Podcasts about Jimmy Rushing

Songs include; It Don't Mean a Thing by Ivie Anderson, Do Nothing Till You Hear From me by Al Hibbler, Blue Skies by Jimmy Rushing, Blues In the Night by Cab Calloway, It Ain't Necessarily So by Maxine Sullivan and Night In Tunisia by Sarah Vaughn.

Welcome to the Listening with Leckrone Podcast, a pop and jazz music history show hosted by the legendary music educator and former director of th University of Wisconsin marching band, Mike Leckrone. I'm Sam Taylor, the producer of the podcast. In this episode, we spotlight three unique singers, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, and Joe Williams, who all spent time as vocalists for the Count Basie Orchestra. We hope you enjoy.  For an episode guide for this and other episodes, visit fourseasonstheatre.com

Érase una vez en Memphis un grupo de estudiantes que formaron una banda. El camino que recorrieron les llevó de la inanición al estrellato. En sus mejores tiempos atraía a tal cantidad de gente que a veces había que suspender los bailes porque la masa de gente amenazaba la integridad del edificio. Durante la era del swing, aproximadamente entre 1935 y 1945, la mayoría de las mejores bandas hacían eso: ofrecían música swing. El Harlem Express durante muchos años, fue la banda de baile más querida del sur. Con José Manuel Corrales.

Volvemos a encender la Wurlitzer. Capítulo que en una parte será magazine de novedades y en otra, mini monográfico. Abriendo con el recuerdo de Kriss Kristofferson y un pequeño tributo al gran vocalista Jimmy Rushing, sonarán piezas como Me And Bobby McGee, My And Mr. Blues, Mister Five By Five y Evenin'. En la sección de actualidad escucharemos a: Frank Catalano & Lurrie Bells - The Sky Is Crying Frank Catalano & Lurrie Bells - The Sky Is Crying Warren Haynes - This Life As We Know it Warren Haynes - Day Of Reckoning Billy Price - Change Your Mind Jovin Webb - Save Me Eric Clapton - One Woman Fantastic Negrito - I Hope Somebody's Loving You Owen Stewart - Punching Bag Mick Fleetwood & Jake Shimabukuro - Need Your Love So Bad Y, entre medias, Wish You Were Here, otra gran obra de Pink Floyd. Gracias por escuchar con cariño y dejar tu corazón en el audio, aunque no lo parezca, esta chorradita es importante. Apoya este proyecto desde 1,49€ al mes. Tan solo tienes que pulsar el botón azul que tienes en la cabecera de este canal Y gracias infinitas, ya que tu aportación nos permite mejorar cada programa. Este programa, como siempre, está dedicado especialmente a nuestros patrocinadores: Iñaki Del Olmo, Mechimariani, L Ibiricu Traba, Nachoigs, David, Alfonso Ladrón, Yago Llopis, Nacho Ruíz, Javier Carmona, Ana López, El Carabasser, Raúl Espinosa, La Última Frontera Radio, Gustavo, Ruth, Carmen Neke, Manuel García, Rebeca Tatiana, Michel y nuestros queridos anónimos.

COUNT BASIE W/ LESTER YOUNG CLASSIC 1936-1947 STUDIO SESSIONS Chicago, November 9, 1936Shoe shine boy, Boogie woogie (I may be wrong), Lady be goodCarl Smith (tp) Lester Young (ts) Count Basie (p) Walter Page (b) Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Rushing (vcl) CLIFFORD BROWN THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE AND PACIFIC JAZZ RECORDINGS: New York, August 28, 1953Easy living, Minor moodClifford Brown (tp) Gigi Gryce (as,fl-1) Charlie Rouse (ts) John Lewis (p) Percy Heath (b) Art Blakey (d) Los Angeles, August 12, 1954 Finders keepers, Joy springClifford Brown (tp) Stu Williamson (v-tb) Zoot Sims (ts) Bob Gordon (bar) Russ Freeman (p) Joe Mondragon (b) Shelly Manne (d) Jack Montrose (arr) Los Angeles, September 8, 1954Bones for JonesClifford Brown (tp) Stu Williamson (v-tb) Zoot Sims (ts) Bob Gordon (bar) Russ Freeman (p) Carson Smith (b) Shelly Manne (d) Jack Montrose (arr) DONALD BYRD / PEPPER ADAMS THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE STUDIO SESSIONS Hackensack, N.J., December 21, 1958When your love has gone (as,bar out), Down tempo, Off to the races, Paul's palDonald Byrd (tp) Jackie McLean (as) Pepper Adams (bar) Wynton Kelly (p) Sam Jones (b) Art Taylor (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 06 de junio, 2024 at PuroJazz.

COUNT BASIE W/ LESTER YOUNG CLASSIC 1936-1947 STUDIO SESSIONS Chicago, November 9, 1936Shoe shine boy, Boogie woogie (I may be wrong), Lady be goodCarl Smith (tp) Lester Young (ts) Count Basie (p) Walter Page (b) Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Rushing (vcl) CLIFFORD BROWN THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE AND PACIFIC JAZZ RECORDINGS: New York, August 28, 1953Easy living, Minor moodClifford Brown (tp) Gigi Gryce (as,fl-1) Charlie Rouse (ts) John Lewis (p) Percy Heath (b) Art Blakey (d) Los Angeles, August 12, 1954 Finders keepers, Joy springClifford Brown (tp) Stu Williamson (v-tb) Zoot Sims (ts) Bob Gordon (bar) Russ Freeman (p) Joe Mondragon (b) Shelly Manne (d) Jack Montrose (arr) Los Angeles, September 8, 1954Bones for JonesClifford Brown (tp) Stu Williamson (v-tb) Zoot Sims (ts) Bob Gordon (bar) Russ Freeman (p) Carson Smith (b) Shelly Manne (d) Jack Montrose (arr) DONALD BYRD / PEPPER ADAMS THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE STUDIO SESSIONS Hackensack, N.J., December 21, 1958When your love has gone (as,bar out), Down tempo, Off to the races, Paul's palDonald Byrd (tp) Jackie McLean (as) Pepper Adams (bar) Wynton Kelly (p) Sam Jones (b) Art Taylor (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 06 de junio, 2024 at PuroJazz.

On this episode: we've got some '30s jazz first, Count Basie with Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young. Then samba and bossa nova, with Stan Getz our featured artist, working with Gary McFarland, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and we'll hear Paul Desmond and Walter Wanderley. For the rest of the program, it's Bill Evans, Pat Metheny, The Rosenberg Trio, Dianne Reeves with Fabrizio Bosso, Allen Toussaint, and Jim Hall.

Musicians who appeared in Art Kane's iconic 1958 photograph, celebrating the golden age of jazz.  Musicians include: Oscar Pettiford, Maxine Sullivan, Jimmy Rushing, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rolling, Count Basie and Lester Young. 

LESTER YOUNG – JONES, SMITH INC Chicago, November 9, 1936Lady Be Good, Shoe Shine Boy, Evenin' (JR-vcl), Boogie Woogie (JR-vcl)Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d), Jimmy Rushing (vcl). WOODY HERMAN – 1937-1938 (CHRONOLOGICAL) The Band That Plays The Blues – New York, October 25 & November 23, 1937I double dare you, My fine feathered friend, I wanna be in Winchell's column, Loch Lomond Clarence Willard, Kermit Simmons (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) And His Orchestra – New York, June 8, 1938Laughing boy blues, Lullaby in rhythm Clarence Willard, Malcolm Crain (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Deane Kincaide (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Bruce Wilkins (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Woody Herman Sonny Skylar (vcl) And His Orchestra – New York, December 22, 1938Indian boogie woogieIrving Goodman, Clarence Willard, Jerry Neary (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Joe Estren, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Hy White (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Mary Martin (vcl) ILLINOIS JACQUET – COLUMBIA SMALL GROUP SWING SESSIONS 1953-62 New York, February 5, 1962 & March 28, 1962Satin doll, Ydeen, Banned in Boston, Indiana, Reverie (ij vcl;re,cd out)Ernie Royal, Roy Eldridge (tp) Matthew Gee (tb) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis o Leo Parker (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith o Kenny Burrell (g) Jimmy Rowser (b) Jimmy Crawford o Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Mundy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) Continue reading Puro Jazz 12 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.

LESTER YOUNG – JONES, SMITH INC Chicago, November 9, 1936Lady Be Good, Shoe Shine Boy, Evenin' (JR-vcl), Boogie Woogie (JR-vcl)Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d), Jimmy Rushing (vcl). WOODY HERMAN – 1937-1938 (CHRONOLOGICAL) The Band That Plays The Blues – New York, October 25 & November 23, 1937I double dare you, My fine feathered friend, I wanna be in Winchell's column, Loch Lomond Clarence Willard, Kermit Simmons (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) And His Orchestra – New York, June 8, 1938Laughing boy blues, Lullaby in rhythm Clarence Willard, Malcolm Crain (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Deane Kincaide (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Bruce Wilkins (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Woody Herman Sonny Skylar (vcl) And His Orchestra – New York, December 22, 1938Indian boogie woogieIrving Goodman, Clarence Willard, Jerry Neary (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Joe Estren, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Hy White (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Mary Martin (vcl) ILLINOIS JACQUET – COLUMBIA SMALL GROUP SWING SESSIONS 1953-62 New York, February 5, 1962 & March 28, 1962Satin doll, Ydeen, Banned in Boston, Indiana, Reverie (ij vcl;re,cd out)Ernie Royal, Roy Eldridge (tp) Matthew Gee (tb) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis o Leo Parker (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith o Kenny Burrell (g) Jimmy Rowser (b) Jimmy Crawford o Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Mundy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) Continue reading Puro Jazz 12 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.

BENNIE MOTEN BENNIE MOTEN'S KANSAS CITY ORCHESTRA  - Camden, NJ, December 13, 1932 Toby, Moten swing, The blue room, Lafayette Hot Lips Page, Joe Keyes, Prince "Dee" Stewart (tp) Dan Minor (tb) Eddie Durham (v-tb,g,arr) Eddie Barefield (cl,as) Jack Washington (as,bar) Ben Webster (ts) Count Basie (p) Leroy "Buster" Berry (g) Walter Page (b) Willie McWashington (d) Jimmy Rushing, (vcl). JOE VENUTI / EDDIE LANG - New York, September 29, 1926Stringing the blues Joe Venuti (vln) Eddie Lang (g) EDDIE LANG / CARL KRESS DUETS  - New York, January 15, 1932 Pickin' my way, Feelin' my way Eddie Lang, Carl Kress (g) FRANKIE TRUMBAUER AND HIS ORCHESTRA WITH BIX AND LANG  - New York, February 4, 1927 Singin' the blues (1) Bix Beiderbecke (cnt) Bill Rank (tb) Frankie Trumbauer (c-mel) Jimmy Dorsey (cl,as) Paul Mertz (p) Howdy Quicksell (bj) Eddie Lang (g-1) Chauncey Morehouse (d) EDDIE LANG  - New York, November 5, 1928 Church Street sobbin' blues (1) Eddie Lang (g) solos acc by Frank Signorelli (p) Justin Ring (chimes-1) RETAGUARDIA JAZZ BAND VOL 3  - Santiago, Chile diciembre 1980/enero 1981 Gatemouth, Savoy blues, Froggie moore Enrique Planas (tp) Duccio Castelli (tb) Guillermo Gabler, Alfredo Puga (cl) Alfredo Espinoza (as) Michael Weiss (bar) Antonio Campusano (p) Juan Christian Amenabar, Juan Carlos Aguila (bj) Domingo Santa Cruz (tu) Lorenzo Martinez (d)  - New York, January 26 & March 20, 1934 White heat, Jazznocracy, Swingin' uptown, Here goes (A fool) Eddie Tompkins, Tommy Stevenson, Sy Oliver (tp,vcl,arr) Henry Wells (tb,vcl) Russell Bowles (tb) Jimmie Lunceford, Willie Smith (cl,as) Joe Thomas (cl,ts) Earl Carruthers (ts,bar) Edwin Wilcox (p,arr) Al Norris (g) Moses Allen (b,vcl) Jimmy Crawford (d) Will Hudson (arr)

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: a retrospective of the career of jazz pianist Earl Hines. His career spanned 1920 to 1983 and bridged early jazz, swing, bebop, and more. In his later career resurgence he did many solo performances and duets, producing over a hundred albums in the 1960s and '70s. We'll hear selections from his early work with Louis Armstrong, some swing recordings from Chicago in the 1930s, some live performances solo and with his orchestra from the 1950s and '60s, and then duets with Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Rushing, and Paul Gonsalves. Then a bit of Gershwin and a live performance from 1973.

Playlist for The Everything Show 4/3/2023 Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing (1957 CBS television) / I Left My Baby Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs / Blood In The Snow Daryl Hall / Our Day Will Come (Live From Daryl's House) War / Slippin' Into Darkness (Mix Master Mike Remix) Beck / Nobody's Fault But My Own Let's Eat Grandma / From The Morning Hank Williams III / My Sweet Love Ain't Around Chris Isaak / You Owe Me Some Kind Of Love Pink Floyd / Fearless Sonic Youth / 100% Black Rebel Motorcycle Club / Stop U2 / So Cruel The Five Americans / Western Union Dub Pistols/Freestylers / Nice Up feat. Horseman Basia / Run for Cover Kenny Burrell / Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You? The Arcs / Eyez Jr. Walker & The All Stars / Cleo's Mood The Blips / Wild Thing II Flying Moon In Space / Faces Brian Eno / Who Are We (Instrumental) RVG / Squid The Tune Weavers / Happy, Happy Birthday Baby John Lennon / Watching The Wheels Altın Gün / Su Sızıyor email: theeverythingshow@aol.comFacebook: www.facebook.com/groups/everythingshow/

Three blues-based sessions by the great Kansas City vocalist accompanied by his swing era brethren - Emmett Berry, Pat Jenkins, Lawrence Brown, Vic Dickenson, Henderson Chambers, Rudy Powell, Ben Richardson, Sammy Price, Pete Johnson, Clarence Johnson, Freddie Green, Roy Gaines, Walter Page, Aaron Bell, Marlowe Morris, Jo Jones --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Great regional bands of the late 1920's from the Southwest and Midwest featuring up and coming players like Julia Lee, Budd Johnson, Jimmy Crawford, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Jimmy Rushing, Jack Washington and Walter Page with several well known local groups who were fortunate enough to make records! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Don Redman — a young man from Piedmont, West Virginia, who did much to create the sound that the world came to know as big band swing — composed “Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You?” just as The Roaring Twenties came to a close. In fact, the song's first studio recording, featuring Don performing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, came out just one week after the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression.The crash even inspired a revision of the song. Andy Razaf's original words reflected the consumer-driven culture of the ‘20s, using expensive gifts to illustrate the depth of the narrator's sentiments. “Bought you a fur coat for Christmas and a diamond ring,” said the initial lyrics, “a big Packard coupe and everything.” Ut-oh, Packard was bankrupted and went out of business. (“Big Cadillac car” took its place in the verse.)The mid-1920s had been good for Don Redman. He was responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong's playing into his arrangements for Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney's Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.It turned out the 1930s were darn good for Don as well. The trademark of his ever-more sophisticated band arrangements was the harmony he wrote to play under the group's solos. His brass and reed sections played off each other in a titillating call-and-response pattern; one section punctuated the figures of the other, while the melody moved around to different orchestral sections and soloists. So innovative was the Don Redman style that it was to be widely imitated in jazz arrangements for decades to come.Redmond remained active in music until his death in 1964 at age 64. And while he never again lived in West Virginia, he did not forget his home state, especially Harper Ferry's Storer College, from which he graduated in 1920. His most lasting musical contribution to the institution was his composition of the “Storer College Alma Mater,” which endured throughout the school's history.Back to the Song“Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You?” was the first song Don Redman wrote for McKinney's Cotton Pickers, but after its 1929 release, the tune went into cold storage.More than a decade passed before the next major jazz artist recorded the song, and it turned out to be yet another West Virginian. Saxophonist Chu Berry, a Wheeling, WV, native, recorded the song in 1941 on the flip side of his rendition of “Sunny Side of the Street.” (Sadly, it would be Berry's last recording before his untimely death from an automobile accident in northern Ohio later that year.)Two years later, Don's song finally made the big time when the great Nat King Cole turned “Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You?” into a hit, topping the 1943 R&B charts. Around the same time, Count Basie adopted the song as a favorite, using it to showcase vocalists, including Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams.Though modernists like Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakely and Paul Bley also recorded the tune over the years, it was among more traditional jazz players that “Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You?” remains a favorite.Our Take on the TuneLast week was our first outing on this great old jazz standard.When we started it, Veezy said she wasn't sure she was familiar with it. By the time we finished it, it sounded like she wrote it herself! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

"Jubilee" is an American treasure. It was the War Dept. Service Division and Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) program that featured African-American musicians and singers. Broadcast to servicemen and women via shortwave radio from 1942 to 1953. Jubilee was conceived at least in part as a morale-building service for African-American troops overseas. This Oct. 24, 1947 features Count Basie and his Orchestra with their vocalist Jimmy Rushing and guest vocalist Ella Mae Morse. So climb aboard the time machine and go back to the days of Big Band and Jazz with Jubilee! This track will be stored in the "Big Band /Jazz" Playlist on this Soundcloud.com originating podcast. Thank you for listening.

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra with Bob Eberly on vocals, Count Basie with Jimmy Rushing, Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra, Artie Shaw, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington with Ella Fitzgerald, Cliff Leeman, Eubie Blake, Stan Getz with Kenny Barron, James Moody, and Enrico Pieranunzi.

Jimmy Rushing was best known as the bluesy vocalist of Count Basie's Orchestra from 1935 to 1948. In fact, as you will hear, Basie originally started it as Rushing's backing group. Their swingin' friendship resulted in the longest partnership of a singer with a big band! I made this documentary in 2002 for BBC Radio 2. The story is told by “Mr. Five By Five”, Rushing himself in a rare interview - along with British jazz legend Humphrey Lyttleton, jazz pianist Dave Frishberg, and authors Gene Lees, Will Friedwald, Chris Albertson and Stephanie Stein Crease. JIMMY RUSHING & COUNT BASIE – a SWINGIN' FRIENDSHIP! RARE Interview! Watch this episode in video HERE “Upfront Theme” ©2022 Niles Smiles Music (BMI) by Richard Niles #JimmyRushing #CountBasie #RichardNiles #RadioRichard #LesterYoung #ClarkTerry #BuckClayton #DaveFrishberg #GeneLees #jazz #jazzsinging #jazzvocalists #bigband #jazzarranging #BBCRadio2 Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our YouTube channel:

WETF Show - Count Basie Live - 1937-38 . . Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Buck Clayton, Dickie Wells, Benny Morton, Jimmy Rushing and Helen Humes with the All American Rhythm Section from the Chatterbox, Savoy and Famous Door! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

"Good Morning Blues" (1937) Count Basie and His Orchestra: 1936 - 1938. The Classics Chronological Series (Classics, Ed. 1990) Count Basie, Buck Clayton, Ed Lewis, Bobby Moore, Eddie Durham, George Hunt, Dan Minor, Earl Warren, Jack Washington, Herschel Evans, Lester Young, Freddie Green, Walter Page, Jo Jones, Jimmy Rushing, Lloyd "Skippy" Martin, Harry "Buster" Smith. El tema es una composición de Eddie Durham, Count Basie y Jimmy Rushing. Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 ¿Sabías que? Count Basie nació en 1904. Su padre era cochero; su madre, que era lavandera, le enseñó a tocar el piano. Aunque nació en Red Bank, New Jersey, es uno de los representantes principales del sonido Kansas City. En el año 1929 ya estaba grabando junto a Bennie Moten.  En los años 30 su orquesta, junto con las de Duke Ellington y Benny Goodman, es una de las máximas representantes del swing. Entre 1936 y 1940 actuó ininterrumpidamente en giras y actuaciones en salas de concierto o de baile, grandes hoteles y restaurantes. En la orquesta que grabó este tema en agosto de 1937 hay grandes músicos como Jimmy Rushing (que es quien canta), Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Freddie Green o Jo Jones. El tema es un clásico en cualquier recopilación de Count Basie. He elegido la incluida en la serie The Classics Chronological, pero podrían haber sido otras muchas como The Complete Decca Recordings. En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos/Tomajazz Remembers… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=23849 Más información sobre Count Basie https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?s=count+basie&submit=Search http://countbasie.com/home/ Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

First broadcast on November 26, 1975. Muhammad Ali discusses his book "The Greatest: My Own Story," touching on topics including his childhood and family, conversion to Islam, stance on the Vietnam War, and experiences in jail. After the conversation with Ali ends, the second half of the program consists of music by Billie Holiday ("God Bless the Child"), Jimmy Rushing ("Going to Chicago"), Nina Simone ("Children Go Where I Send You"), Count Basie, Alan Lomax ("Little John Henry"), Dinah Washington ("Willow Weep For Me"), and Duke Ellington ("East St. Louis Toodle-Oo").

From January 1, 1953, Live from Birdland, NBC Radio presented Basie's All Stars. William James "Count" Basie (August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison, plunger trombonist Al Grey, and singers Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Thelma Carpenter, and Joe Williams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Basie

Part Four of This is the Best Of features the great music of Count Basie. These are some of his popular recordings from the late 1930's plus a few from the 1950's. Some of the songs feature the vocals of blues singer Jimmy Rushing. Count Basie featured a style of music called Kansas City Swing. These are some great soloists in his band like Lester You, Buck Clayton, Herschel Evans and the Count himself. I hope you enjoys the music of the great Count Basie. Thank you all so much for listening. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

Jimmy Rushing e a herdanza do blues: inseparables2021/Mar/FriMúsica de jazzPrograma musical especializado en jazz galego. Dirixe Xabier Facal.

New Moten Stomp - Benny Moten's Kansas City Orchestra from October, 1930 . . one year into the Depression and the Moten band was still popular enough for a marathon recording session for Victor in KC . .featuring Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, Jimmy Rushing, Ed Lewis, Thamon Hayes, Harlan Leonard, Woodie Walder and Willie McWashington --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Swing the night away is an old-time swing and jazz music podcast by Ken Steele. Something a little different for the upcoming holidays. Please check out this special music podcast. Artist names and song titles are in order of play...Woody Herman and His Orchestra - At the Woodchopper’s Ball, Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra feat. Lester Young – Travelling All Alone, Eddie Condon & His Windy City Seven – Love Is Just Around the Corner, Will Bradley Orchestra – Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar, Benny Goodman Sextet feat. Charlie Christian – Rose Room, Fats Waller and His Rhythm – Us on a Bus, Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra – When You’re Smiling, Jimmy Rushing acc. by Count Basie and His Orchestra – Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong), Fats Waller and His Rhythm – There’s Honey on the Moon Tonight, Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra – St. Louis Blues, Bud Freeman and His Summa Cum Laude Orchestra – Tia Juana, Lester Young and Billie Holiday – Back In Your Own Backyard, Fats Waller and His Rhythm – Sweet Sue, Just You, Billie Holiday acc. by Eddie Heywood (piano), John Simmons (bass), Sidney Catlett (drums)– On the Sunny Side of the Street, Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra – Jeepers Creepers, Bix Beiderbecke (solo) –Clementine, Artie Shaw and His Orchestra – Blues in the Night, Count Basie's Kansas City Seven feat. Lester Young – Dickie’s Dream, End. Thanks for listening from, Ken Steele.

On this edition of the MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM. Is it Eberle or Eberly? Bille Holiday’s tenuous relationship with Artie Shaw. Along the way wonderful music by Perry Como, Freddie Slack and Ella Mae Morse, Jimmie Lunsford, Count Basie with Jimmy Rushing, and a whole lot more!

STANDARD SEMANAL.- “Nuages” (Django Reinhardt-Paul Desmond-Oscar Peterson y Stéphane Grappelli-James Carter )-JAZZ RECUERDO ANIVERSARIO.- Dicky Wells - Bones For The King (1958)-JAZZ ACTUALIDAD .- Esta semana tendremos a SERGIO DE LOPE-A NIGT IN UTRERA. PROG.Nº 667.- Dos horas para el análisis y repaso a la historia y actualidad que generan esta música americana . Todo en el tono que acostumbra este programa, en dos secciones JAZZ ANIVERSARIO y JAZZ ACTUALIDAD importantes novedades y diferentes canales de comunicación que se ofrecerán al oyente. STANDARD SEMANAL.- “Nuages” (Django Reinhardt-Paul Desmond-Oscar Peterson y Stéphane Grappelli-James Carter ) JAZZ RECUERDO ANIVERSARIO.- Dicky Wells - Bones For The King (1958) Bones for the King es un álbum del trombonista Dicky Wells que fue grabado en 1958 y lanzado en elsello Felsted . Scott Yanow de AllMusic afirma: "Hay buena música basada en el swing para escuchar en todo este álbum, pero no ocurre nada esencial" Todas las composiciones de Dicky Wells excepto donde se indique. 1. "Huesos para el Rey" - 6:36 2. "Dulce papá Spo-de-o" - 7:26 3. "Me tomaste el corazón" (Skip Hall) - 6:01 4. "Hola Smack!" (Buddy Tate) - 6:20 5. "Ven y tómalo" - 8:04 6. "Danza de Stan" (Buck Clayton) - 6:35 7. Dicky Wells - trombón 8. Buck Clayton - trompeta (pistas 4-6) 9. Vic Dickenson , George Matthews , Benny Morton - trombón (pistas 1-3) 10. Rudy Rutherford - clarinete , saxofón barítono (pistas 4-6) 11. Buddy Tate - saxo tenor , saxofón barítono (pistas 4-6) 12. Skip Hall - piano , órgano 13. Everett Barksdale - guitarra (pistas 4-6) 14. Major Holley - bajo 15. Jo Jones - batería Se cree que Dickie Wells nació el 10 de junio de 1907 en Centerville, Tennessee , Estados Unidos. [4] Su hermano era el trombonista Henry Wells . Se mudó a la ciudad de Nueva York en 1926 y se convirtió en miembro de la banda Lloyd Scott . [4] Jugó con el conde Basie entre 1938-1945 y 1947-1950. [4] También jugó con Cecil Scott , Spike Hughes , Fletcher Henderson , Benny Carter , Teddy Hill , Jimmy Rushing , Buck Clayton y Ray Charles . [4] A mediados de la década de 1960, Wells realizó giras y se desempeñó extensamente, y el inicio del alcoholismo le causó problemas personales que lo llevaron a su semi-retiro. La publicación de su autobiografía en 1973 ayudó a que Wells volviera a su profesión. [4] Dicky Wells (izquierda) y hermano Henry Wells en Eddie Condon's de la ciudad de Nueva York en enero de 1947 En sus últimos años, Wells sufrió una fuerte paliza durante un atraco que afectó su memoria, pero se recuperó y continuó actuando. [4] Tocó con frecuencia en el club de jazz West End en 116th y Broadway, más a menudo con una banda llamada The Countsmen, dirigida por el saxofonista Earle Warren , su colega de los días del Conde Basie. Una marca registrada fue el mute "pepper pepper" de Wells que él mismo hizo. Murió el 12 de noviembre de 1985 en la ciudad de Nueva York . [4] Poco después de su muerte, la familia de Wells donó su trombón a la Universidad de Rutgers . JAZZ ACTUALIDAD .- Esta semana tendremos a SERGIO DE LOPE-A NIGT IN UTRERA. Este disco pone en entre dicho la idea de “lo puro” en música y exalta el concepto que afirma que en la mezcla está el gusto. En él podemos encontrar las composi ciones más íntimas, fruto de las vivencias y experiencias más flamencas y jazzeras. Este trabajo escenifica que la música ni se crea ni se destruye, se transforma. Flamenco y Jazz son músicas de raíz, músicas del pueblo y como los humanos se relacionan entre sí de una manera natural. En “A nigth in Utrera” caminan de la mano los cantes clásicos con los acordes oscuros del jazz y como telón de fondo el flamenco instrumental, siendo un todo en armonía donde encontraremos miles de noches en un solo anochecer. La flauta “alante” de Sergio de Lope será el hilo conductor de un esp

Jimmy Rushing in the 1950's. . .these recordings were taken from several albums Mr Five by Five recorded for Columbia in the late 1950's - many have a big band led by Buck Clayton with arrangements by Clayton, Nat Pierce and Jimmy Mundy. Great solos by Coleman Hawkins, Buddy Tate, Clayton, Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, Dickie Wells, Hilton Jefferson, Claude Hopkins , Ben Webster, Helen Humes, Buster Bailey and Urbie Green. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

En este episodio 16 continuamos con nuestra recorrida por le carrera de Count Basie. Su gran orquesta de los 30, Hershel Evans y Lester Young en tenor, los trompetistas Harry Edison y Buck Clayton. Billie Holiday, Jimmy Rushing y Joe Williams como cantantes. El Woodside en Chicago. Gana contra Chick Webb en el Savoy. En los chismes: los orígenes del mote “Count”, líos con la banda por no comprarle uniformes nuevos. Desbande de la orquesta a fines de los 40. Pequeños grupos, Kansas City 5 y 7. En los 50 reforma la orquesta, nuevos arreglos, giras. Grandes músicos desfilan por su orquesta. Frank Sinatra y Count Basie, eso era Swing!

For ikke så mange år siden fandt man en skat i USA. Skatten bestod i en stribe optagelser fra radioudsendelser med jazz i 1930ne - af en teknisk kvalitet, som var fuldt ud på højde med tidens pladeindspilninger, og hvad mere var – de havde næsten ikke været spillet, så også bevaringstilstanden var helt på toppen, fortæller Radio Jazz studievært Tom Buhmann. Ganske mange af optagelserne var med Count Basies historiske 1936-40 orkester med alle legenderne, Lester Young og Herschal Evans på tenorsax, Harry Edison og Buck Clayton på trompet, basunisterne Dickie Wells, Benny Morton og Vic Dickenson og så The All American Rhythm Section med Basie ved klaveret, Freddie Green på guitar, Walter Page ved bassen og Jo Jones bag trommerne - samt sangerne Jimmy Rushing og Helen Humes. Der er tale om et så omfattende og usædvanligt materiale, at billedet af Basie's 1930er orkester på flere punkter skal tegnes om. Sendt i Radio Jazz i 2019 Der er mere jazz på www.radiojazz.dk

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Searchin'" by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 "Raunchy" by Bill Justis.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg's page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner's take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin': The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins' career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group's classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn't think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It's been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller -- the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog". That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on "Hound Dog" right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original "Hound Dog" -- Big Mama Thornton's version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller's father, Abe, had been furious at how little they'd made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack "Jake the Snake" Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original -- as almost everything released on Spark was -- although it was based around the old "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, "Come a Little Bit Closer"] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we've already talked, back in the episode on "The Wallflower" about one of the Robins' hits on Spark Records, "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine", but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They'd worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they'd had released was “That's What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like "Ten Days in Jail": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Ten Days in Jail"] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman's place. Gardner didn't really want to be in a vocal group -- he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn't come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine", but also several other hits, most notably "Smokey Joe's Cafe", which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn't want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he'd believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like "The Hatchet Man", a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man": [Excerpt: The Robins, "The Hatchet Man"] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in "Framed", which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated -- and still treats -- black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Framed"] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn't bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller's mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller's writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better -- and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I've read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US -- though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define "freelance production team". They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic's organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe's Cafe”, "Cherry Lips": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Cherry Lips"] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were -- and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn't the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco -- but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill's new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren't There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren't very good -- Mike Stoller said, "The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn't sing lead at all. They usually sang 'do-wah,' 'do-wah' and had their hands up in the air." I suspect, myself, that it's a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins' last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, "the Coasters", listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you're likely to find "Riot in Cell Block #9" and "Smokey Joe's Cafe" on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as "Bip and Bop", who had recorded a "Ko Ko Mo" knock-off, "Ding a Ling", backed by "Johnny's Combo" -- the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on "Ko Ko Mo": [Excerpt: Bip and Bop", "Ding Dong Ding"] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux -- he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, "Keep on Smiling"] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group's manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as "the Coasters", supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group's name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as "Carl Gardner and the Coasters", but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said "the Coasters", with no mention of Gardner's name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Down in Mexico"] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe -- and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded "Hound Dog", and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller's life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters' tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall in Love"] They also recorded "Lucky Lips" with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Lucky Lips"] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner's "Teenage Letter"; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Teenage Letter"] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. "Young Blood", was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus' birth name was Jerome Felder, but he'd taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter -- he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, "Send For the Doctor"] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he'd not had any success as a singer, and he'd fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he'd written "Lonely Avenue", which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"] But he didn't really understand this new rock and roll music -- he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie's, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn't been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot -- not only did they like "Lonely Avenue" and the records he'd been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called "Young Blood", which he thought had potential, but it wasn't quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Young Blood"] "Young Blood" was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, "Searchin'", which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller's best, and showed Leiber's sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Searchin'"] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn't present -- I've not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, "Shuffle in the Gravel"] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of "Searchin'" and "Young Blood", Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like "Idol With the Golden Head", were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn't yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Idol With the Golden Head"] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It's hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We've met Gunter before -- he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren't especially -- Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn't be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, "Stranded in the Jungle": [Excerpt: The Cadets, "Stranded in the Jungle"] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group's sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they'd written the group a hit at this point. "Hound Dog" had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We'll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks' time. And a few weeks after that, we'll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters...  

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 “Raunchy” by Bill Justis.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin’: The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins’ career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group’s classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn’t think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It’s been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”. That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on “Hound Dog” right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original “Hound Dog” — Big Mama Thornton’s version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller’s father, Abe, had been furious at how little they’d made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack “Jake the Snake” Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original — as almost everything released on Spark was — although it was based around the old “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Come a Little Bit Closer”] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we’ve already talked, back in the episode on “The Wallflower” about one of the Robins’ hits on Spark Records, “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They’d worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they’d had released was “That’s What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like “Ten Days in Jail”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Ten Days in Jail”] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman’s place. Gardner didn’t really want to be in a vocal group — he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn’t come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but also several other hits, most notably “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn’t want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he’d believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like “The Hatchet Man”, a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “The Hatchet Man”] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in “Framed”, which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated — and still treats — black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn’t bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller’s mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller’s writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better — and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I’ve read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US — though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define “freelance production team”. They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic’s organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, “Cherry Lips”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Cherry Lips”] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were — and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn’t the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco — but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill’s new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren’t There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren’t very good — Mike Stoller said, “The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn’t sing lead at all. They usually sang ‘do-wah,’ ‘do-wah’ and had their hands up in the air.” I suspect, myself, that it’s a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins’ last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, “the Coasters”, listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you’re likely to find “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as “Bip and Bop”, who had recorded a “Ko Ko Mo” knock-off, “Ding a Ling”, backed by “Johnny’s Combo” — the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Bip and Bop”, “Ding Dong Ding”] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux — he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, “Keep on Smiling”] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group’s manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as “the Coasters”, supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group’s name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as “Carl Gardner and the Coasters”, but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said “the Coasters”, with no mention of Gardner’s name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Down in Mexico”] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe — and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded “Hound Dog”, and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller’s life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters’ tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] They also recorded “Lucky Lips” with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter”; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Teenage Letter”] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. “Young Blood”, was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus’ birth name was Jerome Felder, but he’d taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter — he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send For the Doctor”] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he’d not had any success as a singer, and he’d fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he’d written “Lonely Avenue”, which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] But he didn’t really understand this new rock and roll music — he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie’s, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn’t been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot — not only did they like “Lonely Avenue” and the records he’d been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called “Young Blood”, which he thought had potential, but it wasn’t quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Young Blood”] “Young Blood” was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, “Searchin'”, which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller’s best, and showed Leiber’s sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn’t present — I’ve not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Shuffle in the Gravel”] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of “Searchin'” and “Young Blood”, Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like “Idol With the Golden Head”, were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn’t yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Idol With the Golden Head”] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We’ve met Gunter before — he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren’t especially — Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn’t be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, “Stranded in the Jungle”: [Excerpt: The Cadets, “Stranded in the Jungle”] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group’s sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they’d written the group a hit at this point. “Hound Dog” had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We’ll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks’ time. And a few weeks after that, we’ll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters…  

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 “Raunchy” by Bill Justis.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin’: The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins’ career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group’s classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn’t think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It’s been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”. That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on “Hound Dog” right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original “Hound Dog” — Big Mama Thornton’s version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller’s father, Abe, had been furious at how little they’d made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack “Jake the Snake” Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original — as almost everything released on Spark was — although it was based around the old “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Come a Little Bit Closer”] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we’ve already talked, back in the episode on “The Wallflower” about one of the Robins’ hits on Spark Records, “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They’d worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they’d had released was “That’s What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like “Ten Days in Jail”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Ten Days in Jail”] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman’s place. Gardner didn’t really want to be in a vocal group — he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn’t come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but also several other hits, most notably “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn’t want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he’d believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like “The Hatchet Man”, a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “The Hatchet Man”] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in “Framed”, which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated — and still treats — black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn’t bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller’s mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller’s writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better — and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I’ve read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US — though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define “freelance production team”. They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic’s organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, “Cherry Lips”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Cherry Lips”] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were — and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn’t the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco — but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill’s new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren’t There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren’t very good — Mike Stoller said, “The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn’t sing lead at all. They usually sang ‘do-wah,’ ‘do-wah’ and had their hands up in the air.” I suspect, myself, that it’s a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins’ last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, “the Coasters”, listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you’re likely to find “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as “Bip and Bop”, who had recorded a “Ko Ko Mo” knock-off, “Ding a Ling”, backed by “Johnny’s Combo” — the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Bip and Bop”, “Ding Dong Ding”] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux — he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, “Keep on Smiling”] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group’s manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as “the Coasters”, supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group’s name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as “Carl Gardner and the Coasters”, but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said “the Coasters”, with no mention of Gardner’s name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Down in Mexico”] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe — and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded “Hound Dog”, and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller’s life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters’ tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] They also recorded “Lucky Lips” with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter”; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Teenage Letter”] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. “Young Blood”, was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus’ birth name was Jerome Felder, but he’d taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter — he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send For the Doctor”] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he’d not had any success as a singer, and he’d fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he’d written “Lonely Avenue”, which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] But he didn’t really understand this new rock and roll music — he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie’s, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn’t been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot — not only did they like “Lonely Avenue” and the records he’d been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called “Young Blood”, which he thought had potential, but it wasn’t quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Young Blood”] “Young Blood” was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, “Searchin'”, which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller’s best, and showed Leiber’s sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn’t present — I’ve not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Shuffle in the Gravel”] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of “Searchin'” and “Young Blood”, Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like “Idol With the Golden Head”, were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn’t yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Idol With the Golden Head”] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We’ve met Gunter before — he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren’t especially — Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn’t be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, “Stranded in the Jungle”: [Excerpt: The Cadets, “Stranded in the Jungle”] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group’s sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they’d written the group a hit at this point. “Hound Dog” had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We’ll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks’ time. And a few weeks after that, we’ll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters…  

Last week I started a two part birthday salute to the late Count Basie. This week I am going to continue with more early recordings from 1936 - 1939. In addition, I discovered that singer Jimmy Rushing, who was a member of Count Basie's band from 1935 - 1948, celebrates a birthday on August 26. So for the last half of the show we'll hear some of the recordings he made with the Basie band as well as learn about the career of the man they called Mr. Five by Five. So I hope you enjoy this birthday celebration of one of the greatest of all bandleaders Count Basie. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

August 21st is the birthday of pianist and bandleader William Basie better know as the Count. I checked to see if I had done a birthday salute to him in the past and surprisingly I had not. So I hope you'll tune in and listen to some early Basie recordings from 1936 and 1937 as we learn about the career of one of the greatest of Big Band Leaders, Count Basie. The early 1936 band that the Count led was in my opinion one of his most exciting. Some of the players in this band included Jo Jones, Herschel Evans, Lester Young, Walter Page. There is some great music in Part One and next week we will continue with more music from the Basie Band and also celebrate the birthday of Jimmy Rushing and play some of the sides he recorded with Count Basie. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

From STUDIO 67 in Hollywood, join the BIG W for the next two hours as he explores, with a drink in hand, the Space-Age Pop Hi-Fi musical sounds of the 1950’s and the 1960’s in LIVING STEREO! Originally aired on 1420am The Breeze Radio 3/9/19 Playlist Show 365: • (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Machito and His Orchestra • St. Thomas - Derek And Ray • She Loves Me - Frankie Randall • 77 Sunset Strip - Warren Barker Orchestra • The Lonesome Road - Bobby Darin & Judy Garland • The Cat - Dick Hyman • The Most Beautiful Girl In the World - Buddy Greco • Nicollet Avenue Breakdown - Art Van Damme Quintet • Chattanooga Choo Choo - Xavier Cugot • Straight Down The Middle - Bing Crosby • A Fine Romance - Ethel Ennis, Jimmy Rushing & Benny Goodman & His Orchestra • My Apple Pie Guy - Ethel Ennis • Like Love - Ethel Ennis • Wild Is Love - Ethel Ennis • I've Got That Feeling - Ethel Ennis • Love, Don't Turn Away - Ethel Ennis • I Only Have Eyes For You - Ethel Ennis • Love for Sale - Ethel Ennis • The Petite Waltz - Ethel Ennis • Almost Like Being in Love - Ethel Ennis • Lillette - Peter Brady • Fly Now, Play Later - Ray Anthony • Calabash Annie - Si Zentner & Martin Denny • Let There Be Love - The J's With Jamie • Stoney Burke Theme - Nelson Riddle • It's A Wonderful World - Peggy Lee • Rumpus - Al Hirt • Until the Real Thing Comes Along - Dean Martin • Back In Your Own Back Yard - Sammy Davis, Jr. • You're Gonna Hear From Me - Frank Sinatra • Like Young - Andre Previn • It's Delovely - Shorty Rogers & Andre Previn • The Pink Panther Theme - Andre Previn • There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York - Diahann Carroll & Andre Previn • It Had To Be You - Dinah Shore & Andre Previn • That Old Black Magic - Andre Previn • Control Yourself - Doris Day & Andre Previn • Goodbye Charlie - Andre Previn

Singers include: Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme, Jimmy Rushing, Anita O'Day, Mildred Bailey, Maxine Sullivan & Nat King Cole. Songs include: Blue Moon, Jimmy's Blues, When Your Lover Has Gone, Lady Be Good,  Sweet Loraine, Night in Tunisia & More Than You Know.

Quote: “When I die, I’m dead.” —Eloise Westbrook About: Three horizontal stripes, red, black and green, add color to the streetlights and poles in and around the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. These Pan-African flags are a relatively new addition to the area. They were painted just about a year ago thanks to an initiative spearheaded by the neighborhood's local city supervisor, Malia Cohen. “This is about branding the Bayview neighborhood to honor and pay respect to the decades of contributions that African-Americans have made to the southeast neighborhood and to the city,” she said in a statement. But when compared to what’s going on in the neighborhood, these painted flags inadvertently serve as reminders of what this neighborhood once was and what it now isn’t. This used to be a place where you could be Black and thrive. You could find work and own a home. Now, not so much. In Part II of this story about the term Frisco, we try and find out what happened. Show Notes: [00:35] More on “Wild Wes” and Wild SF Tours [03:30] “Kid Kodi” by Blue Dot Sessions [06:10] For reference: Map of San Francisco and its neighborhoods (San Francisco Association of Realtors) [06:40] More on Dr. Raymond Tompkins (San Francisco Bay View Newspaper) [07:40] “Allston Night Owl” by Blue Dot Sessions [09:30] “Roundpine” by Blue Dot Sessions [12:00] Light reading on environmental conditions of Bayview-Hunters Point: Health Inequities in the Bay Area San Francisco Community Health Needs Assessment 2016 On the 14 year life expectancy gap (San Francisco Chronicle) Pollution Problems in Bayview-Hunters Point (Greenaction) [12:30] “The Yards” by Blue Dot Sessions [13:00] “Why I Love Living in Russian Hill” (The Bold Italic) [13:20] On the naming of Russian Hill (FoundSF) Related: the naming of other San Francisco neighborhoods (Mental Floss) [13:50] Light reading on old history of Bayview-Hunters Point Additional reading on the sale (Bernal History Project) [14:30] On the formation of Butchertown (FoundSF) [15:15] Further reading on history of Hunters Point Shipyard development and community (City of San Francisco) [15:30] Light reading on history of Chinese shrimping industry in San Francisco (FoundSF) [15:55] Light reading on Oscar James (Museum of African Diaspora) [16:40] “D-Day” by Nat King Cole [17:00] Light reading on San Francisco’s shipbuilding and war time history World War II Shipbuilding in the Bay Area (National Parks Service) “A Day’s Work” (FoundSF) [17:20] Newsreel footage [17:30] Light reading on the Great Migration: “Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North” (NPR) The African-American Migration Story (PBS) “Why African Americans Left the South in Droves” (Vox) The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration (Smithsonian) “The 'Great Migration' Was About Racial Terror, Not Jobs” (City Lab) “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview” (University of Chicago Press) United States Census [18:20] Light reading on the War Manpower Commission [18:40] The war effort impact on Bayview-Hunters Point And on the population increases (San Francisco Chronicle) [19:00] Excerpt from The Highest Tradition (1946) [19:30] Light reading on treatment of African Americans in the war effort (PBS) Additional reading on A. Philip Randolph Light reading on Executive Order 8802 [21:50] Light reading on how the Japanese internment shaped San Francisco (The Culture Trip) [22:40] Light reading on the history of the Fillmore District (KQED) [23:00] Light reading on Jack’s Tavern (KQED) [23:20] Light reading on Marie Harrison (San Francisco Chronicle) [24:00] “Take Me Back Baby” by Jimmy Rushing [24:30] On San Francisco’s role as the “Harlem of the West” (NPR) Photos from back in the day. Note Bob Scobey’s ‘Don’t Call it Frisco’ jazz band in the gallery. (Timeline) [24:40] “Ghost of Yesterday” by Billie Holiday [25:00] Review of the  Failure and the Harlem Renaissance argument (The Georgia Review) [25:50] “Leave the TV On” by Blue Dot Sessions [28:40] Light reading on Juneteenth [30:00] Related: James Baldwin on Urban Renewal [30:45] The Dynamic American City [31:30] Related reading on Urban Renewal: “The Racist Roots Of “Urban Renewal” And How It Made Cities Less Equal” (Fast Company) “The Wastelands of Urban Renewal” (City Lab) Urban Renewal and Its Aftermath A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949 Urban Revitalization in the United States: Policies and Practices [32:00] Audio of construction site (Freesound.org) [32:20] Light reading on the legacy of the  Housing Act of 1949: Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949: The Past, Present, and Future of Federal Housing and Urban Policy Additional reading on the birth of slum removal and urban renewal Timeline of public housing projects in the US [33:30] Light reading on the Housing Act of 1965 and 1968 A Rundown of Just How Badly the Fair Housing Act Has Failed (Washington Post) The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act Residential Segregation after the Fair Housing Act (American Bar Association) [33:45] Renewing Inequality Project (University of Richmond) [35:00] “Our Digital Compass” by Blue Dot Sessions [35:35] Inspired by this song [35:40] Two tales of urban renewal’s impact on San Francisco’s black population: How Urban Renewal Destroyed The Fillmore In Order to Save It (Hoodline) Racism — and politics — in SF Redevelopment history (48 Hills) [35:45] On the population metrics of San Francisco’s black population: The Loneliness of Being Black in San Francisco (The New York Times) San Francisco's Black population is less than 5 percent (KTVU) The Dream vs. Reality: On Being Black in San Francisco (The Bold Italic) [37:10] On black home ownership in San Francisco (City and County of San Francisco) [37:15] Related: On access to bank loans San Francisco State College protests (FoundSF) Job opportunities back in the day (FoundSF) [37:30] The killing of Matthew Peanut Johnson (San Francisco Chronicle) [37:50] Patrolman Alvin Johnson retelling what happened on the day Matthew “Peanut” Johnson was killed (Bay Area Television Archive) [40:15] 1964: Civil Rights Battles (The Atlantic) Additional reading here [40:35] Short excerpt of video from San Francisco’s 1966 riot [41:00] Light reading on the Human Be-In Festival All the Human Be-In Was Saying 50 Years Ago, Was Give Peace a Chance (The Nation) Full program of the Be-In Festival [43:00] “Passing Station 7” by Blue Dot Sessions [43:50] Light reading on the Big Five   Footage of the Big Five supporting S.F. State Student Strike in 1968 Public Hearing in Bayview Hunters Point with Robert Kennedy (KQED) [45:25] Light reading on The Big Five’s March on Washington—Redevelopment and the Politics of Place in Bayview-Hunters Point (UC Berkeley) [46:40] Andre Herm Lewis from Part I [48:30] “Hunters Point Health Problems Called an `Epidemic'” (San Francisco Chronicle) San Francisco Department of Health Recommendations (2006) [49:40] 'Appropriation At Its Worst': Supervisor Slams 'Bayview Is The New Mission' Ads (Hoodline) [51:40] Light reading on the toxic state of San Francisco’s Navy Shipyard (San Francisco Magazine) [55:05] More at thisissomenoise.com [56:20] Podcast Recommendation: American Suburb (KQED)    

Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing “Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2”, my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn’t as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of — Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins — and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I’ll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I’ll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won’t be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they’d be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon.   Transcript There’s a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called “phonomancers”. These are people who aren’t musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic.   I think “phonomancers” is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don’t themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made — records which are their creative work — by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they’re record producers, sometimes they’re managers, sometimes they’re DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who’ve shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell… I’m sure you can add more to the list yourself. People — almost always men, to be honest — who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song.   And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band.   Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians — Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own.   But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn’t play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks “wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!” And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser — the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten — never played an instrument, didn’t write songs, didn’t sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that — people who didn’t have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them.    Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world.   Because a good bandleader’s talent wasn’t in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we’ve talked about a couple of times already in passing.   Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure — one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on.   (I think it’s more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with).   He didn’t play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He’d worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots’ backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway’s band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown — who we’ll talk about later — later on.   He’d started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit — the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time.   Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder’s band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to “Savoy” from 1943: [Excerpt: “Savoy” by Lucky Millinder]   In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one — one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris.   Harris was already known as “Mr. Blues” when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan.   Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?”   [excerpt “Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?”]   You’ll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we’re now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more.   That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn’t released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn’t released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder’s band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit.   Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away,   This belief was made stronger when “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well” was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own.   (In case you hadn’t realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn’t win him many friends in his personal life).   Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels.   His first record as a solo artist was “Around the Clock Blues”, one of the most influential records ever made:   [Excerpt “Around the Clock Blues” by Wynonie Harris]   If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered:   [excerpt of “So Glad You’re Mine” by Arthur Crudup, showing it’s more or less identical]   Or maybe you know “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry…   [excerpt of “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry, showing it’s also more or less identical]   And of course there was another song with “Around the Clock” in the title, and we’ll get to that pretty soon…   The band on “Around the Clock”, incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis.   That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it’s not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s.   Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we’ll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we’ll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, “Dig this Boogie”:   [excerpt “Dig This Boogie”, Wynonie Harris]   I played that just because of the pianist on that record — Herman “Sonny” Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn’t have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could.   Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was “The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other ‘jail bait’. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook”.   And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they’d both arrive at the venue and he’d pick which one he was riding home in that night.   Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let’s pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as “a black singer who sounds white”, which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown’s main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music.    However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris — and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him.   And Harris wasn’t interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he’d been performing — there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move —  Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn’t up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be.    Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, “I Wonder”, which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but while Gant’s A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown’s song — like this one, the B-side to “I Wonder”   [excerpt “Cecil Boogie” by Cecil Gant]   But Gant wasn’t the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant’s records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he’d just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn’t really in the market for other people’s songs.   But he was so impressed by Brown’s singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant “give him fifty dollars and don’t let him out of your sight!”   And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it:   [excerpt “Good Rocking Tonight” by Roy Brown]   When you listen back to that, now, it doesn’t sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who’d appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time — we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” and Louis Jordan.   It might also sound odd to anyone who’s familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis’ version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing “I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can”. Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown’s original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus — the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you’d think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it’s something altogether different.   This is something that you need to realise — the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that’s all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” is absolutely in the Diddley corner.   But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market.   And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he’d made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did — cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown’s song:   [excerpt from “Good Rocking Tonight” by Wynonie Harris]   There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those “hoy hoy” vocals we just heard, which weren’t part of Roy Brown’s original. That’s a line which comes from “The Honeydripper”, another massively important R&B record.  Harris also included a different instrumental introduction — playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown’s song.    Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it’s for that reason that Wynonie Harris’ version of the song, not Roy Brown’s original, is the one that people call “the first rock and roll record”.    Other than those changes, Harris’ version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown’s version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who’d just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song.   And “Good Rocking Tonight”, in Harris’ version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown’s version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris’ was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market.   Harris’ version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”. Harris himself recorded a sequel, “All She Wants to Do is Rock”, but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title.  There was Roy Brown’s own sequel, “Rockin’ at Midnight”:   [Excerpt “Rockin’ at Midnight” by Roy Brown]   There was Cecil Gant’s “We’re Gonna Rock”   [Excerpt]   There was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston   [Excerpt]   From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn’t escape this new rock craze. Record after record with “rock” in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll.    This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We’re still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we’re still three years away even from the canonical “first rock and roll record”, Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music.   Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that’s based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn’t be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But… we’ve talked before and will talk again about how there’s no real “first rock and roll record”, but if you insist on looking for one then “Good Rocking Tonight” is as good a candidate as any.   Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians’ union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him — in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract — and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door — with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981.   Wynonie Harris wasn’t even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn’t play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death.   The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we’re now finally into the rock era. We’ll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more “first rock and roll songs” as well as at some music that still doesn’t quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you’ve ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.

Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Wynonie Harris and "Good Rockin' Tonight" ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing "Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2", my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn't as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of -- Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins -- and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I'll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I'll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won't be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they'd be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon.   Transcript There's a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called "phonomancers". These are people who aren't musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic.   I think "phonomancers" is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don't themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made -- records which are their creative work -- by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they're record producers, sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who've shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell... I'm sure you can add more to the list yourself. People -- almost always men, to be honest -- who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song.   And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band.   Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians -- Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own.   But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn't play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks "wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!" And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser -- the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten -- never played an instrument, didn't write songs, didn't sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that -- people who didn't have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them.    Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world.   Because a good bandleader's talent wasn't in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we've talked about a couple of times already in passing.   Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure -- one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on.   (I think it's more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with).   He didn't play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He'd worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots' backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway's band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown -- who we'll talk about later -- later on.   He'd started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit -- the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time.   Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder's band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to "Savoy" from 1943: [Excerpt: "Savoy" by Lucky Millinder]   In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one -- one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris.   Harris was already known as "Mr. Blues" when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan.   Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?"   [excerpt "Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?"]   You'll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we're now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more.   That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn't released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn't released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder's band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit.   Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away,   This belief was made stronger when "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well" was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own.   (In case you hadn't realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn't win him many friends in his personal life).   Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels.   His first record as a solo artist was "Around the Clock Blues", one of the most influential records ever made:   [Excerpt "Around the Clock Blues" by Wynonie Harris]   If that sounds familiar, maybe it's because you've heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered:   [excerpt of "So Glad You're Mine" by Arthur Crudup, showing it's more or less identical]   Or maybe you know "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry...   [excerpt of "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry, showing it's also more or less identical]   And of course there was another song with "Around the Clock" in the title, and we'll get to that pretty soon...   The band on "Around the Clock", incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis.   That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it's not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s.   Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we'll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we'll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, "Dig this Boogie":   [excerpt "Dig This Boogie", Wynonie Harris]   I played that just because of the pianist on that record -- Herman "Sonny" Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn't have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could.   Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was "The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other 'jail bait'. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook".   And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they'd both arrive at the venue and he'd pick which one he was riding home in that night.   Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let's pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as "a black singer who sounds white", which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown's main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music.    However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called "Good Rockin' Tonight", he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris -- and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him.   And Harris wasn't interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he'd been performing -- there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move --  Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn't up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be.    Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, "I Wonder", which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record "Good Rockin' Tonight", but while Gant's A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown's song -- like this one, the B-side to "I Wonder"   [excerpt "Cecil Boogie" by Cecil Gant]   But Gant wasn't the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant's records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he'd just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn't really in the market for other people's songs.   But he was so impressed by Brown's singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant "give him fifty dollars and don't let him out of your sight!"   And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it:   [excerpt "Good Rocking Tonight" by Roy Brown]   When you listen back to that, now, it doesn't sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who'd appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time -- we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and Louis Jordan.   It might also sound odd to anyone who's familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis' version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing "I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can". Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown's original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus -- the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you'd think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it's something altogether different.   This is something that you need to realise -- the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that's all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, "Good Rockin' Tonight" is absolutely in the Diddley corner.   But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market.   And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he'd made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did -- cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown's song:   [excerpt from "Good Rocking Tonight" by Wynonie Harris]   There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those "hoy hoy" vocals we just heard, which weren't part of Roy Brown's original. That's a line which comes from "The Honeydripper", another massively important R&B record.  Harris also included a different instrumental introduction -- playing "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown's song.    Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it's for that reason that Wynonie Harris' version of the song, not Roy Brown's original, is the one that people call "the first rock and roll record".    Other than those changes, Harris' version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown's version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who'd just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song.   And "Good Rocking Tonight", in Harris' version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown's version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris' was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market.   Harris' version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of "Good Rockin' Tonight". Harris himself recorded a sequel, "All She Wants to Do is Rock", but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title.  There was Roy Brown's own sequel, "Rockin' at Midnight":   [Excerpt "Rockin' at Midnight" by Roy Brown]   There was Cecil Gant's "We're Gonna Rock"   [Excerpt]   There was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston   [Excerpt]   From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn't escape this new rock craze. Record after record with "rock" in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll.    This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We're still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we're still three years away even from the canonical "first rock and roll record", Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88", 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music.   Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that's based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn't be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But... we've talked before and will talk again about how there's no real "first rock and roll record", but if you insist on looking for one then "Good Rocking Tonight" is as good a candidate as any.   Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians' union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him -- in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract -- and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door -- with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981.   Wynonie Harris wasn't even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn't play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death.   The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we're now finally into the rock era. We'll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more "first rock and roll songs" as well as at some music that still doesn't quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you've ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.

Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Louis Jordan and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan’s music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here’s a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren’t many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We’ve spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven’t we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had “Roll ‘Em Pete”, recorded in 1938. And “Ida Red”, recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll — whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year.   And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place.   If you’ve seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races — well, OK, if you’ve not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it’s not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it’s still a good Marx Brothers film, and it’ll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven’t watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait.   OK, now you’ve definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you’ll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”, and the amazing dancers in that scene.   [Ivy Anderson “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”]   That’s a dance called the Lindy Hop — you might remember that as the dance the “booglie wooglie piggy” did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser — and the people dancing it are Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman’s first Carnegie Hall concert — the one we talked about in episode one — that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later.   [Chick Webb “Stompin’ At The Savoy”]   That’s “Stompin’ at the Savoy” by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers used to dance — there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played.   We’ve seen a few kings of swing so far — Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who’d contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he’d taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He’d been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb’s band enough that he bought the band’s arrangements and used them himself — all of the Goodman band’s biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren’t arrangements he’d bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb’s arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote “Stompin’ at the Savoy”, which we just heard.   There was a rivalry there — Goodman’s band was bigger in every sense, but Webb’s band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb’s Savoy Orchestra and Goodman’s band.   A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players — the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a “his” — this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him — playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played — and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They’d keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner.   And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb’s band set up on one stage, Goodman’s on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening.   And Chick Webb’s band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman’s drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said “I’ll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!”   And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb’s band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren’t really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there’s no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington.   Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important — and it was — the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman’s band, as had Basie’s tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band.   Basie’s band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though — his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers.   [Chick Webb – Ella]   And everyone was in the audience. Goodman’s band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb.   And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb’s lifetime.   Because Webb won — everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb’s band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington.   But everyone also agreed that Basie’s band had got people dancing more. A lot more.   What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said “I don’t give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs ’em? As far as I’m concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too.”   After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb’s band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren’t exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band.   Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you’ve got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you’re going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo — and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted.   But despite all that, Webb’s band still beat them in the audience vote.   That’s how good Webb’s band were, and it’s also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we’ve already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb’s band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan.   [Chick Webb I Can’t Dance I Got Ants In My Pants]   Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it.   He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans — he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb.   In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb’s disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians — he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties.   So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone’s band (you’ll remember him from episode two, he wrote “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). And on December 20, 1938 — ten days before “Roll ‘Em Pete” — Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record “Honey in the Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”.   [excerpt of “Honey in the Bee Ball”]   Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five.   Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we’ll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he’s someone who already had an influence on it, but here’s where he becomes important.   You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music — and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label — the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money.   After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing.   In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She’d been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn’t interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond — the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday’s best-known performance, was “Strange Fruit”, and it was about lynching.   [insert section of Strange Fruit here].   Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it — he’d been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday’s colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday’s label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore.   That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the “song of the century”. And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump’s inauguration, she agreed on one condition — that the song she performed could be “Strange Fruit”. She was disinvited.   As a result of “Strange Fruit”‘s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties — not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of “Flying Home” we looked at towards the end of episode one — and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan — remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan.   Jordan’s new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time — Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying “He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper.”   And while we’ve talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement — while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands.   The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as “jump band” music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton’s band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that’s based on simple chord changes — usually blues changes. And it’s based on the concept of the riff.   We haven’t really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they’re absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It’s an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation — when you “riff on” something, you’re coming up with endless variations and permutations of it.   Riffs were important in swing music — generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You’d have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn’t just about riffs — with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do.   In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that’s it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing — often a boogie rhythm — and you make everything about the energy of the performance.   Jordan’s band did that, and they combined it with Jordan’s own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don’t keep a job like that very long if you’re not good.   Now, Jordan wasn’t good in the same way as Ella was — no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald — but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven’t talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway:   [excerpt from “Reefer Man”]   Jive singers weren’t usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts — when they weren’t just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway.   [Excerpt of “Flat Foot Floogie”]   And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock’s prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music.   Most of Jordan’s songs were written by Jordan himself, although he’s not the credited writer on many of them — rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she’s credited on “Caldonia”, which is a perfect example of Jordan’s comedy jump band style.   [Louis Jordan: Caldonia]   “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” Jordan’s biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 — just after Gabler started producing his records — Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it’s blues or R&B — in fact he’s basically the archetype of a jump blues musician — but remember how we’ve talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner.   And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers — Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as “My Little Buckaroo”, “I’ve Just Gotta Be A Cowboy” and “Ding Dong Polka”, while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote “Dixie Cannonball” and “Muleskinner Blues”.   So “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan’s hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song:   [insert section of Choo Choo Ch’Boogie here]   You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week — and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There’s only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics — “take me right back to the track, Jack” — come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it’s a country and western song.   If there’s any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say “this is where rock and roll really started”. Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan’s 1940s records. And indeed “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced — an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan’s. But we’ll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time.   For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it’s a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you’ll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it — the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what’s necessary. This is a punchy track, and it’s a track that makes you want to dance.   [sax solo excerpt]   And this is music that, because it’s so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this — his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments.   But also, notice the lyrics — “the rhythm of the clickety clack”. It’s that backbeat again, the one we’ve been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains.   That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll — rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we’ll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing “Nobody cares about the railroads any more” or about “the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains”, but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie.   And so next week we’ll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Louis Jordan and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan's music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here's a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren't many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We've spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven't we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had "Roll 'Em Pete", recorded in 1938. And "Ida Red", recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll -- whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year.   And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place.   If you've seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races -- well, OK, if you've not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it's not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it's still a good Marx Brothers film, and it'll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven't watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait.   OK, now you've definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you'll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm", and the amazing dancers in that scene.   [Ivy Anderson "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm"]   That's a dance called the Lindy Hop -- you might remember that as the dance the "booglie wooglie piggy" did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser -- and the people dancing it are Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman's first Carnegie Hall concert -- the one we talked about in episode one -- that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later.   [Chick Webb "Stompin' At The Savoy"]   That's "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey's Lindy Hoppers used to dance -- there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played.   We've seen a few kings of swing so far -- Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who'd contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he'd taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He'd been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb's band enough that he bought the band's arrangements and used them himself -- all of the Goodman band's biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren't arrangements he'd bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb's arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote "Stompin' at the Savoy", which we just heard.   There was a rivalry there -- Goodman's band was bigger in every sense, but Webb's band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb's Savoy Orchestra and Goodman's band.   A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players -- the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a "his" -- this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him -- playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played -- and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They'd keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner.   And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb's band set up on one stage, Goodman's on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening.   And Chick Webb's band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman's drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said "I'll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!"   And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb's band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren't really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there's no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington.   Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important -- and it was -- the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman's band, as had Basie's tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band.   Basie's band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though -- his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers.   [Chick Webb – Ella]   And everyone was in the audience. Goodman's band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb.   And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb's lifetime.   Because Webb won -- everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb's band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington.   But everyone also agreed that Basie's band had got people dancing more. A lot more.   What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey's Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said "I don't give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs 'em? As far as I'm concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too."   After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb's band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren't exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band.   Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you've got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you're going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo -- and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted.   But despite all that, Webb's band still beat them in the audience vote.   That's how good Webb's band were, and it's also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we've already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb's band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan.   [Chick Webb I Can't Dance I Got Ants In My Pants]   Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it.   He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans -- he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb.   In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb's disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians -- he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties.   So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone's band (you'll remember him from episode two, he wrote "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"). And on December 20, 1938 -- ten days before "Roll 'Em Pete" -- Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record "Honey in the Bee Ball" and "Barnacle Bill the Sailor".   [excerpt of "Honey in the Bee Ball"]   Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five.   Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we'll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he's someone who already had an influence on it, but here's where he becomes important.   You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music -- and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label -- the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money.   After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing.   In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She'd been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn't interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond -- the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday's best-known performance, was "Strange Fruit", and it was about lynching.   [insert section of Strange Fruit here].   Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it -- he'd been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday's colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday's label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore.   That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the "song of the century". And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump's inauguration, she agreed on one condition -- that the song she performed could be "Strange Fruit". She was disinvited.   As a result of "Strange Fruit"'s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties -- not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of "Flying Home" we looked at towards the end of episode one -- and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan -- remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan.   Jordan's new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time -- Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying "He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper."   And while we've talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement -- while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands.   The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as "jump band" music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton's band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that's based on simple chord changes -- usually blues changes. And it's based on the concept of the riff.   We haven't really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they're absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It's an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation -- when you "riff on" something, you're coming up with endless variations and permutations of it.   Riffs were important in swing music -- generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You'd have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn't just about riffs -- with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do.   In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that's it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing -- often a boogie rhythm -- and you make everything about the energy of the performance.   Jordan's band did that, and they combined it with Jordan's own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don't keep a job like that very long if you're not good.   Now, Jordan wasn't good in the same way as Ella was -- no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald -- but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven't talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway:   [excerpt from "Reefer Man"]   Jive singers weren't usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts -- when they weren't just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway.   [Excerpt of "Flat Foot Floogie"]   And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock's prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music.   Most of Jordan's songs were written by Jordan himself, although he's not the credited writer on many of them -- rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she's credited on "Caldonia", which is a perfect example of Jordan's comedy jump band style.   [Louis Jordan: Caldonia]   "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," Jordan's biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 -- just after Gabler started producing his records -- Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it's blues or R&B -- in fact he's basically the archetype of a jump blues musician -- but remember how we've talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner.   And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers -- Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as "My Little Buckaroo", "I've Just Gotta Be A Cowboy" and "Ding Dong Polka", while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote "Dixie Cannonball" and "Muleskinner Blues".   So "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan's hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song:   [insert section of Choo Choo Ch'Boogie here]   You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week -- and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There's only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics -- "take me right back to the track, Jack" -- come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it's a country and western song.   If there's any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say "this is where rock and roll really started". Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan's 1940s records. And indeed "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced -- an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan's. But we'll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time.   For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it's a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you'll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it -- the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what's necessary. This is a punchy track, and it's a track that makes you want to dance.   [sax solo excerpt]   And this is music that, because it's so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this -- his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments.   But also, notice the lyrics -- "the rhythm of the clickety clack". It's that backbeat again, the one we've been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains.   That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll -- rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we'll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing "Nobody cares about the railroads any more" or about "the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains", but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people's minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch'boogie.   And so next week we'll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

1939 was a great year for the Count Basie orchestra. This was the last year of their three year contract with Decca records where they would record many of their hits. He still had Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Jimmy Rushing and other original members in the band. He also had a great female vocalist in the band named Helen Humes. I have been listening to the Count Basie band since I was a teenage as my father had some Basie lps in his collection. I hope you enjoy this look at one recording year in the history of one of the greatest swing bands in history - the great Count Basie Orchestra. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

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Louis Armstrong is on Don’s playlist for this week’s Radio Munson, along with the Boswell Sisters, Jimmy Rushing, stride pianist Jeff Barnhart, Harry James, Jane Monheit, Erroll Garner and more.

Cuatro grabaciones de/con Jimmy Rushing entre 1959 y 1961 suenan en la entrega 314 de HDO. Rushing Lullabies (1959), Jimmy Rushing And The Smith Girls – Bessie – Clara – Mamie & Trixie (The Songs They Made Famous) (1960), The Dave Brubeck Quartet Featuring Jimmy Rushing – Brubeck & Rushing (1960), y Basie’s Basement (1959). Como guinda del pastel, la interpretación de “I Left My Baby” que aparecía en el documental y grabación The Sound Of Jazz (1958). Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2017 HDO es un podcast editado, presentado y producido por Pachi Tapiz.

Songs include: Runnin Wild, You Run Your Mouth, A Hit and Run Affair, Running a Temperature, Run Little Rabbit and You Can't Run Away From Love Tonight. Musicians include: Josh White, Jimmy Rushing, Benny Goodman, Thomas "Fats' Waller, Stan Getz, Dick Powell and Tommy Dorsey.

Standing 6’ 5” 300 pounds, Sugaray Rayford is a formidable force. Critics consider Sugaray Rayford to be one of the greatest and last blues shouters; in the same league, as: Big Mama Thornton, Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner. Rarely does a singer appear carrying within him the gift of universal appeal that towers above tastes and trends. Grammy Award nominated, Sugaray Rayford is such an artist. Nominated for BB King Entertainer of the year multiple times.

Part three of Swing That Music has a lot of hits from the golden age of the big bands plus three songs that were unknown to me until I listened to this set. Billie Holliday was a member of the Count Basie Orchestra from March 1937 until February 1938. During this time she was not on any of the studio recordings made by the Basie band. It was a simple explanation - she was under contract to Brunswick and Basie to Decca records. But someone recorded some of their performances off the radio and we have three songs in this set. Also, we have Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie and Anita O'Day with Gene Krupa. I hope you enjoy this set and thank you for listening. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

Entrega especial de HDO, en la que escuchamos al cantante Jimmy Rushing en tres grabaciones de la década de los años 50: Listen To The Blues (1955), The Jazz Odissey Of James Rushing Esq (1957, junto a la orquesta de Buck Clayton), y Little Jimmy Rushing and the Big Brass (1958, con la orquesta de Jimmy Rushing). Esta entrega va con una dedicatoria a Rober Portu. Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2017 HDO es un podcast editado, presentado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. Toda la información de HDO 235 en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=29229. Toda la información de HDO en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=13298

Highlights  from the Armed Forces Radio show, Jubilee. Artists include: Count Basie, Lena Horne, Jimmy Rushing, Harry James, Tampa Red, Helen Humes and Louis Armstrong. Music includes: Ain't Misbehavin, Lady Be Good, Perdido, I'll Be Up Again Someday, Sho Sho Baby and Honeysuckle Rose. 

As we wind up Black Histoy Month on the program today, we are going highlight four African-American male vocalists who sang with the big bands. The four singers are Jimmy Rushing, Louis Jordan, Billy Eckstein, and The Mills Brothers. There is some great music today and we'll also learn a little bit about their careers. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbash.libsyn.com