Podcast appearances and mentions of jimmy mccracklin

Sintonía: "You Can´t Sit Down" Pt. 1" - Philip Upchurch Combo"Have Love Will Travel" - Richard Berry; "I´m A Little Mixed Up" - Betty James; "Love Me Right" - LaVern Baker; "He Knows The Rules" - Jimmy McCracklin; "Thanks Mr. Postman" - Bobby King; "To Be Loved By You" - Marie Knight; "Let Me Be Your Boy" - Wilson Pickett; "Messin´ With The Man" - Muddy Waters; "Fortune Teller" - Benny Spellman; "A Help-Each-Other Romance" - LaVern Baker & Ben E King; "If You Don´t Come (You Better Call)" - Patience Valentine; "Blues For Me" - B.B. King; "First Love Baby" - Lena Calhoun; "Chills And Fever" - Ronnie Love; "Leave My Kitten Alone" - Little Willie John; "It´s Easy Child" - Lula Reed & Freddy King; Bonus: "Catch That Teardrop" - The 5 Royales Todas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "Mod Rhythm & Blues - 36 Original Floorfillers On 2CDs" (2xCD, Not Now Music, 2017)Este programa está dedicado a Álvaro, Laura, Enma y Maia (o Maia y Enma, que tanto monta, monta tanto)Escuchar audio

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Frank L. GoldwasserFormerly known in blues circles as “Paris Slim”, Franck L. Goldwasser was born and raised in Paris, France in the 1960's and studied fine arts before moving to Oakland, California in 1983. A self-taught guitarist and vocalist, Goldwasser began studying the recordings of Elmore James, B.B. King and T- Bone Walker at age 16. In 1978, Goldwasser's first public appearance finds him jamming with the renowned harmonica player Sugar Blue (of Rolling Stones' "Miss You" fame), then a Paris resident. Gaining experience while sitting-in with with visiting American bluesmen such as Luther Allison, George Smith, Jimmy Dawkins and Phillip Walker, Goldwasser lands his first professional gigs as backup guitarist for his idol Texas-bred California bluesman Sonny Rhodes in Paris and Reims. Following Rhodes' invitation to come to California, the Frenchman spends three months in Oakland and Los Angeles in 1981, meeting and jamming with Big Mama Thornton, Smokey Wilson, Lowell Fulson, Frankie Lee, Mark Naftalin, Buddy Ace, Troyce Key and J.J. Malone, Cool Papa and Mark Hummel, while documenting the West Coast blues scene for the French music magazine Soul Bag. Having moved permanently to the San Francisco Bay Area in June 1983 , Franck Goldwasser immerses himself in the then-vibrant East Bay blues scene, quickly landing a job in singer-guitarist Troyce Key's band. While gigging every weekend at the famed Eli Mile High club, he hones his skills working alongside West Coast blues titans Percy Mayfield, Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin, as well as Bay Area blues luminaries Omar “The Magnificient” Shariff (formerly Dave Alexander), Johnny Heartsman, Ron Thompson and Elvin Bishop.

durée : 00:59:04 - Penser - par : Nathalie Piolé -

Label: Checker 885Year: 1958Condition: M-Last Price: $40.00. Not currently available for sale.Here's a beautiful copy of this classic 1958 RnB rocker, with especially fine audio... check out the mp3 "snippet"! Note: This 45 record grades Near Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

1 Wanaoh Black Heat 03:55 What It Is!: Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (Disc 4)2 Freedom for the Stallion Amy Helm 03:23 This Too Shall Light3 One River to Cross Dedicated Men of Zion 03:08 The Devil Don't Like It4 Struttin' On Sunday (1970's recordings) Aaron Neville 03:44 For The Good Times: The Allen Toussaint Sessions (1968-1977)5 Working Kind (Chokin' Kind) John Holt 02:47 John Holt Like A Bolt6 Beware Ann Peebles 03:05 Tellin' it7 Somebody's Been Sleeping 100 Proof Aged In Soul 04:10 Somebody's Been Sleeping (LP)8 Doing For The One I Love Bettye Swann 02:45 Part III - The Fame & Atlantic Years9 Too Many Cooks 8th Day 02:40 8th Day10 How About That? Jimmy McCracklin 02:14 The Stinger Man11 Culture Or Vulture Shirley Davis and the Silverbacks 03:52 12 Stupid Bobby Womack 03:52 The Bravest Man in the Universe13 Bad News Aaron Frazer 03:49 Introducing...14 Sheba Baby Barbara Mason & Monk Higgins 03:31 Sheba, Baby - Queen Of The Private Eyes '7515 Resistance Will Guehoun 04:42 Situation16 Someone Else Kendra Morris 03:22 Nine Lives17 False Faces Billy Paul 06:48 What’s The Word – Socially Conscious Soul Music - Backbeats18 Cannot Find A Way Curtis Mayfield 07:08 Got To Find A Way19 01_Creation (East LA) feat. Jimetta Rose Quantic Presents The Western Transient 06:11 Creation (East L.A.) feat. Jimetta Rose20 Pagabirawa (Une Femme Ou Un Homme ?) Kandy Guira 03:26 Nagtaba21 Follow Your Path Soothsayers 05:56 Lost City22 No Diggity Hackney Colliery Band 04:43 Hackney Colliery Band23 we got love 4th coming 02:43 strange things anthology (1970-1974)24 Fatbackin' Fatback Band 03:15 Dope Funk, Pyschedelic Soul And Acid Jazz From NYC '70-'7425 Hard Times Eugene Blacknell & the New Breed 03:19 We Can't Take Life for Granted26 Kohoutek Father's Children 04:54 Black Art + Machine Gun Funk Vol. 327 T.L.C. Average White Band 07:58 Show Your Hand28 b5. if you wanna laugh H andrews congregation 03:20 Inner Thoughts29 If You Ain't Cheating Brother Tyrone 05:00 Mindbender

Label: Minit 32022 djYear: 1967Condition: M-Price: $35.00Absolutely essential Funky Soul rarity... have a listen to the mp3 "snippet"! Note: This beautiful promo 45 has light storage wear on the labels, but the vinyl (styrene) looks untouched, and the audio sounds pristine Mint!

Cactus – poison in paradise - Tightrope (2021) Gregg Allman - House Of Blues Blues Band - Find yourself another fool - Best Of The Blues Band - 2011 Cory Luetjen & the Traveling Blues Band – Stop - Just the Blue Notes – 2020 Robin Trower - Extermination Blues John Primer – Blues behind close doors John Lee Hooker – Boom Boom - Live In Istanbul Ana Popovic - Blues For Mrs. Pauline (Leave My Boy Alone) Anthony Gomes Band - Darkest Before The Dawn Randy McAllister – Most irritating person in the world - Paperbag salvation Slideboy Vegas – Scratch my back - Reverend Wetfinger - 2021 Jimmy McCracklin & Irma Thomas - It's Gotta Be Love

1 The Chefs Mr. Machine The Chefs 02:45 Funky Music Machine 2 Don't Knock Mavis Staples 02:31 You Are Not Alone 3 You Better Check Yourself The Williams Brothers 03:13 Trust In The Lord 4 Sitting In The Park Billy Stewart 03:18 The Chess Story 1947-1975 (1965-1966) (Disc 11) 5 Your Best Friend Doris Duke 02:50 I'm A Loser 6 Hunger Pains (Previously Unreleased) Earl King 02:06 Motown's Blue Evolution 7 Dog (Part 1) Jimmy McCracklin 02:56 The Soul Of Minit Records 8 You've Been Cancelled Erma Franklin 03:01 Super Soul Sister 9 Crossing Over The Bridge Inez Foxx 02:53 The Complete Stax - Volt Singles: 1972-1975, Volume 5 10 ain't no greens in harlem Soul Dog 03:11 Movin On BUNNY WAILER R.I.P. 11 Rocking Steady (Previously Unreleased Longer Version) Bob Marley & The Wailers 01:51 The Wailing Wailers At Studio One Vol. 2 12 Reincarnated Souls Bob Marley & The Wailers 03:45 Burnin' (Deluxe Edition) (Cd1) 13 Dream Land Bunny Wailer 02:42 Solomonic Singles 1 - Tread Along 1969 - 1976 14 Ballroom Floor Bunny Wailer 03:05 Retrospective 15 Love Fire Bunny Wailer 05:58 Solomonic Singles 2 - Rise & Shine 1977 - 1986 16 Fighting Against Conviction Bunny Wailer 05:11 Blackheart Man (2002 Remaster) 17 Dance Hall Music Bunny Wailer 03:48 Marketplace 18 Reggae Legend Bunny Wailer 03:52 Reincarnated Souls 19 Back to the World Curtis Mayfield 06:50 Back to the World CD4 20 Life Feat. Linda Bloemhard Aiff 05:26 Afro Soul System 21 Blessings Saritah 04:08 Ancient Forward 22 There's a Riot Going On Monophonics 03:55 In Your Brain 23 Afrika Yie Blay Ambolley 06:54 Ketan 24 The Jugglers Average White Band 04:35 Show Your Hand 25 Booga Jivin' Dyke and the Blazers 04:36 Rarities Volume 1 - Phoenix to Hollywood 26 Holly-Wood-If-She-Could Bootsy Collins 03:55 Fresh Outta 'P' University [Disc 2] 27 Here Come the Girls feat. Flomega Lefties Soul Connection 03:35 Have Love Will Travel 28 everything's gonna be alright ria currie & the deep soul mes 02:31 Stay on the Groove 29 Just Can't Help Myself Robert Moore 02:10 Saadia Records Story:Good Things 30 Funky chick Shaolin Temple Defenders 02:45 Chapter I: Enter the temple 31 Don't Break This Ring Robert Cray 04:49

In honor of the recent election, this show is dedicated to the great Peach State: Georgia. All songs will either contain the word "Georgia" in the title, or will be by an artist or group whose name includes "Georgia". Pt. 2 features Jimmy McCracklin, Gov. Jimmie Davis, the GA. Yellow Hammers, Luther "Georgia Boy" Johnson, Ray Charles and more!Support the show (https://paypal.me/BFrank53?locale.x=en_US)

Originally aired August 30 2020 on thehoundnyc.com.TheHound Howl is also available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Instrumental 1) Jimmy McCracklin & His Blues Blasters – Blues Blasters Shuffle2) Earl Hooker – Rockin' Wild3) Big John Greer – Midnight Ramble4) Piano Red – Comin' On5) Johnny & The Debonaires – The Jay Hawk Set Break11:35 ... Read more

It doesn't happen every day that you get to hear a new Beatles song; but today is that day! We proudly present the premiere (as a complete song) of 'You Won't Get Me That Way', as recorded by the Beatles on 27 January 1969 in Apple Studios, Savile Row. You Won't Get Me That Way is a swinging blues, in classic McCartney rocker style. Soulful vocals by McCartney, in excellent voice that day. Some neat drum playing by Ringo, and bluesy guitars by George and John. With a bit more work, this could have turned into a track on 'Let It Be' (compare with 'For You Blue'!), were it not that the Beatles had run out of time to rehearse new songs; Ringo was scheduled to take off at the beginning of February to appear in The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers, so they had to finish the sessions soon. They had not come to a conclusion about the finale for the sessions yet, but they realized there would have to be some kind of live performance, and that an album should be assembled from what had been recorded. Later of course, this would culminate in the live performance on the rooftop of Apple studios on 30 January. Anyway, on 27 January it was high time to put the finishing touches on the songs that had been rehearsed since January 2nd. We can only conclude that the Beatles were in a good mood that day, perhaps they were happy that the rehearsal sessions were coming to an end? This Monday was the 16th day of the Get Back/Let It Be sessions. The Beatles recorded a total of 32 takes of Get Back in a single day, experimenting with different tempos and styles – including mock Japanese and German versions and alternative lyrics. One new song to be introduced on this day was George Harrison’s Old Brown Shoe, which would become the B-side to The Ballad Of John And Yoko later in 1969. Towards the end of the day, they were in the middle of rehearsing I've got a Feeling, when Billy Preston (on keyboards) played a classic blues intro. All 4 Beatles picked up on it, Paul improvised the vocals and the lyrics, and You Won't Get Me That Way was born. They then played a little of Jimmy McCracklin's song "The Walk" before returning to I've Got a Feeling. A pretty disciplined rehearsal session, for Beatles standards in those days..... Still, the lyrics may betray some of what was on Paul's mind in these final days of January. The lyrics mainly consist of 'no, you won't get me that way, you're gonna have to go it on your own', with some additional lyrics at the very end: "you won't get what I can give you. No why should I give you what I gotta give, the way you treat me like you do.' The easiest explanation would be to label the lyrics as some pretty nonsense, produced on the spot. However, when improvising on the spot - as Paul was doing here - some inner thoughts might pop up that otherwise might have remained suppressed. Is it a coincidence that these lyrics emerge in the middle of rehearsing 'I've Got a Feeling, a feeling deep inside'? Let's find out what these lyrics could relate to! The first thing that comes to the attention, is the negative form of the lyrics; it is mostly 'No you won't'. This is unusual for McCartney, whose lyrics are usually upbeat. One of the few McCartney songs with lyrics in the negative form is 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. This song was written 2 months later, in March 1969. Could these 2 songs be related? 'You Won't Get Me That way' seems to be a reply to a request to give something to somebody. Paul will not do that, because of the way 'you treat me like you do'. In fist instance, we may imagine that this would be about some 'love' relationship of Paul's, but that doesn't agree with his actual situation. He had met with Linda (Eastman), was deeply in love, and would marry her soon afterwards (March 1969). It is highly unlikely that he would be singing about refusing Linda what she would ask of Paul. Therefore, the refusal could relate to business, or money matters. And that fits nicely with the lyrics of You Never Give Me Your Money; McCartney has said that this song was written with Allen Klein in mind, saying "it's basically a song about no faith in the person'. A notoriously brash character and tough negotiator, Klein invented the role of business manager, taking a stance as the outsider siding with the artists, the enemy of the record companies. And this Allen Klein would have very much been on McCartney's mind already in January 1969. Klein had been trying to become the Beatles financial manager since 1964. Epstein and Klein had met face-to-face, in London, Klein offering to help with handling the Beatles’ finances. Brian Epstein was royally offended at the suggestion that someone else should do his job for him, and he had Klein shown to the door. After Epstein's death in 1967, Klein renewed his efforts. He had spoken with Lennon during the recording of on 11 December 1968 of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, where Lennon performed Yer Blues. A December 1968 article in Disc and Music Echo in which Lennon worried that the Beatles were nearly broke (Apple losing around 20000 pound each week) lent an air of urgency to Klein’s appeal for Lennon to meet with him to talk Beatles business, and Klein continued his contact with Lennon from the US. He managed to set up a meeting with John & Yoko on January 26, in the Harlequin suite of the Dorchester Hotel, London, where Klein was staying. Klein served them “a carefully researched and prepared vegetarian meal—exactly the macrobiotic dishes John and Yoko preferred.” Klein had studied the music and lyrics of Lennon and spoke sensibly about the meaning of Lennon’s songs. John & Yoko were very impressed with him, and John decided on the spot to make him his personal adviser. There and then he wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI: "Dear Sir Joe: From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff." Lennon wrote a similar letter to Dick James, who ran Northern Songs to publish the Beatles songs. After meeting with John & Yoko, Klein set up a meeting with all four Beatles on 27- or 28 January. Paul McCartney preferred to be represented by Lee and John Eastman, the father and brother respectively of his fiancée, Linda. In fact, the Beatles had appointed Lee Eastman as their financial advisor earlier in January. But now, George and Ringo sided with John & Yoko, and Paul walked out of the meeting. Although we have no direct evidence, it seems likely that Paul was aware of Klein's presence and intentions on January 27th, when they recorded 'You Won't Get Me That Way'. Klein would have had to invite Paul to his meeting sometime during January 27, and they recorded You Won't Get Me' towards the end of the recording session. It was clear that the Beatles could not continue this way; John Eastman came over but could not convince the other 3 Beatles. Eastman felt he could not represent the Beatles if they did not have confidence in him. On 3 February the Beatles met again. Allen Klein was charged with examining their finances and finding a way to stop NEMS from bleeding them of a quarter of their income. As a compromise to Paul, Linda's father and brother were appointed as Apple's General Council, to keep an eye on Allen Klein's activities. However, Klein’s assignment would turn out badly for the Beatles: Dick James, their music publisher, owned a controlling 37.5% of Northern Songs. Lennon and McCartney owned 15% each. After Epstein's death on 27 August 1967, Lennon and McCartney sought to renegotiate their publishing deal with James. In 1968 they invited James for a meeting at Apple Records and it became clear to Dick James that Lennon and McCartney would not renew their contract with Northern Songs. With no new songs being published, Dick James expected that the value of Northern Songs would plummet, and he would lose millions as the major shareholder. In January, Dick James noticed the arrival of Klein through Lennon’s letter. James knew that Klein was a hardball player not averse to questionable business deals; he had a string of lawsuits behind him pending in the States. James feared that Klein would pull some scam that would suddenly leave James out in the cold with nothing. Dick James could no longer offer to sell his shares to Lennon and McCartney, because he expected that they would not pay the full price - threatening to write no more songs when their contract ran out. Therefore, Dick James sold his share of Northern Songs without informing Lennon and McCartney (or Klein), so they had no time to announce their intentions in public. Klein was unsuccessful in buying back NEMS or blocking the sale of Northern Songs, despite his intense efforts. Allen Klein's strategy became to sell Lennon and McCartney’s shares quickly and make some cash before news of the Beatles' breakup leaked - after which the shares would tumble in value. This is why, in the meeting at Apple in October of 1969, where John officially told Paul the Beatles were over, Allen Klein pressured everyone to keep quiet about the situation for at least the next few months. Thus Klein was a factor in Lennon and McCartney losing control of their songs, and they would only regain it decades later; thanks to a revision of copyright laws in the US, the copyright returns to the composer after 56 years, so only now do the first songs return to McCartney and Lennon's estate (Yoko Ono). Klein was successful in other business: sorting out the financial mess of their ill-fated Apple Corps venture. He put an end to the Apple Boutique and got rid of the charlatans and hangers-on. The Beatles’ existing deal with EMI and Capitol gave them 17.5% of the US wholesale price – a considerable amount already. Klein was able to increase to 25%. He argued that, should the label object, The Beatles would cease to record for them. Klein also gained Apple Corps the right to manufacture and sell The Beatles records in the US. EMI would retain the recordings, but Capitol would manufacture the releases on Apple’s behalf. Apple would then profit from the difference between manufacturing and retail costs. The new terms gave The Beatles the right, for the first time, to determine the ways in which their music was manufactured and sold. By 1971 the group’s entire back catalogue was made available on Apple Records. Klein also made sure Let It Be was released as a motion picture rather than a TV film, therefore fulfilling the group's contractual obligations with United Artists. So, the positive contribution of Klein was that The Beatles’ personal incomes were greatly improved, and Apple was guaranteed a regular income until at least 1976. Still, it was downhill from there for Allan Klein and the Beatles. Klein held on to the proceeds from the Concert for Bangladesh, the charity event he organized with Harrison at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1971, delaying the release of the funds to UNICEF for years, and was investigated by the US authorities. After Klein’s contract with Lennon, Harrison and Starr expired in March 1973, they opted not to renew it. The group eventually paid Klein an estimated $4m when all litigation was finally settled in January 1977. Klein was the subject of veiled references in the Harrison song "Beware Of Darkness" – from 1971's All Things Must Pass – and the Lennon composition "Steel And Glass" – on 1974's Walls And Bridges album. In 1979, Klein was sentenced to two months in jail for tax evasion after helping himself to the proceeds from the sale of promotional copies of the Concert For Bangladesh triple album. Klein died 4 July 2009. Of course, McCartney did not know all of this on 27 January 1969, but he must have seen troubles coming his way in the form of Allan Klein. And his sub-conscious pushed the lyrics to his lips: "You won't get what I can give you. No why should I give you what I gotta give, the way you treat me like you do."

Featuring The Jordan Bros., The Xtreems, Lee Shot Williams,Onie Wheeler, Paul and Barry Ryan, Johnny Long,Johnny Daye, Jimmy McCracklin, Motherlode,Equipe 84, Ian and The Zodiacs, Nappy Brown,and more! as broadcast live via 5130kc shortwave 2-22-20

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Susie Q" by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 "Shake a Hand" by Faye Adams.  ----more---- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song "Do it Again a Little Bit Slower" doesn't have the word "just" in the title. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud's terms of service, it's broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him -- Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins' early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already -- all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as "rockabilly", they don't tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don't sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as "swamp rock". [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that's the description that most people now use of him. We'll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It's not that he didn't like country music, of course -- as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers -- but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn't have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] While Hawkins Sr.'s name isn't in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn't, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it's unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn't reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn't the only family member to be a musician, either -- Dale's younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing Daddy Swing"] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we're going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams' widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins' first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn't as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them -- when the car park filled up, they'd just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn't tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan's Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they'd heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan's Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label -- if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer -- the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby", which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] Lewis took an interest in his young employee's music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis' instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like "Ring of Fire"), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins' most famous song, "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q", demo version] Listening to that, it's clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place -- the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn't fully worked out his guitar part, although it's close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist -- a song by Bobby Charles called "Later, Alligator", which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title "See You Later, Alligator": [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, "Later Alligator"] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles'. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed -- "See You Soon, Baboon": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins' demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins' first name -- Leonard Chess misheard "Del Hawkins" over the phone, and the record came out as by "Dale Hawkins", which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins' songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins' follow-up single, a new version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn't receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song -- notably James Burton -- didn't get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song -- I've seen various other putative co-authors listed -- but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians -- it's the kind of song that musicians come up with when they're jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound -- both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff -- is "Baby Please Don't Go" by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters' song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody -- "I've Got My Eyes on You": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "I've Got My Eyes On You"] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin' Wolf -- I've seen some people claim that the song was "ripped off" from Wolf. I don't believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like "Smokestack Lightnin'": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] And "Spoonful": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Spoonful"] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration -- that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about "Suzy". There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis' daughter Suzie -- and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song's lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, "Doin' the Suzie Q"] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one's feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it's likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so -- Jimmy McCracklin, in his song "The Walk", released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing "I know you've heard of the Susie Q": [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, "The Walk"] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, "Susie Q" was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan's opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn't notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins' vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] This new version of "Susie Q" was stripped right down -- it was just guitar, bass, and drums -- none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version -- that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis' fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he's closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo -- Tuminello couldn't make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we've put the song in context, there's an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to "Susie Q" as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to "Susie Q". And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week -- the electric bass. The demo version of "Susie Q" had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music -- though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn't play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass' tailpiece. But that points to something that "Susie Q" was doing that we've not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I've not looked very much at the music that we now think of as "the blues", though at the time it was only a small part of the blues -- the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that's because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false -- as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics -- primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B -- and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. There's never a first anything, and that's especially the case here where we're talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for "Susie Q" as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins' footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones' own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What's surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren't going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, "All Night Long"] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins' cover version of Little Walter's "My Babe": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "My Babe"] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Lo-Do-Dada"] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins' follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people's styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on "Susie Q". By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Do the Twist"] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break "Susie Q" on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I've seen claims, for example, that he produced "Hey Baby" by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, "Hey Baby"] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on "Judy In Disguise With Glasses" by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he's often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit "Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower" by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, "Do it Again A Little Bit Slower"] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Susie Q"] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, "LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: "LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas"] When that wasn't a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department -- a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit -- as well as finally getting his master's degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Wildcat Tamer"] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure -- he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people's records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record -- a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

ESPECIAL JIMMY MCCRACKLIN Jimmy McCracklin nació como James David Walker, el 13 de agosto de 1921, tomo como apellido el de su padastro McCracklin. Las fuentes difieren en cuanto a si nació en Helena, Arkansas o St. Louis, Missouri, pero lo cierto es que creció en Missouri y que su principal influencia en el piano fue Walter Davis, su padre le presento al pequeño Jimmy al pianista veterano. Jimmy se fue a Ohio cuando tenía 16 años, en búsqueda de una carrera en el boxeo y alcanzo un éxito considerable como boxeador aficionado, pero un accidente de automóvil lo dejo con un hombro permanentemente dañado, con lo que su carrera en el boxeo tuvo un final abrupto...

ESPECIAL JIMMY MCCRACKLIN Jimmy McCracklin nació como James David Walker, el 13 de agosto de 1921, tomo como apellido el de su padastro McCracklin. Las fuentes difieren en cuanto a si nació en Helena, Arkansas o St. Louis, Missouri, pero lo cierto es que creció en Missouri y que su principal influencia en el piano fue Walter Davis, su padre le presento al pequeño Jimmy al pianista veterano. Jimmy se fue a Ohio cuando tenía 16 años, en búsqueda de una carrera en el boxeo y alcanzo un éxito considerable como boxeador aficionado, pero un accidente de automóvil lo dejo con un hombro permanentemente dañado, con lo que su carrera en el boxeo tuvo un final abrupto...

With The Lifeguards (aka. The Comets), Otis Redding, The Fireflies, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Eddie Bo, Mickey Baker, Jimmy McCracklin, Faron Young, Jimmy Hughes, Al Hibbler, Burl Ives... We start off with an instrumental a-la The Comets without Bill Haley incognito as The Lifeguards. Another fabulous instrumental in the show which was just a local hit in the Chicagoland area from the Egyptian Combo called "Gale Winds" from '63.

The Hombres [mm:ss] a side: "Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)" b side: "Go Girl, Go" Verve Forecast KF5058 1967 Ugh, booze, cigarettes, women and rock 'n' roll, amirite? jk. A mighty fine Nuggets classic from Memphis's own garage rock band The Hombres. The Beat [mm:ss] a side: "Let Me Into Your Life" b side: "Walking Out on Love" Columbia Records 1-11161 1979 Goddamn, all killer and no filler on this rad release from the (US) Beat. The a-side co-penned by Eddie Money. Jimmy McCracklin [mm:ss] a side: "Let the Door Hit You" b side: "This Thing" Minit MN-880 1967 Great stuff from one of the Bay Area greats. David Bowie [mm:ss] a side: "Let's Dance" b side: "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" EMI Records B-8158 1983 Yes indeed, that is the illustrious Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead guitar. And the b-side is a little number co-written with Giorgio Moroder for the 1982 Paul Schrader version of Cat People. Les Cooper & the Soul Rockers [mm:ss] a side: "Let's Do the Boston Monkey" b side: "Owee Baby" Enjoy Records EN 34569 1965 You know I love a good monkey song. The Cars [mm:ss] a side: "Let's Go" b side: "That's It" Elektra Records E-46063 1979 They're hit single from Candy-O. Dig that Prophet 5! B-side features Benjamin Orr on vox. Raspberries [mm:ss] a side: "Let's Pretend (Stereo)" b side: "Let's Pretend (Mono)" Capitol Records P-3546 1972 Some nascent power pop from Eric Carmen and company. This promo single features a contest for the Raspberries' Rollswagen. All you have to do is return the entry blank explaining which one of the Raspberries is the "foxiest" and why: Eric Carmen, Wally Bryson, Dave Smalley, or Jim Bonfanti. The lucky winner will be the happy owner of the Raspberries' Rollswagen (a VW bug with a Rolls Royce front end) with these "far-out" features: -Special Raspberry-Pearl paint and green vinyl top, personally designed by George Barris for the Raspberries. -Foxy fur upholstery! Created by California's leading auto interior designer Harold Mitchell. -Formula Super Stock Tires on Ansen Sprint Wheels. -Quadrasonic 8-Track Stereo System! Outasight sound with 4 speakers by Car Tapes, Inc of California. -A complete Library of 100 Capitol 8-track cartridges! Includes Beatles! Helen Reddy! Rick Springfield, Leon Russel! Many more favorites. Hoo boy. Wilbert Harrison One Man Band [mm:ss] a side: "Let's Work Together (Part 1)" b side: "Let's Work Together (Part 2)" Sue Records SUE 11 1969 As true today as it was then. You may be familiar with versions by Canned Heat, Bryan Ferry and as we heard a few episodes, Dwight Yoakam. Fine stuff. An improved variation on his original 1962 "Let's Stick Together". Music behind the DJ: "Irena's Theme" by Giorgio Moroder.

2015 James Bay - If you ever want to be in love 1984 Depeche Mode - Just can't get enough (live) 1998 Barenaked Ladies - Leave 1968 Marvin Gaye - I heard it through the grapevine 2018 Dan Owen - Hideaway 2012 Ben Lee - We're all in this together 2018 Kovacs - It's the weekend 1978 Shalamar - Take that to the bank 1985 De Dijk - Groot hart 2003 India.Arie - Can I walk with you 1958 Jimmy McCracklin & His Band - The walk 1987 U2 - Where the streets have no name 2018 Bent van Looy - The open road 1972 Lou Reed - Satellite of love 2007 Milow - You don't know UUR 2 2004 Jason Mraz - The remedy 1973 Golden Earring - Radar Love 1991 Massive Attack - Unfinished sympathy 1989 Peter Gabriel & Youssou 'n Dour - Shaking the tree 2018 Diggy Dex - De zon op 1981 Phil Collins - In the air tonight 1986 Hipsway - Honeythief 2018 George Ezra - Shotgun 1968 The Doors - Love Street 2005 The Fray - How to save a life 1968 Aretha Franklin - Save me 1999 Lauryn Hill - Ex factor 1973 Eugene Blacknell - We know we have to live together

New podcast this week! With Sam "The Man" Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin, Laurel Aitken, Sonny Rollins, David Swirsky, Pretenders, Toots Theilemans, Stevie Wonder, The Hollies, Hall & Oates, George Harrison, Beth Hart, Blackstreet Itunes: http://bit.ly/Hg2RdK Facebook: http://on.fb.me/IzhiJV Email us at MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

show#41311.19.11Tip Jar: http://www.bandanablues.com/donation.htmlJohnny Nicholas & the Texas All Stars - The Last Meal (Rockin' My Blues to Sleep 2001)Lisa Mills - Why Do I Still Love You? (Tempered in Fire 2011)Kid Andersen - I'm Broke (Rock Awhile 2004)John Butler Trio - Treat Yo Mama (Sunrise Over Sea 2004)The Andy Poxon Band - I'll Sing the Blues (Red Roots 2010)Chris Bergrson - Hello Bertha (Imitate The Sun 2010)Danny Overbea - Forty Cups Of Coffee (The Chess Story 1947-1975 (1952-1954 Part One) (Disc 3)Spinner's Section:Spinner plays ChessSugar Pie DeSanto: soulful dress (1964) (2:49)Buddy Guy: I got my eyes on you (1960) (2:18)Billy Steward: sitting in the park (1965) (3:17)Clarence 'Frogman' Henry: ain't got no home (1956) (2:18)The Dells: oh, what a night (1969) (4:03)Otis Rush: all your love (1960) (2:53)Elmore James: I can't hold out (1960) (2:14)Laura Lee: uptight good man (1967) (2:48)Jimmy McCracklin: the walk (1958) (2:43)John Lee Hooker: one Bourbon, one Scotch, one Beer (1966) (2:59)Willie Mabon: I'm mad (1953) (2:36)Edited Checkmate!!- Danny Overbea: forty cups of coffee (1954) (3:08)All tracks are taken from Chess Chartbusters Vol 1 thru 6 released in 2008Back To Beardo:Big Sugar -Come A Little Closer … Now Come! (Revolution Per Minute 2011)Julius Pittman/The Revival - I Wouldn't Treat a Dog (Live Tonite 2011)Terry Garland And Li'l Ronnie - Upside Your Head (Live At The Canal Club 2010)The Nighthawks - Shake And Fingerpop (Live At The Psyche Delly 1977)Ivan Appelrouth - T-Boned Again (Blue & Instrumental 2011)Marion James - Please Don't Waste My Time (Essence 2003)Peter Karp/Sue Foley - Rules of Engagement (He Said She Said 2010) Canned Heat - Bullfrog Blues (Monterey International Pop Festival 1967) 

Mojo's, Mata Hari's & Muckity Mucks......This weeks episode culminating from the shotgun wedding of my record collection and your computer is titled MOJO'S, MATA HARI'S & MUCKITY MUCKS....aptly named as we're starting with Little Esther Phillips from 1964 on the Atlantic records label..."Mojo Hannah"...smooth as silk was Lil Esther...she got her start with Johnny Otis in the early 50's, hooked up with Mel Walker who introduced Esther to the blues, bourbon and heroin......ahem.....in the words of my old buddy Johnny "Jersey to Mersey" Bodnar, we "con-tin-ooh on" with Ray Davies favorite band The Woggles who nail a 3 pointer over the head of Kevin Garnett before he can complain to the ref who's diggin' Dick Dale plunkin' his piano wire geetar strings offa an early offering from the surfguitargod hisself...."Jungle Fever" a favorite here in the Jungle Studios....I've seen SzQ get on her desk and frug out to this slab of 7" magic!! Speaking of magic.....lounge lizard, Claude Bolling slam dunks the 1st set of music with "Strange Magic".As stated in the opening....we have a theme...so it's time for Muck & the Mires to double pump you off your feet with "Mata Hari" so that The Cool Jerks can intercept the inbounds pass with an over the top, E-string slappin' version of Don Gardners' "My baby likes to boogaloo". Rex Garvin & the Mighty Cravers keep the theme alive by double dribbling around the opposition ala Danny Ainge with the uber-hip "Sock it to 'em, JB pt. 1". Al Kooper resorts to taunting the other team and coming close to drawing a technical with "I can't keep from crying [sometimes]"....After a short pause for the cause and info break, Jimmy McCracklin reveals his real reason for playing the piano with "I'm looking for a woman"...true, true...and speaking of truths....The Truth give Donovan's "Hey Gyp [Dig the slowness]" a ride so that Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens as the universal question: "What have you done?"....Donna w/ Darrel Higham & the Enforcers have a go at Johnny Otis' "Casting My Spell" before The Madd weigh in with a cool cover of The Master's Apprentices' "War or the Hands of Time" single which originated on Astor Records 1967.....the smooth, hip sounds of Mose Allison could keep the madman over there in Iran occupied long enough so that Frankie Lee Sims could infiltrate the party at the mosque with "She likes to boogie real low"....which is one of the coolest blues toons ever!! Time to put this Pod to bed with Mott the Hoople covering Leslie West offa his first long player...."Long Red"....

Best of Picks 2009 Originally aired Dec. 19 2008 Ayanna Mashama, Chinese Medicine doctor, herbalist, community healer and activist, mother and grandmother, and Mestre Temba Mashama, Capoiera N'Gola, licensed family therapist, re: Winter Solstice 8:30-8:55 AM: Sistas Wit Style, A Caribbean Folk Performing Dance Company, Dance That Moves The World which is having its Seventh Annual Cultural and Holiday Show: “Back In De Dey”, a Caribbean Holiday Celebration featuring a Holiday Banquet & Cultural Show, Sunday, Dec. 21, the Lakeside Gardens, 666 Bellevue Avenue, Oakland, CA, off Grand Avenue (across the street from Children's Fairyland). The dinner is free for children 17 and under, and $20 donation for everyone else. Doors open at 3 p.m., the dinner starts at 4 p.m. Call (510) 952 –6287/ (510) 387-7771 or sistas_wit_style@yahoo.com/ www.sistas-wit-style.com 9:00-9:25 AM: Stanley E. Williams, co-founder and Artistic Director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which is celebrating its 28th consecutive season as a leading center of African American theatre and Arvis Strickling-Jones, Musical Director and Principal Artist, of Black Nativity: A Gospel Celebration of Christmas is currently on stage through Dec. 28, at PG&E Auditorium, 77 Beale Street@ Market in San Francisco. Visit www.lhtsf.org or call (415) 474-8800. Sunday, Dec. 28, 2 p.m. all seats are $18 and there is a free reception with food after the show at 4 p.m. Shows are Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. performance on Saturdays and Sundays. 9:30-9:55ish AM: Dr. Mable John, former Raelet and Motown's First Lady. She is visiting Northern California for a special concert Saturday, Dec. 20 @ 8 p.m. at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. The concert takes place at 142 Throckmorton Theater. Opening the show will be the Sweet Nectars, the back-up trio for blues legend Jimmy McCracklin. Contact (415) 383-9600 or www.142throckmortontheatre.com. Tickets are $30-$40.

The line-up for Friday, Dec. 19 is as follows: 8:00-8:25 AM: Ayanna Mashama, Chinese Medicine doctor, herbalist, community healer and activist, mother and grandmother, and Mestre Temba Mashama, Capoiera N'Gola, licensed family therapist, re: Winter Solstice 8:30-8:55 AM: Sistas Wit Style, A Caribbean Folk Performing Dance Company, Dance That Moves The World which is having its Seventh Annual Cultural and Holiday Show: “Back In De Dey”, a Caribbean Holiday Celebration featuring a Holiday Banquet & Cultural Show, Sunday, Dec. 21, the Lakeside Gardens, 666 Bellevue Avenue, Oakland, CA, off Grand Avenue (across the street from Children's Fairyland). The dinner is free for children 17 and under, and $20 donation for everyone else. Doors open at 3 p.m., the dinner starts at 4 p.m. Call (510) 952 –6287/ (510) 387-7771 or sistas_wit_style@yahoo.com/ www.sistas-wit-style.com 9:00-9:25 AM: Stanley E. Williams, co-founder and Artistic Director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which is celebrating its 28th consecutive season as a leading center of African American theatre and Arvis Strickling-Jones, Musical Director and Principal Artist, of Black Nativity: A Gospel Celebration of Christmas is currently on stage through Dec. 28, at PG&E Auditorium, 77 Beale Street@ Market in San Francisco. Visit www.lhtsf.org or call (415) 474-8800. Sunday, Dec. 28, 2 p.m. all seats are $18 and there is a free reception with food after the show at 4 p.m. Shows are Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. performance on Saturdays and Sundays. 9:30-9:55ish AM: Dr. Mable John, former Raelet and Motown's First Lady. She is visiting Northern California for a special concert Saturday, Dec. 20 @ 8 p.m. at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. The concert takes place at 142 Throckmorton Theater. Opening the show will be the Sweet Nectars, the back-up trio for blues legend Jimmy McCracklin. Contact (415) 383-9600 or www.142throckmortontheatre.com. Tickets are $30-$40.

http://www.raven.dj/rnb - this week - Dave Hole * Otis Taylor * Carlos Del Junco * Seasick Steve * Erja Lyytinen * Zac Harmon * Carolyn Wonderland * Doug MacLeod * J B Hutto and the Hawks * Dr John * Coleman, Kayne and Wilde *  Jimmy McCracklin

We hop on a train in Chicago's Union Station this week, heading for points west. Crossing through the plains, the mountains and the desert, we arrive at the place where the Pacific meets the land, and blues meets jazz. West Coast blues fill the hour of the 182nd Roadhouse Podcast, with Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Johnny Otis, T-Bone Walker, and Sonny Rhodes welcoming us to the fine tradition of show blues. It's an hour of the coolest blues you've never heard on the California Zephyr - the 182nd Roadhouse Podcast.

We hop on a train in Chicago's Union Station this week, heading for points west. Crossing through the plains, the mountains and the desert, we arrive at the place where the Pacific meets the land, and blues meets jazz. West Coast blues fill the hour of the 182nd Roadhouse Podcast, with Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Johnny Otis, T-Bone Walker, and Sonny Rhodes welcoming us to the fine tradition of show blues. It's an hour of the coolest blues you've never heard on the California Zephyr - the 182nd Roadhouse Podcast.