Neon Town – 2020/DABM - Jaden Hamilton, Bad Spot - S – 2021/JHM - Terry McBride, Callin' All Hearts - S – 2020/TMM - Brian Callihan, Broke It Down. - Brian Callihan – 2020/BCM

From the US, Texas & Canada 1st for Weekly neo-traditonal & classic Country program Fred's Country 2021 w # 10 : since october 1983 Part 1: - Brad Paisley, Sleepin' On The Foldout - Who Needs Pictures - 1999/Arista - Jon Pardi, Tequila Little Time - Heartache Medication (Deluxe Version) – 2021/Capitol - Triston Marez, One Day - S – 2020/TMM - Jaden Hamilton, Bad Spot - S – 2021/JHM - Matt Mercado, A Cowboy's Life - S – 2020/MMM Part 2: - Matt Castillo, Leaving Brownsville Tonight - S – 2021/MCM - Hayden Haddock, Honky Tonk On - Red Dirt Texas – 2020/Hayden Haddock Music,LLC - David Adam Byrnes, Old School - Neon Town – 2020/DABM - Clayton Shay, Signed, Another Man - S – 2021/CSM - James Dupré, City Of Single Girls - Home and Away – 2020/Fleur de Magnolia Music - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2021/MMM Part 3: - JoshTurner, Forever And Ever, Amen - Country State Of Mind – 2020/MCA - Mo Pitney, Boy Gets The Girl - Ain't Lookin' Back – 2020/ - Brooks & Dunn feat Tyler Booth, Lost and Found - Reboot – 2020/ - Wynn Williams, F.M. 1885 - Wynn Williams – 2020/WWM Part 4: - Cooper Wade, In The Middle of the Second Verse - I Ain't Playin' Around – 2018/CWM - Brandi Behlen, Gypsy - S – 2020/BBM - James Dupré, City Of Single Girls - Home and Away – 2020/Fleur de Magnolia Music - Curtis Grimes, Friends - S – 2021/CSM

From the US, Texas & Canada 1st for Weekly neo-traditonal & classic Country program Fred's Country 2021 w # 09 : since october 1983 Part 1: - Desert Rose Band feat Emmylou Harris, Price I Pay - A Dozen Roses - 1991/MCA-Curb - Matt Castillo, Leaving Brownsville Tonight - S – 2021/MCM - Terry McBride, Callin' All Hearts - S – 2020/TMM - Brian Callihan, Same Thing She Told Me - Brian Callihan – 2020/BCM - Dustin Sonnier, Missin' you, Mississippi - Between the Stones & Jones – 2019/DSE Part 2: - Hayden Haddock, Honky Tonk On - Red Dirt Texas – 2020/Hayden Haddock Music,LLC - David Adam Byrnes, Old School - Neon Town – 2020/DABM - James Dupré, City Of Single Girls - Home and Away – 2020/Fleur de Magnolia Music - Randall King, Hey Moon - Leana – 2020/WB - Gord Bamford, Postcards From Pasadena - Honkytonks And Heartaches – 2007/Royalty Part 3: - Josh Abbott Band, One More Two Step -The Highway Kind – 2020/Pretty Damn Tough - Tracy Millar, Loretta's Moonshine - I'm Not 29 No More – 2020 - Chad Cooke Band, Bringing Country Back - S – 2020/King Hall Music - Jaden Hamilton, Bad Spot - S – 2021/JHM Part 4: - Johnny Cash & Marty Stuart, I've Been Around - Forever Words – 2018/Legacy - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2021/MMM - Tyler Booth, Palomino Princess - S – 2020/JBM - Darrin Morris Band, I Will - S – 2020/DMB

Today's Best & your All Time Favorites From the US, Texas & Canada 1st for Weekly neo-traditonal & classic Country program Fred's Country 2021 w # 08 : since october 1983 Part 1: - Alan Jackson,Thank God For The Radio - Who I Am - 1994/Arista - Clay Walker, Need a Bar Sometimes - S – 2020/Show Dog LLC - Josh Abbott Band, Settle Me Down - The Highway Kind – 2020/Pretty Damn Tough - Josh Abbott Band, One More Two Step -The Highway Kind – 2020/Pretty Damn Tough - Randall King, Hey Moon - Leana – 2020/WB Part 2: - Max Flinn, If I Didn't Love You - S – 2021/MMM - Kaitlyn Kohler, Too Many Love Songs - S – 2021/KMG - Brooks & Dunn feat Reba McEntire, Cowgirls Don't Cry - #1s ... and Then Some – 2009/Arista - Matt Mercado, A Cowboy's Life - S – 2021/MMM Part 3: - Drew Fish Band feat Pam Tillis, Every Damn Time - Every Damn Time – 2019/Reel - Triston Marez, One Day - S – 2021 - Granger Smith, Buy A Boy A Baseball - Country Things – 2020/Wheelhouse - Buck Owens vs Neal McCoy vs Charley Pride, Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone - Curtis Grimes, Friend - S – 2021/CGM Part 4: - James Dupré, City Of Single Girls - Home and Away – 2020/Fleur de Magnolia Music - Hayden Haddock, Honky Tonk On - Red Dirt Texas – 2020/Hayden Haddock Music,LLC - Jake Blocker, Blue Night - I Keep Forgetting – 2020/JBM - Clayton Shay, Signed, Another Man - S – 2021/CSM

...(con toques de soul) como los The Redhill Valleys, de Canada, también en el asunto de la roots music. Anda que la banda canadiense de once miembros de Toronto, Canadá, Samantha Martin & Delta Sugar, se las trae con su combinación de blues, soul, gospel y rock y voces excepcionales. Y qué decir del rockero aussie David Schaak o los Great Peacock, buen rock de ahora mismico. Pero no olvidamos a los Tennesee Champagne ni a la potente Jessie Wagner a la que se le caen los zapatos (y a nosotros la mandíbula escuchándola). Finalizamos con los estupendos Reckless Kelly, que los teníamos olvidados, hombre ya! Y de bonus, los 49 Winchester, ¡qué vergüenza!⦁ Whiskeyways, Juanita's⦁ The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow, Rose On the Vine ⦁ The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow, Rock & Roll Deja Vu⦁ The Redhill Valleys, If I Didn't Know You ⦁ Samantha Martin & Delta Sugar, I've Got A Feeling⦁ David Schaak, Honey Pot⦁ David Schaak, Lost, Alone and Lonesome ⦁ Great Peacock, Strange Position⦁ Great Peacock, High Wind⦁ Tennessee Champagne, Wicked⦁ Tennessee Champagne, Shake It⦁ Jessie Wagner, Shoes Droppin⦁ Keith Richards, I Wanna Be Your Man⦁ Reckless Kelly, Fightin' For⦁ 49 Winchester, It's A Shame

Chapter 236 - "If I Didn't Have Material Ready, I'd Be Way More Under Stress" ...as read by Julian Rosen of Common SageThis week we welcome Julian Rosen, frontman for the band Common Sage. Julian gives an overview of his musical influences and his band evolution, plus writing, recording, and not releasing music.Grab some Common Sage tunes - https://commonsage.bandcamp.com/You can also check out Julian's old band Davey Crockett - https://davey-crockett.bandcamp.com/----------Chapter 236 Music:Common Sage - "Wraparound Background"Common Sage - "Oh, December"Common Sage - "Saw Daddy"Common Sage - "Wet Grass"---As The Story Grows links:​Help out at PatreonATSG WebsiteATSG Music and MerchJoin the Email ListATSG FacebookEmail: asthestorygrows@gmail.comYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNuP0_JUpT6DoIhhbGlwEYA?view_as=subscriber

Well, due to popular demand, the boys have compiled a long list of all the intro's from each episode from 2020."We hope you enjoy listening just as much as we enjoy playing them!" - Alex & CallumWant to contact the show? Email: motionspod@gmail.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/motionspod/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/motions_pod/02:45 "Cantina Band" - Star Wars: A New Hope03:14 "The Riders of Rohan" - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers03:49 "The Avengers" - Avengers Assemble 04:35 "Love Theme from the Godfather" - The Godfather05:10 "He's a Pirate" - Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl06:07 "I Wan'na Be Like You" - The Jungle Book06:54 "James Bond Theme" - James Bond08:17 "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" - Armageddon09:23 "Stuck in the Middle With You" - Reservoir Dogs10:18 "Over the Rainbow" - The Wizard of Oz11:21 "Mrs Robinson" - The Graduate12:03 "Theme From Jurassic Park" - Jurassic Park13:17 "My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from Titanic)" - Titanic14:34 "Forrest Gump Suite" - Forrest Gump15:34 "Remember Me" - Coco16:41 "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings" - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs17:58 "The Rains of Castamere" - Game of Thrones19:36 "Kiss the Girl" - The Little Mermaid20:25 "The Avengers (slow)" - Avengers Infinity War/Endgame21:22 "Spiderman Theme" - Spiderman21:43 "If I Didn't Have You" - Monsters Inc.22:42 "Game of Thrones Theme" - Game of Thrones24:02 "Sherlock Theme" - Sherlock24:50 "Bang Bang" - Kill Bill Vol. 125:19 "Twisted Nerve" - Kill Bill Vol. 126:03 "The Lonely Shepherd" - Kill Bill Vol. 128:28 "Hallelujah" - Shrek29:45 "I Need a Hero" - Shrek 230:56 "Flight" - Man of Steel31:57 "The Blue Wrath" - Shaun of the Dead32:58 "This Is My World" - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice34:01 "POSTERITY" Tenet34:47 "Romeo and Juliet" Hot Fuzz36:29 "Is She With You? (Wonder Woman Theme)" Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice37:14 "Happy Hour" - The Worlds End38:14 "Superman Theme" - Superman38:42 "Nemo Egg" - Finding Nemo39:57 "Africa" - Aquaman40:45 "My Shot" - Hamilton: An American Musical41:31 "Don't Stop Me Now" - Shazam!42:21 "Party in the U.S.A." - Pitch Perfect42:53 "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" - Birds of Prey43:40 "Journey to the Island" - Jurassic Park44:13 "Mess Around" - Planes, Trains & Automobiles45:04 "We Go Together" - Grease45:49 "White Christmas" - The Santa Clause47:14 "Somewhere in my Memory" - Home Alone47:57 "Auld Lang Syne" - Traditional See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Poor Taylor Swift. Yet again, she gets screwed by Scooter Braun as he sells her original masters AGAIN for $300 million. We also try to figure out what type of people are actually listening to BTS making them the biggest  band in the world, and how the NFL is also running into copyright music issues with the major record labels.MUSIC REVIEWS: "Who Am I" - Max Rogue "If I Didn't Love You" Frankie DaviesFRESH FINDS:ALBUMS:Live in Maui – Jimi HendrixGood News – Meagan Thee StallionFun – Garth Brooks My Brother's Keeper – Da Baby BE – BTS Copycat Killer' EP-Phoebe BridgersSINGLES:“Easy” - Mild Minds Remix, Tycho “You've Changed” – M Ward “Hurt” - Mumford & Sons Cover“Shark Tank” - Marty O'Reilly & The Old Soul Orchestra, Royal Jelly Jive“How Many Times?” – Joey Pecoraro.“Dreams” – Boyce Avenue Cover“Pain” – Ivy Club  “Where I'm From” – Lukas Graham, feat Wiz Khalifa “chinatown”, “45”- Bleachers (Jack Antonoff) “Hey Boy” – Sia “A Dreamer's Holiday” - Julien BakerNOTABLY BAD:“Purple Blood” – Smashing Pumpkins “Somos Leoes” – Sublime UNCUT SUGGESTIONS:“Come Together” – Urbandawn, Tyson Kelly “Down for the Fifth Time” – Flamingosis “Oogum Boogum Song” – Brenton Wood “One More Day” – The Slingers “Country Road – Live at Santa Barbra, CA” – Jack Johnson, Paula Fuga“Layla” – Derek and the DominosBOURBON REVIEW: Stagg JR 3.2 out of 5 stars

"...if I haven't made you look like a superhero, I've failed..." In epi 14 of season 2, Kitty and Kevin chat with award-winning photographer, Dustin Jack. Dustin has been a pro photographer for over 30 years- shooting everything from rock stars to the Batmobile to Elvis's jumpsuits to landscapes and portraits. Dustin has shot over 200,000 images of guitars for Fretted Americana and designed all of their promo materials. He also directed and produced their YouTube channel's "The Phil X Show". Dustin was named "Photoshop Guru" in 2013 and 2019 and has won multiple awards for his concert photos. You can read more about Dustin on his website- dustinjackphotography.comWe talk with Dustin about designing/shooting the promo shots for the Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard Stadium Tour (rescheduled for 2021?????), reminisce about the 80s, and Kitty shares the story of how she found Dustin via Nikki Sixx's Instagram page and how Dustin blackmailed her to have him on the show. Additionally, Dustin shares what gear he uses to shoot live concerts and portraits. If you love Mötley Crüe and 80s metal bands, this show is for you! See the photos on our Instagram page.Please note- this show was recorded on October 31st, 2020. Also-this one is about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, so it may not be suitable for children. Bookmarks (ish):1:04 Greetings and Salutations2:22 Background7:40 Blackmail12:20 Kitty Meets Nikki Sixx14:50 Stadium Shoot16:55 Nikki's photography21:24 Shooting Backstage/Photo Pit 26:44 Starstruck30:15 Back to the Stadium Shoot35:20 If I Didn't Make You Look Like A Super Hero, I Failed43:40 Editing Process47:13 Set It & Forget It?49:47 Your Friend, Randy Johnson51:03 Darkroom to Digital53:41 Never Stop Learning54:10 How Big Is Your Rig?59:25 The Tree1:05:06 OutroSupport the show (https://urbanromantix.com/podcast)

In which I quickly get off the topic of birthday wishes to my favorite transdude YouTuber and ramble about my own transition, depilating, autism, motivations of abusers & bullies, feedback, and being bass-ackwards AF.Tim Minchin's full, uncut 'If I Didn't Have You': https://youtu.be/Zn6gV2sdl38

Pixar Month plunges on, and this week we have a composer, musician, worship leader, educator, and all-around-great guy Mark Burrows. Joining us in the WHEEL Studios (Nichols Hills auxiliary) is my co-host Suzann Wade. Whilst Mark Suzann and I would normally catch up with some chips and salsa at Blue Mesa, these are unprecedented times, so we catch up on the zoom and let you nosey people listen in.Mark talks about the challenges of the sacred music biz during a pandemic, the horrors of poorly-written childrens religious curriculum, the power of puppetry, and how Pixar smashed the Disney Princess formula.Mark brings to the table "If I Didn't Have You" from Monster's Inc. Then the WHEEL chooses something so incongruous that Daniel forces a re-spin.You can join Mark every Sunday (virtually at least) at Fort Worth First United Methodist Church, and really there's no reason you shouldn't.

몬스터주식회사 OST / Monsters, inc. OST 1. If I Didn't Have You 2. Monsters, Inc. 3. The Scare Floor 4. Boo's Tired 5. Enter The Heroes 6. Walk To Work

This hour promises an abundance of top quality tracks you'll love. This train is barreling forward with signs of stopping. Get on board!!! FACEBOOK: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/modmarty TWITTER: twitter.com/modmarty ----------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "Baby Don't Leave Me" Jimmy Ricks - Jubilee "Three Little Pigs" Lloyd Price - Spaton "Loop De Loop" Johnny Thunder - Diamond "Have Love Will Travel" The Off-Beats - Guyden "Copy Cat" The Cadillacs - Jubilee "The Sock" The Sharpees - One-Derful "Jump And Dance" The Carnaby - Piccadilly "Love Me Baby" Jon & Robin And The In Crowd - Abnak "Caio Baby" Lynne Randell - Columbia "(Come On And Be My) Sweet Darlin'" Jimmy 'Soul' Clark - Soulhawk "Chains Of Love" Candy & The Kisses - Decca "The Duck" Bobby Freeman - Autumn "Soul Party" Billy Clark & The Maskman - Disc'Az "Top Twenty" Bunny Shivel - Capitol "I Miss You Baby (How I Miss You)" Marv Johnson - Tamla-Motown "Hand Clappin' Time" Gino - Golden Crest "Ever Lasting Love" Robert Knight - Rising Sons "Hard Time For Young Lovers" Eddie Hodges - Aurora "Try Me And See" Ruth Brown - Skye "So Much Love" Faith Hope & Charity - Crewe "If I Didn't Love You" The Profiles - Duo "Doodlum" The Off-Beats - Guyden

HARLEM. IF I DIDN’T MEAN YOU WELL. DON’T IT MAKE IT BETTER. DELLA REESE WHO IS SHE AND WHAT IS SHE TO YOU. I WANT TO SPEND THE NIGHT. USE ME. LONELY TOWN, LONELY STREET. GIL SCOTT-HERON GRANDMA’S HANDS. MAKE A SMILE FOR ME. MAKE LOVE TO YOUR MIND. OH YEAH! SPANKY WILSON KISSING MY LOVE. HOPE SHE’LL BE HAPPIER (LIVE) ARETHA FRANKLIN LET ME IN YOUR LIFE. I WISH YOU WELL. THEN YOU SMILE AT ME. SYREETA LET ME BE THE ONE YOU NEED. FAMILY TABLE. SHE’S LONELY. LYN COLLINS AIN’T NO SUNSHINE. CAN WE PRETEND? LOVE IS. GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS WHO IS SHE (AND WHAT IS SHE TO YOU)? I WANT TO SPEND THE NIGHT. LEAN ON ME (LIVE). RAILROAD MAN. I’LL BE WITH YOU. ESTHER PHILLIPS LET ME IN YOUR LIFE. BETTER DAYS (THEME FROM “MAN AND BOY”). LOVELY NIGHT FOR DANCING (7” VERSION). CAROLYN FRANKLIN SWEET NAOMI. WORLD KEEPS TURNING (LIVE). YOU JUST CAN’T SMILE IT AWAY. THE BEST YOU CAN. GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS BETTER YOU GO YOUR WAY. RALPH MACDONALD IN THE NAME OF LOVE (7” VERSION) THE CRUSADERS SOUL SHADOWS (7” VERSION) HELLO LIKE BEFORE. DIANA ROSS THE SAME LOVE THAT MADE ME LAUGH. TENDER THINGS. GROVER WASHINGTON, JR. JUST THE TWO OF US (7” VERSION). MEMORIES ARE THAT WAY. I CAN’T WRITE LEFT-HANDED (LIVE).

This week we shine a spotlight on some of our favourites and often played gems. We revisit some big hits and discover some new-to-us awesomeness. Mod Marty is in BC this week which means look out for more great tunes dropping in the next show when he gets back. FACEBOOK: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/modmarty TWITTER: twitter.com/modmarty ----------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "Eleanore Rigby" Aretha Franklin - Atlantic "Thanks A Lot" Brenda Lee - Decca "I Know That He Loves Me" Theola Kilgore - Reo "Going To A Happening" Tommy Neal - PaMeLiNe "Cool Pearl" The Capitols - Karen "Just One Look" The Soul Twins - Karen "We'll Be Dancing On The Moon" Trade Martin - Coed "If I Didn't Love You Girl" Travis Pike's Tea Party - RnB "Everybody Needs A Little Love" Bern Elliot & The Fenmen - London "What A Man" Linda Lyndell - Volt "A Woman Was Made For A Man" Barbara Trent ft. Richi Corbin Trio - Red "90 day freeze (On Her Love)" 100 Proof (Aged In Soul) - Buddah "You're Just A Fool In Love" Dee Dee Sharpe - Atco "Shake A Tail Feather" Ray Charles - Atlantic "I Don't Know" Linda Lyndell - Volt "Hey Sister" Monguito Santamaria - Discjockey "Skinny Minnie" Gerry & The Pacemakers - Capitol "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" The Righteous Brothers - Philles "Don't Wait Too Long" Bettye Swann - Money "Since I Lost The One I Love" The Impressions - ABC-Paramount "The Slush" Bill doggett - King

We McDonald’s star-making turn on her show-stopping blind audition on the hit NBC TV show The Voice drew national attention in 2016. It was the kind of momentous debut she had been preparing for her entire life. Singing since the age of 12, We attended the Harlem School for the Arts after school and on weekends, where she studied theater, piano and further cultivated her unique and righteously robust voice. We McDonald is a singer, and songwriter and that has been touring internationally and sharing her sultry vocal gift with the world. In 2017, We had the opportunity of appearing on the Emmy Award winning PBS Gershwin Awards honoring Legend Tony Bennett. And, in 2018 she belted the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium. Available now is her latest single “If I Didn’t Love You”, released early 2019. Late 2019 her self-titled EP is scheduled to be released featuring a diverse slate of songs written by We that showcase her soaring vocal presence. A newly published children’s and young adult book author, We released: Make It Happen! We McDonald: Singer, part of the Make It Happen! series of books that help middle school students build skills to reach their own goals; and a picture book, The Little Girl with The Big Voice, written by We for younger children. We’s captivating story as a singer, songwriter and as a teenager courageously embracing her uniqueness resonates with kids as well as adults looking to expand their own understanding of themselves and the world around them.

We McDonald’s star-making turn on her show-stopping blind audition on the hit NBC TV show, The Voice, drew national attention in 2016. It was the kind of momentous debut she had been preparing for her entire life. Singing since the age of 12, We attended the Harlem School for the Arts after school and on weekends, where she studied theater, piano and further cultivated her unique and righteously robust voice. We McDonald is a singer, and songwriter and that has been touring internationally and sharing her sultry vocal gift with the world. In 2017, We had the opportunity of appearing on the Emmy Award winning PBS Gershwin Awards honoring Legend Tony Bennett. And, in 2018 she belted the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium. Available now is her latest single “If I Didn’t Love You”, released early 2019. Late 2019 her self-titled EP is scheduled to be released featuring a diverse slate of songs written by We that showcase her soaring vocal presence. A newly published children’s and young adult book author, We released: Make It Happen! We McDonald: Singer, part of the Make It Happen! series of books that help middle school students build skills to reach their own goals; and a picture book, The Little Girl with The Big Voice, written by We for younger children. We’s captivating story as a singer, songwriter and as a teenager courageously embracing her uniqueness resonates with kids as well as adults looking to expand their own understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Suggestible things to watch, read and listen to. Hosted by James Clement @mrsundaymovies and Claire Tonti @clairetonti.Visit https://bigsandwich.co/ for a bonus weekly show, a monthly commentary, early stuff and an ad free podcast feed for $9 per month.Plus OneTim Minchin’s If I Didn’t Have YouDefending JacobUnlocking UsI’m Still Here by Austin Channing BrownRandy Writes A NovelSend your recommendations to suggestiblepod@gmail.com, we’d love to hear them.You can also follow the show on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook @suggestiblepod and join our ‘Planet Broadcasting Great Mates OFFICIAL’ Facebook Group. So many things. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Send Me" by Sam Cooke 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 "Little Darlin'" by The Gladiolas. Also, an announcement -- the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this, for details.  ----more---- Resources The Mixcloud is slightly delayed this week. I'll update the post tonight with the link. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick's work, it's an essential book if you're even slightly interested in the subject. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke's music for the beginner. A note on spelling: Sam Cooke was born Sam Cook, the rest of his family all kept the surname Cook, and he only added the "e" from the release of "You Send Me", so for almost all the time covered in this episode he was Cook. I didn't feel the need to mention this in the podcast, as the two names are pronounced identically. I've spelled him as Cooke and everyone else as Cook throughout. Book of the Podcast Remember that there's a book available based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast. You can buy it at this link, which will take you to your preferred online bookstore. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before about how the music that became known as soul had its roots in gospel music, but today we're going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling. Sam Cooke was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it's doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it today. But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field he was something of a superstar. He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life, and while that's something that will come up more in future episodes, it's worth noting here. Cooke started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which as we've talked about before was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all living and performing in the city during young Sam's formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers. The Soul Stirrers had started out in 1926 as a group in what was called the "jubilee" style -- the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionised gospel music. There are no recordings of the Soul Stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous jubilee recording: [Excerpt: The Fisk Jubilee Singers, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"] But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the Soul Stirrers switched styles, and became one of the first -- and best -- gospel quartets in the new style. In the late forties, the Soul Stirrers signed to Specialty Records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.H. Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers feat. R.H. Harris, "In That Awful Hour"] Sam Cooke was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers -- five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area, under the name The Singing Children. Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success. Indeed the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would. The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can -- you never do anything by halves, and if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing properly. And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don't worry about who you step on to do it. After spending some time with his family group, Cooke joined a newly-formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Ink Spots song "If I Didn't Care" to a girl. That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day. Sam Cooke only stayed with them a couple of years, and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a soundalike singer, Johnnie Taylor, and listening to Taylor's recordings with the group you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member: [Excerpt: Johnnie Taylor and the Highway QCs, "I Dreamed That Heaven Was Like This"] The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cooke was absolutely unquestionably the star of the Highway QCs. Creadell Copeland, one of the group's members, later said “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.” The group didn't make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time -- he loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice. But his biggest influence was still R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, who was the most important person in the gospel quartet field. This wasn't just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers -- though he was, and that was certainly part of it -- but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalise the gospel quartet movement. (Just as a quick explanation -- in both black gospel, and in the white gospel music euphemistically called "Southern Gospel", the term "quartet" is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them. I'll generally refer to all of these as "groups", because I'm not from the gospel world, but I'll use the term "quartet" when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times. Just know that if I mention quartets, I'm not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them). Harris worked with a less well known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges, of another popular group, the Famous Blue Jays: [Excerpt: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, “Praising Jesus Evermore”] Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music and their onstage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation's leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer. The Highway QCs joined the Convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the Soul Stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QCs. It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other's shows, and if they were popular enough they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show. When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirrers shows, though, the Soul Stirrers would act as if they didn't know them, and would only invite them on to the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song. From the Highway QCs' point of view, the only possible explanation was that the Soul Stirrers were terrified of the competition. A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some young kids who thought they were the next big thing. On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QCs were clearly the group to beat -- and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to. And soon the QCs found themselves being mentored by R.B. Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers. Robinson would train them, and help them get better gigs, and the QCs became convinced that they were headed for the big time. But it turned out that behind the scenes, there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers. Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo. It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QCs, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.H. Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place. The other Highway QCs were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him "Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you." And so, in March 1951, Sam Cooke went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him. Rupe had to admit that Cooke could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.H. Harris: [Excerpt: the Soul Stirrers, "Come, Let Us Go Back to God"] But towards the end of the session, the Soul Stirrers insisted that they should record "Jesus Gave Me Water", a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QCs' set. Rupe thought that this was ridiculous -- the Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song, on Specialty, not six months earlier. What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards? But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Jesus Gave Me Water"] Rupe lost his misgivings, both about the song and about the singer -- that was clearly going to be the group's next single. The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cooke as their singer -- he was younger than the rest of them, and he didn't have Harris' assurance and professionalism, yet. But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with "Peace in the Valley" on the B-side. That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey fourteen years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence. "Jesus Gave Me Water" was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful, and meanwhile Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel. Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realised when "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" became the biggest hit Specialty had ever had to that point that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music. “Jesus Gave Me Water” had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, but while he was singing gospel, he wasn't living a very godly life. He got married in 1953, but he'd already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant. But Cooke treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in – use them for as long as they've got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient. For the next few years, the Soul Stirrers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring, but they didn't have any breakout success, even as other Specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist. The Soul Stirrers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it's easy to see why: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, "Nearer to Thee"] Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cooke needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the Soul Stirrers in the studio for the first time. The reason, actually, was to do with Cooke's laziness. They'd gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cooke hadn't written a song, and they needed one. The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible. He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said "I got one". He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing -- and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, "Touch the Hem of His Garment", was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of His Garment"] Blackwell knew then that Cooke was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cooke should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group. The Soul Stirrers were only selling in the low tens of thousands -- a reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kind of numbers that would make anyone rich. Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed. There's an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word "Baby" to "Jesus". In the mid-fifties things seemed to be the other way -- people were having hits by taking Gospel songs and changing the word "Jesus" to "baby", or near as damnit. Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take "This Little Light of Mine": [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "This Little Light of Mine"] and turn it into "This Little Girl of Mine: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "This Little Girl of Mine"] But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren't that much less blatant. And so Sam Cooke travelled to New Orleans, to record in Cosimo Matassa's studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits. Or, rather, Dale Cook did. Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer, without necessarily getting a better career to replace it. So the decision was made to put the single out under the name "Dale Cook", and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability. If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam's brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam's brother L.C. (whose name was just the initials L.C.) later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam's. As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cooke had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, "Wonderful": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, "Wonderful"] One quick rewrite later, and that song became, instead, "Lovable": [Excerpt: Dale Cook, "Lovable"] Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam's brother L.C. went to Memphis, with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth. The lineup of the show was almost entirely black – people like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and so on – but Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words – the Colonel wouldn't allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis. Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L.C. was Sam's brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L.C. about how great Sam was, and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers. Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by "Dale Cook", the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by "Dale Sam Cook", and the Soul Stirrers started to be asked if they were going to sing "Lovable" in their shows. Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrers for the moment, though it's noticeable that songs like "Mean Old World" could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, "Mean Old World"] But barely a week after the session that produced “Mean Old World”, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he'd written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing. Sam Cooke was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he'd treated the Highway QCs. Cooke flew to LA, to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player. White was very unimpressed with Cooke – he thought that the new song Cooke sang to them, "You Send Me", was just him repeating the same thing over and over again. Art Rupe helped them whittle the song choices down to four. Rupe had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record – for example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long – and the final choices for the session were made with Rupe's criteria in mind. The songs chosen were "Summertime", "You Send Me", another song Sam had written called "You Were Made For Me", and "Things You Do to Me", which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono. The recording session should have been completely straightforward. Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player – along with Clif White on guitar there was René Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and acted as instrumental arranger; Harold Battiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing, and who wasn't playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers; Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosimo Matassa's studio, and Ted Brinson, the only LA native, on bass -- Brinson was a regular player on Specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA R&B act, to the extent that it was his garage that "Earth Angel" by the Penguins had been recorded in. And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who were among the most in-demand vocalists in LA. So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was, until Art Rupe turned up just after they'd recorded "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Battiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cooke's vocals. They were, in Rupe's view, trying to make Sam Cooke sound like Billy Ward and his Dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst. The Billy Ward reference was because René Hall had recently arranged a version of "Stardust" for the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Stardust"] And the new version of "Summertime" had some of the same feel: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Summertime"] If Sam Cooke was going to record for Specialty, he wasn't going to have *white* vocalists backing him. Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white -- and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music, was not lost on Bumps Blackwell. Even worse than the whiteness of the singers, though, was that some of them were women. Rupe and Blackwell had already had one massive falling-out, over "Rip it Up" by Little Richard. When they'd agreed to record that, Blackwell had worked out an arrangement beforehand that Rupe was happy with -- one that was based around piano triplets. But then, when he'd been on the plane to the session, Blackwell had hit upon another idea -- to base the song around a particular drum pattern: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Rip it Up"] Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit. Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cooke, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him, Rupe decided it was the last straw. Blackwell had to go. He was also convinced that Sam Cooke was only after money, because once Cooke discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the Soul Stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money. Rupe didn't like that kind of greed from his artists -- why *should* he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold? But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money. They eventually came to an agreement -- Blackwell would leave Specialty, and take Sam Cooke, and Cooke's existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced that they were going to be a hit. Rupe would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cooke recordings in the future, but Cooke and Blackwell were free to take "You Send Me", "Summertime", and the rest to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen. While they waited around for Keen to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynel Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsie Williams, Googie Rene, John Dolphin, and everyone else who was part of the LA R&B community. Meanwhile, the Soul Stirrers got Johnnie Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QCs, to replace him in the Stirrers. While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more. When the single came out, everyone thought that "Summertime" would be the hit, but "You Send Me" quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Several cover versions came out almost immediately. Sam and Bumps didn't mind the versions by Jesse Belvin: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "You Send Me"] Or Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, "You Send Me"] They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song -- and anyway, they knew that Sam's version was better. What they did object to was the white cover version by Teresa Brewer: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, "You Send Me"] Even though her version was less of a soundalike than the other LA R&B versions, it was more offensive to them -- she was even copying Sam's "whoa-oh"s. She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued -- and her version was charting, and made the top ten. Fortunately for them, Sam's version went to number one, on both the R&B and pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which accidentally cut him off half way through a song. But there was still trouble with Art Rupe. Sam was still signed to Rupe's company as a songwriter, and so he'd put "You Send Me" in the name of his brother L.C., so Rupe wouldn't get any royalties. Rupe started legal action against him, and meanwhile, he took a demo Sam had recorded, "I'll Come Running Back To You", and got René Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on "You Send Me" and "Summertime" he'd despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like "You Send Me" as possible: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "I'll Come Running Back To You"] And in retaliation for *that* being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he'd recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn't been released, and got the Specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called the Valiants, and put it out on Keen: [Excerpt: The Valiants, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] Specialty had to rush-release Little Richard's version to make sure it became the hit -- a blow for them, given that they were trying to dripfeed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left. As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cooke was on top of the world. But the seeds of his downfall were already in place. He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way -- people who had helped him, like the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, and especially women. He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support. He was taking his father's maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt. But such was his talent and charm, that even the people he hurt ended up defending him. Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cooke, we'll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we'll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others. Because the story of Sam Cooke gets very, very unpleasant.

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke 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 “Little Darlin'” by The Gladiolas. Also, an announcement — the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this, for details.  —-more—- Resources The Mixcloud is slightly delayed this week. I’ll update the post tonight with the link. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner. A note on spelling: Sam Cooke was born Sam Cook, the rest of his family all kept the surname Cook, and he only added the “e” from the release of “You Send Me”, so for almost all the time covered in this episode he was Cook. I didn’t feel the need to mention this in the podcast, as the two names are pronounced identically. I’ve spelled him as Cooke and everyone else as Cook throughout. Book of the Podcast Remember that there’s a book available based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast. You can buy it at this link, which will take you to your preferred online bookstore. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before about how the music that became known as soul had its roots in gospel music, but today we’re going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling. Sam Cooke was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it’s doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it today. But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field he was something of a superstar. He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life, and while that’s something that will come up more in future episodes, it’s worth noting here. Cooke started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which as we’ve talked about before was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all living and performing in the city during young Sam’s formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers. The Soul Stirrers had started out in 1926 as a group in what was called the “jubilee” style — the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionised gospel music. There are no recordings of the Soul Stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous jubilee recording: [Excerpt: The Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”] But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the Soul Stirrers switched styles, and became one of the first — and best — gospel quartets in the new style. In the late forties, the Soul Stirrers signed to Specialty Records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.H. Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers feat. R.H. Harris, “In That Awful Hour”] Sam Cooke was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers — five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area, under the name The Singing Children. Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success. Indeed the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would. The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can — you never do anything by halves, and if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don’t worry about who you step on to do it. After spending some time with his family group, Cooke joined a newly-formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Ink Spots song “If I Didn’t Care” to a girl. That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day. Sam Cooke only stayed with them a couple of years, and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a soundalike singer, Johnnie Taylor, and listening to Taylor’s recordings with the group you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member: [Excerpt: Johnnie Taylor and the Highway QCs, “I Dreamed That Heaven Was Like This”] The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cooke was absolutely unquestionably the star of the Highway QCs. Creadell Copeland, one of the group’s members, later said “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.” The group didn’t make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time — he loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice. But his biggest influence was still R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, who was the most important person in the gospel quartet field. This wasn’t just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers — though he was, and that was certainly part of it — but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalise the gospel quartet movement. (Just as a quick explanation — in both black gospel, and in the white gospel music euphemistically called “Southern Gospel”, the term “quartet” is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them. I’ll generally refer to all of these as “groups”, because I’m not from the gospel world, but I’ll use the term “quartet” when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times. Just know that if I mention quartets, I’m not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them). Harris worked with a less well known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges, of another popular group, the Famous Blue Jays: [Excerpt: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, “Praising Jesus Evermore”] Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music and their onstage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation’s leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer. The Highway QCs joined the Convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the Soul Stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QCs. It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other’s shows, and if they were popular enough they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show. When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirrers shows, though, the Soul Stirrers would act as if they didn’t know them, and would only invite them on to the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song. From the Highway QCs’ point of view, the only possible explanation was that the Soul Stirrers were terrified of the competition. A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some young kids who thought they were the next big thing. On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QCs were clearly the group to beat — and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to. And soon the QCs found themselves being mentored by R.B. Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers. Robinson would train them, and help them get better gigs, and the QCs became convinced that they were headed for the big time. But it turned out that behind the scenes, there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers. Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo. It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QCs, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.H. Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place. The other Highway QCs were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him “Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.” And so, in March 1951, Sam Cooke went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him. Rupe had to admit that Cooke could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.H. Harris: [Excerpt: the Soul Stirrers, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God”] But towards the end of the session, the Soul Stirrers insisted that they should record “Jesus Gave Me Water”, a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QCs’ set. Rupe thought that this was ridiculous — the Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song, on Specialty, not six months earlier. What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards? But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Jesus Gave Me Water”] Rupe lost his misgivings, both about the song and about the singer — that was clearly going to be the group’s next single. The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cooke as their singer — he was younger than the rest of them, and he didn’t have Harris’ assurance and professionalism, yet. But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with “Peace in the Valley” on the B-side. That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey fourteen years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence. “Jesus Gave Me Water” was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful, and meanwhile Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel. Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realised when “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” became the biggest hit Specialty had ever had to that point that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music. “Jesus Gave Me Water” had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, but while he was singing gospel, he wasn’t living a very godly life. He got married in 1953, but he’d already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant. But Cooke treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in – use them for as long as they’ve got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient. For the next few years, the Soul Stirrers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring, but they didn’t have any breakout success, even as other Specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist. The Soul Stirrers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it’s easy to see why: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer to Thee”] Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cooke needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the Soul Stirrers in the studio for the first time. The reason, actually, was to do with Cooke’s laziness. They’d gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cooke hadn’t written a song, and they needed one. The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible. He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said “I got one”. He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing — and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”, was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”] Blackwell knew then that Cooke was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cooke should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group. The Soul Stirrers were only selling in the low tens of thousands — a reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kind of numbers that would make anyone rich. Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed. There’s an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word “Baby” to “Jesus”. In the mid-fifties things seemed to be the other way — people were having hits by taking Gospel songs and changing the word “Jesus” to “baby”, or near as damnit. Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] and turn it into “This Little Girl of Mine: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “This Little Girl of Mine”] But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren’t that much less blatant. And so Sam Cooke travelled to New Orleans, to record in Cosimo Matassa’s studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits. Or, rather, Dale Cook did. Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer, without necessarily getting a better career to replace it. So the decision was made to put the single out under the name “Dale Cook”, and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability. If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam’s brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam’s brother L.C. (whose name was just the initials L.C.) later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam’s. As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cooke had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”] One quick rewrite later, and that song became, instead, “Lovable”: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, “Lovable”] Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam’s brother L.C. went to Memphis, with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth. The lineup of the show was almost entirely black – people like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and so on – but Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words – the Colonel wouldn’t allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis. Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L.C. was Sam’s brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L.C. about how great Sam was, and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers. Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by “Dale Cook”, the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by “Dale Sam Cook”, and the Soul Stirrers started to be asked if they were going to sing “Lovable” in their shows. Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrers for the moment, though it’s noticeable that songs like “Mean Old World” could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Mean Old World”] But barely a week after the session that produced “Mean Old World”, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he’d written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing. Sam Cooke was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he’d treated the Highway QCs. Cooke flew to LA, to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player. White was very unimpressed with Cooke – he thought that the new song Cooke sang to them, “You Send Me”, was just him repeating the same thing over and over again. Art Rupe helped them whittle the song choices down to four. Rupe had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record – for example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long – and the final choices for the session were made with Rupe’s criteria in mind. The songs chosen were “Summertime”, “You Send Me”, another song Sam had written called “You Were Made For Me”, and “Things You Do to Me”, which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono. The recording session should have been completely straightforward. Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player – along with Clif White on guitar there was René Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and acted as instrumental arranger; Harold Battiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing, and who wasn’t playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers; Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and Ted Brinson, the only LA native, on bass — Brinson was a regular player on Specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA R&B act, to the extent that it was his garage that “Earth Angel” by the Penguins had been recorded in. And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who were among the most in-demand vocalists in LA. So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was, until Art Rupe turned up just after they’d recorded “You Send Me”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Battiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cooke’s vocals. They were, in Rupe’s view, trying to make Sam Cooke sound like Billy Ward and his Dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst. The Billy Ward reference was because René Hall had recently arranged a version of “Stardust” for the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Stardust”] And the new version of “Summertime” had some of the same feel: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Summertime”] If Sam Cooke was going to record for Specialty, he wasn’t going to have *white* vocalists backing him. Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white — and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music, was not lost on Bumps Blackwell. Even worse than the whiteness of the singers, though, was that some of them were women. Rupe and Blackwell had already had one massive falling-out, over “Rip it Up” by Little Richard. When they’d agreed to record that, Blackwell had worked out an arrangement beforehand that Rupe was happy with — one that was based around piano triplets. But then, when he’d been on the plane to the session, Blackwell had hit upon another idea — to base the song around a particular drum pattern: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Rip it Up”] Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit. Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cooke, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him, Rupe decided it was the last straw. Blackwell had to go. He was also convinced that Sam Cooke was only after money, because once Cooke discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the Soul Stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money. Rupe didn’t like that kind of greed from his artists — why *should* he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold? But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money. They eventually came to an agreement — Blackwell would leave Specialty, and take Sam Cooke, and Cooke’s existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced that they were going to be a hit. Rupe would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cooke recordings in the future, but Cooke and Blackwell were free to take “You Send Me”, “Summertime”, and the rest to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen. While they waited around for Keen to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynel Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsie Williams, Googie Rene, John Dolphin, and everyone else who was part of the LA R&B community. Meanwhile, the Soul Stirrers got Johnnie Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QCs, to replace him in the Stirrers. While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more. When the single came out, everyone thought that “Summertime” would be the hit, but “You Send Me” quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Several cover versions came out almost immediately. Sam and Bumps didn’t mind the versions by Jesse Belvin: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “You Send Me”] Or Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “You Send Me”] They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song — and anyway, they knew that Sam’s version was better. What they did object to was the white cover version by Teresa Brewer: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “You Send Me”] Even though her version was less of a soundalike than the other LA R&B versions, it was more offensive to them — she was even copying Sam’s “whoa-oh”s. She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued — and her version was charting, and made the top ten. Fortunately for them, Sam’s version went to number one, on both the R&B and pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which accidentally cut him off half way through a song. But there was still trouble with Art Rupe. Sam was still signed to Rupe’s company as a songwriter, and so he’d put “You Send Me” in the name of his brother L.C., so Rupe wouldn’t get any royalties. Rupe started legal action against him, and meanwhile, he took a demo Sam had recorded, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”, and got René Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on “You Send Me” and “Summertime” he’d despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like “You Send Me” as possible: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”] And in retaliation for *that* being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he’d recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn’t been released, and got the Specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called the Valiants, and put it out on Keen: [Excerpt: The Valiants, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Specialty had to rush-release Little Richard’s version to make sure it became the hit — a blow for them, given that they were trying to dripfeed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left. As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cooke was on top of the world. But the seeds of his downfall were already in place. He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way — people who had helped him, like the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, and especially women. He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support. He was taking his father’s maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt. But such was his talent and charm, that even the people he hurt ended up defending him. Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cooke, we’ll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we’ll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others. Because the story of Sam Cooke gets very, very unpleasant.

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke 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 “Little Darlin'” by The Gladiolas. Also, an announcement — the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this, for details.  —-more—- Resources The Mixcloud is slightly delayed this week. I’ll update the post tonight with the link. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner. A note on spelling: Sam Cooke was born Sam Cook, the rest of his family all kept the surname Cook, and he only added the “e” from the release of “You Send Me”, so for almost all the time covered in this episode he was Cook. I didn’t feel the need to mention this in the podcast, as the two names are pronounced identically. I’ve spelled him as Cooke and everyone else as Cook throughout. Book of the Podcast Remember that there’s a book available based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast. You can buy it at this link, which will take you to your preferred online bookstore. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before about how the music that became known as soul had its roots in gospel music, but today we’re going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling. Sam Cooke was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it’s doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it today. But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field he was something of a superstar. He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life, and while that’s something that will come up more in future episodes, it’s worth noting here. Cooke started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which as we’ve talked about before was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all living and performing in the city during young Sam’s formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers. The Soul Stirrers had started out in 1926 as a group in what was called the “jubilee” style — the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionised gospel music. There are no recordings of the Soul Stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous jubilee recording: [Excerpt: The Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”] But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the Soul Stirrers switched styles, and became one of the first — and best — gospel quartets in the new style. In the late forties, the Soul Stirrers signed to Specialty Records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.H. Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers feat. R.H. Harris, “In That Awful Hour”] Sam Cooke was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers — five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area, under the name The Singing Children. Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success. Indeed the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would. The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can — you never do anything by halves, and if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don’t worry about who you step on to do it. After spending some time with his family group, Cooke joined a newly-formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Ink Spots song “If I Didn’t Care” to a girl. That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day. Sam Cooke only stayed with them a couple of years, and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a soundalike singer, Johnnie Taylor, and listening to Taylor’s recordings with the group you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member: [Excerpt: Johnnie Taylor and the Highway QCs, “I Dreamed That Heaven Was Like This”] The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cooke was absolutely unquestionably the star of the Highway QCs. Creadell Copeland, one of the group’s members, later said “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.” The group didn’t make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time — he loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice. But his biggest influence was still R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, who was the most important person in the gospel quartet field. This wasn’t just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers — though he was, and that was certainly part of it — but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalise the gospel quartet movement. (Just as a quick explanation — in both black gospel, and in the white gospel music euphemistically called “Southern Gospel”, the term “quartet” is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them. I’ll generally refer to all of these as “groups”, because I’m not from the gospel world, but I’ll use the term “quartet” when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times. Just know that if I mention quartets, I’m not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them). Harris worked with a less well known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges, of another popular group, the Famous Blue Jays: [Excerpt: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, “Praising Jesus Evermore”] Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music and their onstage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation’s leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer. The Highway QCs joined the Convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the Soul Stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QCs. It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other’s shows, and if they were popular enough they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show. When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirrers shows, though, the Soul Stirrers would act as if they didn’t know them, and would only invite them on to the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song. From the Highway QCs’ point of view, the only possible explanation was that the Soul Stirrers were terrified of the competition. A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some young kids who thought they were the next big thing. On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QCs were clearly the group to beat — and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to. And soon the QCs found themselves being mentored by R.B. Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers. Robinson would train them, and help them get better gigs, and the QCs became convinced that they were headed for the big time. But it turned out that behind the scenes, there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers. Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo. It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QCs, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.H. Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place. The other Highway QCs were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him “Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.” And so, in March 1951, Sam Cooke went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him. Rupe had to admit that Cooke could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.H. Harris: [Excerpt: the Soul Stirrers, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God”] But towards the end of the session, the Soul Stirrers insisted that they should record “Jesus Gave Me Water”, a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QCs’ set. Rupe thought that this was ridiculous — the Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song, on Specialty, not six months earlier. What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards? But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Jesus Gave Me Water”] Rupe lost his misgivings, both about the song and about the singer — that was clearly going to be the group’s next single. The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cooke as their singer — he was younger than the rest of them, and he didn’t have Harris’ assurance and professionalism, yet. But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with “Peace in the Valley” on the B-side. That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey fourteen years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence. “Jesus Gave Me Water” was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful, and meanwhile Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel. Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realised when “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” became the biggest hit Specialty had ever had to that point that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music. “Jesus Gave Me Water” had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, but while he was singing gospel, he wasn’t living a very godly life. He got married in 1953, but he’d already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant. But Cooke treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in – use them for as long as they’ve got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient. For the next few years, the Soul Stirrers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring, but they didn’t have any breakout success, even as other Specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist. The Soul Stirrers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it’s easy to see why: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer to Thee”] Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cooke needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the Soul Stirrers in the studio for the first time. The reason, actually, was to do with Cooke’s laziness. They’d gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cooke hadn’t written a song, and they needed one. The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible. He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said “I got one”. He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing — and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”, was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”] Blackwell knew then that Cooke was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cooke should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group. The Soul Stirrers were only selling in the low tens of thousands — a reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kind of numbers that would make anyone rich. Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed. There’s an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word “Baby” to “Jesus”. In the mid-fifties things seemed to be the other way — people were having hits by taking Gospel songs and changing the word “Jesus” to “baby”, or near as damnit. Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] and turn it into “This Little Girl of Mine: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “This Little Girl of Mine”] But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren’t that much less blatant. And so Sam Cooke travelled to New Orleans, to record in Cosimo Matassa’s studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits. Or, rather, Dale Cook did. Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer, without necessarily getting a better career to replace it. So the decision was made to put the single out under the name “Dale Cook”, and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability. If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam’s brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam’s brother L.C. (whose name was just the initials L.C.) later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam’s. As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cooke had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”] One quick rewrite later, and that song became, instead, “Lovable”: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, “Lovable”] Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam’s brother L.C. went to Memphis, with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth. The lineup of the show was almost entirely black – people like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and so on – but Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words – the Colonel wouldn’t allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis. Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L.C. was Sam’s brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L.C. about how great Sam was, and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers. Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by “Dale Cook”, the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by “Dale Sam Cook”, and the Soul Stirrers started to be asked if they were going to sing “Lovable” in their shows. Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrers for the moment, though it’s noticeable that songs like “Mean Old World” could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Mean Old World”] But barely a week after the session that produced “Mean Old World”, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he’d written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing. Sam Cooke was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he’d treated the Highway QCs. Cooke flew to LA, to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player. White was very unimpressed with Cooke – he thought that the new song Cooke sang to them, “You Send Me”, was just him repeating the same thing over and over again. Art Rupe helped them whittle the song choices down to four. Rupe had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record – for example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long – and the final choices for the session were made with Rupe’s criteria in mind. The songs chosen were “Summertime”, “You Send Me”, another song Sam had written called “You Were Made For Me”, and “Things You Do to Me”, which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono. The recording session should have been completely straightforward. Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player – along with Clif White on guitar there was René Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and acted as instrumental arranger; Harold Battiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing, and who wasn’t playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers; Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and Ted Brinson, the only LA native, on bass — Brinson was a regular player on Specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA R&B act, to the extent that it was his garage that “Earth Angel” by the Penguins had been recorded in. And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who were among the most in-demand vocalists in LA. So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was, until Art Rupe turned up just after they’d recorded “You Send Me”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Battiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cooke’s vocals. They were, in Rupe’s view, trying to make Sam Cooke sound like Billy Ward and his Dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst. The Billy Ward reference was because René Hall had recently arranged a version of “Stardust” for the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Stardust”] And the new version of “Summertime” had some of the same feel: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Summertime”] If Sam Cooke was going to record for Specialty, he wasn’t going to have *white* vocalists backing him. Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white — and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music, was not lost on Bumps Blackwell. Even worse than the whiteness of the singers, though, was that some of them were women. Rupe and Blackwell had already had one massive falling-out, over “Rip it Up” by Little Richard. When they’d agreed to record that, Blackwell had worked out an arrangement beforehand that Rupe was happy with — one that was based around piano triplets. But then, when he’d been on the plane to the session, Blackwell had hit upon another idea — to base the song around a particular drum pattern: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Rip it Up”] Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit. Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cooke, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him, Rupe decided it was the last straw. Blackwell had to go. He was also convinced that Sam Cooke was only after money, because once Cooke discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the Soul Stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money. Rupe didn’t like that kind of greed from his artists — why *should* he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold? But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money. They eventually came to an agreement — Blackwell would leave Specialty, and take Sam Cooke, and Cooke’s existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced that they were going to be a hit. Rupe would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cooke recordings in the future, but Cooke and Blackwell were free to take “You Send Me”, “Summertime”, and the rest to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen. While they waited around for Keen to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynel Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsie Williams, Googie Rene, John Dolphin, and everyone else who was part of the LA R&B community. Meanwhile, the Soul Stirrers got Johnnie Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QCs, to replace him in the Stirrers. While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more. When the single came out, everyone thought that “Summertime” would be the hit, but “You Send Me” quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Several cover versions came out almost immediately. Sam and Bumps didn’t mind the versions by Jesse Belvin: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “You Send Me”] Or Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “You Send Me”] They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song — and anyway, they knew that Sam’s version was better. What they did object to was the white cover version by Teresa Brewer: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “You Send Me”] Even though her version was less of a soundalike than the other LA R&B versions, it was more offensive to them — she was even copying Sam’s “whoa-oh”s. She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued — and her version was charting, and made the top ten. Fortunately for them, Sam’s version went to number one, on both the R&B and pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which accidentally cut him off half way through a song. But there was still trouble with Art Rupe. Sam was still signed to Rupe’s company as a songwriter, and so he’d put “You Send Me” in the name of his brother L.C., so Rupe wouldn’t get any royalties. Rupe started legal action against him, and meanwhile, he took a demo Sam had recorded, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”, and got René Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on “You Send Me” and “Summertime” he’d despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like “You Send Me” as possible: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”] And in retaliation for *that* being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he’d recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn’t been released, and got the Specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called the Valiants, and put it out on Keen: [Excerpt: The Valiants, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Specialty had to rush-release Little Richard’s version to make sure it became the hit — a blow for them, given that they were trying to dripfeed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left. As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cooke was on top of the world. But the seeds of his downfall were already in place. He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way — people who had helped him, like the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, and especially women. He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support. He was taking his father’s maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt. But such was his talent and charm, that even the people he hurt ended up defending him. Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cooke, we’ll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we’ll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others. Because the story of Sam Cooke gets very, very unpleasant.

With romantically charged #1 hits like “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not” and “If I Didn’t Have You,” multi-platinum international success, and honors as Vocal Duo of the Year from both the ACM and CMA Awards, Country duo Thompson Square admit they don’t have much left on their bucket list. So for the husband-and-wife team of Keifer and Shawna Thompson, the next chapter of their career is about something different. “This album is called Masterpiece, and the definition of a masterpiece is an artist’s life’s work,” Keifer explains, hinting at the creative satisfaction behind the duo’s third studio album. “When we’re 80 years old and we look back, we want to be able to say we’re really proud of all the stuff we did.” Working independently for the first time, Masterpiece arrives at a tipping-point moment for the duo – and it finds them taking skillful control of their acclaimed musical bond. www.thompsonsquare.com www.facebook.com/britjonesmusic www.throwbackcountrymusicpodcast.com Please share and hit the subscribe button (it's free!) Give us a 5 star rating and write a sweet review of the show! This will help us continue to bring you the best of the best in country music! Cheers- Brit Jones --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/throwbackcountrymusic/support

  Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at the Ink Spots and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one — Mixcloud doesn’t allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn’t set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don’t apply). I apologise for that, but it’s rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots’ music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg’s website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca  is a wonderful resource for detail about the band’s career. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I’m covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that’s useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records. I’m using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson’s autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It’s credited there as by “Shirlita Bolton”, but that’s actually the name of Deke’s widow, who owns the rights to the book — it’s definitely Deke’s autobiography. It’s very short, only seventy-three pages, and it’s full of inaccuracies, but it’s still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it’s very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about “top and bottom”, I say “they first did it in the studio”. I don’t mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they’d already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended… Transcript OK, so we’ve covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now — we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we’ve stayed around there.   Now, we’re still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we’re moving away from those shows, and we’re going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time.   We’ve talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll — the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We’ve seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll.   There’s one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we’ve not covered yet, and that’s the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started.   And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups.   Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using… well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you’d play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you’d play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn’t sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in — though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies “all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived”.   Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough.    The Ink Spots formed out of people who’d started their careers in these groups — Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo “Charlie and Jerry”, while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves “King, Jack, and Jester” or sometimes “King, Jack, and Jesters”.   In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most.   The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups — they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this:   [Mills Brothers: “It Don’t Mean a Thing”]   There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They’re imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they’d listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something  that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers.   The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby’s radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall — they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia.    Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with “Paper Moon” when they got back — their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties — and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day.    But they’d lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they’d lost it to people who’d been imitating them — to the band we last heard of performing as “King, Jack, and Jesters”.   By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes.   In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name — there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent’s office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I’ll read the next bit from Watson’s book directly:   “To me, it seemed like inspiration. ‘That’s it!’ I shouted. ‘How about calling us the Ink Spots?’   The boys really yelled this time. ‘There you go again Deek!’ Charlie exclaimed. ‘That’s right!’ agreed Hoppy, ‘always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he’ll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes’   They all talked at once. ‘Man, you know ain’t nobody wants to be no Ink Spot’.”   Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing “Your Feet’s Too Big”, which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name “four-dice Rastus”, and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It’s entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race.   That said, I’m not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I’m not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people “should” have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes.   Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers.   But there was a problem — Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band’s performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn’t continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music.    In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots’ manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club’s manager, knew his boss’ band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots’ records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it’s Kenny’s voice you think of. Or at least, it’s Kenny and Hoppy Jones.   Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots’ music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called “top and bottom”.   (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I’m happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny).   Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller — they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed:   [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing “Your Feet’s Too Big”]   When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while — still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of “Swing High, Swing Low”.    [excerpt of “Swing High Swing Low”]   Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it.   He refined the idea of Hoppy’s spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit “If I Didn’t Care”, but the one we’re going to look at is their 1941 record “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure — this one:   [excerpt of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”]   We’d then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals:   [excerpt of him singing]   Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice   [excerpt of that]   And finally there’d be a final line with Kenny singing lead again.   When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They’d found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here’s the intro to “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)”   [intro to that song]   Now here’s the intro to “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”   [intro to that song]   And here’s the intro to “To Each His Own”   [intro to that song]   And to “Whispering Grass”   [intro to that song]   I could go on… if you don’t believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on.    This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it:   [excerpt: “Juke Box Saturday Night”]   But the thing is — all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked.    And when I say “number one” or “top ten”, I don’t mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly — and when they did, they didn’t have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them.   That may sound like I’m being dismissive of the Ink Spots’ music. I’m not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not?    The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak — roughly from 1939, when they started making “top and bottom” records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder’s band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder’s band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder’s band, was easily available.   But Gale  was taking the majority of the money — Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you’ve got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn’t have to share it.   The Ink Spots’ period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart.   Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well — Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who’d put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them — he’d worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace.   But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own “Ink Spots”. Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month — but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died.    After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn’t let him.   The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band — unlike Watson he hadn’t quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits.   In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called “the Ink Spots” which didn’t have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone’s manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name — although I’ve seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn’t allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he’d founded.   Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile,  had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on “a completely new idea”.    This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called “the Brown Dots”.   The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential — “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”, written by two of their members.    [excerpt of “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”]   That’s been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat “King” Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson.   Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as “the Ink Spots”. Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves “The Ink Spots” and Fuqua would tour as “Charlie Fuqua’s New Ink Spots”.   Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as “the Ink Spots” — he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while.    There’s one recording of that version of the band — Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson — live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again:   [excerpt of “Wish You Were Here”]   As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy’s bass vocal:   [excerpt of “I Don’t Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You”]   So there was one version of “the Ink Spots” touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who’d sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots.   That wasn’t a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again — and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots.   Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted.   You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren’t a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.    And they did. Every surviving member of the band — not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you — went out on tour as “the Ink Spots”. At one point there were up to forty different “Ink Spots” groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who’d been in a proper version of the Ink Spots — and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as “Ink Spots”, in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they’d just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point.   The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I’ve been able to find details for took place in 2013.   But the Ink Spots’ career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn’t the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we’ll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music.   And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots’ final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, as one of the two tracks he would record.   But we’ll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes’ time…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at the Ink Spots and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one -- Mixcloud doesn't allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn't set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don't apply). I apologise for that, but it's rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots' music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg's website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca  is a wonderful resource for detail about the band's career. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I'm covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that's useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records. I'm using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson's autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It's credited there as by "Shirlita Bolton", but that's actually the name of Deke's widow, who owns the rights to the book -- it's definitely Deke's autobiography. It's very short, only seventy-three pages, and it's full of inaccuracies, but it's still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it's very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about "top and bottom", I say "they first did it in the studio". I don't mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they'd already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended... Transcript OK, so we've covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now -- we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we've stayed around there.   Now, we're still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we're moving away from those shows, and we're going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time.   We've talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll -- the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We've seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll.   There's one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we've not covered yet, and that's the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started.   And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups.   Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using... well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you'd play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you'd play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn't sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in -- though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies "all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived".   Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough.    The Ink Spots formed out of people who'd started their careers in these groups -- Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo "Charlie and Jerry", while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves "King, Jack, and Jester" or sometimes "King, Jack, and Jesters".   In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most.   The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups -- they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this:   [Mills Brothers: "It Don't Mean a Thing"]   There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They're imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they'd listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something  that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers.   The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby's radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall -- they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia.    Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with "Paper Moon" when they got back -- their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties -- and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day.    But they'd lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they'd lost it to people who'd been imitating them -- to the band we last heard of performing as "King, Jack, and Jesters".   By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes.   In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name -- there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent's office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I'll read the next bit from Watson's book directly:   "To me, it seemed like inspiration. 'That's it!' I shouted. 'How about calling us the Ink Spots?'   The boys really yelled this time. 'There you go again Deek!' Charlie exclaimed. 'That's right!' agreed Hoppy, 'always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he'll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes'   They all talked at once. 'Man, you know ain't nobody wants to be no Ink Spot'."   Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing "Your Feet's Too Big", which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name "four-dice Rastus", and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It's entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race.   That said, I'm not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I'm not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people "should" have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes.   Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers.   But there was a problem -- Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band's performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn't continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music.    In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots' manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club's manager, knew his boss' band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots' records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it's Kenny's voice you think of. Or at least, it's Kenny and Hoppy Jones.   Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots' music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called "top and bottom".   (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I'm happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny).   Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller -- they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed:   [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing "Your Feet's Too Big"]   When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while -- still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of "Swing High, Swing Low".    [excerpt of "Swing High Swing Low"]   Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it.   He refined the idea of Hoppy's spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit "If I Didn't Care", but the one we're going to look at is their 1941 record "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure -- this one:   [excerpt of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin"]   We'd then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals:   [excerpt of him singing]   Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice   [excerpt of that]   And finally there'd be a final line with Kenny singing lead again.   When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They'd found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here's the intro to "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"   [intro to that song]   Now here's the intro to "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire"   [intro to that song]   And here's the intro to "To Each His Own"   [intro to that song]   And to "Whispering Grass"   [intro to that song]   I could go on... if you don't believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on.    This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it:   [excerpt: "Juke Box Saturday Night"]   But the thing is -- all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked.    And when I say "number one" or "top ten", I don't mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly -- and when they did, they didn't have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them.   That may sound like I'm being dismissive of the Ink Spots' music. I'm not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not?    The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak -- roughly from 1939, when they started making "top and bottom" records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder's band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder's band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder's band, was easily available.   But Gale  was taking the majority of the money -- Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you've got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn't have to share it.   The Ink Spots' period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart.   Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well -- Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who'd put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them -- he'd worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace.   But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own "Ink Spots". Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month -- but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died.    After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn't let him.   The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band -- unlike Watson he hadn't quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits.   In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called "the Ink Spots" which didn't have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone's manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name -- although I've seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn't allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he'd founded.   Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile,  had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on "a completely new idea".    This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called "the Brown Dots".   The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential -- "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", written by two of their members.    [excerpt of "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons"]   That's been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat "King" Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson.   Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as "the Ink Spots". Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves "The Ink Spots" and Fuqua would tour as "Charlie Fuqua's New Ink Spots".   Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as "the Ink Spots" -- he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while.    There's one recording of that version of the band -- Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson -- live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again:   [excerpt of "Wish You Were Here"]   As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy's bass vocal:   [excerpt of "I Don't Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You"]   So there was one version of "the Ink Spots" touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who'd sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots.   That wasn't a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again -- and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots.   Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted.   You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren't a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.    And they did. Every surviving member of the band -- not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you -- went out on tour as "the Ink Spots". At one point there were up to forty different "Ink Spots" groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who'd been in a proper version of the Ink Spots -- and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as "Ink Spots", in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they'd just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point.   The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I've been able to find details for took place in 2013.   But the Ink Spots' career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn't the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we'll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music.   And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots' final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", as one of the two tracks he would record.   But we'll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes' time...   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Programa nº 77 de El podcast de Cinoscar & Rarities. 3º audio dedicado al Cine del S. XXI. 1. Hablamos del cine estrenado en España durante el año 2002. 2. Desvelamos las cintas ganadoras de la encuesta Las mejores películas del 2002. 3. Analizamos "EL VIAJE DE CHIHIRO" y repasamos los mejores títulos del STUDIO GHIBLI. ¡Gracias por darle al play! Guía del programa: 1' Presentación - 2' Estrenos 02 - 8' Bandas sonoras 02 - 14' Taquilla 02 - 18' TV y series 02: "The Wire (Bajo escucha)" - 22' Premios y festivales 02 - 27' Obituario 02 - 31' Cine español 02 - 44' Encuesta: Las mejores películas de 2002 - 53' Especial STUDIO GHIBLI - 58' Curiosidades de "EL VIAJE DE CHIHIRO" - 65' Las mejores películas del Studio Ghibli - 82' Despedida y canción: "If I Didn't Have You", de Randy Newman Redes sociales: @CinoscaRarities Blog: http://cachecine.blogspot.com.es/ Correo: cinoscararities@gmail.com Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ec/podcast/podcast-cinoscar-rarities/id1085302751?mt=2

양파껍질은 까도까도 껍질이 계속 나옵니다. 그래서 알 수 없는 사람을 보고 양파같은 사람이라고도 말하는 거겠죠. 그런데 더 아이러니한 것은 지금 우리가 살고 있는 이 시대도 양파껍질처럼 벗겨도 벗겨도 끝없이 드러나고 있다는 사실. 그 껍질의 최후에는 무엇이 나타날지, 그리고 우리는 그것을 끝까지 벗겨낼 수 있을지. 우리의 강한 신념이 있다면 충분히 가능하지 않을까 희망을 품어봅니다. 11월 8일 여기는 여러분과 함께 꿈꾸는 문화다락방의 강민선입니다.  -문화다락방, 오프닝멘트- 11월 8일 문화다락방 - 강영음공 시간 입니다. 가을의 전설 legend of the fall - the ludlows 마당을 나온 암탉 - 바람의 멜로 첨밀밀 - 월량대표아적심 아메리칸 셰프 chef - I like it like that 몬스터 주식회사 - If I Didn't Have You 탑건 - Take My Breath Away 브이포벤데타 - 차이코프스키 1812 서곡

“I'm having the time of my life. I have a love affair with music, but being able to entertain people is what I get out of it.”So says Country artist Jake Clayton, the gifted singer, thought-provoking songwriter and talented multi-instrumentalist who is attracting the attention of Country fans and radio programmers everywhere with his hot new single, “What Not to Do.” Jake is the rare artist who is able to enthrall a packed house with not just his vocals, songs and showmanship, but with his amazing instrumental ability as well. Playing over 20 instruments as an in-demand Nashville session musician, he is now stepping out on his own to take his place among the greats of Country music. “What Not to Do,” a song about the consequences of poor decision-making from his album By the Light of the Moon, is an uptempo, guitar-and-fiddle-driven romp that brings Charlie Daniels to mind. But Jake's highly-recognizable tenor is all his own, inviting comparisons to Garth Brooks, The Eagles and Tim McGraw.A native of rural Mexico, Missouri, Jake was raised by musical parents who sang professionally in the area. He was given his late grandfather's fiddle – which he still plays to this day – when he was 13. But he wasn't able to stop there, soon taking up just about any instrument with strings or keys, including banjo, organ, pedal steel guitar and more, while developing his singing and stage chops. “I learned about playing music by watching VHS tapes of concerts that really captivated me, like Garth's show in Central Park,” he recalls. “But most importantly, they showed me how an artist entertains an audience.”As he learned every instrument in sight, Jake also began to understand the importance of delivering captivating vocals and crafting a good song. “The Dixie Chicks picked great, but their songs and their harmonies were powerful, too,” he remembers. “That's when I started to take singing and songwriting more seriously.”At 17 Jake was fronting his own shows. “I actually had my own theater in Missouri for a couple years, an old restaurant we converted into a venue where I could perform,” he recalls fondly. “I was doing mostly classic Country for older people who understood and loved music, which was great. Because of my age I really didn't do bar gigs much. Then I took a fill-in job playing fiddle with The Oak Ridge Boys at 19 and moved to Nashville when I was 20.”Jake has since been a utility man in the live bands of Tanya Tucker, Collin Raye, Jimmy Wayne, Joey & Rory and Jamie O'Neal, and travelled for several years with singer Sunny Sweeney on two major tours. And in 2015, Sweeney enlisted Jake and his own band to support her on Miranda Lambert's 2015 Certified Platinum Tour. Opportunities like this have made it possible for him to be part of opening slots with such Country music headliners as Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, Jason Aldean, The Band Perry, George Strait, and many more.As an in-demand studio musician, Jake's credits include playing violin and cello on Thompson Square's #1 single, “If I Didn't Have You,” and playing fiddle, dobro and lap steel on Sunny Sweeney's critically acclaimed album, Provoked. He was the featured dobro player on Joey & Rory's Inspired DVD and TV special, and he recorded and co-produced the theme song for The Sportsman Channel's Legacy Trails TV. Jake also recorded an acclaimed instrumental album, Barnyard Stomp, which was distributed by Rock guitar legend Steve Vai's Favored Nations label.As a solo artist, Jake has opened for Charlie Daniels, Jon Pardi, and Jerrod Niemann. He's seen his childhood dreams come true as he's graced the stages of Madison Square Garden, The Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame and other legendary venues.Jake is a natural singer, with a distinctive voice that is right at home on today's Country radio. “My vocals are one of the reasons I get hired to work with other artists, besides the fact that I play so many instruments,” the gregarious artist says. “I've been influenced by the best. I could listen to Don Henley sing the phone book, and Garth, of course, really knows how to deliver a lyric. I love Collin Raye, and Jared Leto from the band 30 Seconds to Mars. And I learned so much from being on the road with Tanya about how to do things inside a melody, and how to connect with people.”Every song on By the Light of the Moon was written or co-written by Jake, whose songwriting heroes include some of the legends of Country as well as today's most successful young writers. “I'm a fan of Kacey Musgraves' writing, and I really love Sunny's writing,” he says. “I think Bob DiPiero (David Nail, Martina McBride) is one of the greats. I love Tom T. Hall. And you can't beat Marty Robbins, who was the pinnacle of what an artist and writer should be.”Jake and his band play about 50 shows a year right now, and he looks to do more with the success of his new single. “We play all over the country and have been received really well everywhere we go,” he says. “While I still play for other artists, I see myself doing less and less of that in the future, because my main goal is to continue to release my own music and to give people a show they won't forget. We're all about the music and getting it out to the fans.”

This program continues the 6/8/88 session with Jimmy Mazzy (banjo/vocals), Fred Lind (cornet), Paul Meymaris (clarinet), Don Frothingham (piano), and John Kafalas (tuba). The selections are “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Louisian-I-A,” and “If I Didn’t Care.” Send questions or comments to podcast@kafalas.com.