Podcasts about jefferson high school

Jefferson High School's Unified Bowling Team placed first at the high school state tournament this past weekend. The Indiana Department of Health issued new guidance to local and county health departments to stop accepting gender change requests for Indiana birth records. Indiana's Natural Resources Commission approved a bobcat trapping season in 40 southern Indiana counties Tuesday. A House committee approved legislation Tuesday that would make significant changes to Medicaid programs. Want to go deeper on the stories you hear on WFYI News Now? Visit wfyi.org/news and follow us on social media to get comprehensive analysis and local news daily. Subscribe to WFYI News Now wherever you get your podcasts. WFYI News Now is produced by Drew Daudelin, Zach Bundy and Abriana Herron, with support from News Director Sarah Neal-Estes.

Michelle Book is a Jefferson High School graduate and will be retiring tomorrow as the Food Bank of Iowa President and CEO as she looks back on her career there.

The modernization of Benson Polytechnic High School is nearing completion. Originally budgeted for $202 million in 2016 and funded by a voter-approved bond in 2017, the scope of the project was subsequently expanded along with the cost. The revised budget, partially paid for through another bond in 2020, was $410 million. Part of the problem is that the school is oversized. Benson enrollment last year was 823, but the new school was designed for 1,700. Enrollment has decreased by almost 50% over the past 30 years, and there is little chance that it will grow significantly. Many of the classrooms will simply be mothballed. The next school up for modernization is Jefferson High School, and the Board plans to make the same mistake. The target enrollment is 1,700, but there were only 481 students in May. The construction budget has grown from $311 million in 2020 to $491 in 2024. Since the District doesn't have the money, the Board plans to ask for an additional $125 million in May of 2025, as part of a much larger bond request of $2.9 billion. School board members are required to manage public funds as a “prudent person” would, but overbuilding schools by 100% or more is the opposite of prudent behavior.

Terrence Hayes is running for Portland City Council in District 1. He grew up with drug-addicted parents in the Chicago projects, and his sister is still suffering from active drug addiction. Terrence moved to Portland with his father and graduated from Jefferson High School. As a former gang member who spent 13 years in prison for attempted murder, Terrence now works to help young men avoid a lifetime of violent crime and turn their lives around. He owns a graffiti removal business and is married with children. His cousin was shot and killed by a Portland police officer. As a city council candidate, Terrence's priority is public safety. He is endorsed by the Portland Police Association. https://teamhayesforportland.comhttps://www.cesystems.tech/campaign/friendsofterrencehayeshttps://x.com/Hayes4Portlandhttps://www.instagram.com/teamhayes4portland?igsh=bHN6c2dnNXFtNmRuhttps://x.com/rationalinpdx/status/1664330255044349953?s=46 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/1648409/a-murder-in-portland/https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7osi7kRg9T/https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/07/10/city-council-entrance-interview-terrence-hayes/

Richard DeWayne Martin was welcomed into heaven by Jesus, his parents Roy and Veronica Martin of Roanoke, VA, and his grandparents, Albert and Annie Martin and Eva Smith Lacy. Richard is survived by his wife of 59 years, Winifred (Winkie) Martin; three children, Melissa Vath (Marc), Hunter Martin (Allyson), and Blake Martin; six grandchildren who knew him as Boppy, Ann-Katherine Vath Perdue (Taylor), Mallory Martin Crain (Taylor), Courtland Martin Thomas (Travis), Andy Vath, Alex Vath, and Palmer Martin (Maddie); and eight great-grandchildren. Born on Sept. 10, 1942, in Roanoke County, VA, Richard attended Jefferson High School and Roanoke College. He...Article LinkSupport the Show.

Worries about the Cascadia Subduction Zone have persisted for the last 50 years. Oregon school districts have considered the possibility of a major earthquake as they build and renovate existing structures. In line with this approach, the Portland Public School district has embarked on a decades-long modernization project, most recently the proposed $491 million modernization of Jefferson High School. The extensive renovation plans raise concerns about the necessity and benefits of the large-scale project, especially given the uncertainty of a potential Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. Oregon code requires schools to meet seismic Category III standards, prioritizing life safety. The district has chosen to construct the new Jefferson to Category IV standards. This level, typically reserved for emergency facilities, adds an extra $5.00 per square foot to building cost. Jefferson isn't the only school with an excessive budget. Cleveland and Ida B. Wells high schools have surpassed $400 million in the last month. In contrast, the ongoing Bend Senior High rebuild has a budget of $187 million and is compliant with the required seismic code. While safety is important, overbuilding schools to an unnecessary standard is a misallocation of resources. School districts should focus on meeting the required safety codes while directing additional funds towards enhancing students' learning and development. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeewithcascade/message

Send us a Text Message.What if witnessing a tragic event could redefine your entire life's trajectory? Join us for a heartfelt conversation with Tyler Gancos from Ashtabula County, Ohio, as he recounts his journey from growing up in a tough Cleveland neighborhood to finding peace in the rural serenity of Jefferson, Ohio. Tyler takes us through his high school adventures at Jefferson High School, where he navigated the complexities of adolescence through football, music, and theater, often finding refuge in the band room.Discover how turning down football scholarships due to health concerns led Tyler to immerse himself in the dynamic worlds of music and culinary arts. From late-night jam sessions to mastering the art of cooking, Tyler's Italian heritage shines through as he shares the joys and challenges of working in various culinary roles, including his passion for making pizzas. Listen to his tales of camaraderie and the creative outlets that shaped his adulthood in Ashtabula County.Join our discussion on the artistic movement revitalizing Ashtabula County, from the vibrant scene on Bridge Street to the charm of Walnut Beach, even amidst the harsh winters. We also touch on light-hearted topics like the allure of lighthouses and adventurous exploits, bringing a touch of whimsy to our conversation. Wrapping up, we emphasize the significance of supporting local arts and businesses, fostering a strong cultural fabric that enriches our communities. Don't miss this episode filled with Tyler's inspiring stories and our shared love for small-town life.Stupid Should Hurt Link to my Merch store the Stupid Should Hurt Line!Reaper Apparel Reaper Apparel Co was built for those who refuse to die slowly! Reaper isn't just clothing it's a lifestyle!Subscribe for exclusive content: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1530455/support Tactical BrotherhoodThe Tactical Brotherhood is a movement to support America.Dubby EnergyFROM GAMERS TO GYM JUNKIES TO ENTREPRENEURS, OUR PRODUCT IS FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO BE BETTER.ShankitgolfOur goal here at Shankitgolf is for everyone to have a great time on and off the golf courseSweet Hands SportsElevate your game with Sweet Hands Sports! Our sports gloves are designed for champions,Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the Show.

Going off the theme of last week's episode, we're continuing this week with a conversation featuring a mother/daughter duo at Jefferson High School. Michele Jensen has been a science teacher at JHS for 29 years, and her daughter Hannah is about to wrap up her first year as an english teacher. In this episode, we learn all about the pros and cons, the ups and downs, the good and the bad of working at a school with a family member.

“I've really enjoyed getting into classrooms to affirm my colleagues. I seek whenever I do a visit to say something that is both positive and true. I could just be positive, but if it's not truthful, students can sense that. I've really enjoyed getting to bop in, see great teaching in action, and affirm my colleagues in front of their students.”Dr. Brett D. Epperson is Director of Choral Activities and Assistant Professor of Music at Hastings College. He directs the Hastings College Choir and teaches courses in conducting, vocal pedagogy, diction and studio voice. Brett also serves as director of the adult Chancel Choir at First Presbyterian Church of Hastings.Prior to his career in higher education, Brett was a public school music educator for nearly a decade. Epperson led choral programs at Yutan Public Schools (Nebraska), Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and East High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. Under his leadership at Lincoln East, the choral program tripled in enrollment, East Singers was selected as a featured concert choir at the Nebraska Music Educators Association Conference and Epperson was the recipient of a Lincoln Public Schools Inspire Award for implementing an Adaptive Music program. Epperson has also served as a graduate assistant within the College of Music at Florida State University, was an adjunct instructor of voice at Doane University (Nebraska), and is a previous Artistic Director-Conductor of the Lincoln Lutheran Choir.Dr. Epperson is active as a guest conductor, clinician, adjudicator and collaborative keyboardist, with appearances across the United States, the Caribbean and Europe. In June 2023, Epperson traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a featured conductor as part of AVoice4Peace choral festival. As a vocalist, he has sung with Grammy-nominated choral ensembles and has been a featured soloist in choral-orchestral performances across the Midwest and South. Galaxy Music Corporation released his first published composition in 2022.Brett earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Michigan State University, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Music Education-Choral Conducting from Florida State University.To get in touch with Brett, you can find him on Facebook (@brettdepperson) or Instagram (@brettdepperson).Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro Part 3 episode from February 16, 2024, to hear how to share your story with us.Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.Podcast music from Podcast.coPhoto in episode artwork by Trace Hudson

At its May 7th meeting, the Portland Public Schools Board voted to spend nearly $1 billion to build new school buildings and sports facilities for Ida B. Wells and Cleveland High Schools, respectively. One reason the price tag is so high is that the Board has decided to prohibit the use of natural gas within the schools, as part of the District's campaign against fossil fuels. But making the schools all-electric doesn't free the district away from fossil fuels. It simply shifts the gas consumption from the schools to other locations, where PGE will burn gas to generate electricity for those schools. The District's climate policy is purely symbolic. Moreover, the District is planning to have diesel generators on site to provide backup power for outages. Consultants have looked at other fuels, but none provide the attributes needed to instantly provide electricity. When this issue came up several months ago regarding the expensive rebuild of Jefferson High School, Board Member Julie Brim-Edwards asked what the cost of going all-electric would be. No one on the consultant team could answer the question. With three large school projects in the pipeline, the Board should know the cost before construction begins. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeewithcascade/message

Today on City Cast Portland, we're talking about the costly outcome of Mayor Ted Wheeler's missing text messages, Lake Oswego's battle to keep the public out of their lake, and the dramatic cost increase in rebuilding Jefferson High School. Joining host Claudia Meza on our Friday news roundup are our very own producer Giulia Fiaoni and Althea Billings, KBOO news director and host of the weekly talk show “The Gap.” Stories Discussed in Today's Episode: The Cost of Rebuilding Portland's Jefferson High School Is Going Up. A Lot [OPB] Portland Pays $167,000 To Settle Lawsuit Over Mayor Ted Wheeler's Text Messages [OPB] How Thousands of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler's Texts Were Missing for Years [OPB] Fight Over Access to Oswego Lake Heads Back to Trial [OPB] Jury Trial Underway in Lawsuit Challenging Lake Oswego Ban on Public Lake Access [KGW] Become a member of City Cast Portland today! Get all the details and sign up here.  Who would you like to hear on City Cast Portland? Shoot us an email at portland@citycast.fm, or leave us a voicemail at 503-208-5448. Want more Portland news? Then make sure to sign up for our morning newsletter, Hey Portland, and be sure to follow us on Instagram.  Looking to advertise on City Cast Portland? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise. Learn more about the sponsors of this episode: Science Week From the Association of Science Communicators through April 12 ‘Fat Ham' at Seattle Rep through May 12 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week, Cascade Policy Institute provided suggestions to the Board of Portland Public Schools to reduce costs on the Jefferson High School modernization project. The project is paused due to the budget ballooning from $311 million (approved by voters in a 2020 bond issue) to $491 million. Cascade's primary advice for the PPS Board can be applied to all publicly funded projects: practice common sense prudence. The prudent person principle provides perspective on three cost-prohibitive aspects of public projects: Building above code requirements; Energy efficiency expenditures with payback periods exceeding 20 years; Overbuilding. To meet building code requirements for seismic resilience, Jefferson must be designed as a risk category III structure. Current plans call for building to the costly and unnecessary standard of risk category IV. The state mandates 1.5% of most public buildings' budgets be allocated to green energy technology. Agency managers of four other Oregon school districts have refused to comply due to the excessive length of the pay-back period. Finally, building realistically sized projects is key. Jefferson's current enrollment is below 500 students yet the rebuild is planned for 1,700, a flagrantly excessive size in a school district with declining enrollment. The areas of excess in the Jefferson High School re-build are common in public projects. A prudent person would rein in this spending. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeewithcascade/message

This week, Brett had the privilege of sharing some time with Tampa and Florida legend – Governor Bob Martinez. He was Tampa's 54th mayor and Florida's 40th governor; both positions held as the first of Spanish descent. He also has deep roots in Tampa, his grandparents having immigrated from Spain at the turn of the 20th Century during a great boom in the cigar industry there. His father worked in the restaurant business, including as a long-time employee at the famed Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, and then later at the family-owned Café Sevilla in West Tampa. Martinez was a star athlete at Jefferson High School, a graduate of the University of Tampa, and got his professional start as a classroom teacher before becoming the Executive Director of the Hillsborough County Classroom Teachers Association. He was called upon by Governor Ruben Askew to serve on the Governing Board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District and chair three Basin Boards there: The Hillsborough River, Northwest Hillsborough, and Alafia River. They discuss his childhood in Old Tampa where he enjoyed school, excelled at sports, and spent his free moments fishing with his father and his friends; how Café Sevilla became the birthplace of a mayor's race and the campaign to be Governor of Florida; how his service as head of the teachers union gave him his first taste of real politics; his time at Swiftmud gave him a taste for the water and environmental needs of a region; and a mayorship that gave him the opportunity to restore, innovate, and move his home city forward. His term as governor would be marked by enacting some of the most consequential environmental policy in Florida history including the enactment of the Preservation 2000 conservation land acquisition program, the Growth Management Act, and the Surface Water Improvement and Management Act. He also implemented the Florida Lottery, created Florida's Turnpike Authority, and created Space Port Florida. There are a few other achievements in particular that hold a more personal value to Brett including Martinez's restoration of the Lowry Park Zoo from the ground up as mayor; the creation of Florida Prepaid College; the rebirth of Nature's Classroom in Hillsborough County; an amazing nearly 70-year (and counting) partnership with his beloved wife Mary Jane; and of course, his analysis of why the Tampa Cuban sandwich is superior to the one from Miami (it's the bread). He's still as active as ever, serving on many boards and clubs, is a Senior Policy Advisor with the Holland & Knight Law Firm, and at 89 years-old, you can still find him on his daily walks or on the tennis court. We hope you enjoy the conversation! To visit Governor Martinez's page at the Holland & Knight law firm, go here: https://www.hklaw.com/en/professionals/m/martinez-bob To see his useful, but woefully incomplete Wikipedia page, head here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Martinez To see a decent history of Florida's land conservation programs, including Governor Martinez's efforts which led to Preservation 2000, go here: https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/IR/00/00/19/42/00001/FE33100.pdf To see an image of the menu from the Governor's family restaurant, check it out here: http://ciadigitalcollections.culinary.edu/digital/collection/p16940coll1/id/14253 The Governor was a star athlete at the University of Tampa, and the sports facility there is even named in his honor. To get a look at that, head to their site here: https://www.tampaspartans.com/information/athletic_info/facilities/Martinez/index This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline. Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast's leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com. This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions. RES is the nation's leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida's natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we're striving to become Florida's first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state's natural environment and the events that shape it. To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier. You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at FLwaterpod@gmail.com with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you'd like to know more about. Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance. And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for this podcast. The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold.

GDP Script/ Top Stories for Nov 19th  Publish Date:  Nov 17th    HENSSLER 15 From the Henssler Financial Studio Welcome to the Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. Today is Sunday, November 19th and Happy Birthday to Meg Ryan. ***HARRY MET SALLY – DINER SCENE*** I'm Bruce Jenkins and here are your top stories presented by Peggy Slappy Properties. Deputies Arrest Third Suspect In Murder Of Football Star Killed Outside Sugarloaf Mills Suwanee's Shaun King, Lilburn's Diane Owens Recognized for Service to Mercer University's Board of Trustees Sol Systems and Gas South Team Up to Donate $300K in support of STEM Education at Gwinnett schools All of this and more is coming up on the Gwinnett Daily Post podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen daily and subscribe! Break 1: Peggy Slappy   STORY 1: Deputies Arrest Third Suspect In Murder Of Football Star Killed Outside Sugarloaf Mills Gwinnett County sheriff's deputies arrested Kpadeh Jones, a Lawrenceville resident, as the third suspect in the shooting of Elijah DeWitt, a Jefferson High School football standout, killed in a shooting outside Sugarloaf Mills in Lawrenceville last year. Jones, along with Kemare Bryan and Chandler Richardson, faces charges related to DeWitt's murder, including felony and malice murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of certain felonies. DeWitt's family filed a lawsuit against the mall's owners, security officials, Dave and Buster's, and five individuals, alleging insufficient measures to address known crime-related issues at the mall before DeWitt's death. The lawsuit is pending in Gwinnett County State Court.     STORY 2: Suwanee's Shaun King, Lilburn's Diane Owens Recognized for Service to Mercer University's Board of Trustees Suwanee's Shaun King and Lilburn's M. Diane Owens were recognized for completing five-year terms on Mercer University's Board of Trustees. King, senior pastor of Johns Creek Baptist Church, earned his Doctor of Divinity degree in 2018 from the School of Theology. Owens, a retired attorney and former board chair, is a 1977 graduate of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a 1980 graduate of the Law School. The board also acknowledged other trustees who completed their terms. Nine new trustees were elected, including Nancy Grace and Erin Keller. Thomas P. Bishop was elected as the board chair for 2024. STORY 3: Sol Systems and Gas South Team Up to Donate $300K in support of STEM Education at Gwinnett schools Gas South and Sol Systems have collaborated to contribute nearly $300,000 to Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) for STEM education. The funding aims to develop renewable energy learning tools, train teachers, engage students, and support schools in working toward STEM certification. GCPS focuses on preparing students for a future workforce by integrating renewable energy Academic Knowledge and Skills into STEM disciplines. The initiative promotes interdisciplinary learning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills necessary for STEM and renewable energy careers. KidWind, a clean energy education leader, will collaborate with GCPS to enhance hands-on learning opportunities for students, including internships and industry partnerships.   We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.874.3200 for more info. We'll be right back   Break 2: MOG  – TOM WAGES – DTL –    STORY 4: Kim Jong Un's daughter marks a year as country's propaganda star In a departure from tradition, North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un's daughter, dubbed the "respected daughter," made her public debut at the test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last year, breaking the tradition of keeping leader's children out of the public eye. The daughter, thought to be named Ju Ae, has been used in state propaganda to humanize Kim as a father and convey a message of a new generation ready to lead the family dynasty, reliant on nuclear weapons. The move aims to bolster support for the country's weapons program, emphasizing its role in protecting children from perceived external threats. The daughter has appeared in public 16 times in the past year, often associated with military events. Speculation remains about her potential succession, but given her young age, it is too early to tell. The state propaganda is expected to keep her in a prominent role.   STORY 5: Congressional dysfunction puts the nation's fiscal reputation at risk Moody's has downgraded its outlook on the United States from "stable" to "negative," citing "continued political polarization" and the nation's inability to address fiscal challenges. The recent fiscal dysfunction, including the threat of a government shutdown, has consequences for millions and tarnishes the country's reputation for economic responsibility. Moody's first gave the U.S. its highest credit rating in 1917, but the agency lowered its outlook, emphasizing political polarization. The article calls for voters to rebuke those prioritizing partisan politics over national interests, highlighting the need for Congress to transcend partisan agendas to address the nation's challenges.   We'll be back in a moment   Break 3:  Glow Light Show  - ESOG - INGLES 1   STORY 6: Sugar Hill City Council Race Headed to a Runoff In a Sugar Hill City Council race, initially showing Meg Avery defeating Councilwoman Jenn Thatcher by five votes, the certified results, including provisional ballots, now indicate a tie with both candidates receiving 729 votes. The city announced a runoff election for Post #3 on December 5th. The election initially seemed unfavorable for incumbents, as challengers, including Avery, appeared to secure victories. Now, Avery and Thatcher will compete in a runoff, and early voting is scheduled from November 27 to December 1, with election day voting on December 5 at Sugar Hill City Hall. STORY 7: Steve Gasper Announces Campaign For Gwinnett School Board District 3 Seat Steve Gasper, a frequent critic of the Gwinnett County Board of Education, has announced his candidacy for the District 3 seat in the May 2024 nonpartisan school board elections. Gasper, a former vice chairman of the Gwinnett Republican Party, has been vocal at school board meetings, criticizing the district's leadership under a Democrat majority. His campaign focuses on empowering educators, ensuring school safety, promoting transparency, fostering community engagement, and delivering high-quality education. Gasper, a former educator and Boy Scout volunteer, aims to bring a fresh and forward-thinking approach to education in Gwinnett County. We'll have final thoughts after this.   Break 4: GCPS - Henssler 60    Signoff –  Thanks again for hanging out with us on today's Gwinnett Daily Post podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties, or the Paulding County News Podcast. Read more about all our stories, and get other great content at Gwinnettdailypost.com.  Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. 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Full-text: For decades, Portland Public Schools (PPS) has tried to close the “achievement gap” between white and non-white students. “Race,” they wrote in their 2013 Racial Education Equity Policy, “must cease to be a predictor of student achievement and success.” To do this, they began dedicating 8% of their yearly budget to General Fund Equity. This fund has taken various forms, first as “action plan” reporting, then as professional development training, now as “transformative curriculum and pedagogy” through a Racial Equity and Social Justice (RESJ) Lens. Funds are directed selectively toward inner-city schools with more racial minorities, like Jefferson High School. After 10 years, it's still not clear what this has accomplished. The district's Citizen Budget Review Committee routinely wants to know how specifically PPS uses these mechanisms to meet their equity goals. The answer is more social workers and updated curricula, but these ideas seem no different from non-equity-related programs. These supposed remedies for the achievement gap also appear disconnected from statistical reality. In middle schools, as General Fund Equity payments increase with the district's budget, test scores for “historically underserved” students continue to lag about 40% behind white students in English Language Arts (ELA) and math. This is especially true for PPS's “focus” schools in the inner city. Meanwhile, test scores for all students continue to decline. Portland Public Schools can celebrate improving graduation rates, but not much else. Instead of following the same old strategy, PPS should get creative. More alternative schools could incentivize students, including non-white students, to improve their academic performance. The result: educational equity, what the district wants. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeewithcascade/message

Welcome to From Complex to Queens, Home Run Applesauce's podcast focusing on the Mets' minor league system. Day three concluded the 2023 MLB Draft. With their 11th round pick, the Mets selected Brett Banks, a right-handed senior pitcher from UNC Wilmington. With their 12th round pick, the Mets selected Brady Kirtner, a right-handed pitcher from Virginia Tech. With their 13th round pick, the Mets selected Ben Simon, a right-handed pitcher from Elon University. With their 14th round pick, the Mets selected John Valle, a right-handed prep pitcher from Jefferson High School in Tampa, Florida. With their 15th round pick, the Mets selected Justin Lawson, a right-handed senior pitcher from North Carolina State. With their 16th round pick, the Mets selected Jake Zitella, a prep third baseman from St Charles East High School in St. Charles, Illinois. With their 17th round pick, the Mets selected Bryce Jenkins, a right-handed senior pitcher from the University of Tennessee. With their 18th round pick, the Mets selected Gavyn Jones, a left-handed prep pitcher from White Oak High School in White Oak, Texas. With their 19th round pick, the Mets selected Christian Little, right-handed pitcher from LSU. With their 20th round pick, the Mets selected Kellum Clark, an outfielder from Mississippi State University. Get your MY BOOKIE DEPOSIT BONUS OF 50% and support the show! —> https://mybookie.website/HomerunAppleSauce As always, you can listen or subscribe to all of our Home Run Applesauce podcasts through Apple Podcasts, where we encourage you to leave a review if you enjoy the show. It really helps! And you can find us on the Stitcher app, Spotify, or listen wherever you get podcasts. Visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and to help directly support the podcasters whose work you've enjoyed for years. Got any questions? Comments? Concerns? You can email the show at fromcomplextoqueens at gmail dot com, and follow us on Twitter: Steve is (@stevesypa), Lukas is (@lvlahos343), Ken is (@kenlavin91), and Thomas is (@sadmetsszn). Until next week, #lovethemets #lovethemets! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some editors say sports stories are the hardest stories to write because we already know the endings. But readers and viewers love them anyway! Even folks who don't keep up with sports often find something to warm their hearts in an inspiring tale. Why are sports stories captivating even to people who aren't sports fans? And why do sports stories carry their enormous power to create social change? To talk about that, Amy and Holland invited Dr. Tom LeGrand, a former sports podcaster, and Brendan Scott, an English teacher and a coach, to the table.  Dr. Tom LeGrand serves as the Regional Director Carolinas for Impact America. Tom also has experience in radio broadcasting, podcasting, and writing. From 2010-2012, Tom co-hosted The Lettermen's Lounge, a sports podcast that covered local, national and international athletics. It is a subsidiary of Jungle Gem Sports, LLC. Brendan Scott earned a degree in English from the University of Colorado and then traveled to Guatemala where he taught writing, English, and physical education for three years at the Inter-American School of Xela. After returning to the U.S., Brendan earned a master's degree in English Education at Regis University and began teaching high school English. He also coaches the women's basketball and cross-country teams at Jefferson High School. Brendan recently married April, a librarian, after proposing to her on a trip to Harry Potter World. He blogs at Living Spiritually and Adventure With Brendan.

"I had already taught about a third of the students that we had at the opening of the school. We were able to hit the ground running. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other and team building. We built our own culture and have decided what we want to be." - John Parezo"It's been a really cool experience for me to teach elementary students for the first time. What's still blowing my mind every week is how musical and tuneful and brilliant these little people really are and how quickly they soak things up like sponges. They just learn so fast." - Stephanie Schumacher Stephanie Schumacher is wrapping up her first season with Honors Choirs of Southeast Minnesota as the conductor of both Children's Chorus and Treble Choir and the Director of Education and Enrichment. Honors Choirs is a nonprofit organization that serves about 300 students in grades 1-12 from all over southeast Minnesota. Stephanie holds a bachelor of arts in music education from Concordia College, where she studied with Dr. Rene Clausen. She has spent the last twelve years in the public schools, teaching everything from middle school band to high school chamber choir and directing musicals. Under her direction, many of her singers have participated in the MN All-State Choirs and ACDA Honor Choirs. At the height of the pandemic, her high school concert choir was selected to perform at the Minnesota Music Education Association Conference and was able to perform via videorecording, socially distanced and masked. This summer Stephanie will begin a three-year term as the Southeast District Chair for ACDA of Minnesota. She frequently serves as an adjudicator for MMEA, ACDA, and various local contests. Stephanie has sung with the Choral Arts Ensemble in Rochester, Minnesota, for past 15 seasons and serves as Alto I section leader. Stephanie lives in Zumbrota, Minnesota, with her husband, Aaron, who is also a choir director,  and their children, Kate and Will.John Parezo currently serves as the choir and show choir director at Jefferson High School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In just two years as a new school, the choir department has already grown in size and has started to be recognized for musical excellence in competitive show choirs and vocal jazz ensembles. Prior to the opening of Jefferson in 2021, John worked at Roosevelt High School as the assistant choir director for six years. He was the director of Roosevelt High School's Chorale, RiderChor and Capitol Harmony show choir. He also co-conducted Mixed and Freshman Choruses. Under his direction, the Roosevelt RiderChor was invited to participate in and served as a featured performance choir for several festivals and conferences. Capitol Harmony show choir earned several grand champion placements in unisex division competition along with numerous evening finals placements. John is currently the All-State Show Choir Chair for the South Dakota High School Activities Association and President-Elect for South Dakota Region II Music. John was named Roosevelt High School Assistant Director of the Year for both the 2018-19 and the 2016-17 school years. He was also the 2017 SD-ACDA Overture Award recipient - an award given to outstanding choral directors in their first five years of teaching.To get in touch with Steph, you can find her on Instagram (@honorschoirs) or visit honorschoirs.org. To get in touch with John, find him on Instagram (@sfjeffersonchoirs) or visit jeffersonchoirs.com.Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro Part 2 episode from May 22, 2023, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.Podcast music from Podcast.coPhoto in episode artwork by Trace Hudson from Pexels

Numerous elite prospects came into town this weekend for the annual Scavenger Hunt, including Dylan Raiola, Jeremiah Smith, Ryan Williams, KJ Bolden, and more. We recap the weekend's events, a Jefferson High School workout, and special Guest Hunter Street, one of the notable faces of the UGA Spike Squad! This broadcast is brought to you by our sponsors: Apotheos Roastery - https://www.dgdpodcast.com/apotheos Alumni Hall - https://www.dgdpodcast.com/alumnihall If you're looking for licensed Georgia Bulldogs Apparel, Accessories, and more, head over to Alumni Hall. Mention the show if you're in the store and get 10% off your order! If you're looking for premium quality coffee, look no further than Apotheos Roastery, the OFFICIAL coffee & cold brew partner of the Classic City Collective. Head over to our website and shop their selection of coffees. For each bag purchased using our website, Apotheos will donate 20% of the proceeds from EVERY bag! Follow The DGD Podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedgdpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedgdpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ben Bachmann, Paul Maharry, and Dayne Young discuss Georgia's big recruiting weekend and the famous scavenger hunt that was the talk of social media. The guys also discuss the Jefferson High School throwing session including Dylan Raiola, Sammy Brown, and many other big-time recruits.

Welcome to the weekend!This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette Digital News Desk, and I'm here with your update for Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 9.It will be perhaps our first truly nice weather weekend of spring. According to the National Weather Service, it will be sunny in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 67 degrees.On Sunday it will be mostly sunny, with a high near 69 degrees.The wind will also be mild, hovering between 5 and 15 mph, with gusts of 20 mph.As student enrollment declines and school officials say Iowa's per-pupil state aid has failed to keep up with rising costs, the Cedar Rapids Community School District is looking to trim $2 million in planned spending from its general fund — more than 80 percent of which pays staff salaries and benefits.K-12 student enrollment in Cedar Rapids schools dropped 1,170 students — almost 10 percent — from 17,129 during the 2018-19 school year to 15,959 during the 2022-23 school year. The enrollment loss of 127 students from the current fiscal year to next is a decrease of about $2.57 million in per-pupil state aid, said Karla Hogan, Cedar Rapids schools executive director of business services.State aid, which is based on the number of students attending a district, runs a year behind. The district's student count in October 2023 will be used to determine funding for the fiscal 2025 budget.While the district is working to cut $2 million in spending from its original budget plan, those cuts are not expected to impact student learning, and school officials hope to avoid job cuts, Hogan said. The $2 million decrease is less than 1 percent of the district's overall budget for fiscal year 2024, which begins July 1 and ends June 30, 2024.Marion City Council members have advanced an ordinance that will open the door to deploying automatic traffic cameras in the city.The traffic camera proposal initially was presented by Marion Police Chief Mike Kitsmiller in council work session Feb. 21, saying the cameras would improve safety despite a police staffing shortage. An ordinance clearing the way to begin a local program passed its first consideration March 23. It again unanimously passed Thursday night, and now must go to a third consideration.The next City Council meeting will be at 5:30 p.m. April 20, though it's not yet clear if the third and final consideration will happen at that meeting.The proposed ordinance does not specify which company the city would contract with to supply and maintain the cameras — or where the cameras would go. The proposal simply gives the city the option of installing them.The Jefferson High School academic decathlon team is heading to a national competition once again after taking top honors in the state for 23 consecutive years.“It's a legacy,” said Kevin Darrow, coach of the Jefferson High academic decathlon team. “Twenty-three years isn't done by accident. It's a formula. It's not what we learn, it's how we learn.”The J-Hawks won the National Academic Decathlon for the first time in the school's history in 2022. The students are now studying for the national tournament April 27-29 in Frisco, Texas. In 2025, the National Academic Decathlon will be held in Des Moines.Have a good weekend everyone. I hope you can enjoy the nice weather.

Students from North Portland's Jefferson High School made history earlier this month. Two members of the Jefferson Dancers won awards for choreography at the National High School Dance Festival. It was the first time any school won top honors for two different pieces. We'll talk with one of the young choreographers, John Kearney, and the group's artistic director, Steve Gonzales.

The odds were stacked against the Hebron girls basketball team heading into the 2022-23 season. After losing in the Class A Private state finals last season, the Lions had the daunting task of moving up two classifications to a much deeper Class AAA, making their road back to the Macon Centreplex that much tougher. But with a retooled roster and the winningest head coach in the history of Georgia high school basketball, the jump didn't phase the Lions in the least. Facing off against defending state champion Lumpkin County in the Class AAA state finals Friday afternoon, the Lions pummeled the Indians for four quarters and cruised to a 68-36 win for their second state title in program history and 15th for legendary head coach Jan Azar. Azar now has two state titles in her first four seasons at Hebron. More impressively, the win over the Indians completes an undefeated season for Hebron at 32-0, the only team in the state of Georgia to do that this season. Standout sophomore guard Aubrey Beckham finished with 16 points, six rebounds and six assists while Jakerra Butler scored 13 of her 16 points in the second half to pair with 13 rebounds. The Lions also got double-digit scoring efforts from Amiya Porter, who had 12 points, and Nickyia Daniel, who scored 11. Defensively, the Lions held the Indians to just 23 percent from the field and out-rebounded them 37-26. For the first time in program history, the Brookwood girls basketball team has its state championship. The Broncos overcame a sluggish first half and struggles on the offensive glass to race past the defending Class AAAAAAA state champion Norcross Blue Devils 43-39 behind a dominant performance from Super Six senior guard Diana Collins. Collins scored a game-high 21 points, including 15 in the second half, to lead the Broncos. Danielle Osho was the only other Bronco to score in double figures with 10 points. Jade Weathersby was close behind with nine points and 12 rebounds. Despite giving up 21 offensive rebounds on the night, the Broncos defense still managed to hold the Blue Devils to just 25 percent from the field. The Blue Devils attempted 18 more shots than the Broncos, but struggled all night to knock down shots. For the parents of Elijah DeWitt, the last five months have been what they call a “daily nightmare.” DeWitt, who was a football and baseball standout at Jefferson High School, died after he was shot in a parking lot at Sugarloaf Mills, outside Dave and Busters, on Oct. 5. The incident has been described as an attempted robbery. Now, DeWitt's family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the mall, its owner and security officials as well as Dave and Buster's. The lawsuit that was filed this week names several defendants, including Simon Property Group, Sugarloaf Mills Limited Partnership, Universal Protection Service LLC, Dave and Buster's of Georgia LLC, Sugarloaf Mills security director Jason Choy and five individuals referred to as “John Does 1-5.” The lawsuit alleges that the defendants in the case failed to keep the mall premises safe; allowed a public nuisance to exist; engaged in negligent employee hiring, training, supervision, and retention practices; and failure to voluntarily undertake a duty of care for Elijah DeWitt. Among the allegations outlined in the lawsuit is that there had been ongoing crime-related issues a Sugarloaf Mills before DeWitt was shot, and that the mall's owners and security officials, as well as Dave and Buster's officials, did not do enough to address those issues. Chandler Richardson and Kemare Bryan are awaiting trial on murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of certain felonies charges in connection with the teen's death. An arraignment hearing for Richardson was held Friday morning. DeWitt had been on a date with his girlfriend at mall on the night he died. Gwinnett police said at the time that DeWitt had gotten into an altercation with Richardson and Bryan. The DeWitt family has previously said his death was the result of a botched robbery. Officials for Simon Property Group and Sugarloaf Mills could not be reached for comment on Friday. Dave and Buster's spokeswoman Karena Bibbins-McKeever told the Daily Post that the entertainment venue chain could not comment on the lawsuit. Gwinnett County residents are being invited to participate in discussion on mental health in the Duluth area this week. Gwinnett County Board of Education chairwoman Tarece Johnson said in an announcement on Facebook that community leaders got together to organize the panel discussion, which will take place from 5 until 7 p.m. on Wednesday at the McClure Health Science High School, which is located at 3921 Club Drive in unincorporated Duluth. The event is described as a community listening panel discussion and question-and-answer session. A flyer that has been circulating for the event says a “Gwinnett Team of Mental Health Professionals” will participate in the panel discussion. The flyer states the panel will consist of representatives from the Mental Health Support Network, Viewpoint Health, cyber security firm Fort Security, Barber Therapy, a licensed clinical social worker, and a licensed professional counselor. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers launched — and then quickly “paused” — efforts to find a new name for Lake Lanier and Buford Dam on Friday afternoon. The lake and the dam were highlighted in a report from a federal commission that looked at renaming Department of Defense properties which are named for people who served in the Confederate Army. The Naming Commission was created in response to the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. The Naming Commission's Final Report to Congress pointed out Buford Dam is named for the city of Buford, but added that the city was named for Algernon Sidney Buford, who was a member of the Virginia Militia during the Civil War. The commission said Lake Lanier was named for the poet, Sidney Lanier, who had also been served as a private in the Confederate Army. The renaming of Lake Lanier would not be as simple as the Army deciding to change it in response to the commission's report. That's because he lake name was set by Congress when it approved its creation in 1946. In other words, the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate would have to agree to changing the lake's name. If that name were to change, it would have a cascading effect that would reverberate across the community because of places in he community that are named for either the lake or the dam. In Gwinnett, these place include Buford Dam Road and Corps of Engineers-run Buford Dam Park, as well as Lanier Middle School and Lanier High School. There is also Lanier Islands and residential communities. Gwinnett County's congressional representatives are asking high school students to submit artwork for a chance to that work displayed in the U.S. Capitol. Congressional districts across the nation hold art competitions each year where high school students from their respective district can enter artwork they created in one several different types of visual mediums. The winner of each district's competition will have heir artwork displayed in the Capitol in Washington D.C. for one year. Most, if not all, members of Congress participate in the nationwide effort each year, and that includes the three congressional members who represent parts of Gwinnett County: U.S. Reps. Lucy McBath, Rich McCormick and Andrew Clyde. McBath announced his past week that the deadline to submit work for the 7th Congressional District Art Competition will be 5 p.m. on April 24. Entries must be submitted in person or by mail to McBath's district office, which is located at 3700 Crestwood Parkway, Suite 270 in Duluth. An online entry form and a required release form can be found at mcbath.house.gov/art-competition. McCormick and Clyde, who represent the 6th and 9th congressional districts respectively, have not announced their respective district's submission deadline, but both of them have posted entry forms on their congressional websites. The form for McCormick's District can be found at mccormick.house.gov/services/art-competition while the form for Clyde's district can be found at clyde.house.gov/forms/submitartwork/. McCormick's office is also directing questions about the 6th Congressional District Art Competition to Suzanne Swain at Suzanne.swain@mail.house.gov. For more information be sure to visit www.bgpodcastnetwork.com   https://www.lawrencevillega.org/  https://www.foxtheatre.org/  https://guideinc.org/  https://www.psponline.com/  https://www.kiamallofga.com/  https://www.milb.com/gwinnett  https://www.fernbankmuseum.org/  www.atlantagladiators.com    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ben Clymer grew up in Bloomington and ended up playing on a state championship team as a sophomore for Jefferson High School in 1994. Clymer ended up playing for Team USA in two IIHF World Junior Championships and played in the NCAA Division I tournament for the University of Minnesota in 1997. He was taken in the second round of the 1997 NHL Draft, ended up having shoulder surgery and missing the 1997-98 season. He left college and played one season in the WHL for the Seattle Thunderbirds before signing with the Tampa Bay Lightning. He played for the Lightning from 1999-2004. From 2007-10, he finished his playing career overseas, including one season for Dynamo Minsk in the KHL in Russia. Clymber is now an analyst for Minnesota Wild and the Univeristy of Minnesota hockey games on Bally Sports North, the Big Ten Network and ESPN. He is also a squirt youth hockey coach. Clymer talks about the many roads he's traveled because of hockey on The Rink Live podcast with Jess Myers and Mick Hatten.

The Mexican American Studies course is offered to students at Jefferson High School in San Antonio. Fronteras visited the class in January to speak with the educators who helped bring the course to life, and to students on what the class has taught them so far.

Another titan in the game joins us this week on the ABCA Podcast with Jefferson High School head coach, John Lowery. Lowery is a well-deserved inductee in the 2023 Hall of Fame class. Lowery is heading into his 52nd season at Jefferson High School. Lowery has amassed 1392 wins, 12 West Virginia State Championships and 26 state tournament appearances. Lowery got an opportunity to coach all three of his sons in high school and all three went on to play college baseball. In this episode we discuss practice planning, holding players accountable, fundraising, history of West Virginia baseball players and we even had an opportunity to get some insight from his wife Vicky in this one. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Rapsodo. The industry leader in baseball player development technology, has a special offer on their HITTING & PITCHING 2.0 units. Go to Rapsodo.com/rapsodo-savings and get up to a $1,000 off! Trusted by the best in baseball, Rapsodo is used by all 30 MLB teams, 100% of D1 Champions since 2010, and 100% of the Top 100 Prospects in this year’s MLB draft. Scott Brown, Vanderbilt’s pitching coach and associate head coach has this to say about Rapsodo, “everyone involved in teaching pitchers this day and age could benefit from owning Rapsodo and using it for immediate feedback to educate their pitchers.” Again, save up to $1,000 when you decide to train and build champions with Rapsodo. Visit Rapsodo.com/savings and take advantage of this great offer. The ABCA Podcast is presented by Netting Pros. Netting Professionals are improving programs one facility at a time, specializing in the design, fabrication and installation of custom netting for backstops, batting cages, dugouts, bp screens and ball carts. They also design and install digital graphic wall padding winds

Schnucks Athlete of the Week Kayden Rundel Jefferson High School by

 Buford came into Friday's game with a perfect record, ranked No. 1 in the state and a consensus top-10 team nationally, and winner of three straight state championships. Walton was not intimidated. The Raiders prepared this week as if Buford was just another opponent and left Tom Riden Stadium with a 42-35 victory in the second round of the Class AAAAAAA state playoffs. The win sent shockwaves far beyond the Buford and Walton communities — but not as much on the Raiders' sideline. Walton will return to the road for the quarterfinals next week, facing another unbeaten foe in Carrollton. Of Buford's 11 wins this season, eight of them were decided by more than 20 points, but that did not faze Walton's will to play spoiler. Walton will play Friday night on the road against Carrollton. About half a dozen local families that grew a little larger this year via adoption celebrated the milestone Saturday at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church. The event was hosted by the Cobb County office of the Division of Family and Children Services, the state organization that provides child protective services, foster care and adoption. Along with a breakfast of chicken and waffles, Cobb DFCS provided photographers for the families to take Thanksgiving portraits, and gave each family a $25 Walmart gift card to have the photos printed. Deputy Director of Cobb DFCS Carmen Nance organized the event to honor adopting families. She said Cobb has 436 children in foster care. According to Nance, the county's foster system needs community support — more foster families, and more resources for those families. Nance said it is important for children in foster care to stay within their home community if possible, so they can maintain some of their social network through friends, school, and church. Nance said the Cobb County Foster Adoptive Parent Association is a good resource for those looking to foster, adopt, or support the local foster system. MUST Ministries is expecting 10,000 runners this Thanksgiving Day as the nonprofit celebrates 20 years of racing against poverty with the MDJ Gobble Jog. Since 2002, families from all over the world have come together on Marietta Square to run in the Marietta Daily Journal MUST Ministries Gobble Jog, one of the largest Thanksgiving Day races in the Southeast. The annual event raises funds for those in need who come to MUST for housing, food, job assistance, clothing and more. This year, MUST will help more than 60,000 people across eight metro Atlanta counties find a second chance at hope. Runners and walkers choose between a 10K, 5K, 1K, Tot Trot (50 yards) or being a phantom runner. For more information, visit gobblejog.org or mustministries.org.  The Mount Paran Christian cheerleading team recently won its 11th straight state championship in competition cheer held at the Macon Centreplex.  The team faced not only a new competitive class when the Eagles moved up to Class AA, but also extended its streak with a new coaching staff led by McKenzie Rutan, Shelley Ray, and Nikki Hamilton. To date, the squad is the only team in Georgia, in any classification, to have won 11 consecutive cheer titles. The streak began with the 2012-13 season. Competition cheerleading is acknowledged as an Olympic sport and has been recognized by the GHSA/NCAA for more than 25 years. The cheer squad holds the most consecutive state championships for any sport in Cobb County, and is closing in on the Walton girls tennis team's mark of 13 titles in 14 years, and 16 championships in 18 years, between 2001 and 2018. This 11th consecutive title also puts the competition cheer team second in most consecutive titles in the state in any sport behind Jefferson High School wrestling, which won every year from 2001 to 2019. Five interceptions and a lost fumble led to five Rockmart touchdowns in North Cobb Christian's 63-10 loss at Rockmart in the second round of the Class AA state playoffs Friday night. Coming off of a thrilling 14-6 win in the first round, No. 10 North Cobb Christian (10-2) was hit with costly mistakes on offense against the Number 7-ranked Yellow Jackets to lead to an early exit in the playoffs. The Eagles went into halftime down 28-10 after getting some traction on a nine-play, 76-yard scoring drive late in the second quarter that ended with quarterback Matty Go finding Skyler Parker down the left sideline for an 18-yard touchdown pass. When they came back from the break, that momentum deteriorated quickly. Rockmart scored on the first possession of the second half as Cam Ferguson capped an 8-play, 70-yard drive with a 22-yard touchdown run. Ty'Shawn Johnson intercepted Go two plays into North Cobb Christian's possession, leading to a short field and a 15-yard touchdown run by Rockmart quarterback JD Davis a short time later. Go finished 9-of-16 for 114 yards, all of which came in the first half as the senior was 0-for-4 in the second half, each time getting picked off. The Eagles were held to 75 yards rushing for a total of 189 yards of offense. Rockmart, meanwhile, had 304 yards with 291 coming on the ground. Davis and Ferguson each had two touchdowns while Brent Washington scored two touchdowns, one on a 2-yard run and another on a 60-yard interception return, both in the second quarter. Marietta used bookstore Book Nook will close, according to a letter written by the store's owners. Before shuttering, the Marietta Book Nook on Roswell Road is discounting nearly everything in its stock by 50% every Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the rest of November. The store will not be open on other days. The letter does not specify an end date for the sale or an ultimate closing date. Trade credits will still be accepted at the other Book Nook locations in Decatur and Lilburn. Some items are exempt from the 50% off discount: comics, graphic novels, and premium items, which will be identified by a star sticker. Everything else is half off. The Book Nook had been temporarily closed to customers for about a month because of a change in management, according to the store's manager, Alexa Dunford. Dunford was not sure what caused the change. During that time, staff have been reorganizing the shelves to prepare for the sale. The book store has been a staple of Marietta's used book market since 1973. #CobbCounty #Georgia #LocalNews      -            -            -            -            -            The Marietta Daily Journal Podcast is local news for Marietta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, and all of Cobb County.             Subscribe today, so you don't miss an episode! MDJOnline            Register Here for your essential digital news.            https://www.chattahoocheetech.edu/  https://cuofga.org/ https://www.esogrepair.com/ https://www.drakerealty.com/           Find additional episodes of the MDJ Podcast here.             This Podcast was produced and published for the Marietta Daily Journal and MDJ Online by BG Ad Group   For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com            See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

DoveLewis slashes walk-in hours amid staffing shortage. Len Bergstein, veteran analyst and political consultant, has died. .Portland could soon have another museum, this one devoted to comics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘On Herschel's team': Top Republicans to visit Georgia to boost Walker's bid; Funeral services announced for slain Jefferson High School football player; Georgia candidates set money records ahead of November election; Tex McIver denied bond ahead of 2nd murder trial

‘On Herschel's team': Top Republicans to visit Georgia to boost Walker's bid; Funeral services announced for slain Jefferson High School football player; Georgia candidates set money records ahead of November election; Tex McIver denied bond ahead of 2nd murder trial

Last week, local law enforcement responded to false reports of an active shooter at Jefferson High School. After notice was given, some parents rushed to the school on high alert. Many of the them were angry, visibly upset and frightened because their children were not released.

Georgia Bulldogs Insider and Publisher of UGASports.com, Radi Nabulsi, joined Andy & Randy to talk about Georgia's dominant performance in the 49-3 Week 1 win over the Oregon Ducks and the conversation steered towards standout true freshman defensive back Malaki Starks. Starks, the true freshman out of Jefferson High School, lead Georgia with 8 tackles against Oregon and capped off his performance with one of the better interceptions you will see in college football this season or any other season. “What about this young man Starks (Malaki Starks)? I know we go back to the interception he had, which was unbelievable but the all-around game, it's not like he is just playing safety. He is a like a jack-of-all-trades, a guy like we were just talking about, like Tyrann Mathieu,” Randy said. “He (Starks) lines up everywhere. They can play him at star, they can play him in the dime package, free safety, strong safety, hell anywhere. Selling popcorn in the stands. He can do it all,” Nabulsi replied. “That interception will be on his highlight reel when he is drafted…you just can't have a crazier interception than that, it's just impossible,” Nabulsi added. Nabulsi also went on to explain how Starks played quarterback in high school and how he would excel in any position he winds up playing. The #2 Georgia Bulldogs host Samford at 4pm this Saturday September 10th. You can listen to Andy & Randy Monday-Friday from 11a-2p.

Sources:wikipedia.orgallthatsinteresting.comchildhoodbiography.comrefinery29.comcbsnews.comthewrap.comthecrimesheet.comthetab.comyoutube.comPhillip Carlo Interview

Stephanie Burgeon graduated from South Dakota State University with both her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees.  This is her 28th year in education. She will be a counselor at George McGovern Middle School in Sioux Falls this Fall.  She previously spent time in the Yankton and Wagner school districts. She is married to her husband Michael. She has two sons, Brody is a full time soldier in the US Army and Hudson will be a sophomore at Jefferson High School. In her spare time she enjoys reading, baking, shopping and spending time with my family.

For Monday's episode of The Sports Scouting Report Podcast With Lee Brecheen, Lee video chats with West Jefferson High School head football coach Willie Brooks. Coach Brooks talks about the West Jefferson football program and the strides the program has made since taking over as head coach. Coach Brooks also talks about the great players that have come through the program, the key players that were a part of the turnaround at West Jefferson under Coach Brooks' leadership, the incredible talent that the West Bank in New Orleans has, and finally, Coach even tells a story about coaching a young Eddie Lacy before he would later go on and have a great career with the Alabama Crimson Tide as well as the Green Bay Packers.

This episode of Spotlight is especially special, as we welcome a Sioux Falls School District student onto the podcast for the first time ever! Taliyah Hayes is an insightful senior at Jefferson High School who is enrolled in our Teacher Pathway program. This unique pathway program exposes students to the education profession sooner. It provides high schoolers an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of teaching and work in another classroom to experience all the possibilities. In this episode, Taliyah shares with Superintendent Jane Stavem what inspired her to already make a firm decision to pursue a career in teaching Special Education, and how the Teacher Pathway program is helping her to achieve those goals.

Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... 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 "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. 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/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode,  and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single

On Today's Episode: Logan and Tim are joined by one of their best friends, Joe Link, to discuss navigating hobbies as a parent, Joe's experience as a teacher for the past two decades, and how to actively work on "cultivating enthusiasm" with your children.About Today's Guest: Joe Link is a Language Arts and Stagecraft teacher at Jefferson High School, as well as a community artist who works with organizations such as Theatre Cedar Rapids and SPT Theatre. From One Dad to Another is the weekly show where Tim Arnold and Logan Adam Schultz share some stories and share some laughs, chat with area guests, and challenge themselves and others to grow as modern parents.Have an idea for a guest or topic we should discuss? Reach out to us via email (logan@lasgroup.net), Facebook, Instagram, or LASPodcastNetwork.com!New episodes every Wednesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you find your podcasts.From One Dad to Another is produced and distributed by the L.A.S. Podcast Network in Cedar Rapids, IA. For more, visit LASPodcastNetwork.com.Subscribe to L.A.S.+ for just $10/month and get bonus episodes of this show, ad-free versions of every L.A.S. Podcast, pre-sale access to live events, early access to special podcasts and projects, and more benefits, all while support local Iowa creators and businesses. For more information and to get started, head to LASPodcastNetwork.com/plus.

Episode 2 of Reach High Knowledge includes guest Ethan Smith! Ethan is a multi sport athlete at Jefferson High School! Listen in to hear him talk about life growing up in Lafayette, IN and his motivation to “Reach High” in life!

John Canzano talks with former Oregon Duck and 2x Super Champion with the Dallas Cowboys, Mel Renfro. Canzano asks Renfro what it was like to never lose a game while at Jefferson High School in Portland, how he feels about college athletes being able to take advantage of opportunities with NIL today, when did he have the most fun playing football, what were those first five or so years in the NFL like, what was Tom Landry like as a coach, details on his relationship with Mike Ditka and Ditka's non-profit organization, how many players used stickum back in his playing day and how did it start, and much more. Subscribe NOW to this podcast for more great content. Follow @JohnCanzanoBFT on Twitter

Episode 22/52 is out now.  This time we had the great pleasure to chat with El Paso County Judge, Ricardo Samaniego. Born and raised in El Paso, Judge Samaniego is a proud graduate from Jefferson High School. Before taking public office, Judge Samaniego worked in various fields in both the private and public sector. His professional background is all-encompassing as he worked as an El Paso County Juvenile Probation Officer, an Interim Director for the El Paso County Housing Authority, Human Resources Director for Rio Grande Workforce Solutions, and as an Operations Director for SERCO of Texas. Judge Samaniego is passionate about positively impacting our community and definitely someone not afraid to stand up for what he believes is right.  During this episode we chat about his past work experience and the reason why he became County Judge.  We talked about his experience handling this pandemic, the contributing factors that led him to issue a shutdown order which went against Gov. Greg Abbott's executive orders as well as the phone conversations he had with the governor during that time.   Judge Samaniego also talks about the importance of being an advocate for health care workers and the overall  impact this pandemic has had on our community. Judge Samaniego also shares what goes through his mind when people question his intent and motives as well as the process of questioning his own decisions at times.   This is a great conversation you don't want to miss!    Other topics covered: Masks in school Mental health Opening international bridges  El Paso Healing Garden 

We sit down with Jefferson High School head football Coach Tony Martinez to talk about his team and the upcoming 2021 high school football season.

Having a Pet Alligator Mary Thorn is no regular pet guardian. Yes, she has dogs, but she also has a pet squirrel and an Alligator that she dresses in clothing. Mary just battled the State of Florida to keep "Rambo," a 6' gator that she considers part of the family. The calm and collected reptile also is a therapy animal for troubled children. Listen Now Nature is the Worst E. Reid Ross (Cracked) will tell us about 500 of the most absurd and horrifying things that happen in nature. From murderous squirrels to farting fish, "E" uncovers, and revels in, some of Mother Nature's ugliest moments. Listen Now World's Longest Tail A dog in Belgium earned himself a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the world's longest tail. An Irish wolfhound named Keon gets the honor. His tail measures 30.2 inches long from the top of the bone to the tip, without including his hair, according to the Guinness World Records. Listen Now Cat Gets Diploma There's a cat named Oreo C. Collins from Macon, Georgia, who successfully earned an online "High School Diploma" from Jefferson High School. Oreo's owner, Kelvin Collins, actually got Oreo's diploma as a way to highlight fraud in online degree programs. Listen Now Read more about this week's show.

Crunch Time Plays welcomes one of the top players in the 2024 class Sammy Brown to talk his move to Jefferson High School in Georgia this fall, how playing both sides of the ball in high school will benefit him in college, the advantages of being a coaches son, the visits that he went on in the month of June when recruiting was back open, his camp sessions and seeing how coaches are teaching him on the field, being offered already by so many SEC schools, the main thing he is looking for when choosing a school, and much more!

Scott Kitzman is a native of Rockford, IL and currently resides in Roscoe, IL with his wife Sheila and kids, Elena and Jack. Scott started his swimming career at the age of 6 and swam with the Rockford Marlins in the 1980's. While with the Marlins, Scott was a Junior National finalist in numerous events. Scott attended Jefferson High School in Rockford where he was a four-year state finalist. Scott culminated his competitive swimming career at Columbia University in New York City. While at Columbia, Scott was team captain and was awarded All-Ivy and Academic All-Ivy awards. After college, Scott returned to the family building supply business where he worked until it closed in 2011. Scott is currently a stay-at-home parent which affords him the time to be our head coach. Scott is still swimming competitively at US Masters competitions. Enjoy the show!

Welcome back to Jonah Asks. Meet Mark. A dedicated musician and educator, Mark is now a school administrator and an all-around thoughtful and funky gentleman. I met Mark about fifteen years ago, teaching at Jefferson High School in Daly City. Our paths have crossed again in the last year in the adult school environment. For that I'm grateful. In this episode, Mark talks about: *growing up with religion *life travels from Virginia to Arkansas to the Bay Area *life on the road as a touring musician *San Francisco over the last two decades. We also discuss: *political activism *religious hypocrisy *education *creativity *identity (work vs everything else) Check out Mark's music at http://www.hollinsandhollins.com/ To support the podcast, share, rate and subscribe. Or you can buy me a virtual coffee here. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jonahasks As always, thanks for listening and be safe. This is temporary, Jonah

Good friend of ours Tim Reck joins the show this week. Tim is a longtime coach who has been at both Roosevelt and Washington and just recently accepted the job to become the first ever Head BBB Coach at Jefferson High School. Tim shares some of his best memories of his time at WHS, and how he made it a point to make sure each person he coaches feel valued and respected.

For Wednesday's episode of The Sports Scouting Report Podcast With Lee Brecheen, Lee interviews East Jefferson High School head basketball coach Marcell Fisher. Coach Fisher is originally from Syracuse, New York and talks about his coaching career, which now puts him in New Orleans, Louisiana. Coach Fisher has also been the head coach at stops like Clark, Hahnville, Lake Area New Tech, Cohen, and most recently, KIPP Renaissance. Coach Fisher also talks about his first season at East Jefferson, some of his star players, and even talks a little East Jefferson football as his son Ahmad Fisher is a 6'4 defensive end on the Warriors football team coached by Frank Allelo. Finally, both Lee and Coach Fisher have some fun in predicting what will happen in March Madness!

For months now, you've heard us talk about the construction process and progress of our two new schools, Jefferson High School and Ben Reifel Middle School, set to open next fall. However, there is so much more to opening a new school beyond the physical construction process. In today's episode, Superintendent Stavem sits down with Jefferson Principal Dan Conrad and Ben Reifel Principal Shane Hieronimus, where they discuss the people side of opening a new school. From hiring staff to establishing a school vision, they address the complex work it takes to create a sense of tradition and love for a new school early on. Whether you're a future Bison or Cavalier, or just interested in learning more about the new schools, this episode is for you!

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore. 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 single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh's book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg's page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin' Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-"Louie" "Havana Moon" and "El Loco Cha Cha Cha" The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have "Louie" Will Travel collects Berry's post-Modern recordings, including "Louie Louie" itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who's been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We're going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We're going to look at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The story of "Louie Louie" begins with Richard Berry. We've seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes -- most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he'd been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he's been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on "The Wallflower", back in March 2019, and even there he wasn't the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we're looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself -- he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn't want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character -- he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass -- though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we've seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season -- Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn't record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "I Had a Love"] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "Tell Me You Love Me"] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn't credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn't have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern's subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, "She Wants to Rock": [Excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by "rock" they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names -- as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, "Rabbit on a Log"] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, "Lonesome Desert"] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, "Set My Heart Free"] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers -- the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, "Each Step"] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn't just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he'd learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn't matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people's records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group -- but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups -- Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with "Stranded in the Jungle", and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9", where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins' normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Riot in Cell Block #9"] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry's voice on that record -- he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn't him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to "Riot", "The Big Break", which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "The Big Break"] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] But of course that didn't stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James' "The Wallflower", which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, "The Wallflower"] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, "Hey! Henry", which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Hey! Henry"] And he wrote "Good Rockin' Daddy" for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it's likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork -- quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well -- and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry's most famous song, "Louie Louie", was both. There is nothing original about "Louie Louie", yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry's original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was "El Loco Cha Cha Cha", originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, "El Loco Cha Cha Cha"] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as "La Bamba", "Twist and Shout", and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. "Havana Moon" by Chuck Berry was the B-side to "You Can't Catch Me", and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like "Me stand and wait for boat to come": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat "King" Cole's "Calypso Blues": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole, "Calypso Blues"] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into "Louie Louie", which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that's what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] While Berry's inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in "La Bamba", "Louie Louie" didn't actually use that precise sequence. I'm going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the "Louie Louie" riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get "Wild Thing": [Excerpt: "Wild Thing" riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord -- if you're playing in C, you've got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn't sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you're a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you'd resolve that problem is to play power chords -- power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn't be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren't particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh -- so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 -- but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] That wouldn't be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry's record, which was released as the B-side to a version of "You Are My Sunshine", and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and "Louie Louie" was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he'd been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When "Louie Louie" started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to "Louie Louie" rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, "Have Love Will Travel", but that wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Have Love Will Travel"] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father -- but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to "Louie Louie" and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 -- he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio -- you couldn't sell those rights -- but he wouldn't receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn't matter. A song like "Louie Louie", a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. "Louie Louie" was just another song he'd written, no more important than "Look Out Miss James" or "Rockin' Man", and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa's riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry's original, not the later versions) it wasn't going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn't been for Ron Holden. We've not talked about the Pacific Northwest's music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool -- another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became "an LA musician" or "a New York musician", and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician -- his father, Oscar Holden, was known as "the father of Seattle jazz", and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called "Love You So": [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Love You So"] He didn't have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen's new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including "Gee, But I'm Lonesome", a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry's old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys' first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced "Louie Louie" to the music scene there -- he'd heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn't performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden's arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden -- or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds' arrangements -- had made a crucial change to "Louie Louie", one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of "Louie Louie" from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry's original record, just Ron Holden's live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden's did listen to the original record -- once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers -- who are often referred to as "the Fabulous Wailers" to distinguish them from Bob Marley's later, more famous group -- were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene -- most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, "Tall Cool One", which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] They didn't have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band's three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the "Live at the Castle" album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Since You Been Gone"] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song "Spanish Castle Magic": [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] But it was their version of "Louie Louie" that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin' Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were -- they'd all learned it from Ron Holden's live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts' ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin' Robin Roberts, "Louie Louie"] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin' Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of "Louie Louie" wasn't a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours' drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I'm going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties -- people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox -- indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing "Louie Louie" by Rockin' Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band's shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with "Like, Long Hair" a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Like, Long Hair"] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group's piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band -- they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren't smashing guitars -- Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group's manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record "Louie Louie" as the label's first single. Revere wasn't keen -- he didn't like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Louie Louie"] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts -- it didn't break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won't be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they're sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added "Louie Louie" to their set. And they'd both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were... not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group's lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends -- both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church -- and they had grown up together. Ely's parents didn't encourage the duo's music -- Ely's biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely's mother remarried, his stepfather didn't want him to have anything to do with music -- but Easton's did, and Easton's father became the group's manager. Easton's mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group's name for them. Easton's father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did -- and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there's also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin' Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of "Let's give it to them right now!" but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they'd done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of "Louie Louie" with no breaks, and Ely's voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he's come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next -- the Raiders' manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said "No, I'm not. I've not got any money", and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It's incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they're doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released... well, it was the second-best version of "Louie Louie" recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they'd ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead -- he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn't sing and Ely couldn't play the drums, and they said that wasn't going to happen. Easton then played his trump card -- when his mother had registered the band name, she'd registered it just in his name. If they didn't do things his way, they weren't going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders' record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen's version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn't the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on "LSD-25", and who we'll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops -- customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get "Louie Louie". Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the "bubbling under" section of the charts -- the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind "Dominique" by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, "Dominique"] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you'd mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them -- the Singing Nun's song had a chorus that went "Dominique, nique, nique", and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, "nique" was a swear word, an expletive meaning "to fornicate", roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn't there. And that was true of "Louie Louie" as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn't he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics "really" were -- apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like "We'll take her and park all alone/She's never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again" and "on that chair I'll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair" -- the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported "A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted." On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of "Louie Louie" to labs (under special seal, in case they'd be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry's record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying "at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer". This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to "Louie Louie" at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton's yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with "I Could Be So Good To You": [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, "I Could Be So Good To You"] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of "Louie Louie", in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, "Louie Louie"] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song -- there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he'd quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job -- but then he'd been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who'd bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn't even understand why the song was popular -- the only version that sounded like the record he'd wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who'd added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he'd been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they'd just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley's former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, "Louie Louie"] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who'd made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry's old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who'd sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life -- Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He'd seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved -- along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren't legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use "Louie Louie" in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners -- but they didn't want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren't sorted, they'd just use "Wild Thing" instead. In order to make sure the commercials used "Louie Louie", the song's owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn't get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from "Louie Louie" in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing "Louie Louie" until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen's name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year -- no-one's sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell's lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you're listening to this, someone will be playing "duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh"

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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…)

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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 single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh’s book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg’s page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin’ Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-“Louie” “Havana Moon” and “El Loco Cha Cha Cha” The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have “Louie” Will Travel collects Berry’s post-Modern recordings, including “Louie Louie” itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who’s been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We’re going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We’re going to look at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The story of “Louie Louie” begins with Richard Berry. We’ve seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes — most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he’d been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he’s been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on “The Wallflower”, back in March 2019, and even there he wasn’t the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we’re looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself — he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn’t want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character — he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass — though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we’ve seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season — Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn’t record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “I Had a Love”] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “Tell Me You Love Me”] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn’t credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn’t have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern’s subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, “She Wants to Rock”: [Excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by “rock” they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names — as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, “Rabbit on a Log”] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Lonesome Desert”] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, “Set My Heart Free”] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers — the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, “Each Step”] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn’t just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he’d learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn’t matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people’s records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group — but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups — Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with “Stranded in the Jungle”, and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9”, where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins’ normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry’s voice on that record — he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn’t him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to “Riot”, “The Big Break”, which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “The Big Break”] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] But of course that didn’t stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James’ “The Wallflower”, which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, “The Wallflower”] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, “Hey! Henry”, which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Hey! Henry”] And he wrote “Good Rockin’ Daddy” for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it’s likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork — quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well — and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry’s most famous song, “Louie Louie”, was both. There is nothing original about “Louie Louie”, yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry’s original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”, originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as “La Bamba”, “Twist and Shout”, and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. “Havana Moon” by Chuck Berry was the B-side to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like “Me stand and wait for boat to come”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat “King” Cole’s “Calypso Blues”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Calypso Blues”] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into “Louie Louie”, which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that’s what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] While Berry’s inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in “La Bamba”, “Louie Louie” didn’t actually use that precise sequence. I’m going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the “Louie Louie” riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get “Wild Thing”: [Excerpt: “Wild Thing” riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord — if you’re playing in C, you’ve got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn’t sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you’re a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you’d resolve that problem is to play power chords — power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn’t be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren’t particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh — so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 — but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] That wouldn’t be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry’s record, which was released as the B-side to a version of “You Are My Sunshine”, and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and “Louie Louie” was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he’d been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When “Louie Louie” started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to “Louie Louie” rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, “Have Love Will Travel”, but that wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Have Love Will Travel”] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father — but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to “Louie Louie” and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 — he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio — you couldn’t sell those rights — but he wouldn’t receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn’t matter. A song like “Louie Louie”, a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. “Louie Louie” was just another song he’d written, no more important than “Look Out Miss James” or “Rockin’ Man”, and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa’s riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry’s original, not the later versions) it wasn’t going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn’t been for Ron Holden. We’ve not talked about the Pacific Northwest’s music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool — another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became “an LA musician” or “a New York musician”, and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician — his father, Oscar Holden, was known as “the father of Seattle jazz”, and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called “Love You So”: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Love You So”] He didn’t have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen’s new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including “Gee, But I’m Lonesome”, a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry’s old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Gee But I’m Lonesome”] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys’ first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced “Louie Louie” to the music scene there — he’d heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn’t performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden’s arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden — or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds’ arrangements — had made a crucial change to “Louie Louie”, one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of “Louie Louie” from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry’s original record, just Ron Holden’s live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden’s did listen to the original record — once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers — who are often referred to as “the Fabulous Wailers” to distinguish them from Bob Marley’s later, more famous group — were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene — most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, “Tall Cool One”, which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, “Tall Cool One”] They didn’t have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band’s three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the “Live at the Castle” album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, “Since You Been Gone”] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song “Spanish Castle Magic”: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Spanish Castle Magic”] But it was their version of “Louie Louie” that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin’ Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were — they’d all learned it from Ron Holden’s live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts’ ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin’ Robin Roberts, “Louie Louie”] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin’ Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of “Louie Louie” wasn’t a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours’ drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I’m going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties — people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox — indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing “Louie Louie” by Rockin’ Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band’s shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with “Like, Long Hair” a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Like, Long Hair”] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group’s piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band — they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren’t smashing guitars — Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group’s manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record “Louie Louie” as the label’s first single. Revere wasn’t keen — he didn’t like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Louie Louie”] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts — it didn’t break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won’t be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they’re sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added “Louie Louie” to their set. And they’d both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were… not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group’s lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends — both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church — and they had grown up together. Ely’s parents didn’t encourage the duo’s music — Ely’s biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely’s mother remarried, his stepfather didn’t want him to have anything to do with music — but Easton’s did, and Easton’s father became the group’s manager. Easton’s mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group’s name for them. Easton’s father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did — and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there’s also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin’ Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of “Let’s give it to them right now!” but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they’d done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of “Louie Louie” with no breaks, and Ely’s voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he’s come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next — the Raiders’ manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said “No, I’m not. I’ve not got any money”, and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It’s incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they’re doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released… well, it was the second-best version of “Louie Louie” recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they’d ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead — he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn’t sing and Ely couldn’t play the drums, and they said that wasn’t going to happen. Easton then played his trump card — when his mother had registered the band name, she’d registered it just in his name. If they didn’t do things his way, they weren’t going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders’ record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen’s version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn’t the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who we’ll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops — customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get “Louie Louie”. Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the “bubbling under” section of the charts — the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, “Dominique”] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you’d mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them — the Singing Nun’s song had a chorus that went “Dominique, nique, nique”, and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, “nique” was a swear word, an expletive meaning “to fornicate”, roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn’t there. And that was true of “Louie Louie” as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn’t he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics “really” were — apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like “We’ll take her and park all alone/She’s never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again” and “on that chair I’ll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair” — the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported “A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted.” On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of “Louie Louie” to labs (under special seal, in case they’d be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry’s record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying “at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer”. This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to “Louie Louie” at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton’s yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with “I Could Be So Good To You”: [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, “I Could Be So Good To You”] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of “Louie Louie”, in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, “Louie Louie”] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song — there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he’d quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job — but then he’d been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who’d bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn’t even understand why the song was popular — the only version that sounded like the record he’d wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who’d added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he’d been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they’d just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley’s former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, “Louie Louie”] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who’d made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry’s old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who’d sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life — Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He’d seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved — along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren’t legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use “Louie Louie” in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners — but they didn’t want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren’t sorted, they’d just use “Wild Thing” instead. In order to make sure the commercials used “Louie Louie”, the song’s owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn’t get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from “Louie Louie” in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing “Louie Louie” until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen’s name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year — no-one’s sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell’s lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you’re listening to this, someone will be playing “duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh”

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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…)

Todays Guest is a Tampa, Florida native who from a young age has fell in love with the game of football! After meeting around the age 6 we have became brothers and have played basketball and football together for many years. After little league ball he decided to go to Jefferson High School where he had a successful High School Career on the field, becoming one of the premier running backs in the Bay area. After graduating from Jefferson he decided to take his academic and athletic career to Alcorn State in Mississippi, where he had a breakout freshman season and is currently getting ready to start off his Sophomore year. On todays episode we discuss growing up in Tampa, his love for the game of football, having a breakout freshman season, and the overall HBCU Experience! If you enjoyed this podcast be sure to subscribe and leave a rating! In the reviews let me know who I should have on the show next! Follow The DJ Henderson Podcast: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/djhendersonpodcast/ Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/djhenderson_/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DjHenderson__ Snapchat: @Djhendo2x Follow Niko: Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikoduffey Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikoduffey/

SHOW NOTES INTRODUCING WILL KELLUM! As I continued on interviewing American Star Finalists for 2020, I got to my interview with William Kellum, an American Star Finalist in agribusiness.  William comes from the small town of Jefferson City in Georgia.  He is now studying electrical engineering at the University Of Georgia. During high school William and his friend started a lawn care business.  This is a common type of business for FFA students to start, and it is also the business that I see FFA students having the most success with.  It is truly a business that a student can start in high school and run for the rest of their working career with great success. Any type of business is going to require marketing.  As a matter of fact, once you buy your equipment, make your product or offer your service you are only about 10% done with creating a business.  The other 90% is going to be marketing. Never in the history of this show have I interviewed someone who took advantage of everything at their disposal to market their business like William and his partner did during high school.  They were both on the football team, and they convinced the public address announcer to do a little commercial for them each time one of their numbers were called.  They participated in a talent show at their school and turned it into a commercial.  And today, now that William has gone off on his own with the business, he has used his jersey number in the name of "47 Lawn Care". William loves entrepreneurship, and he looks at things differently.  This is a recipe for success.  He is studying electrical engineering to give allow him to improve his business and take it to higher levels.  It is exciting to see where this is going. SUPERVISED AGRICULTURAL EXPERIENCE: Landscaping And Lawn Care HIGH SCHOOL: Jefferson High School; Jefferson City, Georgia MASCOT: Dragons FFA ADVISOR: David Calloway CONTACT INFORMATION FOR WILLIAM KELLUM: Click on the picture below to be taken to the Jefferson High School FFA website: Williams's FFA Advisor's Email Address: dcalloway@jeffcityschools.org Jefferson High School's Telephone Number: 706-367-2881 FFA LINKS: National FFA Organization Supervised Agricultural Experiences (SAE's) Support FFA  Donate to FFA - One way that FFA students are able to start small businesses is through an FFA grant of $1,000.  In 2014, 141 FFA students received these grants.  With your donations, more students can get this head start - pay it forward. REASONS TO DONATE TO FFA: Only 2% of Americans grow and raise most of the food and livestock consumed by the other 98% as well as the rest of the world.  FFA is providing the needed education, training and resources to Americans that will carry that torch forward and insure that America continues to have inexpensive, quality food. Rural Communities will rely on entrepreneurship in the future for population growth and job creation.  The FFA is a major catalyst to that entrepreneurial growth. Farmers, ranchers and those working in agriculture give the rest of America incredible amounts of freedom because the search for food is as simple as going to the grocery store: “The future of American agriculture depends on the involvement and investment in America’s youth, In order to prepare for the population of tomorrow, we need to encourage America’s youth today, and show that careers in agriculture are profitable, rewarding, and vital.”. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue Where Off-Farm Income And Matt Brechwald Can Be Heard:   Member Of The National Association Of Farm Broadcasters

"Game 1: 4th Inning" highlights Greg Fetherston, Head Baseball Coach at Jefferson High School. Fether unpacks his journey growing up in Jefferson, playing baseball at UW-Whitewater, and shortly after graduation becoming head baseball coach at his alma mater. Along with the numerous Rock Valley Conference championships, the Eagles won the 2014 Division 2 state championship and were runners-up in 2018.  A huge thank you to Fether for taking the time to sit down with us today and for his support of this podcast. 

Welcome to Beyond the Mat with Forrest Przybysz!  In this episode, we chat with Forrest about his start in wrestling at Jefferson High School in Jefferson, GA.  We will then talk about his time at Appalachian State.  You can follow Forrest on Instagram & Twitter You can follow The Grind on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Thank you for listening, Go Apps! 

Greg Brown Jefferson High School Head Girls Basketball Coach ISS/Alternative School/Health & PE Head Girls Basketball Coach 706-260-7673 Started out as Volunteer Assistant at Tennessee Temple Academy in 2003. I was an Assistant Boys Coach for 3 years winning a State Championship in 2006-2007. I was the Head Girls Basketball Coach there for 1 season finished with a 23-9 record (previous season record was 4-25), including the first ever Region Championship in the history of the school. Got married and took a job at Northwest Whitfield High School and was an Assistant Coach for 4 seasons. Became the Head Coach there in 2011 and was there for 7 seasons finishing with a 148-49 record, 2 region championships, and 5 Sweet 16 appearances. Became the Head Coach at Jefferson High School in 2018. Inherited a team with 0 returning starters and 2 players with Varsity experience. Finished the 2018-2019 season with a 25-4 record, Region Runner-up, and an Elite 8 appearance. In 2019-2020 finished the season with a 25-5 record, Region Championship, and an Elite 8 appearance. Married to Carrie Brown (my Assistant Coach), 3 kids Rylee (10), Willow Grace (7), Carden (6) gbrown@jeffcityschools.org @man2mandcoach --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-furtado/support

On our eleventh episode, we welcome Mr. Tom Barker, Retired Director of Bands at Lafayette Jefferson High School to the podcast.

Just like millions of students around the world, Michael Carreon’s school year didn’t go quite as he expected it to. He couldn’t have gone into his senior year at Jefferson High School expecting to spend one third of it at home. Nor could he have expected to win the Grande Communications Superstar Scholarship at BexarFest 2020. Now, he’s using that springboard to pursue his dream of being a filmmaker.

Diane Borchardt was a former teacher's aide/study hall monitor at Jefferson High School in Wisconsin. She was convicted of hiring three of her students to murder her estranged husband, Ruben Borchardt, on Easter morning in 1994. At her trial, Diane Borchardt was found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.Support the show (https://talkmurder.com/join/)

Guest: Neil Lomax - Former PSU Legend and NFL QB John Canzano talks with Neil Lomax about why going first in the NFL Draft isn't all that it seems, Houston Lillard taking the job at Jefferson High School, and why Jake Luton has an advantage over Justin Herbert in the draft. Subscribe NOW to this podcast for more great content. It’s free. Why wouldn’t you? Follow @JohnCanzanoBFT on Twitter.

This week, a conversation with Lissette Jacobson about growing up the daughter of Mexican immigrants, social justice, using football to bond with boys in her school and what it takes to be a successful administrator. She is the new principal of Pioneer Elementary School in West Chicago. Also on the show, a drive to Jefferson High School in Rockford for a tour of their college and career-prep classes. The tour included dozens of protesters outside, holding up signs and chanting. They were protesting because the person who the tour was for was controversial, Trump-appointed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Have a topic or story you think should be covered on the show? Send them in to teacherslounge@niu.edu . While you're there, nominate an educator who you think should be on the show. And if you are a teacher who should be on the show, let us know! SHOW NOTES Educator in this episode: Lissette Jacobson Listen/read more about the topics covered: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Met With

Some editors say sports stories are the hardest stories to write because we already know the endings. But readers and viewers love them anyway! Even folks who don't keep up with sports often find something to warm their hearts in an inspiring tale. Why are sports stories captivating even to people who aren't sports fans? And why do sports stories carry their enormous power to create social change? To talk about that, Amy and Holland invited Dr. Tom LeGrand, a former sports podcaster, and Brendan Scott, an English teacher and a coach, to the table.  Dr. Tom LeGrand serves as the Regional Director Carolinas for Impact America. Tom also has experience in radio broadcasting, podcasting, and writing. From 2010-2012, Tom co-hosted The Lettermen's Lounge, a sports podcast that covered local, national and international athletics. It is a subsidiary of Jungle Gem Sports, LLC. Brendan Scott earned a degree in English from the University of Colorado and then traveled to Guatemala where he taught writing, English, and physical education for three years at the Inter-American School of Xela. After returning to the U.S., Brendan earned a master's degree in English Education at Regis University and began teaching high school English. He also coaches the women's basketball and cross-country teams at Jefferson High School. Brendan recently married April, a librarian, after proposing to her on a trip to Harry Potter World. He blogs at Living Spiritually and Adventure With Brendan.  

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins (more…)

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Goodnight My Love" by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins.----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg's website, and Etta James' autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I've pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days -- he's a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it's impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don't end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we're looking at today, "Goodnight My Love". Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when "Goodnight My Love" came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people's histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There's so little information about Belvin that if you didn't know anything about him, you'd assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B -- among musicians, especially those on the West Coast -- there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder's favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn't. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke's death, his widow kept all of Cooke's records separate from her other albums -- except Belvin's, which she kept with Cooke's. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre's "most revered stylist". And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let's talk about the life -- and the tragic death -- of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis' band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis' "Barrel House Stomp": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Barrel House Stomp"] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, "Three Dots and a Dash". Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely's saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin's first recording with the group was on "All That Wine is Gone", an answer record to "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee". [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, "All That Wine is Gone"] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, "Baby Don't Go", was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song "Dream Girl": [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, "Dream Girl"] "Dream Girl" went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit -- a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I'll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one -- but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it "Marvin and Johnny", and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn't stick with a single "Johnny". Instead "Johnny" would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as "Marvin and Johnny", including "Cherry Pie", on which the role of "Johnny" was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Cherry Pie"] "Cherry Pie" was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny's other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of "Ko Ko Mo", which didn't manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como's version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Ko Ko Mo"] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin's career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn't get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, "My Angel"] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, "So Fine"] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, "Hum De Dum"] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin's Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, "The Girl in My Dreams" was the closest thing he'd had to a big success since the similarly-named "Dream Girl" several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, "The Girl in my Dreams"] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart -- not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of "Goodnight My Love", is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved -- in particular the song "Bertha Lou" by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, "Bertha Lou"] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars -- Burnette's son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of "Goodnight My Love", the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it's normally told goes as follows -- Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge -- but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn't have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That's the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin's cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people's half-finished songs, and so it's entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Belvin's version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin's share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he'd seen with "Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like "Senorita", to doo-wop novelty songs like "My Satellite", a song whose melody owes something to "Hound Dog", credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, "My Satellite"] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge's brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin's friend Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies "gangster of love" persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like "Three Hours Past Midnight": [Excerpt: "Three Hours Past Midnight", Johnny "Guitar" Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, "Is It True": [Excerpt: The Saxons, "Is It True"] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label -- at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I've given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven't listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits -- and "Goodnight My Love" and "Earth Angel" had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding -- the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven't been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown's replacement in Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown's group, he'd developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records -- he'd made "Dragnet Blues", which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he'd also done his Johnny Ace impression on "Johnny Ace's Last Letter", a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace's death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, "Johnny Ace's Last Letter"] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called "You Cheated", which looked like it could possibly be a big hit -- except that the label it was on wasn't willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, "You Cheated"] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn't want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song -- he didn't like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre -- but a gig was a gig, and it'd be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Tommy "Buster" Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into "Handsome" Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn't spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as "The Shields" rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, "You Cheated"] That's Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn't given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry -- this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. "You Cheated" ended up making number twelve on the pop charts -- a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together -- the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn't make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, "Nature Boy", where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: "Nature Boy", the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as "You Cheated". The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn't like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn't even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label -- RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on -- and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat "King" Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was "Guess Who?", a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Guess Who?"] That song made the top forty -- hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it's not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin's death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I've not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there's a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there's also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That's just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it's impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It's my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as "the first rock and roll show of 1960", the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin's. Jesse had just recorded his second album, "Mr Easy", which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin's turn towards pop balladry in the Nat "King" Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, "Blues in the Night"] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration -- in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn't dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn't arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse's mother in LA, asking if she'd heard from them. She hadn't. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin's guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here's the thing -- within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin's car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night -- and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it's possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin's driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles -- who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we'll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse's mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, "Goodnight My Love"] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

They are a group that have been performing since 1842. We’ll hear from maestro Bill Kisinger about Lafayette Citizens Band . Thursday night (August 8) is the final concert at Riehle Plaza with guests Organistan and Monday, September 2 nd (Labor Day) is their 2019 season finale at Jefferson High School.

On tap this week are my first husband and wife guests, David and Thea Strand, local performers and arts supporters. We talk about shared experiences with local arts, including the Jefferson High School music program, and the dual roles of performers and parents of performers.

Keith Harrison knows more than most about "riding high" and having to "let it whip." The Grammy Award-winning artist tells “What Had Happened Was” host Amelia Robinson about his life as a member of the funk bands Faze-O, Dazz Band and Heatwave. The Jefferson High School grad breaks down how much money he never earned from the hit song “Riding High,” and where he thinks all those millions went. Keith says he’s experienced band infighting, jealousy and a whole lot of fun during his long career in the music industry. Keith describes being dazzled by Clarence "Satch" Satchell from the Ohio Players and his fish bowl table and explains why he used cocaine, heroin and nearly every other drug in the book before giving it all up. He won a Best R&B Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal Grammy Award with the Dazz Band for 1982’s "Let It Whip” and penned “Let It All Blow.” Keith will play at the Levitt Pavilion at Dave Hall Plaza in downtown Dayton 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 3. The concert follows a festival celebrating The Dayton Sister Cities Committee’s 50th anniversary with Oiso, Japan. The Dayton area was hit 15 tornadoes on Memorial Day. Want to help the community recover? The Dayton Foundation’s Tornado Relief Fund (daytonfoundation.org) and The Foodbank (thefoodbankdayton.org) are accepting financial donations.

Hip-hop artist Victor Rivera of Rockford, Illinois, is the latest guest on the “From the Newsroom” podcast. Rivera is a teacher, an influencer and a leader of a group of breakdancers, known as B-Boys and B-Girls in the hip-hop universe. He’s keeping that dance style, mostly associated with 80s and 90s hip-hop, alive in future generations with events and gatherings throughout the city. Rivera’s father immigrated as a teenager from Mexico to Rockford, eventually raising three sons here as first generation Mexican-Americans. Rivera attended Jefferson High School in Rockford. He has a degree in sound technology and music business from Madison Media in Wisconsin. Register Star multimedia journalist Scott P. Yates interviews Rivera about those topics and more in the latest podcast episode. Listen to the podcast online at www.rrstar.com, and subscribe to "From the Newsroom: Rockford Register Star" wherever you find your podcasts. More information Hosted by Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star; 815-987-1348; syates@rrstar.com; @scottpyates RRSTAR story: Local breakdancing scene thrives decades later, new documentary highlights Rockford’s history https://www.rrstar.com/news/20180810/local-breakdancing-scene-thrives-decades-later-new-documentary-highlights-rockfords-history Victor Rivera’s social media: https://www.instagram.com/vicmonsta/ https://www.facebook.com/vic.monsta Music credits: “Never too late” by Victor Rivera More people to know: Evangelina Jimenez (member: 317 Art Collective) https://www.instagram.com/laindigobaby/ https://www.facebook.com/laindigobaby/ Shaniqwa Porter https://www.instagram.com/callmesalsa/ Jacob Polhill https://www.instagram.com/jacob_polhill/ www.jacobpolhill.com

Coach Matt Orton Performance Physical Education Teacher / Strength and Conditioning Specialist Cedar Rapids Jefferson HS - (2011-2019) Head Wrestling Coach (2011-2017) Performance Physical Education Teacher/ Strength and Conditioning Specialist Iowa City West - (2004 - 2011) Asst. Wrestling Coach PE Teacher/ Asst. Wrestling Coach St. Charles West (MO) - (1997 - 2004) College Career: Southwest Missouri State (1990-1994)Wrestling (DI National Qualifier 1994) College - I had a tremendous S&C coach in Kirk Woolfolk (now at Naval Academy). I have always trained on my own and had a desire to teach/ coach sport performance, strength and conditioning. I was given the opportunity to teach an advanced weights course at Iowa City West in 2004 and everything blossomed from there.   Coach Orton Contact Information Email: morton@cr.k12.ia.us Twitter: https://twitter.com/jhawkfitness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jhawkfitness Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jhawkfitness   TeamBuildr Thank you to TeamBuildr for sponsoring this episode. TeamBuildr is the leading software for high schools and colleges by providing coaches the ability to write programs online, generate over 13 reports and even train athletes remotely for side-income.   ***SPECIAL OFFER*** Right now, if you sign up with code BigTime, you will receive a free APRE programming template which works automatically within TeamBuildr. No more spreadsheets and workout cards to track training maxes that change day by day. Automate your programming without outsourcing your programming with TeamBuildr.   Reminder that this is the link for anyone signing up for TeamBuildr on your website: af.tbldr.co/BigTime     Optimum Nutrition Athletics Thank you Optimum Nutrition Athletics for sponsoring today's episode. After dominating the sports nutrition industry for over 30 years, newly created Optimum Nutrition Athletics brings that same trust and quality that knows how to put convenient options for protein in the hands of athletes who desire to become bigger, stronger and better at their sport. Contact Derek Walters, Director, for more information. dwalters@glanbia.com   Big Time Strength Contact InfoEmail: bigtimestrength@gmail.comTwitter: @BigTime_SCInstagram: bigtimestrengthWebsite: BigTimeStrength.com Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the episode please subscribe, rate, leave a comment and share with other coaches!

Back in 2015, Southern University football player Devon Gales was left paralyzed after an injury on the field during a game against the University of Georgia. He's now back on the football field as a coach at Jefferson High School. Hosts Jon Nelson and Tommy Palmer talk about Devon's return to football with John Jackson, the superintendent of Jefferson City Schools.

    Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Earth Angel" by the Penguins. 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. Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg's site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.  The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis. And this CD contains all the Penguins' releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When you're dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll's does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways. This is not to say that such music can't be original -- but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected. And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues -- songs like "Hound Dog" or "Roll Over Beethoven" or "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There's the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we've talked about uses -- that's not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones. Then there's the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV -- this is the chord sequence for "La Bamba" and "Louie Louie" and "Twist and Shout" and "Hang On Sloopy". And finally, there's the doo-wop chord sequence. This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences -- I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] But those two sequences are so similar that we'll just lump them both in under the single heading of "the doo-wop chord sequence" from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that's the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It's the progression that lies behind thirties songs like "Blue Moon", and the version of "Heart and Soul" most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it's also in "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello, "Enola Gay" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Million Reasons" by Lady Gaga, "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled... whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It's also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you're not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.) [Excerpt: "Blue Moon", Elvis Presley, going into "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton, going into "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled] But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it's behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. "Duke of Earl", "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", "In The Still of the Night", "Sh'boom" -- it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them. And today we're going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group, that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the fifties, in the scene around Central Ave. One thing you'll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast with all the different bands swapping members and taking each others' names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Byrd, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Byrd, who wasn't the same Bobby Byrd as the Bobby Byrd who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we're talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Byrd. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes weren't in the bird group called the Flamingoes that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingoes, they were in a different band called the Flamingoes that went on to become the Platters. Got that? I'm sorry. I'll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the Penguins, in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn't, just remember, not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I'm consulting for this, written by experts who've spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We'll start with the Hollywood Flames. The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948, at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as "The Flames", and came out in January 1950: [excerpt: "Please Tell Me Now", the Flames] Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murry Wilson: [excerpt "Tabarin", the Hollywood Flames] Murry Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we'll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early 55, and reformed later -- throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names, but in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn't active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called "Earth Angel", and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he'd help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves The Penguins, after the mascot on Kool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school. Because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians than you'd expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry… The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant – in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher -- the music teacher Samuel Browne, who along with Hazel Whittaker and Marjorie Bright was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Browne put together an astonishing programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about -- jazz and blues -- while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat "King" Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of. Half the great black musicians in California in the forties and fifties learned in Browne's lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren't Browne's star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters. Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor R&B star already, and he would soon become a major one. He helped Williams and Hodge with their song “Earth Angel”, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit; a song called "Dream Girl": [Excerpt: "Dream Girl", Jesse and Marvin] Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of "Earth Angel": [Excerpt: "Earth Angel", the Penguins] But that's not the only part of “Earth Angel” that was borrowed. There's the line "Will you be mine?", which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows: [Excerpt: "Will You Be Mine?": The Swallows] Then there's this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, "I Know"] That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that's because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after "Earth Angel". It wasn't generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that. And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jessie Mae Robinson. That song, "I Went to Your Wedding", later became a hit for the country singer Patti Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song: [Excerpt: "I Went to Your Wedding", Patti Page] Now listen to the middle eight of "Earth Angel": [Excerpt: "Earth Angel", the Penguins] The song was a Frankenstein's monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs, But like the monster, it took on a life of its own. And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Doo-Tone Records, and was a former musician, who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Foxx, and wanted to put out albums of Foxx's live set. Foxx initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything then people wouldn't pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set. Laff of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums: [excerpt: Red Foxx: Laff of the Party] Williams wasn't, primarily, a record-company owner, though. He was like Sam Phillips -- someone who provided recording services -- but his recordings were songwriters' demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn't sing themselves, and as he put it "I had the Penguins doing some vocals and they begged me 'Please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous' and all that. They kept buggin' me 'til I said, 'Okay, what have you got?'" Their first single, credited to "The Dootsie Williams Orchestra, with Vocal by The Penguins" didn't even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, "There Ain't No News Today", wasn't an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynonie Harris' "Who Threw the Whisky in the Well?" [Excerpt: The Dootsie Williams Orchestra with the Penguins, "There Ain't No News Today"] But the "what have you got?" question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings. As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis: "They said, 'We got a song called 'Earth Angel' and a song called 'Hey Senorita'.' Of course, 'Earth Angel' was all messed up, you know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. "Earth Angel" was not even intended to be an A-side, originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was "Hey Senorita": [excerpt: The Penguins, "Hey Senorita"] Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour's dog barking. But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about "Earth Angel". Dootsie Williams took the demo recording to Dolphin's of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We've talked about Dolphin's last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphin's also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop. And Dolphin's radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about "Earth Angel" -- it's a song where the emphasis is definitely on the "Angel" rather than on the "Earth". Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world -- they were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn't pay the rent and so now you had no-one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we've talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life -- and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in "Earth Angel" is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations rather than in anything like real world relationships. (This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles "Dream Girl", which again is about a fantasy of a woman rather than about a real woman). The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer -- she's not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail -- and as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it's likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick "Huggy Boy" Hugg, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played "Earth Angel" and "Hey Senorita", and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn't want to waste time rerecording the songs when they'd gone down so well, and released it as the final record. Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it? Would Georgia Gibbs get in with a bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone? As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts, who went to number one (or number three, I've seen different reports in different sources) on the pop charts with their version. After "Sh'Boom", the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to barbershop harmony with a version of "The Whiffenpoof Song", but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit, bland, covers first of "Earth Angel" and then of "Ko Ko Mo", which restored them to the top of the charts at the expense of the black originals. [excerpt: The Crew Cuts, "Earth Angel"] But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins' version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artists' songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more-or-less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, "Ookey Ook": [excerpt: the Penguins, "Ookey Ook"] That, however, wasn't a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band any advances on royalties, even as "Earth Angel" rose to number one on the R&B charts, and the Penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Buck Ram, the songwriter and manager who also looked after the Platters, and got a new contract with Mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn't see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren't seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn't matter. They'd be big stars on Mercury, after all. They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, rerecording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn't end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren't really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguins' current success as a way to get a deal both for them *and* for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own -- a hit written by Buck Ram -- he stopped bothering with the Penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they'd broken their contract with Dootone, they made no money at all from having sung "Earth Angel”. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby. They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked, but then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisby's replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung lead on "Earth Angel", and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seem to have been two rival sets of Penguins recording. By 1963, Dexter Tisby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter who was actually a member of the Coasters who'd split from the other three members of *his* group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group lineups being confusing. At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of Penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit but would appear on many doo-wop compilations -- so many that it's as well known as many of the big hits: [excerpt: "Memories of El Monte", the Penguins] It's fascinating to listen to that song, and to realise that by the very early sixties, pre-British Invasion, the doo-wop and rock-and-roll eras were *already* the subject of nostalgia records. Pop not only will eat itself, but it has been doing almost since its inception. We'll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he starts making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. "Earth Angel" had originally been credited to Curtis WIlliams and Gaynell Hodge, but they'd been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when "Earth Angel" had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the Penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsie Williams, so (according to Marv Goldberg) for a while Dootsie Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013 Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gaynell Hodge. And Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lineups of Penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold twenty million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.

    Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. 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. Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg’s site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.  The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis. And this CD contains all the Penguins’ releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When you’re dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll’s does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways. This is not to say that such music can’t be original — but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected. And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues — songs like “Hound Dog” or “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There’s the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we’ve talked about uses — that’s not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones. Then there’s the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV — this is the chord sequence for “La Bamba” and “Louie Louie” and “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy”. And finally, there’s the doo-wop chord sequence. This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences — I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] But those two sequences are so similar that we’ll just lump them both in under the single heading of “the doo-wop chord sequence” from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that’s the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It’s the progression that lies behind thirties songs like “Blue Moon”, and the version of “Heart and Soul” most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it’s also in “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello, “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “Million Reasons” by Lady Gaga, “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled… whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It’s also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you’re not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.) [Excerpt: “Blue Moon”, Elvis Presley, going into “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton, going into “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled] But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it’s behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. “Duke of Earl”, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, “In The Still of the Night”, “Sh’boom” — it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them. And today we’re going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group, that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the fifties, in the scene around Central Ave. One thing you’ll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast with all the different bands swapping members and taking each others’ names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Byrd, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Byrd, who wasn’t the same Bobby Byrd as the Bobby Byrd who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we’re talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Byrd. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes weren’t in the bird group called the Flamingoes that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingoes, they were in a different band called the Flamingoes that went on to become the Platters. Got that? I’m sorry. I’ll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the Penguins, in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn’t, just remember, not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I’m consulting for this, written by experts who’ve spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We’ll start with the Hollywood Flames. The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948, at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as “The Flames”, and came out in January 1950: [excerpt: “Please Tell Me Now”, the Flames] Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murry Wilson: [excerpt “Tabarin”, the Hollywood Flames] Murry Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we’ll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early 55, and reformed later — throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names, but in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn’t active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called “Earth Angel”, and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he’d help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves The Penguins, after the mascot on Kool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school. Because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians than you’d expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry… The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant – in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher — the music teacher Samuel Browne, who along with Hazel Whittaker and Marjorie Bright was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Browne put together an astonishing programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about — jazz and blues — while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat “King” Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of. Half the great black musicians in California in the forties and fifties learned in Browne’s lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren’t Browne’s star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters. Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor R&B star already, and he would soon become a major one. He helped Williams and Hodge with their song “Earth Angel”, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit; a song called “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: “Dream Girl”, Jesse and Marvin] Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] But that’s not the only part of “Earth Angel” that was borrowed. There’s the line “Will you be mine?”, which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows: [Excerpt: “Will You Be Mine?”: The Swallows] Then there’s this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, “I Know”] That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that’s because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after “Earth Angel”. It wasn’t generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that. And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jessie Mae Robinson. That song, “I Went to Your Wedding”, later became a hit for the country singer Patti Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song: [Excerpt: “I Went to Your Wedding”, Patti Page] Now listen to the middle eight of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] The song was a Frankenstein’s monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs, But like the monster, it took on a life of its own. And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Doo-Tone Records, and was a former musician, who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Foxx, and wanted to put out albums of Foxx’s live set. Foxx initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything then people wouldn’t pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set. Laff of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums: [excerpt: Red Foxx: Laff of the Party] Williams wasn’t, primarily, a record-company owner, though. He was like Sam Phillips — someone who provided recording services — but his recordings were songwriters’ demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn’t sing themselves, and as he put it “I had the Penguins doing some vocals and they begged me ‘Please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous’ and all that. They kept buggin’ me ’til I said, ‘Okay, what have you got?'” Their first single, credited to “The Dootsie Williams Orchestra, with Vocal by The Penguins” didn’t even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, “There Ain’t No News Today”, wasn’t an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynonie Harris’ “Who Threw the Whisky in the Well?” [Excerpt: The Dootsie Williams Orchestra with the Penguins, “There Ain’t No News Today”] But the “what have you got?” question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings. As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis: “They said, ‘We got a song called ‘Earth Angel’ and a song called ‘Hey Senorita’.’ Of course, ‘Earth Angel’ was all messed up, you know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. “Earth Angel” was not even intended to be an A-side, originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was “Hey Senorita”: [excerpt: The Penguins, “Hey Senorita”] Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour’s dog barking. But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about “Earth Angel”. Dootsie Williams took the demo recording to Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We’ve talked about Dolphin’s last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphin’s also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop. And Dolphin’s radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about “Earth Angel” — it’s a song where the emphasis is definitely on the “Angel” rather than on the “Earth”. Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world — they were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn’t pay the rent and so now you had no-one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we’ve talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life — and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in “Earth Angel” is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations rather than in anything like real world relationships. (This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles “Dream Girl”, which again is about a fantasy of a woman rather than about a real woman). The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer — she’s not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail — and as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it’s likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played “Earth Angel” and “Hey Senorita”, and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn’t want to waste time rerecording the songs when they’d gone down so well, and released it as the final record. Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it? Would Georgia Gibbs get in with a bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone? As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts, who went to number one (or number three, I’ve seen different reports in different sources) on the pop charts with their version. After “Sh’Boom”, the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to barbershop harmony with a version of “The Whiffenpoof Song”, but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit, bland, covers first of “Earth Angel” and then of “Ko Ko Mo”, which restored them to the top of the charts at the expense of the black originals. [excerpt: The Crew Cuts, “Earth Angel”] But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins’ version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artists’ songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more-or-less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, “Ookey Ook”: [excerpt: the Penguins, “Ookey Ook”] That, however, wasn’t a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band any advances on royalties, even as “Earth Angel” rose to number one on the R&B charts, and the Penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Buck Ram, the songwriter and manager who also looked after the Platters, and got a new contract with Mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn’t see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren’t seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn’t matter. They’d be big stars on Mercury, after all. They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, rerecording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn’t end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren’t really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguins’ current success as a way to get a deal both for them *and* for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own — a hit written by Buck Ram — he stopped bothering with the Penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they’d broken their contract with Dootone, they made no money at all from having sung “Earth Angel”. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby. They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked, but then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisby’s replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung lead on “Earth Angel”, and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seem to have been two rival sets of Penguins recording. By 1963, Dexter Tisby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter who was actually a member of the Coasters who’d split from the other three members of *his* group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group lineups being confusing. At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of Penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit but would appear on many doo-wop compilations — so many that it’s as well known as many of the big hits: [excerpt: “Memories of El Monte”, the Penguins] It’s fascinating to listen to that song, and to realise that by the very early sixties, pre-British Invasion, the doo-wop and rock-and-roll eras were *already* the subject of nostalgia records. Pop not only will eat itself, but it has been doing almost since its inception. We’ll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he starts making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. “Earth Angel” had originally been credited to Curtis WIlliams and Gaynell Hodge, but they’d been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when “Earth Angel” had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the Penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsie Williams, so (according to Marv Goldberg) for a while Dootsie Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013 Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gaynell Hodge. And Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lineups of Penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold twenty million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.