Podcasts about imperial records

https://www.patreon.com/isyanderandkoda You already know how to please the Machine Gods at this point so thank you so much. And make your voices heard for which faction you would like to see next! -Isyander P.s for those of you who want to send stuff our way. Thank you in advance. Po BoxIsyander & Koda Po Box 1196, Tacoma, Wa, 98402, USAAnything below is made for (and by) the omnissiah. You can read it though, just a summary of the banger of a video you're watching.———TAGSAdeptus Administratum, Warhammer 40k, Imperial Bureaucracy, Adeptus Terra, Warhammer 40k Administratum, Imperial Administration, Malcador the Sigillite, Lexicanum, High Lords of Terra, Senatorum Imperialis, Age of Apostasy, Goge Vandire, Imperial Tithe, Departmento Munitorum, Departmento Exacta, Estate Imperium, Warhammer 40k Lore, Warhammer 40k History, Warhammer Imperium, Bureaucratic Nightmare, Red Tape, Imperial Records, Paperwork, Warhammer 40k Deep Dive, Warhammer 40k Documentary, Imperial Logistics, Adeptus Administratum Secrets, Warhammer 40k Analysis, Bureaucracy in Warhammer, The Imperium's Backbone, Warhammer 40k Research, Administrative Horror, Paper-Pushers, Imperial Data, Imperial Governance, Administrative Inefficiency, Warhammer 40k Codex, Dark Imperium, Imperial Order, Administrative Red Tape, Paperwork in Warhammer, Bureaucratic Failures, High-Level Administration, Imperial Records Management, Imperial Supply Lines, Adeptus Administratum Exposed, Hidden Bureaucracy, Warhammer 40k Insider, Warhammer 40k Administrative System, Chaos of Bureaucracy, Paperwork That Saves Worlds, Imperial Paperwork, Inescapable Bureaucracy, The Administrative Machine, Detailed Warhammer 40k Study, Ultimate Guide to the Administratum, Imperial Scribes, Warhammer 40k Administrative Horror, Inefficiency of the Administratum, Administrative Legends, Bureaucratic Institutions, Imperial Archive, Scribe Culture, Warhammer 40k Fandom, Hidden Imperial Secrets, The Empire of Paperwork, Deep Dive Administratum, Imperium Organization, Legendary Administratum, Administrative Memes, Warhammer 40k Documentaries, Imperial Bureaucrats, Adeptus Administratum Review, Imperial Supply Chain, The Bureaucracy of the Imperium, Data Management in Warhammer, Ancient Imperial Records, Warhammer 40k Office, Warhammer 40k Administrative Hierarchy, Red Tape Overload, The Paper Trail of the Imperium.————————————Opinions expressed in this video are solely those of Isyander & Koda and in no way reflect the views or opinions of Games Workshop Ltd.Artwork throughout this video is used for educational purposes. if you see your artwork and would like an art credit, message me.Support the show

On the show this time, it's the warm dreamy grooves of New York band Cults. New York indie-pop band Cults return with their 6th full length, 'To The Ghosts.' It's been 14 years since Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivian formed the band. A playlist of music from filmmaker John Waters that they popped in the deck on a road-trip revealed a shared love of 60s girl groups. Organically, that led to them making music together. They recorded with young producer Shane Stoneback, a relationship that continues to this day, and to this new album. 'To The Ghosts' is available on Imperial Records. Recorded August 13, 2024. Crybaby Left My Keys Onions Hung The Moon Watch the full Live on KEXP session on YouTube.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the show this time, it's the warm dreamy grooves of New York band Cults. New York indie-pop band Cults return with their 6th full length, 'To The Ghosts.' It's been 14 years since Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivian formed the band. A playlist of music from filmmaker John Waters that they popped in the deck on a road-trip revealed a shared love of 60s girl groups. Organically, that led to them making music together. They recorded with young producer Shane Stoneback, a relationship that continues to this day, and to this new album. 'To The Ghosts' is available on Imperial Records. Recorded August 13, 2024. Crybaby Left My Keys Onions Hung The Moon Watch the full Live on KEXP session on YouTube.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It all began toward the end of a rollicking rehearsal when between songs the guys started talking about what they planned to do in the week ahead. Danny mentioned that lately he had been getting out early to take his walks in the morning before the heat set in. That prompted Charlie to start singing that Fats Domino song, “I'm walkin', yes, indeed, and I'm talkin' ‘bout you ‘n' me…”. Well, Danny — who by anybody's definition is a walking jukebox — started playing the old tune. Sam and Jack quickly picked up the vibe. Charlie reached for the banjo to add a little pepper to the pot while Randy searched his memory bank for the words and melody.Suddenly the song just started arranging itself. Click here to give it a spin.About the SongFats Domino wrote “I'm Walkin'” in 1957, working with his frequent collaborator Dave Bartholomew.It became Domino's third release in a row to reach No. 1 on the R&B chart, where it stayed for six weeks.Flashback: How Fats Became FatsDown in New Orleans in 1947, bandleader Billy Diamond heard a stocky 19-year-old French Creole lad named Antoine Dominique Domino playing at a backyard barbecue. Diamond was so impressed with the pianist that he hired him for his band, The Solid Senders, booking him to play with his crew at the Hideaway Club in the Crescent Club's Ninth Ward, where he would earn the princely sum of $3 a week.Two years later, Antoine — whom by then Diamond had christened “Fats” — was still at the Hideaway when he was discovered by former trumpeter Dave Bartholomew, the New Orleans A&R man for Imperial Records, a fledgling independent label out of Los Angeles.The PartnershipThe two partnered up and started working together. Soon, they had refashioned a number called “Junker's Blues” (an old New Orleans song about heroin addiction) into a tune they called “The Fat Man.” Initially, folks at Imperial hated it; however, they warmed to it considerably when it became an immediate hit, selling a million copies after its December 1949 release.Today "The Fat Man" often is called the very first rock 'n' roll record. Musicologist Ned Sublette says the song in fact was rock and roll before that term was even coined.Critics say Domino staked out new musical territory by playing a stripped-down and more aggressive boogie-woogie piano with a series of hot triplets and snare-like backbeats.Curiously, Fats himself, though, was not convinced that his work was of a new genre. Years later — in 1956 — he commented, “What they call ‘rock and roll' is rhythm and blues, and I've been playing it for 15 years in New Orleans."Meanwhile, “The Fat Man” was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Bartholomew. In the mid-1950s, Dave and Fats wrote more than 40 hits for Imperial, including the Billboard No. 1 pop chart hit “Ain't That a Shame,” as well as “Blue Monday,” “I'm In Love Again” and “Whole Lotta' Loving.”And of course — eight years into their collaboration — came that kicky “I'm Walkin'.”Crossing OverThat particular song also solidified Fats Domino's crossover appeal when it peaked at No. 4 on the pop singles chart.Later that same year, Ricky Nelson covered it on an episode of his mom and dad's hit television series, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. Subsequently, Rick's 1957 single also reached No. 4 on the pop chart as well as No. 10 on the R&B chart.Sixty-two years later, Fats' original Imperial Records release was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Label: Imperial 66270Year: 1968Condition: MLast Price: $15.00. Not currently available for sale.Here's a beautiful Mint copy of one of this group's very best singles. The flip is a VERY strange psychedelic rock experiment.... The A side is just wonderfully strange. Note: This copy comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. It has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio). (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)

This is the unlikely musical tale of a 1950's Italian kid from New York City not named Dion DiMucci.We're talking about John Henry Ramistella.This artist has been inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame but the big door prize still eludes him. It's possibly the contention that a career delivering mostly vivid, colorful cover versions of brilliant material makes him a melodic figure of less import.I vigorously disagree.He was a different kind of pioneer and If anyone belongs in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's Johnny Rivers.The omission is glaring.- Rich Buckland"The Whisky was a smash from opening night," Rivers says. I brought my following from Gazzari's." Rivers and his famous red Gibson ES-335 guitar symbolized the Strip's new youth-oriented atmosphere. They weren't at the Whisky long when he and Adler thought of cutting a live album. Another L.A. club owner loaned Rivers and Adler money to hire Wally Heider's remote recording unit. "We recorded this album two nights in a row and took it to every record company in town. None of them wanted it," Johnny recalls.Liberty Records executive Bob Skaff liked the tape and convinced reluctant Liberty President Al Bennett to release it on Imperial Records. Bennett had purchased Imperial from founder Lew Chudd, and ran it as a small, semi-independent label. To release Rivers' recordings, he and Adler formed Dunhill Productions with Bobby Roberts (an ex-member of The Dunhills, a tap dancing group that inspired the name) and Pierre Cossette (now producer of the Grammy Awards show). This eventually evolved into Dunhill Records, home to L.A rock legends The Mamas & The Papas, The Grass Roots and Steppenwolf.Adler and company were disappointed that the album would appear on what they considered a secondary label. But not Johnny. "When they said 'Imperial Records.' I just jumped up and went 'YEAH! YEAH!' Because I grew up with nothing but Imperial Records, Bobby Mitchell, Fats Domino, and Ricky Nelson, and I thought 'What a cool label!'" Both Rivers and Adler came to see Imperial's smallness as a plus. "it gave Lou and me the autonomy to pick our own singles and work closely with the promotion men and marketing people," Rivers says. "I think that had a lot to do with why we had so much success, because we had a real good handle on it.".-Johnny Rivers

Show #1000 The GRAND Show 01. Cuby+Blizzards - Just for Fun (2:48) (Desolation, Philips Records, 1966) Part of BB#30 with Beardo - February 2004: 02. Shane Henry - The Bitter End 03. Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Out Of The Dark 04. Curtis Salgado - Strong Suspicion 05. Richville - Gotta Let You Go (2:46) (Raw, Tub Thumper Records, 2021) 06. Gigantjes - Comes Love (4:05) (Royal Giants, Mercury Records, 1992) 07. Fat Harry & the Fuzzy Licks - Silicon Woman (3:05) (Hard Lovin' Man, Continental Record Services, 2012) Beardo's section of BB#103 - July 2005: 08. Chicago Blues Reunion - New Truck 09. Mother Earth - Down So Low 10. Barry Goldberg (and Mike Bloomfield) - ??? 11. Nick Jameseson (and Butterfield) - When The Blues Comes Callin' 12. Big Blind - Like Me (3:43) (Circus Left Town, Cool Buzz Records, 2009) 13. The Veldman Brothers - Real Deal (4:49) (Livin' By The Day, self-release, 2014) 14. Livin' Blues - Waitin' On You (2:44) (Hell's Session, Philips Records, 1969) Part of BB#130 with Beardo - February 2006: 15. Paul Mark & the Van Dorens - The Secret To My Success 16. Frank Zappa - Stinkfoot 17. Barbara Blue - Bag Of Bones 18. Cuban Heels - Gritbag (2:38) (Gritbag, Cool Buzz Records, 2011) 19. Arthur Ebeling - Simple Man (1:58) (Simple Man, Dureco Records, 1993) 20. Detonics - Mr. Barber (2:12) (Raise Your Bet, Naked Productions, 2018) Part of BB#200 with Beardo - July 2007: 21. Hamilton Loomis - He Got A Key (Just Gimme One Night) 22. The Wingnut Adams Blues Band - The Funk (Tub Thumpin') 23. John Nemeth - She Did Not Show (Magic Touch) 24. Grant Lyle - Broke Down Engine (Retronym by William McTell) 25. Twisters - She's Krazy (After The Storm) 26. Free Lance Band - Hit Or Miss (3:32) (Rough 'n Tough, Red Bullet Records, 1980) 27. Jim Wake & Sleepwalker - Don't Wake Me Up Until I'm Sober (2:40) (Preaching To The Perverted, self-release, 1999) 28. Jan Akkerman - Green Onions (3:15) (Talent For Sale, Imperial Records, 1968) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Label: Imperial 5565Year: 1958Condition: M-Price: $20.00Here's a beautiful copy of one of Nelson's very best double-sided hits. The very short (1:55!) B side ranks among his very best Rockabilly rockers, blessed as he was with an excellent backing band. Check out the mp3 "snippet" of it in our online "jukebox"! Collector Nerd Alert: The label says clock time is 1:47 for "It's Late," but my recording of it is 1:55, and that's about the same time listed on the accompanying LP. Note: This 45 record comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. It looks almost new (Labels, Vinyl) and has Near Mint sound. The A side has a touch of wear, but the B side sounds almost pristine. (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)

Shoutout to the Bronx's own Dirty Diana for coming on my show for an interview! Dirty Diana discussed her new mixtape Expensive Taste, starting out as a dancer at the Apollo, and DJ Kool Herc discovering her. She talked about how she started networking by doing more shows, her relationship with DJ KaySlay, and her conversation with the late great DMX being the most important conversation that she has ever had. She also got into creating her own independent label Imperial Records, her Get Dirty clothing line, and her acting roles in Black Roses & Spit Fire. Dirty Diana's new mixtape Expensive Taste is available on all mixtape platforms, including Spinrilla: https://spinrilla.com/mixtapes/dirti-diana-expensive-taste. Dirty Diana's music is available on all music platforms, including YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DirtiDiana and Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dirti-diana/1090661593. Follow Dirti Diana on Instagram: @therealdirtidiana and Twitter: @dirtidiana Shoutout to Lnyce for connecting us! Follow Lnyce on Instagram and Twitter: @lnyce Follow me on Instagram and Twitter: @thereelmax. Website: https://maxcoughlan.com/index.html. Website live show streaming link: https://maxcoughlan.com/sports-and-hip-hop-with-dj-mad-max-live-stream.html. MAD MAX Radio on Live 365: https://live365.com/station/MAD-MAX-Radio-a15096. Subscribe to my YouTube channel Sports and Hip Hop with DJ Mad Max: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCE0107atIPV-mVm0M3UJyPg.  Dirti Diana on "Sports and Hip-Hop with DJ Mad Max" visual on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdproJcLa1o. 

Label: Imperial 66270 djYear: 1968Condition: M-Last Price: $20.00. Not currently available for sale.Here's a beautiful promo copy of one of this group's very best singles. The flip is a VERY strange psychedelic rock experiment.... The A side is just wonderfully strange. :-) This audio is so clean I decided to make a snippet, so if you don't already know and love "Zabadak," have a listen! The song takes a number of twists and turns during its entire 3:40 length (long for 1968!)... the snippet captures the first 1:45. Note: This copy comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. The labels and vinyl (styrene) exhibit faint traces of storage wear. The audio itself is pristine!

Bobby Charles era apenas un crío cuando descolgó el teléfono y llamó a las oficinas de Chess Records en Chicago. El chaval cantó los primeros versos de su primera canción y consiguió un trabajo. Cuando llegó a Chicago desde su Luisiana natal nada era poco esperaban. Para empezar Charles era blanco, y además era un adolescente. Pero su primera canción, See You Later Alligator, se convirtió en un gran éxito para Bill Haley.La historia de Bobby Charles era repleta de grandes canciones, temas que han cantado Neil Young, Ray Charles, Fats Domino o Willie Nelson, pero su nombre apenas es recordado.Charles tuvo unos buenos años en Chicago antes de firmar por Imperial Records y componer para Fats Domino, pero a finales de los sesenta Charles se cansó de todo y huyó. Se cobijó en Woodstock y allí se hizo amigo de los chicos de The Band, que le grabaron su primer disco de estudio.Desde principios de los setenta hasta su muerte, la vida de Bobby Charles está llena de lagunas. Se le quemó una casa y la siguiente se la llevó un huracán. Tras años desaparecido volvió a grabar algunos discos y siguió siendo una figura respetada por los grandes compositores, incluso participó en El Último Vals de The Band.Esta semana dedicamos un Sofá Sonoro especial a contar la vida y carrera de Bobby Charles y a escuchar sus canciones, las que cantó él y las que escribió para otros. Un viaje necesario para recuperar el legado de uno de los grandes nombres olvidados de la música.

Label: Imperial 66267Year: 1967Condition: M-Price: $18.00This is one of those great songs from the Year of Love that oldies radio never plays anymore... but should! The B side is a previously unreleased, non-album track. The A side is slightly edited from a 3:52 album track. Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. It has Near Mint labels, and the vinyl looks untouched. The audio sounds pristine Mint!

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

Bandana Blues Special Spinner's Seventies #4 Using up left-over bandwidth with other music Spinner (still) listens to. 01. Ben Sidran - The Funky Elephant (3:22) (Don't Let Go, Blue Thumb Records, 1974) 02. Paul Davis - Sweet Magnolia Blues (4:43) (Southern Tracks & Fantasies, Bang Records, 1976) 03. CCC Inc. - Keep On Truckin' (1:50) (To Our Grandchildren, Imperial Records, 1971) 04. Michael Stanley Band - Calcutta Auction (4:30) (Ladies' Choice, Epic Records, 1976) 05. Hoyt Axton (ft. Arlo Guthrie) - Roll Your Own (2:10) (Southbound, A&M Records, 1975) 06. Arlo Guthrie - If You Would Just Drop By (4:17) (Washington County, Reprise Records, 1970) 07. Cate Bros. Band - Yield Not To Temptation (4:06) (Cate Bros. Band, Asylum Records, 1977) 08. Alquin - High Rockin' (5:27) (Best Kept Secret, Polydor Records, 1976) 09. Tom Pacheco - The Beer Song (2:48) (Swallowed Up In The Great American Heartland, RCA Records, 1976) 10. Egg Cream - Can I Stay (3:37) (Egg Cream Featuring Andy Adams, Pyramid Records, 1977) 11. Jimmy Buffett - God's Own Drunk (6:12) (Living And Dying in 3/4 Time, ABC Records, 1974) 12. Jeff Beck - Air Blower + Scatterbrain (10:37) (Blow By Blow, Epic Records, 1975)

Label: Imperial 66216Year: 1966Condition: M-Price: $20.00To understand why this terrific single is so sought-after (and hard to find!), check out the mp3 "snippet" for the B side (which by the way isn't available through iTunes or other online services for some reason): "House on Soul Hill" is one for the ages! Note: This copy comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. The labels have a little "bubbling" with some ringwear, grading a strong EX. The vinyl (styrene) has some light scuffing, but the audio itself sounds pristine Mint.

Label: Imperial 66132Year: 1965Condition: MPrice: $25.00Don't miss the terrific self-penned number on the flip, which according to sources features Roger McGuinn of the Byrds on lead guitar. Have a listen to the mp3 "snippet". Note: This beautiful copy has a drillhole and comes in a vintage Imperial Records factory sleeve. Aside from the drillhole, the labels look Mint. The vinyl looks untouched, and the audio sounds pristine Mint! (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)

Welcome to the second in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: —-more—- Transcript Today we’re going to talk about a record that wasn’t a rock and roll record at all — in fact it was a novelty record, and regarded as such. But it was a record that would have a huge impact on the whole history of the record industry, in ways you really wouldn’t expect from a silly little track. Today, we’re going to talk about “The Flying Saucer”. “The Flying Saucer” is an extremely early example of what would come to be called sampling. It’s a novelty record that in most ways is no different from the kind of thing Stan Freberg was doing at the time with records like “St George and the Dragonet”: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, “St George and the Dragonet”] Before video, and before even widespread adoption of TV, there was a large market for audio comedy, and we’ll see as the series goes on how audio engineering techniques developed for comedy would be repurposed for use in rock and roll music. For comedy records, you needed to be able to make strange and unusual sounds — and that kind of thing would come in useful when trying to develop a sound that would catch the ear of young people. The track we’re talking about today, “The Flying Saucer”, was put together by the songwriting and production team Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman. Buchanan was a songwriter who specialised in comedy songs — for example he wrote several albums’ worth of material for the Three Stooges: [Excerpt: The Three Stooges, “We’re Coming To Your House”] Goodman, meanwhile, was a producer, and it seems like he only had one idea. That idea was something that he called “break-ins”, but would later be better known as sampling or mash-ups. In a break-in recording, there would be a spoken-word narrative, but bits of other people’s records would interrupt the narrative, usually acting as punchlines to a set-up. “The Flying Saucer” was the first, and most successful, of these. Flying saucers were very much in the zeitgeist in the early fifties. The term had come to prominence in 1947, as a result of the famous Roswell incident, and for the next few years — a time of increasing paranoia in the US as the USSR had developed their own nuclear bombs, and there was a real possibility that the world might be rendered unfit for human habitation at any moment — a lot of the paranoia was filtered into belief that the world was being watched over by malevolent aliens. “The Flying Saucer” tapped in to that, and into the other new craze that was sweeping the nation, rock and roll, and merged the two. It took the format of Orson Welles’ famous radio version of War of the Worlds, and parodied it, first having a DJ interrupt the record he was playing — “Open up That Door” by Nappy Brown — to announce that a flying saucer had landed, and then having an on-the-spot reporter interview witnesses and the aliens themselves — and having all the dialogue from those witnesses be excerpts of current hits, including songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Carl Perkins, and Nappy Brown’s “Don’t Be Angry”: [Excerpt: “The Flying Saucer”] Nothing like this had ever been done before — there had, apparently, been a single other record, decades earlier, that had included samples of other records, but that had been as part of a comedy sketch with people turning the dial of the radio and hearing different songs — it had been diegetic music that they were listening to. This was something else, and something for which the music industry wasn’t prepared. Buchanan and Goodman tried to get several record labels to put it out, but had no success, and eventually took the tape directly to WINS radio, where several DJs, including Alan Freed, played it, and it got an immediate response from the audience. The next day, they took the recording to George Goldner, who you may remember from the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” as having a near-infallible ear for a hit record. He agreed to put it out, and set up a new label, Universe, for Buchanan and Goodman’s record. But after they’d pressed up a few thousand records, he discovered there already was a Universe Records. Rather than waste the money, Goldner, Buchanan, Goodman, and a few of Goldner’s employees spent all night drawing the letter L at the beginning of “Universe”, changing it to “Luniverse”. The track became a massive hit, but also a massive legal headache. The record company cut deals with the licensing agencies responsible for the songs sampled, which meant that they ended up paying a massive seventeen cents in songwriting royalties per eighty-nine-cent record sold (by comparison it was not unknown for songwriting royalties to be as low as a cent a record). And that should have been enough to cover them, at a time when there were no federal copyrights on sound recordings, but they were sued nonetheless by Imperial Records, Chess Records, and artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis. The lawsuit was ruled in Buchanan and Goodman’s favour, as the record was clearly parody by the standards of 1950s copyright law, and they celebrated with a followup single, “Buchanan and Goodman on Trial”, which followed the same formula as “The Flying Saucer”, and was a minor hit: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “Buchanan and Goodman on Trial”] The two men made one further record before Buchanan went on his way, but Goodman kept making records under the Buchanan and Goodman name, with records like “Flying Saucer Goes West”, “Flying Saucer the Third”, and “Frankenstein of ’59”. Goodman kept doing this for decades, churning out supposed novelty records long after the novelty had well and truly worn off, and usually trying to cash in on some hit film, with records like “Superfly Meets Shaft”, or “Kong” (a parody of the King Kong remake). One time, amazingly enough, he did manage to get to number four with one of these, “Mr Jaws”: [Excerpt: Dickie Goodman, “Mr. Jaws”] The follow-up, “Mrs. Jaws”, based on Jaws II, didn’t do so well, and “Mr. Jaws” would be Goodman’s last big hit. He died in 1989. Next week, we’ll look at the only group other than Buchanan and Goodman ever to release a record on Luniverse…

Welcome to the second in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: ----more---- Transcript Today we're going to talk about a record that wasn't a rock and roll record at all -- in fact it was a novelty record, and regarded as such. But it was a record that would have a huge impact on the whole history of the record industry, in ways you really wouldn't expect from a silly little track. Today, we're going to talk about "The Flying Saucer". "The Flying Saucer" is an extremely early example of what would come to be called sampling. It's a novelty record that in most ways is no different from the kind of thing Stan Freberg was doing at the time with records like "St George and the Dragonet": [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St George and the Dragonet"] Before video, and before even widespread adoption of TV, there was a large market for audio comedy, and we'll see as the series goes on how audio engineering techniques developed for comedy would be repurposed for use in rock and roll music. For comedy records, you needed to be able to make strange and unusual sounds -- and that kind of thing would come in useful when trying to develop a sound that would catch the ear of young people. The track we're talking about today, "The Flying Saucer", was put together by the songwriting and production team Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman. Buchanan was a songwriter who specialised in comedy songs -- for example he wrote several albums' worth of material for the Three Stooges: [Excerpt: The Three Stooges, "We're Coming To Your House"] Goodman, meanwhile, was a producer, and it seems like he only had one idea. That idea was something that he called "break-ins", but would later be better known as sampling or mash-ups. In a break-in recording, there would be a spoken-word narrative, but bits of other people's records would interrupt the narrative, usually acting as punchlines to a set-up. "The Flying Saucer" was the first, and most successful, of these. Flying saucers were very much in the zeitgeist in the early fifties. The term had come to prominence in 1947, as a result of the famous Roswell incident, and for the next few years -- a time of increasing paranoia in the US as the USSR had developed their own nuclear bombs, and there was a real possibility that the world might be rendered unfit for human habitation at any moment -- a lot of the paranoia was filtered into belief that the world was being watched over by malevolent aliens. "The Flying Saucer" tapped in to that, and into the other new craze that was sweeping the nation, rock and roll, and merged the two. It took the format of Orson Welles' famous radio version of War of the Worlds, and parodied it, first having a DJ interrupt the record he was playing -- "Open up That Door" by Nappy Brown -- to announce that a flying saucer had landed, and then having an on-the-spot reporter interview witnesses and the aliens themselves -- and having all the dialogue from those witnesses be excerpts of current hits, including songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Carl Perkins, and Nappy Brown's "Don't Be Angry": [Excerpt: "The Flying Saucer"] Nothing like this had ever been done before -- there had, apparently, been a single other record, decades earlier, that had included samples of other records, but that had been as part of a comedy sketch with people turning the dial of the radio and hearing different songs -- it had been diegetic music that they were listening to. This was something else, and something for which the music industry wasn't prepared. Buchanan and Goodman tried to get several record labels to put it out, but had no success, and eventually took the tape directly to WINS radio, where several DJs, including Alan Freed, played it, and it got an immediate response from the audience. The next day, they took the recording to George Goldner, who you may remember from the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" as having a near-infallible ear for a hit record. He agreed to put it out, and set up a new label, Universe, for Buchanan and Goodman's record. But after they'd pressed up a few thousand records, he discovered there already was a Universe Records. Rather than waste the money, Goldner, Buchanan, Goodman, and a few of Goldner's employees spent all night drawing the letter L at the beginning of "Universe", changing it to "Luniverse". The track became a massive hit, but also a massive legal headache. The record company cut deals with the licensing agencies responsible for the songs sampled, which meant that they ended up paying a massive seventeen cents in songwriting royalties per eighty-nine-cent record sold (by comparison it was not unknown for songwriting royalties to be as low as a cent a record). And that should have been enough to cover them, at a time when there were no federal copyrights on sound recordings, but they were sued nonetheless by Imperial Records, Chess Records, and artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis. The lawsuit was ruled in Buchanan and Goodman's favour, as the record was clearly parody by the standards of 1950s copyright law, and they celebrated with a followup single, "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial", which followed the same formula as "The Flying Saucer", and was a minor hit: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial"] The two men made one further record before Buchanan went on his way, but Goodman kept making records under the Buchanan and Goodman name, with records like "Flying Saucer Goes West", "Flying Saucer the Third", and "Frankenstein of '59". Goodman kept doing this for decades, churning out supposed novelty records long after the novelty had well and truly worn off, and usually trying to cash in on some hit film, with records like "Superfly Meets Shaft", or "Kong" (a parody of the King Kong remake). One time, amazingly enough, he did manage to get to number four with one of these, "Mr Jaws": [Excerpt: Dickie Goodman, "Mr. Jaws"] The follow-up, "Mrs. Jaws", based on Jaws II, didn't do so well, and “Mr. Jaws” would be Goodman's last big hit. He died in 1989. Next week, we'll look at the only group other than Buchanan and Goodman ever to release a record on Luniverse...

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys’ recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we’re going to look at the Everly Brothers’ first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they’d released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We’re going to look at “Cathy’s Clown”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves — and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn’t move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios’ profits. An aside about that — one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America’s dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we’ve looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America’s car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren’t as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it’s also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century — records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn’t have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing “I Love to Singa”: [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, “I Love to Singa”] That’s a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, “I Love to Singa”] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record “Young Love” spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, “Young Love”] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough — after all, he wasn’t signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star — but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount’s pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles — “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series’ stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, “Sixteen Reasons”] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn’t want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They’d topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It’s usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them — he arranged their final Cadence single, “Let it Be Me”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Let it Be Me”] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they’d paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years — the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade — or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He’s particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman “Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)”] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the “Grand Canyon Suite”, and its third movement, “On the Trail” had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear “On the Trail” to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But “On the Trail” was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here’s a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, “Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail”] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration — when his dad had been a child, he’d had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn’t been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing “Mary had a little Ike” at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe — though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn’t actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] I say it’s written by Don — the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don’s writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I’m assuming for these purposes that it’s a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It’s a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there’s the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation — “Don’t want your love any more” — and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don’s voice slowly drops relative to Phil’s, so by the end of the line they’re a third apart. It’s like he’s stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] The song’s structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I’d say that it definitely does have a chorus — the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it’s repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] If that’s not a chorus, I’m honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song’s structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it’s such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was — in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology — it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don’s singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don’s solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that’s what you expect if you’ve listened to a few of their records. But there’s also a change in rhythm. One of the things you’ll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll — and also in soul — moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we’ve looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you’d get in the fifties. And you can hear in “Cathy’s Clown” the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it’s still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we’ve looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device — a tape loop. Now, I’ve seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this — thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn’t that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier — there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It’s an almost inaudible delay, but it’s enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live — all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential — you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like “What You’re Doing”, “Ticket to Ride”, and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the “Cathy’s Clown” chorus. “Cathy’s Clown” topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called “Walk Right Back”, which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Walk Right Back”] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he’d only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he’d write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they’d already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn’t the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we’ve discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, “Temptation”, an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Temptation”] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they’d already recorded “Love Hurts”, a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project — their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”, which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name “Adrian Kimberly”: [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, “Pomp and Circumstance”] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don’t know, “Pomp and Circumstance”, under the name “Land of Hope and Glory”, is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil’s side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio’s “Raspberries, Strawberries”, written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, “Cornbread and Chitlings”] The other two singers on that track were people we’re going to hear a lot from in later episodes — a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit “Crying in the Rain”, and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants’ songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems — Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were “vitamin shots” to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as “food poisoning”, as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after “Temptation” was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After “Temptation” they had three more top thirty hits, “Don’t Blame Me”, “Crying in the Rain”, and “That’s Old Fashioned”. They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after “That’s Old Fashioned” in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn’t chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three… you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career — “Gone Gone Gone” in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and “Bowling Green” in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren’t artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don’s troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they’d started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Somebody Help Me”] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, “Roots”, an album that, like their earlier “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us”, looked back to the music they’d grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Illinois”] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman’s first album and Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It’s conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys’ performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it’s quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father’s real favourite to politics — Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted “Where’s Phil?” He replied “The Everly Brothers died ten years ago”. Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father’s funeral. They both had minor points of success — an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there — but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”: [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they’d regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, “Graceland”] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn’t worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform “Bye Bye Love” together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, “Bye Bye Love”] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else’s voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly’s health put an end to the Everly Brothers — he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn’t an end to Everly infighting though — the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil’s estate and Don over the credit for “Cathy’s Clown” was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil’s ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Cathy's Clown" by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 "Poetry in Motion" by Johnny Tillotson.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys' recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we're going to look at the Everly Brothers' first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they'd released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We're going to look at "Cathy's Clown": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves -- and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn't move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios' profits. An aside about that -- one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America's dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we've looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America's car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren't as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it's also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century -- records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn't have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing "I Love to Singa": [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, "I Love to Singa"] That's a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, "I Love to Singa"] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record "Young Love" spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, "Young Love"] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough -- after all, he wasn't signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star -- but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount's pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles -- "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series' stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb"] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, "Sixteen Reasons"] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn't want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They'd topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It's usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them -- he arranged their final Cadence single, "Let it Be Me": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Let it Be Me"] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they'd paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years -- the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade -- or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman's jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He's particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" -- Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman "Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)"] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the "Grand Canyon Suite", and its third movement, "On the Trail" had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear "On the Trail" to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But "On the Trail" was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here's a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail"] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration -- when his dad had been a child, he'd had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn't been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing "Mary had a little Ike" at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe -- though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn't actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] I say it's written by Don -- the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don's writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I'm assuming for these purposes that it's a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It's a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there's the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation -- "Don't want your love any more" -- and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don's voice slowly drops relative to Phil's, so by the end of the line they're a third apart. It's like he's stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] The song's structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I'd say that it definitely does have a chorus -- the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it's repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] If that's not a chorus, I'm honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song's structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it's such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was -- in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology -- it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don's singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don's solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that's what you expect if you've listened to a few of their records. But there's also a change in rhythm. One of the things you'll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll -- and also in soul -- moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we've looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you'd get in the fifties. And you can hear in "Cathy's Clown" the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it's still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we've looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device -- a tape loop. Now, I've seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this -- thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn't that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier -- there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It's an almost inaudible delay, but it's enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live -- all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential -- you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like "What You're Doing", "Ticket to Ride", and "Tomorrow Never Knows", all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the "Cathy's Clown" chorus. "Cathy's Clown" topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called "Walk Right Back", which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Walk Right Back"] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he'd only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he'd write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they'd already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn't the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we've discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, "Temptation", an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Temptation"] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they'd already recorded "Love Hurts", a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Love Hurts"] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project -- their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance", which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name "Adrian Kimberly": [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, "Pomp and Circumstance"] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don't know, "Pomp and Circumstance", under the name "Land of Hope and Glory", is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil's side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio's "Raspberries, Strawberries", written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, "Cornbread and Chitlings"] The other two singers on that track were people we're going to hear a lot from in later episodes -- a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit "Crying in the Rain", and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants' songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems -- Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were "vitamin shots" to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as "food poisoning", as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after "Temptation" was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After "Temptation" they had three more top thirty hits, "Don't Blame Me", "Crying in the Rain", and "That's Old Fashioned". They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after "That's Old Fashioned" in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn't chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three... you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career -- "Gone Gone Gone" in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and "Bowling Green" in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren't artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don's troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they'd started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Somebody Help Me"] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, "Roots", an album that, like their earlier "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us", looked back to the music they'd grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Illinois"] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman's first album and Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It's conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys' performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it's quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father's real favourite to politics -- Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted "Where's Phil?" He replied "The Everly Brothers died ten years ago". Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father's funeral. They both had minor points of success -- an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there -- but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me": [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me"] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they'd regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, "On the Wings of a Nightingale": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "On the Wings of a Nightingale"] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon's "Graceland", from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Graceland"] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn't worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform "Bye Bye Love" together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, "Bye Bye Love"] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else's voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly's health put an end to the Everly Brothers -- he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn't an end to Everly infighting though -- the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil's estate and Don over the credit for "Cathy's Clown" was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil's ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

1968: Sonny & Cher weren't cool anymore, and Cher ended her time at Imperial Records with "Backstage". In between, there was "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", the Newport Pop Festival, and greatest hits albums. Find out about all of it here!

Rick Nelson was the son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. They had a hit radio show in the 1940s and a popular TV show “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” from 1952 to 1966. In 1957, while Rick was on the TV show he recorded his first single for Imperial Records, “Be Bop Baby,” which sold more than a million copies. I mentioned the song to him during his appearance at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva and we discussed his show biz career.

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

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

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

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Birmingham Bounce" by Hardrock Gunter. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll.  The information about the "Yancey Special" bassline and its history comes from "Before Elvis", by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the "Fats Domino" tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we're going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting -- something which we haven't really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled -- Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we're talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you're looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we'll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with "Ain't That A Shame". He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he'd been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds -- rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren't even normally directly to their audiences -- they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino's audience -- he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s -- they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it's true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs -- enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino's first album, Rock and Rollin' With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material -- mostly hit singles he'd had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we've looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin'. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn't sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino's commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino's shows were often disrupted by riots.   We've been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the "inappropriate" behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his "pulsating jungle rhythms" -- and there's not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that -- but there was little shocking about Domino's actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. "My Blue Heaven" had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, "My Blue Heaven"]   Domino's version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with "I'm In Love Again" on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "My Blue Heaven"]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula -- one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as "I'm in the Mood for Love", "As Time Goes By", and "When My Dreamboat Comes Home".   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd -- whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple -- whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who'd thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether -- they'd either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman -- trying to avoid another riot because of "race mixing" -- said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren't allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn't turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was "Honey Chile", a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called "Shake, Rattle, and Rock":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Honey Chile"]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. "Blueberry Hill" was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We've talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino's taste for country and western music, it's possible that Autry's version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Blueberry Hill"]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong's recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: "Blueberry Hill"]   Domino loved Armstrong's version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn't get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn't been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, "We got nuthin'".   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I'm still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it's just before he starts the second middle eight -- there's a *slight* change of sonic ambience there -- but I wouldn't swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings "the wind in the willow":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino's career forever.   He couldn't have been more wrong. The song became Domino's biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino's biographer Rick Coleman, "When I'm dead and gone a million times, they'll still be playing 'da-da-da-da-dee-dah'".   Not only was Domino's version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong's version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film "Loving You":   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blueberry Hill"]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "I'm Ready"]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Tears on My Pillow"]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we're going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records -- indeed it's very similar to the one Domino used on "Ain't That a Shame", which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we've talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it's used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, "How Long Blues"]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade "Lux" Lewis, with his song "Yancey Special":   [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Yancey Special"]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, "Long Gone":   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, "Long Gone"]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to "Yancey Special", because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he'd come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn't help himself in his testimony -- he claimed, at first, that he hadn't named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called "Yancey Special" which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn't by itself be copyrightable -- which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won't repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of "Yancey Special" to come out before he'd registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on "I Hear You Knockin'", a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey "Piano" Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"]   Domino had used the bassline in "Ain't That A Shame", as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif -- he also used it in "Blue Monday", another song which he'd written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "Blue Monday"]   Domino's remake of that song would become his next hit after "Blueberry Hill", and almost as big a success. Worldwide, "Blueberry Hill" was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis' "Hound Dog" and "Heartbreak Hotel" in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat "Que Sera Sera" by Doris Day -- however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino's shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. "Blueberry Hill" made Billboard's top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We've talked before about how the recent "Old Town Road" debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino's records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn't being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino's career in chart terms, and "Blueberry Hill" was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we're going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we've barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and "Blueberry Hill" in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn't fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you'll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don't like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That's not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It's how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents -- George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it's how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Birmingham Bounce” by Hardrock Gunter. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  The information about the “Yancey Special” bassline and its history comes from “Before Elvis”, by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the “Fats Domino” tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we’re going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting — something which we haven’t really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled — Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we’re talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you’re looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we’ll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with “Ain’t That A Shame”. He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he’d been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds — rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren’t even normally directly to their audiences — they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino’s audience — he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s — they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it’s true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs — enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino’s first album, Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material — mostly hit singles he’d had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we’ve looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin’. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn’t sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino’s commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino’s shows were often disrupted by riots.   We’ve been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the “inappropriate” behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his “pulsating jungle rhythms” — and there’s not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that — but there was little shocking about Domino’s actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. “My Blue Heaven” had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “My Blue Heaven”]   Domino’s version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with “I’m In Love Again” on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “My Blue Heaven”]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula — one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as “I’m in the Mood for Love”, “As Time Goes By”, and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home”.   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd — whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple — whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who’d thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether — they’d either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman — trying to avoid another riot because of “race mixing” — said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren’t allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn’t turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was “Honey Chile”, a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called “Shake, Rattle, and Rock”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Honey Chile”]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. “Blueberry Hill” was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We’ve talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino’s taste for country and western music, it’s possible that Autry’s version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, “Blueberry Hill”]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong’s recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: “Blueberry Hill”]   Domino loved Armstrong’s version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn’t get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn’t been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, “We got nuthin'”.   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I’m still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it’s just before he starts the second middle eight — there’s a *slight* change of sonic ambience there — but I wouldn’t swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings “the wind in the willow”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino’s career forever.   He couldn’t have been more wrong. The song became Domino’s biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, “When I’m dead and gone a million times, they’ll still be playing ‘da-da-da-da-dee-dah'”.   Not only was Domino’s version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong’s version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film “Loving You”:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blueberry Hill”]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “I’m Ready”]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we’re going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records — indeed it’s very similar to the one Domino used on “Ain’t That a Shame”, which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we’ve talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it’s used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, “How Long Blues”]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade “Lux” Lewis, with his song “Yancey Special”:   [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Yancey Special”]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, “Long Gone”:   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, “Long Gone”]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to “Yancey Special”, because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he’d come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn’t help himself in his testimony — he claimed, at first, that he hadn’t named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called “Yancey Special” which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn’t by itself be copyrightable — which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won’t repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of “Yancey Special” to come out before he’d registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on “I Hear You Knockin'”, a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey “Piano” Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”]   Domino had used the bassline in “Ain’t That A Shame”, as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif — he also used it in “Blue Monday”, another song which he’d written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “Blue Monday”]   Domino’s remake of that song would become his next hit after “Blueberry Hill”, and almost as big a success. Worldwide, “Blueberry Hill” was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis’ “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat “Que Sera Sera” by Doris Day — however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino’s shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. “Blueberry Hill” made Billboard’s top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We’ve talked before about how the recent “Old Town Road” debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino’s records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn’t being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino’s career in chart terms, and “Blueberry Hill” was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we’re going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we’ve barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and “Blueberry Hill” in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn’t fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you’ll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don’t like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That’s not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It’s how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents — George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it’s how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Birmingham Bounce” by Hardrock Gunter. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  The information about the “Yancey Special” bassline and its history comes from “Before Elvis”, by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the “Fats Domino” tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we’re going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting — something which we haven’t really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled — Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we’re talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you’re looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we’ll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with “Ain’t That A Shame”. He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he’d been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds — rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren’t even normally directly to their audiences — they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino’s audience — he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s — they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it’s true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs — enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino’s first album, Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material — mostly hit singles he’d had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we’ve looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin’. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn’t sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino’s commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino’s shows were often disrupted by riots.   We’ve been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the “inappropriate” behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his “pulsating jungle rhythms” — and there’s not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that — but there was little shocking about Domino’s actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. “My Blue Heaven” had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “My Blue Heaven”]   Domino’s version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with “I’m In Love Again” on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “My Blue Heaven”]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula — one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as “I’m in the Mood for Love”, “As Time Goes By”, and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home”.   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd — whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple — whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who’d thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether — they’d either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman — trying to avoid another riot because of “race mixing” — said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren’t allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn’t turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was “Honey Chile”, a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called “Shake, Rattle, and Rock”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Honey Chile”]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. “Blueberry Hill” was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We’ve talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino’s taste for country and western music, it’s possible that Autry’s version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, “Blueberry Hill”]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong’s recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: “Blueberry Hill”]   Domino loved Armstrong’s version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn’t get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn’t been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, “We got nuthin'”.   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I’m still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it’s just before he starts the second middle eight — there’s a *slight* change of sonic ambience there — but I wouldn’t swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings “the wind in the willow”:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino’s career forever.   He couldn’t have been more wrong. The song became Domino’s biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, “When I’m dead and gone a million times, they’ll still be playing ‘da-da-da-da-dee-dah'”.   Not only was Domino’s version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong’s version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film “Loving You”:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blueberry Hill”]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “I’m Ready”]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we’re going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records — indeed it’s very similar to the one Domino used on “Ain’t That a Shame”, which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we’ve talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it’s used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, “How Long Blues”]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade “Lux” Lewis, with his song “Yancey Special”:   [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Yancey Special”]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, “Long Gone”:   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, “Long Gone”]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to “Yancey Special”, because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he’d come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn’t help himself in his testimony — he claimed, at first, that he hadn’t named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called “Yancey Special” which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn’t by itself be copyrightable — which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won’t repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of “Yancey Special” to come out before he’d registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on “I Hear You Knockin'”, a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey “Piano” Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”]   Domino had used the bassline in “Ain’t That A Shame”, as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif — he also used it in “Blue Monday”, another song which he’d written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “Blue Monday”]   Domino’s remake of that song would become his next hit after “Blueberry Hill”, and almost as big a success. Worldwide, “Blueberry Hill” was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis’ “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat “Que Sera Sera” by Doris Day — however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino’s shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. “Blueberry Hill” made Billboard’s top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We’ve talked before about how the recent “Old Town Road” debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino’s records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn’t being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino’s career in chart terms, and “Blueberry Hill” was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we’re going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we’ve barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and “Blueberry Hill” in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn’t fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you’ll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don’t like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That’s not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It’s how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents — George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it’s how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Train Kept A-Rollin'" by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 "Jump, Jive, an' Wail", by Louis Prima. ----more----  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I've mostly used Billy Burnette's self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It's a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I've been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes' relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on "Train Kept A-Rollin'", and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn't seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we're going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There's a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we'll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades -- the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys... rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken -- over each other's heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette's case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They'd grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black's brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group -- the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey's at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn't like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin' Wolf. Burlison's guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf's electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf's early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I've seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On":   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I'm Moving On"]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night's show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn't just get three random people he'd never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was "you", and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn't long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, "You're Undecided", for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "You're Undecided", Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called "Rockabilly Boogie", which they didn't get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, "Rockabilly Boogie"]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word "rockabilly", and Billy Burnette, Dorsey's son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny's son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one -- that it's a portmanteau of the words "rock" and "hillbilly", to describe rocking hillbilly music -- but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it's just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison's old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they'd come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn't go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, "Shattered Dreams", although that song didn't get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "Shattered Dreams"]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They'd simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn't need them.   They didn't have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called "Tear It Up", which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of "You're Undecided":   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "Tear It Up"]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that's what they were -- a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio weren't happy at all about their recordings. They didn't want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn't know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley's studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they'd been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he'd ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley's studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we've already looked at "Rocket 88", which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville "A-Team", the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison's.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock 'n' Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry":   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"]   But that was a good five years after the Rock 'n' Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, "Honey Hush", was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Honey Hush"]   It's not one of Turner's best, to be honest -- leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work -- but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock 'n' Roll Trio's cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Honey Hush"]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called "Train Kept A-Rollin'".   "Train Kept A-Rollin'", like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called "Cow Cow Boogie", which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, "Cow Cow Boogie"]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title "Train Kept A-Rollin'":   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, "The Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison's guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The single wasn't a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words "the train kept rolling all night long".   Sadly, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio didn't last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by "Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio", and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette's backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit -- he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren't even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material -- Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents' TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like "Believe What You Say", "Waiting In School", "It's Late", and "Just A Little Too Much":   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Just a Little Too Much"]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name "the Burnette Brothers":   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, "Warm Love"]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, "There Was a Tall Oak Tree", which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a "most promising newcomer" award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey's, were in a very different style from the Rock 'n' Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, And You're Mine":   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "You're Sixteen"]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny's solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we'll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined "the Sun Rhythm Section", a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin', and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette -- Johnny and Dorsey's sons -- on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

“The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James” is STILL the #1 New Release at the Amazon Kindle Store for Blues Books. On sale now at https://tinyurl.com/yy6vlsv3 (Amazon) and at https://tinyurl.com/y4ql53s2 (Apple Books) The Imperial Record label, founded in 1948 in Los Angeles, is well known as the home of Fats Domino and other great New Orleans artists, as well as Texas guitar hero T-Bone Walker. On this episode of Blues Unlimited, however, we focus on some of the fantastic Country and Down Home Blues that Imperial held in their catalog over the years, from Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Papa Lightfoot, Lil' Son Jackson, BooZoo Chavis, Snooks Eaglin, and many more. Partly inspired by a series of three LPs that came out more than 50 years ago, simply entitled "Rural Blues," we'll hear lots of rarities and classic sides from Imperial, as well as associated labels (such as Aladdin, which Imperial bought in 1961) and a few other operations that were on Imperial's radar as well. The three LPs -- the material for which was notably selected by Bob "The Bear" Hite and Henry Vestine of Canned Heat fame -- were originally subtitled "Goin' Up The Country" (Volume 1); "Saturday Night Function" (Volume 2); and "Down Home Stomp," and have long been considered to be classics of the genre. Pictured: The distinctive cover art for "Rural Blues, Vol. 1." Are you looking for ways to promote your band’s latest release, product, business, or service? Advertise on the podcast that’s been downloaded over one million times, and reach a global audience of blues lovers! Contact us at bluesunlimited at gmail dot com for more details! This episode is available commercial free and in its original full-fidelity high quality audio exclusively to our subscribers at Bandcamp. Your annual subscription of $27 a year will go directly to support this radio show, and you’ll gain INSTANT DOWNLOAD ACCESS to this and more than 170 other episodes from our extensive archive as well. More info is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

“The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James” is STILL the #1 New Release at the Amazon Kindle Store for Blues Books. On sale now at https://tinyurl.com/yy6vlsv3 (Amazon) and at https://tinyurl.com/y4ql53s2 (Apple Books) The Imperial Record label, founded in 1948 in Los Angeles, is well known as the home of Fats Domino and other great New Orleans artists, as well as Texas guitar hero T-Bone Walker. On this episode of Blues Unlimited, however, we focus on some of the fantastic Country and Down Home Blues that Imperial held in their catalog over the years, from Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Papa Lightfoot, and many more. Pictured: The distinctive cover art for "Rural Blues, Vol. 1." Are you looking for ways to promote your band’s latest release, product, business, or service? Advertise on the podcast that’s been downloaded over one million times, and reach a global audience of blues lovers! Contact us at bluesunlimited at gmail dot com for more details! This episode is available commercial free and in its original full-fidelity high quality audio exclusively to our subscribers at Bandcamp. Your annual subscription of $27 a year will go directly to support this radio show, and you’ll gain INSTANT DOWNLOAD ACCESS to this and more than 170 other episodes from our extensive archive as well. More info is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Show #797 Summer Heat The summer heat made Spinner go slow, but it didn't stop him from producing a nice Bandana Blues episode. 01. Jersey Swamp Cats - Cupcake! (3:30) (Go Cat Go!, self-release, 2019) 02. Cheyenne James - Gypsy Mama (4:23) (Burn It Up, self-release, 2018) 03. Rodrigo Souza - Down The River (3:54) (Down The River, self-release, 2019) 04. Luca Kiella - Ten O'Clock Blues (2:00) (Figure It Out, self-release, 2019) 05. Ross Osteen Band - Nighttime (5:15) (Williwaw, self-release, 2019) 06. Shaun Murphy - Blues In The Morning (3:41) (Mighty Gates, Vision Wall Records, 2017) 07. Trevor B. Power Band - Jack (4:28) (Everyday Angel, self-release, 2019) 08. Tullie Brae - Break These Chains (4:03) (Revelation, Endless Blues Records, 2019) 09. Burton Gaar - Short Red Dress (3:30) (Blue Eyed Soul, Black & Tan Records, 2019) 10. Stef Paglia - Warmth Instead Of Cold (8:03) (Never Forget, self-release, 2019) 11. Big Daddy Wilson - Trippin' On You (4:25) (Deep In My Soul, Ruf Records, 2019) 12. Smiley Lewis - I Hear You Knockin' (2:35) (45 RPM Single, Imperial Records, 1955) 13. Gale Storm - I Hear You Knockin' (2:21) (45 RPM Single, Dot Records, 1955) 14. Fats Domino - I'm Walking (2:05) (45 RPM Single, Imperial Records, 1957) 15. Dave Bartholomew - The Monkey (2:28) (45 RPM Single, Imperial Records, 1957) 16. Mark Cameron - Where I Got You From (4:30) (On A Roll, Cop Records, 2019) 17. Alice Howe - Getaway Car (3:42) (Visions, self-release, 2019) 18. Zac Harmon - Sunday Morning After Saturday Night (4:45) (Mississippi BarBQ, Catfood Records, 2019) 19. Cassie Keenum & Rick Randlett - One More Last Time (4:50) (Hauntings, self-release, 2017) 20. Cash Box Kings - Bluesman Next Door (4:43) (Hail To The Kings!, Alligator Records, 2019) 21. Terry Robb - Death Of Blind Arthur (2:52) (Confessin' My Dues, NiaSounds Records, 2019) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "Ain't That A Shame". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. I've leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it's the only biography of Domino I know of, and we're looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we've looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we're going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It's been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on "The Fat Man", and episode twelve, on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called "Dreaming", featuring members of both Domino's touring band and of Bartholomew's studio band. It's credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, "Dreaming"] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino's manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade's car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino's benefit -- Domino's contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest -- which might often be several times as much money. With Cade's death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew's partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino's career. One of the things we've touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership -- although this is using "strained" in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino's piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew's arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, "Going to the River", one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Going to the River"] Dave Bartholomew called that "a nothing song" -- and it's easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don't remember what that is, it's that "bom, BOM bom" rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there's not much of musical interest there -- you've got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they're mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn't been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, "Going to the River"] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn't a white man having a hit with a black man's song, but another black man, who'd heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn't like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song "I Hear You Knocking" for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey "Piano" Smith to play in an imitation of Domino's style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knocking"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn't their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a "bad luck singer", because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world -- in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country -- and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he'd sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn't true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino's touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist's instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist's back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino's backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino's tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins' cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits -- "Please Don't Leave Me", "Rose Mary", "Something's Wrong", "You Done Me Wrong", and "Don't You Know" all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows -- and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino's fingerprints on it than Bartholomew's. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn't tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you'd never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn't just go "You made me cry", but "You made -- BAM BAM -- me cry -- BAM BAM" [excerpt: Fats Domino, "Ain't That A Shame"] That's the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew's real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It's all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn't his idea. Domino's biographer Rick Coleman -- to whose biography of Domino I'm extremely indebted for this episode -- suggests that Dave Bartholomew's arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard "Tin Roof Blues". I can *sort of* hear it, but I'm not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, "Tin Roof Blues"] Another possible influence on "Ain't That A Shame" is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His "Ain't It A Shame" doesn't sound much like "Ain't That A Shame", but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Ain't It A Shame"] Indeed, early pressings of "Ain't That A Shame" mistakenly called it "Ain't It A Shame", presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino's records, now that Matassa's studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly -- a trick which made Domino's voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn't be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino's records "they couldn't find the damn notes on the piano!" Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn't speak English. He did speak English -- though it was his second language, after Creole French -- but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn't recognise it as English at all. Domino's relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics -- a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to "Ain't That A Shame" in a mock "poetry recital", to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We'll see our friends on the way We'll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I'll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as "Ain't That A Shame". As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone's cover version came out almost before Domino's did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called "the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour", played records by both black and white people. As the country's biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of "Ain't That A Shame", and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, "He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor". That's sort of true -- Randle wasn't a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of "Ain't That A Shame" to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show -- early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to "Isn't That A Shame" because he thought "Ain't" ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain't That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against "Tutti Frutti", among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone's cover "When I first heard it I didn't like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don't care if a thousand people make it." Talking to Domino's biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. "Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn't singing" -- and here he used an expletive that I'm not going to repeat because I'm not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes -- "Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don't make it right!" Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone's misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino's hit "Bo Weevil", and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Bo Weevil"] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, "Bo Weevil"] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils -- pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners -- and while boll weevils didn't reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino's music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn't handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain't That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police's heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. "Ain't That A Shame" was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, "All By Myself", would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While "All By Myself" was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here's Broonzy's song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: "All By Myself"] And here's Domino's: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: "All By Myself"] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino's hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records -- that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded "All By Myself", isn't boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the "chick", syncopating it, so it's sort of "a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick". The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino's future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew's tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino's music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren't the only ones doing it -- Professor Longhair and Huey "Piano" Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other's material and put their own unique spin on it -- but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. "Ain't That A Shame" was just the start of Domino's rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years -- he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like "I'm in Love Again", "I'm Walkin'", "Blue Monday", "Valley of Tears", "I Want to Walk You Home" and "Walking to New Orleans". Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records -- there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino's consistent quality. So we'll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill...

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it’s the only biography of Domino I know of, and we’re looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we’ve looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we’re going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It’s been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on “The Fat Man”, and episode twelve, on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called “Dreaming”, featuring members of both Domino’s touring band and of Bartholomew’s studio band. It’s credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Dreaming”] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino’s manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade’s car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino’s benefit — Domino’s contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest — which might often be several times as much money. With Cade’s death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew’s partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino’s career. One of the things we’ve touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership — although this is using “strained” in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino’s piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, “Going to the River”, one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Going to the River”] Dave Bartholomew called that “a nothing song” — and it’s easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don’t remember what that is, it’s that “bom, BOM bom” rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there’s not much of musical interest there — you’ve got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they’re mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn’t been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “Going to the River”] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn’t a white man having a hit with a black man’s song, but another black man, who’d heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn’t like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song “I Hear You Knocking” for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey “Piano” Smith to play in an imitation of Domino’s style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knocking”] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn’t their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a “bad luck singer”, because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world — in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country — and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he’d sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn’t true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino’s touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist’s instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist’s back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino’s backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino’s tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins’ cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits — “Please Don’t Leave Me”, “Rose Mary”, “Something’s Wrong”, “You Done Me Wrong”, and “Don’t You Know” all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows — and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino’s fingerprints on it than Bartholomew’s. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn’t tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you’d never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn’t just go “You made me cry”, but “You made — BAM BAM — me cry — BAM BAM” [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Ain’t That A Shame”] That’s the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew’s real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It’s all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn’t his idea. Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman — to whose biography of Domino I’m extremely indebted for this episode — suggests that Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard “Tin Roof Blues”. I can *sort of* hear it, but I’m not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, “Tin Roof Blues”] Another possible influence on “Ain’t That A Shame” is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His “Ain’t It A Shame” doesn’t sound much like “Ain’t That A Shame”, but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Ain’t It A Shame”] Indeed, early pressings of “Ain’t That A Shame” mistakenly called it “Ain’t It A Shame”, presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino’s records, now that Matassa’s studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly — a trick which made Domino’s voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn’t be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino’s records “they couldn’t find the damn notes on the piano!” Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn’t speak English. He did speak English — though it was his second language, after Creole French — but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn’t recognise it as English at all. Domino’s relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics — a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to “Ain’t That A Shame” in a mock “poetry recital”, to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We’ll see our friends on the way We’ll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I’ll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as “Ain’t That A Shame”. As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone’s cover version came out almost before Domino’s did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called “the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour”, played records by both black and white people. As the country’s biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of “Ain’t That A Shame”, and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, “He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor”. That’s sort of true — Randle wasn’t a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of “Ain’t That A Shame” to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show — early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to “Isn’t That A Shame” because he thought “Ain’t” ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain’t That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against “Tutti Frutti”, among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone’s cover “When I first heard it I didn’t like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don’t care if a thousand people make it.” Talking to Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. “Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn’t singing” — and here he used an expletive that I’m not going to repeat because I’m not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes — “Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don’t make it right!” Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone’s misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino’s hit “Bo Weevil”, and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Bo Weevil”] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “Bo Weevil”] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils — pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners — and while boll weevils didn’t reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino’s music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn’t handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain’t That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police’s heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. “Ain’t That A Shame” was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, “All By Myself”, would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While “All By Myself” was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here’s Broonzy’s song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: “All By Myself”] And here’s Domino’s: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: “All By Myself”] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino’s hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records — that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded “All By Myself”, isn’t boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the “chick”, syncopating it, so it’s sort of “a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick”. The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino’s future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew’s tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino’s music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren’t the only ones doing it — Professor Longhair and Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other’s material and put their own unique spin on it — but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. “Ain’t That A Shame” was just the start of Domino’s rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years — he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like “I’m in Love Again”, “I’m Walkin'”, “Blue Monday”, “Valley of Tears”, “I Want to Walk You Home” and “Walking to New Orleans”. Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records — there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino’s consistent quality. So we’ll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill…

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it’s the only biography of Domino I know of, and we’re looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we’ve looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we’re going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It’s been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on “The Fat Man”, and episode twelve, on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called “Dreaming”, featuring members of both Domino’s touring band and of Bartholomew’s studio band. It’s credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Dreaming”] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino’s manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade’s car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino’s benefit — Domino’s contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest — which might often be several times as much money. With Cade’s death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew’s partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino’s career. One of the things we’ve touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership — although this is using “strained” in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino’s piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, “Going to the River”, one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Going to the River”] Dave Bartholomew called that “a nothing song” — and it’s easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don’t remember what that is, it’s that “bom, BOM bom” rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there’s not much of musical interest there — you’ve got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they’re mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn’t been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “Going to the River”] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn’t a white man having a hit with a black man’s song, but another black man, who’d heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn’t like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song “I Hear You Knocking” for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey “Piano” Smith to play in an imitation of Domino’s style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knocking”] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn’t their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a “bad luck singer”, because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world — in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country — and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he’d sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn’t true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino’s touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist’s instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist’s back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino’s backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino’s tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins’ cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits — “Please Don’t Leave Me”, “Rose Mary”, “Something’s Wrong”, “You Done Me Wrong”, and “Don’t You Know” all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows — and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino’s fingerprints on it than Bartholomew’s. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn’t tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you’d never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn’t just go “You made me cry”, but “You made — BAM BAM — me cry — BAM BAM” [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Ain’t That A Shame”] That’s the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew’s real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It’s all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn’t his idea. Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman — to whose biography of Domino I’m extremely indebted for this episode — suggests that Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard “Tin Roof Blues”. I can *sort of* hear it, but I’m not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, “Tin Roof Blues”] Another possible influence on “Ain’t That A Shame” is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His “Ain’t It A Shame” doesn’t sound much like “Ain’t That A Shame”, but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Ain’t It A Shame”] Indeed, early pressings of “Ain’t That A Shame” mistakenly called it “Ain’t It A Shame”, presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino’s records, now that Matassa’s studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly — a trick which made Domino’s voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn’t be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino’s records “they couldn’t find the damn notes on the piano!” Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn’t speak English. He did speak English — though it was his second language, after Creole French — but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn’t recognise it as English at all. Domino’s relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics — a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to “Ain’t That A Shame” in a mock “poetry recital”, to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We’ll see our friends on the way We’ll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I’ll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as “Ain’t That A Shame”. As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone’s cover version came out almost before Domino’s did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called “the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour”, played records by both black and white people. As the country’s biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of “Ain’t That A Shame”, and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, “He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor”. That’s sort of true — Randle wasn’t a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of “Ain’t That A Shame” to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show — early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to “Isn’t That A Shame” because he thought “Ain’t” ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain’t That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against “Tutti Frutti”, among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone’s cover “When I first heard it I didn’t like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don’t care if a thousand people make it.” Talking to Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. “Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn’t singing” — and here he used an expletive that I’m not going to repeat because I’m not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes — “Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don’t make it right!” Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone’s misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino’s hit “Bo Weevil”, and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Bo Weevil”] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “Bo Weevil”] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils — pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners — and while boll weevils didn’t reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino’s music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn’t handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain’t That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police’s heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. “Ain’t That A Shame” was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, “All By Myself”, would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While “All By Myself” was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here’s Broonzy’s song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: “All By Myself”] And here’s Domino’s: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: “All By Myself”] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino’s hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records — that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded “All By Myself”, isn’t boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the “chick”, syncopating it, so it’s sort of “a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick”. The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino’s future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew’s tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino’s music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren’t the only ones doing it — Professor Longhair and Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other’s material and put their own unique spin on it — but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. “Ain’t That A Shame” was just the start of Domino’s rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years — he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like “I’m in Love Again”, “I’m Walkin'”, “Blue Monday”, “Valley of Tears”, “I Want to Walk You Home” and “Walking to New Orleans”. Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records — there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino’s consistent quality. So we’ll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill…

Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

  Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don't buy the "Kindle edition" at that link, because it's just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he's also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The information on Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino here largely comes from Blue Monday by Rick Coleman. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 while the Fats Domino tracks are on They Call Me the Fat Man Erratum I used the wrong version of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" when editing this podcast. The version used here is a soundalike remake from 1958, rather than the 1952 original. Apologies for the error.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   This is a rather special episode in some ways. The topic of this episode is "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Price, and I'll be frank -- I was not originally going to give "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" its own episode. Not because it's not a great record -- it is -- but because I was going to deal with it in passing when I cover one of the other records made by its vocalist, Lloyd Price. But that was before I noticed an odd coincidence of timing. I needed to prerecord this episode, because it's Christmas and I'm visiting my in-laws, and so I was looking at what records came next in the history on my timeline, and I noticed two things: The first was that "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" was the next important record to be released in the timeline I'd put together. And the second was that Dave Bartholomew, that record's producer, was born one hundred years ago exactly, on December 24th, 1918. I simply couldn't pass up an opportunity to do an episode celebrating the hundredth birthday of one of the great pioneers of rock and roll music, and one who is happily still alive. We talked about Bartholomew a bit a couple of weeks ago, in the episode about "The Fat Man" by Fats Domino, but he needs to be discussed in more detail, as he was one of the most important musicians of the fifties. As we heard, he brought the "Spanish tinge" to rhythm and blues records and collaborated with Fats Domino on all of Domino's big hits -- and we'll be hearing more about him in that context in a few weeks -- but he did a lot more. Not only did he produce classic records by Frankie Ford and T-Bone Walker, not only did he write "One Night", which became a big hit for Smiley Lewis and a bigger one for Elvis, but he also wrote Chuck Berry's only number one hit: [excerpt "My Ding-A-Ling" by Chuck Berry] OK, that may not be Berry's finest moment as a performer, but it shows just how wide Bartholomew's influence was. Despite that, rather astonishingly, there's never been a biography written of Bartholomew, and even "Honkers and Shouters", the classic book on the history of rhythm and blues which contains almost the only in-depth interviews with many of the musicians and record producers who made this music, only devotes a handful of paragraphs to Bartholomew's work. I've barely been able to even find any in-depth interviews with Bartholomew, and so my knowledge of him is built up from lots of offhand mentions and casual connections in books on other people. But he worked with so *many* other people that that still amounts to quite a lot. So let's talk about "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and let's do it by picking up the story of Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino after "The Fat Man". "The Fat Man" was a massive hit, but it caused some strain between its producer and its performer. Domino had gone on tour to support the record, as part of a larger package with Bartholomew's band as the headliners. Domino would only perform a few songs at a time, and most of the show was Bartholomew's band. Domino resented Bartholomew for getting most of the money, while Bartholomew resented Domino for his popularity -- Domino was starting to overshadow the nominal star of the show. But more than that, Domino just didn't seem to be getting on well with the rest of the band. This wasn't because he was unfriendly -- although Domino was always someone who seemed a little socially awkward -- just that Domino was a homebody who absolutely resented ever having to go away from home, and especially as he had a newborn baby son he wanted to be home for. Indeed, when the tour had started, Domino had missed the first few days by the simple expedient of hiding for several days, and it was only when a union official had come knocking at his door explaining what happened to people who broke their contracts that he relented and went on the tour. And even then, he packed a suitcase full of foods like pickled pig's feet, in case he couldn't get his favourite foods anywhere else. Domino was a sheltered, nervous, shy, person -- someone who had been so unworldly that when his first record came out he didn't have a record player to play it on and had to listen to it on jukeboxes -- and this exasperated Bartholomew, who was a far more well-travelled and socially aware person. But the two of them still continued to collaborate, and to make records together, including some great ones like this version of the traditional New Orleans song "Eh La Bas!", which Bartholomew rewrote with the great boogie pianist Professor Longhair and titled "Hey! La Bas Boogie" [excerpt "Hey! La Bas Boogie" by Fats Domino] The collaborations caused other problems, too -- both Bartholomew and Domino thought, with good reason, of themselves as the true talent in their collaborations. Domino believed that his piano playing and singing were the important things on the records, and that since he was bringing in most of the ideas fully-formed Bartholomew wasn't doing much to make the records successful. Bartholomew, on the other hand, thought that the song ideas Domino was bringing in were basically nursery rhymes, while his own songs were more sophisticated -- Domino had little formal musical knowledge and usually used only a couple of chords, while Bartholomew was far more musically knowledgeable; and Domino wasn't a native English speaker, and tended to use very simple lyrics while when Bartholomew brought in ideas he would come up with strong narratives and punning lyrics. Bartholomew thought that when the songs Domino brought in became successful, it was because of Bartholomew's patching up of them and his arrangements. Bartholomew resented that Domino was becoming a big star, and Domino resented that Bartholomew patronised him in the studio, treating him as an employee, not an equal partner. Of course, both were right -- Bartholomew was by far the better songwriter, but Domino had great instincts for a hook. Bartholomew was a great arranger, and Domino was a great performer. As so often in musical collaborations, the sum was much greater than its parts, and it was the tension between the two of them that drove the collaboration. But while Bartholomew had problems with Fats, his real problems were with Al Young, a white New Orleans record store owner who was an associate of Lew Chudd, Imperial Records' owner. He didn't like Young's habit of trying to make it look like it was him, rather than Bartholomew, who was producing the records, and he especially didn't like when Young cut himself in on the songwriting royalties for songs Bartholomew wrote. This problem came to a head when Bartholomew got back home from a particularly stressful tour with Domino over Thanksgiving. It had been far too cold for the Louisiana musicians in the Midwest, and they'd been ripped off by the tour promoters -- they'd received only something like two hundred dollars between them, rather than the two thousand they'd been promised. Domino actually had to call home and ask his family to wire him his bus fare back from Missouri to New Orleans. And when Bartholomew got back, he popped into Al Young's record shop -- and Young showed him the fifteen hundred dollar Christmas bonus cheque he'd just received from Imperial Records for all his hard work that year. Bartholomew had received no bonus, despite having done far more for the company than Young had, and he assumed that the reason was because Bartholomew was black and Young was white. He decided right then to quit Imperial, and to become a freelancer working for whoever had work. Domino continued making records in the same style, and even continued to have hits with songs that followed the formula he'd established with Bartholomew, some of them even bigger than the ones they'd made together, like "Goin' Home". But Al Young was the producer on that record, and while Domino did his usual great performance and it had that tresillo rhythm, Young knew nothing about music, and so the arrangement was haphazard and the sax solo was off-key at points: [excerpt: solo from "Goin' Home", Fats Domino] But it was still a big hit, and Al Young got his name stuck on the credits as a co-writer, which is what mattered to him at least, even if everyone was unhappy with the recordings. That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and made its way into the top thirty on the pop charts, and you can hear its influence all over the place, for example in this other classic track: [excerpt "Shake a Hand", Faye Adams] It also influenced a young piano player and arranger named Ray Charles, and we'll talk more about him later. But the fact remains, it's not as good as the stuff Domino was doing with Bartholomew. It has the power and the catchiness, but it doesn't have the depth and the sophistication. Lew Chudd, around this time, tried to get Art Young to get Dave Bartholomew back working with Domino again, but Bartholomew just slammed the phone down on Young. He didn't need Imperial Records, he didn't need Fats Domino, and he *certainly* didn't need Art Young. He was working with other people now. In particular, he was working with Specialty Records. Specialty Records was an LA-based record label, like most of the labels that worked with New Orleans musicians were -- for whatever reason, even though LA and New Orleans are thousands of miles away from each other, it was the Los Angeles companies rather than anywhere closer that seemed to pick up on the sound coming from New Orleans. Specialty was run by Art Rupe. Art Rupe is, amazingly, still alive and even older than Dave Bartholomew -- he turned 101 a few months back -- and he's one of the most important figures in the development of rhythm and blues in the 1950s. Indeed, he was the producer of yet another record occasionally labelled "the first rock and roll record", "R.M.'s Blues" by Roy Milton, which was one of the early records to combine a boogie piano and a backbeat. [excerpt: "R.M.'s Blues" by Roy Milton] And in his case, it's no coincidence that he ended up working with New Orleans musicians -- he was impressed by Fats Domino's Imperial Records releases, Imperial being another Los Angeles based label, and so he came to New Orleans to see if there were other people like Domino about. Rupe put out an ad for people to come to Cosimo Mattassa's studio to audition, but it wasn't until he was packing up to leave and fly back to Los Angeles without any success, that a singer called Lloyd Price walked into the studio and sang his song "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". Rupe cancelled his flight -- this was someone worth recording. Price was, at the time, a jingle creator for a local radio station, providing music for the DJs to use while they were advertising various products. At the time, radio advertising in the US was much like podcast advertising is now, and in the same way that a podcast host might interrupt what they're doing and try to tell you about the benefits of a new mattress, so, then, might DJs -- and in the same way that some podcast hosts will vary their set texts, so would the DJs, and one of the DJs for whom Lloyd Price created jingles had a catchphrase -- "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". Price had come up with a melody to go along with those words -- or, rather, he'd adapted a pre-existing melody to it -- and the result had been popular enough that he had decided to turn it into a full song. And Price had sat in with Dave Bartholomew and his band in Kenner, his hometown, singing a few songs with them. Bartholomew had told him "I'm not working with Lew Chudd any more, I'm just hanging around Cosimo Matassa's studio catching the odd bit of arrangement work there -- why don't you come down and see if we can get you recorded?" But Price was so unfamiliar with New Orleans that he didn't even know how to get to Rampart Street, which is why he'd arrived so late. Luckily for everyone concerned, he managed to find the most famous street in New Orleans eventually. When they started recording the song, Bartholomew started to get annoyed with the guitarist on the session, Ernest McLean . "I wanted to get some sort of a rhythm going and he de dum de dum, de dum de dum [Laurel and Hardy rhythm]. I say, man, that's, that's, that ain't nothing. What the hell you get that thing from?" That's from one of the few interviews I've seen with Bartholomew -- other sources say it was his piano player, Salvador Doucette, who was the problem. Whichever musician it was was apparently a jazz musician who had no real love or feel for rhythm and blues, and Bartholomew was getting exasperated, but at the same time he had no option but to go with what he had. But then fate intervened. Fats Domino happened to be passing the studio, and he decided to just call in and say hello, since it was the studio he recorded in regularly -- and he found Dave Bartholomew there. Domino and Bartholomew hadn't worked together in over a year at this point -- March 1952 -- and things were tense at first, but Bartholomew decided he'd be the one to ease the tension, and asked Domino to sit in. At first Domino refused, saying "Man, you know I can't sit in! I'm under contract!", but he sat around in the session, having a few drinks and watching the band work. Eventually, he said "Well, I'm gonna have me some fun, I'm gonna sit in anyway!" The resulting record was the one that knocked "Goin' Home" off the top of the R&B charts, and it would become one of the defining records of the rock and roll era. "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" is, in many ways, an attempt to recapture the success of "The Fat Man". It has many of the same musicians, the same arranger, and the same basic melody that the earlier record did. But being recorded three years later on meant it was also recorded after three years more advancement in the rock and roll style, and "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" is notably more rhythmically complex than the earlier record -- and that's largely down to Dave Bartholemew's arrangement. Let's have a look at the individual elements of the track -- starting with Fats Domino's piano playing. Domino is mostly playing triplets, which is the way that he played most of the time: [excerpt: piano part from "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"] You've got the drums, by the great Earl Palmer, where he's making the transition between his early shuffle style and his later backbeat emphasis -- you can hear he's trying to do two things at once on the drums, he's trying to swing it *and* produce a backbeat, so you've essentially got him doing polyrhythms. You've got the bass, a different rhythm again, and then you've got those horns, just doing long, sustained, "blaaaat" parts. And then over that you've got Lloyd Price, singing in a Roy Brown imitation, but with a teenager's style -- Price had just turned nineteen -- it's a song about unrequited love or lust, a teenager's song of yearning. And then to top it off there's the sax solo by Herb Hardesty -- the prototype for the solos he would provide for all Domino's hits from this point on. It's an amazing combination; this is the record that crystallised the New Orleans sound and became the template all the others would follow. "The Fat Man" had been the prototype, with some rough edges still there. This was a slicker, more assured, version of the same thing. Art Rupe was certainly pleased, but they were lucky to have been working with Rupe himself -- soon after this recording, Rupe decided to expand his operations in New Orleans, and put Johnny Vincent in charge. While Rupe has a reputation as a decent businessman by 1950s record company standards, Johnny Vincent does *not*. When Vincent later owned his own record company, Ace, he was so bad at paying the musicians that Huey "Piano" Smith and Mac Rebbennack had to go and hold Vincent at gunpoint while they searched his office -- and his person -- for the money he owed them. And then, a few months later, they had to do the same thing again, because being held up at gunpoint just the once wasn't enough for him to think better of ripping them off. Vincent was also not a particularly skilled record producer, at least according to Rebennack. I can't repeat his comments about Vincent's approach in full, because if I use some of the words he used iTunes will restrict this podcast to adults only, but the gist is that Vincent was a con-man who knew nothing about record production. It's probably not a massive coincidence that Dave Bartholomew stopped working for Specialty very shortly after the recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". I've not seen a precise enough timeline to know for sure that it was Johnny Vincent's arrival at the label that persuaded Bartholomew he didn't want to work for them any more, but it seems likely to me. What I *do* know, though is that Lew Chudd heard "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", compared it to the records Art Young was producing for Fats Domino, and realised that he could be doing a hell of a lot better than he was. He eventually, through an intermediary, managed to persuade Bartholomew to talk to him again, and Bartholomew was hired back to work at Imperial. The same month, April 1952, that "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" came out, Domino and Bartholomew were back in Matassa's studio, working together again, and recording a collaboration which sounds like a true combination of both men's styles: [excerpt: "Poor Me" -- Fats Domino] UPTO PART 7 Domino and Bartholomew would work together regularly in the studio until at least 1967, and live off and on for decades after that. And we'll hear more of their collaborations later. But Lloyd Price wasn't hampered by the fact that his producer had gone off to another label either. His follow-up single, cut at the same session as "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" with the same musicians, was a double-sided hit, both sides making the top ten on the R&B charts. And the same happened with the single after that, cut with different musicians -- a song called "Ain't it a Shame", which may just have given Domino and Bartholomew an idea. After that he hit a bit of a dry spell in his career, and by 1956 he was reduced to recording a sequel to "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" -- "Forgive me Clawdy": [excerpt "Forgive Me Clawdy": Lloyd Price] But then "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" itself got a second wind, and was covered in 1956 by both Elvis and Little Richard. This seems to have jump-started Price's career, and we'll pick up his story with his later big hits. "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" had a long life -- it's been recorded over the years by everyone from Paul McCartney to the Replacements -- and happily most of the major figures involved in the record did too, which makes a very pleasant change from the bit of the episode where I usually tell you that the singer died in poverty and obscurity of alcoholism. Lloyd Price is still going strong, still performing aged 85, and he released his most recent album in 2016. Art Rupe is still alive aged 101, and while I'm sad to say Fats Domino is now dead, he died only last year, aged 89, an extremely wealthy man who had received every award his peers could bestow and had been given medals by multiple Presidents. And, as I said at the start, this episode will go up at one minute past midnight on the twenty-fourth of December 2018, which means it's Dave Bartholomew's hundredth birthday, It's unlikely he'll ever hear it but I'd like to wish him a happy birthday anyway, and many more of them. So to finish off... here's a record Bartholomew played on seven years ago, when he was ninety-three: [Excerpt: Alia Fleury "Christmas in the Quarters"] And for those of you who celebrate it, a merry Christmas to all of you at home.

  Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The information on Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino here largely comes from Blue Monday by Rick Coleman. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 while the Fats Domino tracks are on They Call Me the Fat Man Erratum I used the wrong version of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” when editing this podcast. The version used here is a soundalike remake from 1958, rather than the 1952 original. Apologies for the error.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   This is a rather special episode in some ways. The topic of this episode is “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price, and I’ll be frank — I was not originally going to give “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” its own episode. Not because it’s not a great record — it is — but because I was going to deal with it in passing when I cover one of the other records made by its vocalist, Lloyd Price. But that was before I noticed an odd coincidence of timing. I needed to prerecord this episode, because it’s Christmas and I’m visiting my in-laws, and so I was looking at what records came next in the history on my timeline, and I noticed two things: The first was that “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was the next important record to be released in the timeline I’d put together. And the second was that Dave Bartholomew, that record’s producer, was born one hundred years ago exactly, on December 24th, 1918. I simply couldn’t pass up an opportunity to do an episode celebrating the hundredth birthday of one of the great pioneers of rock and roll music, and one who is happily still alive. We talked about Bartholomew a bit a couple of weeks ago, in the episode about “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino, but he needs to be discussed in more detail, as he was one of the most important musicians of the fifties. As we heard, he brought the “Spanish tinge” to rhythm and blues records and collaborated with Fats Domino on all of Domino’s big hits — and we’ll be hearing more about him in that context in a few weeks — but he did a lot more. Not only did he produce classic records by Frankie Ford and T-Bone Walker, not only did he write “One Night”, which became a big hit for Smiley Lewis and a bigger one for Elvis, but he also wrote Chuck Berry’s only number one hit: [excerpt “My Ding-A-Ling” by Chuck Berry] OK, that may not be Berry’s finest moment as a performer, but it shows just how wide Bartholomew’s influence was. Despite that, rather astonishingly, there’s never been a biography written of Bartholomew, and even “Honkers and Shouters”, the classic book on the history of rhythm and blues which contains almost the only in-depth interviews with many of the musicians and record producers who made this music, only devotes a handful of paragraphs to Bartholomew’s work. I’ve barely been able to even find any in-depth interviews with Bartholomew, and so my knowledge of him is built up from lots of offhand mentions and casual connections in books on other people. But he worked with so *many* other people that that still amounts to quite a lot. So let’s talk about “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and let’s do it by picking up the story of Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino after “The Fat Man”. “The Fat Man” was a massive hit, but it caused some strain between its producer and its performer. Domino had gone on tour to support the record, as part of a larger package with Bartholomew’s band as the headliners. Domino would only perform a few songs at a time, and most of the show was Bartholomew’s band. Domino resented Bartholomew for getting most of the money, while Bartholomew resented Domino for his popularity — Domino was starting to overshadow the nominal star of the show. But more than that, Domino just didn’t seem to be getting on well with the rest of the band. This wasn’t because he was unfriendly — although Domino was always someone who seemed a little socially awkward — just that Domino was a homebody who absolutely resented ever having to go away from home, and especially as he had a newborn baby son he wanted to be home for. Indeed, when the tour had started, Domino had missed the first few days by the simple expedient of hiding for several days, and it was only when a union official had come knocking at his door explaining what happened to people who broke their contracts that he relented and went on the tour. And even then, he packed a suitcase full of foods like pickled pig’s feet, in case he couldn’t get his favourite foods anywhere else. Domino was a sheltered, nervous, shy, person — someone who had been so unworldly that when his first record came out he didn’t have a record player to play it on and had to listen to it on jukeboxes — and this exasperated Bartholomew, who was a far more well-travelled and socially aware person. But the two of them still continued to collaborate, and to make records together, including some great ones like this version of the traditional New Orleans song “Eh La Bas!”, which Bartholomew rewrote with the great boogie pianist Professor Longhair and titled “Hey! La Bas Boogie” [excerpt “Hey! La Bas Boogie” by Fats Domino] The collaborations caused other problems, too — both Bartholomew and Domino thought, with good reason, of themselves as the true talent in their collaborations. Domino believed that his piano playing and singing were the important things on the records, and that since he was bringing in most of the ideas fully-formed Bartholomew wasn’t doing much to make the records successful. Bartholomew, on the other hand, thought that the song ideas Domino was bringing in were basically nursery rhymes, while his own songs were more sophisticated — Domino had little formal musical knowledge and usually used only a couple of chords, while Bartholomew was far more musically knowledgeable; and Domino wasn’t a native English speaker, and tended to use very simple lyrics while when Bartholomew brought in ideas he would come up with strong narratives and punning lyrics. Bartholomew thought that when the songs Domino brought in became successful, it was because of Bartholomew’s patching up of them and his arrangements. Bartholomew resented that Domino was becoming a big star, and Domino resented that Bartholomew patronised him in the studio, treating him as an employee, not an equal partner. Of course, both were right — Bartholomew was by far the better songwriter, but Domino had great instincts for a hook. Bartholomew was a great arranger, and Domino was a great performer. As so often in musical collaborations, the sum was much greater than its parts, and it was the tension between the two of them that drove the collaboration. But while Bartholomew had problems with Fats, his real problems were with Al Young, a white New Orleans record store owner who was an associate of Lew Chudd, Imperial Records’ owner. He didn’t like Young’s habit of trying to make it look like it was him, rather than Bartholomew, who was producing the records, and he especially didn’t like when Young cut himself in on the songwriting royalties for songs Bartholomew wrote. This problem came to a head when Bartholomew got back home from a particularly stressful tour with Domino over Thanksgiving. It had been far too cold for the Louisiana musicians in the Midwest, and they’d been ripped off by the tour promoters — they’d received only something like two hundred dollars between them, rather than the two thousand they’d been promised. Domino actually had to call home and ask his family to wire him his bus fare back from Missouri to New Orleans. And when Bartholomew got back, he popped into Al Young’s record shop — and Young showed him the fifteen hundred dollar Christmas bonus cheque he’d just received from Imperial Records for all his hard work that year. Bartholomew had received no bonus, despite having done far more for the company than Young had, and he assumed that the reason was because Bartholomew was black and Young was white. He decided right then to quit Imperial, and to become a freelancer working for whoever had work. Domino continued making records in the same style, and even continued to have hits with songs that followed the formula he’d established with Bartholomew, some of them even bigger than the ones they’d made together, like “Goin’ Home”. But Al Young was the producer on that record, and while Domino did his usual great performance and it had that tresillo rhythm, Young knew nothing about music, and so the arrangement was haphazard and the sax solo was off-key at points: [excerpt: solo from “Goin’ Home”, Fats Domino] But it was still a big hit, and Al Young got his name stuck on the credits as a co-writer, which is what mattered to him at least, even if everyone was unhappy with the recordings. That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and made its way into the top thirty on the pop charts, and you can hear its influence all over the place, for example in this other classic track: [excerpt “Shake a Hand”, Faye Adams] It also influenced a young piano player and arranger named Ray Charles, and we’ll talk more about him later. But the fact remains, it’s not as good as the stuff Domino was doing with Bartholomew. It has the power and the catchiness, but it doesn’t have the depth and the sophistication. Lew Chudd, around this time, tried to get Art Young to get Dave Bartholomew back working with Domino again, but Bartholomew just slammed the phone down on Young. He didn’t need Imperial Records, he didn’t need Fats Domino, and he *certainly* didn’t need Art Young. He was working with other people now. In particular, he was working with Specialty Records. Specialty Records was an LA-based record label, like most of the labels that worked with New Orleans musicians were — for whatever reason, even though LA and New Orleans are thousands of miles away from each other, it was the Los Angeles companies rather than anywhere closer that seemed to pick up on the sound coming from New Orleans. Specialty was run by Art Rupe. Art Rupe is, amazingly, still alive and even older than Dave Bartholomew — he turned 101 a few months back — and he’s one of the most important figures in the development of rhythm and blues in the 1950s. Indeed, he was the producer of yet another record occasionally labelled “the first rock and roll record”, “R.M.’s Blues” by Roy Milton, which was one of the early records to combine a boogie piano and a backbeat. [excerpt: “R.M.’s Blues” by Roy Milton] And in his case, it’s no coincidence that he ended up working with New Orleans musicians — he was impressed by Fats Domino’s Imperial Records releases, Imperial being another Los Angeles based label, and so he came to New Orleans to see if there were other people like Domino about. Rupe put out an ad for people to come to Cosimo Mattassa’s studio to audition, but it wasn’t until he was packing up to leave and fly back to Los Angeles without any success, that a singer called Lloyd Price walked into the studio and sang his song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. Rupe cancelled his flight — this was someone worth recording. Price was, at the time, a jingle creator for a local radio station, providing music for the DJs to use while they were advertising various products. At the time, radio advertising in the US was much like podcast advertising is now, and in the same way that a podcast host might interrupt what they’re doing and try to tell you about the benefits of a new mattress, so, then, might DJs — and in the same way that some podcast hosts will vary their set texts, so would the DJs, and one of the DJs for whom Lloyd Price created jingles had a catchphrase — “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. Price had come up with a melody to go along with those words — or, rather, he’d adapted a pre-existing melody to it — and the result had been popular enough that he had decided to turn it into a full song. And Price had sat in with Dave Bartholomew and his band in Kenner, his hometown, singing a few songs with them. Bartholomew had told him “I’m not working with Lew Chudd any more, I’m just hanging around Cosimo Matassa’s studio catching the odd bit of arrangement work there — why don’t you come down and see if we can get you recorded?” But Price was so unfamiliar with New Orleans that he didn’t even know how to get to Rampart Street, which is why he’d arrived so late. Luckily for everyone concerned, he managed to find the most famous street in New Orleans eventually. When they started recording the song, Bartholomew started to get annoyed with the guitarist on the session, Ernest McLean . “I wanted to get some sort of a rhythm going and he de dum de dum, de dum de dum [Laurel and Hardy rhythm]. I say, man, that’s, that’s, that ain’t nothing. What the hell you get that thing from?” That’s from one of the few interviews I’ve seen with Bartholomew — other sources say it was his piano player, Salvador Doucette, who was the problem. Whichever musician it was was apparently a jazz musician who had no real love or feel for rhythm and blues, and Bartholomew was getting exasperated, but at the same time he had no option but to go with what he had. But then fate intervened. Fats Domino happened to be passing the studio, and he decided to just call in and say hello, since it was the studio he recorded in regularly — and he found Dave Bartholomew there. Domino and Bartholomew hadn’t worked together in over a year at this point — March 1952 — and things were tense at first, but Bartholomew decided he’d be the one to ease the tension, and asked Domino to sit in. At first Domino refused, saying “Man, you know I can’t sit in! I’m under contract!”, but he sat around in the session, having a few drinks and watching the band work. Eventually, he said “Well, I’m gonna have me some fun, I’m gonna sit in anyway!” The resulting record was the one that knocked “Goin’ Home” off the top of the R&B charts, and it would become one of the defining records of the rock and roll era. “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is, in many ways, an attempt to recapture the success of “The Fat Man”. It has many of the same musicians, the same arranger, and the same basic melody that the earlier record did. But being recorded three years later on meant it was also recorded after three years more advancement in the rock and roll style, and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is notably more rhythmically complex than the earlier record — and that’s largely down to Dave Bartholemew’s arrangement. Let’s have a look at the individual elements of the track — starting with Fats Domino’s piano playing. Domino is mostly playing triplets, which is the way that he played most of the time: [excerpt: piano part from “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] You’ve got the drums, by the great Earl Palmer, where he’s making the transition between his early shuffle style and his later backbeat emphasis — you can hear he’s trying to do two things at once on the drums, he’s trying to swing it *and* produce a backbeat, so you’ve essentially got him doing polyrhythms. You’ve got the bass, a different rhythm again, and then you’ve got those horns, just doing long, sustained, “blaaaat” parts. And then over that you’ve got Lloyd Price, singing in a Roy Brown imitation, but with a teenager’s style — Price had just turned nineteen — it’s a song about unrequited love or lust, a teenager’s song of yearning. And then to top it off there’s the sax solo by Herb Hardesty — the prototype for the solos he would provide for all Domino’s hits from this point on. It’s an amazing combination; this is the record that crystallised the New Orleans sound and became the template all the others would follow. “The Fat Man” had been the prototype, with some rough edges still there. This was a slicker, more assured, version of the same thing. Art Rupe was certainly pleased, but they were lucky to have been working with Rupe himself — soon after this recording, Rupe decided to expand his operations in New Orleans, and put Johnny Vincent in charge. While Rupe has a reputation as a decent businessman by 1950s record company standards, Johnny Vincent does *not*. When Vincent later owned his own record company, Ace, he was so bad at paying the musicians that Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebbennack had to go and hold Vincent at gunpoint while they searched his office — and his person — for the money he owed them. And then, a few months later, they had to do the same thing again, because being held up at gunpoint just the once wasn’t enough for him to think better of ripping them off. Vincent was also not a particularly skilled record producer, at least according to Rebennack. I can’t repeat his comments about Vincent’s approach in full, because if I use some of the words he used iTunes will restrict this podcast to adults only, but the gist is that Vincent was a con-man who knew nothing about record production. It’s probably not a massive coincidence that Dave Bartholomew stopped working for Specialty very shortly after the recording of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. I’ve not seen a precise enough timeline to know for sure that it was Johnny Vincent’s arrival at the label that persuaded Bartholomew he didn’t want to work for them any more, but it seems likely to me. What I *do* know, though is that Lew Chudd heard “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, compared it to the records Art Young was producing for Fats Domino, and realised that he could be doing a hell of a lot better than he was. He eventually, through an intermediary, managed to persuade Bartholomew to talk to him again, and Bartholomew was hired back to work at Imperial. The same month, April 1952, that “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” came out, Domino and Bartholomew were back in Matassa’s studio, working together again, and recording a collaboration which sounds like a true combination of both men’s styles: [excerpt: “Poor Me” — Fats Domino] UPTO PART 7 Domino and Bartholomew would work together regularly in the studio until at least 1967, and live off and on for decades after that. And we’ll hear more of their collaborations later. But Lloyd Price wasn’t hampered by the fact that his producer had gone off to another label either. His follow-up single, cut at the same session as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” with the same musicians, was a double-sided hit, both sides making the top ten on the R&B charts. And the same happened with the single after that, cut with different musicians — a song called “Ain’t it a Shame”, which may just have given Domino and Bartholomew an idea. After that he hit a bit of a dry spell in his career, and by 1956 he was reduced to recording a sequel to “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” — “Forgive me Clawdy”: [excerpt “Forgive Me Clawdy”: Lloyd Price] But then “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” itself got a second wind, and was covered in 1956 by both Elvis and Little Richard. This seems to have jump-started Price’s career, and we’ll pick up his story with his later big hits. “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” had a long life — it’s been recorded over the years by everyone from Paul McCartney to the Replacements — and happily most of the major figures involved in the record did too, which makes a very pleasant change from the bit of the episode where I usually tell you that the singer died in poverty and obscurity of alcoholism. Lloyd Price is still going strong, still performing aged 85, and he released his most recent album in 2016. Art Rupe is still alive aged 101, and while I’m sad to say Fats Domino is now dead, he died only last year, aged 89, an extremely wealthy man who had received every award his peers could bestow and had been given medals by multiple Presidents. And, as I said at the start, this episode will go up at one minute past midnight on the twenty-fourth of December 2018, which means it’s Dave Bartholomew’s hundredth birthday, It’s unlikely he’ll ever hear it but I’d like to wish him a happy birthday anyway, and many more of them. So to finish off… here’s a record Bartholomew played on seven years ago, when he was ninety-three: [Excerpt: Alia Fleury “Christmas in the Quarters”] And for those of you who celebrate it, a merry Christmas to all of you at home.

Show #767 Another Detour Thru The Past This Bandana Blues episode is filled with old and real old music. So get ready for another detour thru the past! 01. Joe Turner - Morning Noon And Night [1955] (2:40) (Jumpin' With Joe, Charlie Records, 1984) 02. Jimmie Gordon - You're Bound To Look Like A Monkey [1937] (1934-1938 The Remaining Titles, Old Tramp, 1993) 03. Slim Harpo - Blues Hangover (3:07) (Rainin' In My Heart, Excello Records, 1961) 04. Taj Mahal - Done Changed My Way Of Living (7:04) (The Natch'l Blues, Columbia Records, 1968) 05. Doctor Clayton - Ain't Gonna Drink No More [1946] (Doctor Clayton & his Buddies Complete Recordings 1946-1947, Old Tramp, 1995) 06. Eddie Floyd - If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody (2:39) (Knock On Wood, Atlantic Records, 1967) 07. Red Nelson - You Done Me Wrong [1947] (2:51) (Red Nelson 1935-1947, Old Tramp, 1995) 08. Charlie Musselwhite - Fell On My Knees (5:40) (Louisiana Fog, Kent Records, 1968) 09. Little Frankie Lee & The Saxtons - Taxi Blues [1965] (2:47) (If It's Not A Hit I'll Eat My Hat, Ace Records, 1985) 10. Sonny Jones - I'm Pretty Good At It [1939] (2:51) (Carolina Blues Guitar 1936-1939, Old Tramp, 1994) 11. James Brown - No No No No [1956] (2:15) (Please Please Please, King, 1958/Sing, 1988) 12. Charlie Burse & his Memphis Mudcats - Oil It Up And Go [1939] (Complete Recordings 1939, Old Tramp, 1993) 13. Mississippi John Hurt - Cow Hooking Blues (6:04) (Avalon Blues, Rounder Records, 1963) 14. Virgil Childers - Who's That Knockin' At My Door [1938] (2:45) (Carolina Blues Guitar 1936-1939, Old Tramp, 1994) 15. Curtis Jones - Good Woman Blues (3:17) (In London, Decca / Beat Goes On, 1964) 16. Gwen Foster & Tom Ashley - Bay Rum Blues [ca. 1930] (2:54) (Old Time Harmonica Classics, Country Records, 1991) 17. Chicken Shack - You Ain't No Good (3:34) (Forty Blue Fingers, Freshly Packed And Ready To Serve, Blue Horizon, 1968) 18. Sony Parker - Money Ain't Everthing [1952] (2:30) (Boogie Uproar-Gems From The Peacock Vaults, One Day Music, 2014) 19. Spencer Davis Group - On The Green Light (3:04) (Autumn '66, Fontana Records, 1966) 20. Jan Akkerman - On The Green Light (2:55) (Talent For Sale, Imperial Records, 1968) 21. Tramline - Sorry Sorry (8:57) (Somewhere Down The Line, Island Records, 1968) 22. Wild Jimmy Spruill - Hard Grind [1959] (The Sky Is Crying-The Fire Records Story, One Day Music, 2014) 23. Josh White - Mean Mistreater (4:51) (The House I Live In, Elektra Records, 1960) 24. Dr. Horse - Jack, That Cat Was Clean [1962] (The Sky Is Crying-The Fire Records Story, One Day Music, 2014) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help me deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

    Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “The Fat Man”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I’ve had to edit it down rather ruthlessly — I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn’t affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who’s still alive — we’re now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine — and I hope he’ll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song — “Junko Partner” by Dr. John — that doesn’t appear in the finished podcast. But it’s a good song anyway. Fats Domino’s forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright — a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We’ll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there’s a reason for that — his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, “Danza”, I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk’s piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk’s “Danza” and “Night in the Tropics” on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who’s interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it’s dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word “Negro” thoughout — at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it’s very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a very good book, though I don’t totally buy Coleman’s argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) — it’s labelled “New Orleans Joys” there, but it’s clearly the same song as “New Orleans Blues”, which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the “Spanish tinge”. The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll.   The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll — people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock — the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues — Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls “vocal group rock and roll” but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I’d add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands — people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York.   So far, we’ve talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven’t yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let’s take a trip down the Mississippi.   We can trace New Orleans’ importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.   Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic — Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer — he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this:   [Excerpt of “Danza”]   That’s a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s.   And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form.   We don’t know — we can’t know — how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both — we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk’s work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans.   And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans’ status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music — all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap.   Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic — he wrote pieces called things like “the Dying Poet”, he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for “death”. He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose.   So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time.   But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used.   In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We’ll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey “Piano” Smith… it’s in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own.   And if there’s one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it’s “Junker’s Blues”. You’ve probably not heard that name before, but you’ve almost certainly heard the melody:   [section of “Junker’s Blues” as played by Champion Jack Dupree]   That’s Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That’s the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style.   “Junker’s Blues” itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which we’re going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair…   [section of “Tipitina”]   “Tee Nah Nah”   [“Tee Nah Nah” — Smiley Lewis]   And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie.   But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be “the first rock and roll record”.   Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do.   He grew up in a kind of poverty that’s hard to imagine now — his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them.   By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He’d played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show — Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him.   But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities — and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws’ house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn’t exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records.   Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino.   Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II — he’d already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging.   After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with “Country Boy”   [excerpt of “Country Boy” by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra]   Now, something you may notice about that song is that “dan, dah-dah” horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as “habanera” rhythms. That word means “from Havana”, and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music — Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece — coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century.   The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a “bam bam” [demonstrates]. That beat is one we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future.   These rhythms were the basis of the original tango — which didn’t have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that “dan, dah-dah” rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him — French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans — that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge”. Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll’s “New Orleans Blues”:   [excerpt “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton]   Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It’s the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations.   But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that “dah dah dah” up against something else — on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it — and he seems to have been the first one to do this — that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour.   I’m going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I’m going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other.   You have the backbeat, which we’ve talked about before — “one TWO three FOUR” — emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that.   And you have the tresillo, which is “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and” — emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and”.   You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this:   [excerpt — recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other]   That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I’ve said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something).   The musicians on “Country Boy” were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time.   Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word “funky” to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There’s a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band “can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?”   Palmer would then pretend to “wind up” his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That’s the kind of story that’s hard to believe, but it’s been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true.   Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa’s studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music.   Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa’s case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We’ve actually already heard one record made by him, last week — Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn’t have that New Orleans sound to it — it’s of the type we’re referring to as coastal jump band music. It’s music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city.   Matassa’s studio was tiny — it was in the back room of his family’s appliance store, which also had a bookmaker’s upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production — he’d been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today’s standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn’t record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master.   To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master — the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master — it’s a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out — at which point, you create a new mother from the original master.   They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone’s job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor — by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax.   A wax master couldn’t be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn’t be used as a master, so you had two choices — you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you’d be able to play one of them — destroying it in the process — to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same.   To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians.   Truth be told, the J&M studio didn’t have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact.   But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino’s first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made.   Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was “Junker’s Blues”. Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren’t quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine.   But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. “The Fat Man” was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of “The Fat Man”, too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of “they call me a junker, because I’m loaded all the time”, Domino sang “they call me the fat man, ‘cos I weigh two hundred pounds”.   Now, “The Fat Man” actually doesn’t have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it’s *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that “Spanish tinge” that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It’s music that absolutely couldn’t come from anywhere else.   [Excerpt from “The Fat Man”]   Domino’s scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers — there’s a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I’ve not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there’d be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing — Domino’s later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record — but in this case it’s Domino’s own voice doing the job.   And while this recording doesn’t have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it’s definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You’d have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you’d lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you’d lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you’d lay Domino’s piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they’re not doing is playing the same thing — there’s an astonishing complexity there.   Bartholomew’s lyrics, to the extent they’re about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway — the same kind of thing as Howlin’ Wolf’s later “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” or “Built for Comfort” — but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino’s obvious *cheeriness*.   Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry — to the extent that it’s difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he’d lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005.   By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person — I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive — remember, this was the era of the blues shouter — Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he’s bragging sexually, he doesn’t actually sound like he means it.   “The Fat Man” went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino — and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we’ve seen who’s going to get more episodes about him. We’ve now reached the point where we’re seeing the very first rock star — and this is the point beyond which it’s indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who’d sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it’s Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as “The Fat Man”, it’s safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as “the first rock and roll record” to go, we’re now definitely in the rock and roll era.