Podcast appearances and mentions of john swenson

In this special episode of the Windy City Historians we revisit our discussion of Jean Nicolet in late historian John Swenson's last interview.

The Troubled Nation gathers at Snake & Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge to celebrate the milestone, as guests and supporters join Manny and René to reminisce about the first 200 episodes and look forward to the future. The Struggle Continues! Topics include a French Quarter Fest recap, Earth Day, the Soul Bowl, Jude Acers, Sidney Smith, the Youngbloods, ‘60s music festivals, Bill Graham, chess with Jamie Foxx, Ouija boards, a ghost story, a favorite episode, Doug Belote, Chris Rose, common sense, Putin, Gina Phillips, new sculptures, Chris Champagne, city politics, Carlo Nuccio, the NFL draft, online gambling, the Saints’ future, John Wayne, big announcements, Dave Clements, Jeff Treffinger, good hair, a patio upgrade, scams, a junior prom, Craig Yokum, Dave Turgeon/Dee Slut, John Swenson, Michael Deas, Natasha Sanchez, art school, Pratt Institute, “Art School Confidential,” starving artists, Renoir, a multimedia world tour, Suzanne Charbonnet, Tony Green, Rob Rothman, a car accident, Charity Hospital, an orchid, Reese’s candy, Malort, and much more. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break music: "Red Cadillac" from "Hope Is Not For The Weak," "This Is About This" and "Orbit Of Blame" from "This Is About This" by the Geraniums Outro music: "Sensible Shoes" from "Little Houses In Space" by the Geraniums Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Shirts here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram Iguanas Tour Dates René Coman Facebook Jude Acers Facebook Sidney Smith Facebook Gina Phillips Facebook Chris Champagne Facebook Snake and Jake's Facebook Jeff Treffinger Facebook Michael Deas Facebook Natasha Sanchez Facebook Suzanne Charbonnet Facebook

In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century.Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties.After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw.Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops.The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.

In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century. Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties. After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw. Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops. The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network. Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century.Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties.After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw.Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops.The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.

In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century. Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties. After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw. Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops. The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network. Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.

In this episode we welcome the great blues & country writer Tony Russell, who talks about his new Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records — and the joys of the original Americana sound from the '20s to the '40s. Tony also talks us through his writing career from the late '60s to the present, with a particular nod to a 1972 Cream piece about B.B. King.The focus on the "Old-Time" country of Fiddlin' John Carson & Uncle Dave Macon carries through to discussion of those compelling revivalists Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, big faves of the RBP crew — and then to clips we hear from a 1983 audio interview with Phil Everly of peerless country-pop harmonists the Everly Brothers. Phil talks about the strained relationship with brother Don and the prospect of the Everlys reunion that happened in the fall of that year.For those less smitten by Appalachia and "high lonesome" close-harmony singing, there are heartfelt farewells to roots reggae icon Bunny Wailer & trad-jazzer turned "Father of British R&B" Chris Barber, both of whom were lost to the music world last week. There's effusive appreciation of the Wailers co-founder's classic 1976 solo debut Blackheart Man, while RBP's co-founder Martin Colyer pitches in with reminiscences of his uncle Ken's bandmate Barber.Mark talks us through his highlights from recent additions to the RBP Library, including the great Derek Taylor holding forth on the Stones' drug bust in 1967 and the recently-departed Chick Corea discussing his Return To Forever group with Zoo World's John Swenson in 1974. Barney namechecks a Kandia Crazy Horse hymn to the L.A. Canyons from 2009 and Jasper rounds things off with remarks on Danger Mouse's Rome project, from 2011, and London MC Sway's 2006 album This is My Demo.Many thanks to special guest Tony Russell, whose new book Rural Rhythm is published by OUP and available now.Pieces discussed: Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, B.B. King, Gillian Welch, Gillian Welch, Phil Everly, Bunny Wailer, The Wailers, Chris Barber, Chris Barber, Ben Webster, Peter Green, Curtis Mayfield, Roky Erickson, Rolling Stones, Chick Corea, The Time, L.L. Cool J, L.A. Canyons, Dave Edmunds, Valerie June, Sway and Danger Mouse.

In this episode we welcome the great blues & country writer Tony Russell, who talks about his new Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records — and the joys of the original Americana sound from the '20s to the '40s. Tony also talks us through his writing career from the late '60s to the present, with a particular nod to a 1972 Cream piece about B.B. King.The focus on the "Old-Time" country of Fiddlin' John Carson & Uncle Dave Macon carries through to discussion of those compelling revivalists Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, big faves of the RBP crew — and then to clips we hear from a 1983 audio interview with Phil Everly of peerless country-pop harmonists the Everly Brothers. Phil talks about the strained relationship with brother Don and the prospect of the Everlys reunion that happened in the fall of that year.For those less smitten by Appalachia and "high lonesome" close-harmony singing, there are heartfelt farewells to roots reggae icon Bunny Wailer & trad-jazzer turned "Father of British R&B" Chris Barber, both of whom were lost to the music world last week. There's effusive appreciation of the Wailers co-founder's classic 1976 solo debut Blackheart Man, while RBP's co-founder Martin Colyer pitches in with reminiscences of his uncle Ken's bandmate Barber.Mark talks us through his highlights from recent additions to the RBP Library, including the great Derek Taylor holding forth on the Stones' drug bust in 1967 and the recently-departed Chick Corea discussing his Return To Forever group with Zoo World's John Swenson in 1974. Barney namechecks a Kandia Crazy Horse hymn to the L.A. Canyons from 2009 and Jasper rounds things off with remarks on Danger Mouse's Rome project, from 2011, and London MC Sway's 2006 album This is My Demo.Many thanks to special guest Tony Russell, whose new book Rural Rhythm is published by OUP and available now. Pieces discussed: Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, B.B. King, Gillian Welch, Gillian Welch, Phil Everly, Bunny Wailer, The Wailers, Chris Barber, Chris Barber, Ben Webster, Peter Green, Curtis Mayfield, Roky Erickson, Rolling Stones, Chick Corea, The Time, L.L. Cool J, L.A. Canyons, Dave Edmunds, Valerie June, Sway and Danger Mouse.

In this episode we welcome the great blues & country writer Tony Russell, who talks about his new Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records — and the joys of the original Americana sound from the '20s to the '40s. Tony also talks us through his writing career from the late '60s to the present, with a particular nod to a 1972 Cream piece about B.B. King. The focus on the "Old-Time" country of Fiddlin' John Carson & Uncle Dave Macon carries through to discussion of those compelling revivalists Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, big faves of the RBP crew — and then to clips we hear from a 1983 audio interview with Phil Everly of peerless country-pop harmonists the Everly Brothers. Phil talks about the strained relationship with brother Don and the prospect of the Everlys reunion that happened in the fall of that year. For those less smitten by Appalachia and "high lonesome" close-harmony singing, there are heartfelt farewells to roots reggae icon Bunny Wailer & trad-jazzer turned "Father of British R&B" Chris Barber, both of whom were lost to the music world last week. There's effusive appreciation of the Wailers co-founder's classic 1976 solo debut Blackheart Man, while RBP's co-founder Martin Colyer pitches in with reminiscences of his uncle Ken's bandmate Barber. Mark talks us through his highlights from recent additions to the RBP Library, including the great Derek Taylor holding forth on the Stones' drug bust in 1967 and the recently-departed Chick Corea discussing his Return To Forever group with Zoo World's John Swenson in 1974. Barney namechecks a Kandia Crazy Horse hymn to the L.A. Canyons from 2009 and Jasper rounds things off with remarks on Danger Mouse's Rome project, from 2011, and London MC Sway's 2006 album This is My Demo. Many thanks to special guest Tony Russell, whose new book Rural Rhythm is published by OUP and available now. Pieces discussed: Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, B.B. King, Gillian Welch, Gillian Welch, Phil Everly, Bunny Wailer, The Wailers, Chris Barber, Chris Barber, Ben Webster, Peter Green, Curtis Mayfield, Roky Erickson, Rolling Stones, Chick Corea, The Time, L.L. Cool J, L.A. Canyons, Dave Edmunds, Valerie June, Sway and Danger Mouse.

In this episode we welcome the great blues & country writer Tony Russell, who talks about his new Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records — and the joys of the original Americana sound from the '20s to the '40s. Tony also talks us through his writing career from the late '60s to the present, with a particular nod to a 1972 Cream piece about B.B. King. The focus on the "Old-Time" country of Fiddlin' John Carson & Uncle Dave Macon carries through to discussion of those compelling revivalists Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, big faves of the RBP crew — and then to clips we hear from a 1983 audio interview with Phil Everly of peerless country-pop harmonists the Everly Brothers. Phil talks about the strained relationship with brother Don and the prospect of the Everlys reunion that happened in the fall of that year. For those less smitten by Appalachia and "high lonesome" close-harmony singing, there are heartfelt farewells to roots reggae icon Bunny Wailer & trad-jazzer turned "Father of British R&B" Chris Barber, both of whom were lost to the music world last week. There's effusive appreciation of the Wailers co-founder's classic 1976 solo debut Blackheart Man, while RBP's co-founder Martin Colyer pitches in with reminiscences of his uncle Ken's bandmate Barber. Mark talks us through his highlights from recent additions to the RBP Library, including the great Derek Taylor holding forth on the Stones' drug bust in 1967 and the recently-departed Chick Corea discussing his Return To Forever group with Zoo World's John Swenson in 1974. Barney namechecks a Kandia Crazy Horse hymn to the L.A. Canyons from 2009 and Jasper rounds things off with remarks on Danger Mouse's Rome project, from 2011, and London MC Sway's 2006 album This is My Demo. Many thanks to special guest Tony Russell, whose new book Rural Rhythm is published by OUP and available now. Pieces discussed: Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, B.B. King, Gillian Welch, Gillian Welch, Phil Everly, Bunny Wailer, The Wailers, Chris Barber, Chris Barber, Ben Webster, Peter Green, Curtis Mayfield, Roky Erickson, Rolling Stones, Chick Corea, The Time, L.L. Cool J, L.A. Canyons, Dave Edmunds, Valerie June, Sway and Danger Mouse.

Paul Sanchez, New Orleans Best Songwriter Paul Sanchez is the best songwriter in New Orleans. He's been writing songs and telling stories since he was six years old. Join us as we talk about New Orleans, music and storytelling. Learn about the earliest days of Paul's former band Cowboy Mouth, his connection to Steven Soderbergh, and who has the best singing voice in New Orleans. This interview first aired in October 2016. My interview skills have improved since then, but listening to this one today made me smile. I hope it brings joy to you as well. Give it a listen then check out Paul's music online. His first solo release was Jet, Black and Jealous (1992). It's still one of my favorite albums by any singer songwriter. Previous Episodes Mentioned Mardi Gras Indians - Episode #13 Beyond Bourbon Street Sponsors Two Chicks Walking Tours If you love New Orleans, you’ve probably wandered through the Garden District. It is beautiful, but it really comes to life when you have a guide who can tell you about the history and about the people who live there. On a Two Chicks Walking tour you learn about the architecture, the residents and more. You also get to tour Lafayette Cemetery, just across the street from Commander’s Palace. Two Chicks keeps their tour groups small and offers a more intimate experience than most. You’ll have time to ask your questions and really walk away getting an insider’s perspective of the Garden District. Two Chicks also offers tours of St. Louis Cemetery #1 and the Ladies of the Night tour. Whatever you choose, know you will be in great hands and will have a wonderful time. Use code BEYOND and save 15%. twochickswalkingtours.com   Liz Wood Realty Have you decided to move to New Orleans? If so, let Liz Wood and her team over at Liz Wood Realty help you find the right place. They can help whether you plan to rent or purchase the home of your dreams! New Orleans is a terrific city, but choosing the neighborhood that’s the best fit for you can be overwhelming. Liz makes the process fun and easy. Reach out to Liz at lizwoodrealty.com and make your dream of living in New Orleans a reality! Several members of our community have done just that and are thrilled with their new homes! You will be, too! LizWoodRealty.com   The Old 77 Hotel and Chandlery When you're ready to make your plans to visit New Orleans, you'll need a place to stay! The Old 77 is ideally situated in the Warehouse District, just three blocks from the French Quarter. It features a variety of pet-friendly rooms, the award-winning Compere Lapin restaurant, and more. You'll love the location, the rooms, and the food, but the details and the service are what you'll fall in love with! To book your room, click here or use code BBOLD77 to save 25% off their regular rates. Thank You Thanks to Paul Sanchez for being a guest on the podcast. I could listen to his stories for days. Luckily, we all can through his music. Thanks also to Joel Sharpton from Pro Podcasting Services for being the intro voice of the Beyond Bourbon Street podcast. Resources If you would like to listen to Paul's music, and/or purchase a CD or an album (yes!), here are several sources. Louisiana Music Factory: shop online or visit Louisiana Music Factory in person on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. Online: Find Paul's music on iTunes or Amazon Music. Much of his work is also available at PaulSanchez.com. Threadhead Cultural Foundation - the Threadheads have funded the work of more than 100 artists since they began. Here's a link to a recent print interview with Paul in Offbeat Magazine by John Swenson. In it, Paul talks about his recent health challenges, his career in music, and a discovery about his family's history. Subscribe to the Podcast If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you do enjoy listening, please share Beyond Bourbon Street with someone who shares our love of New Orleans. Support Us on Patreon Would you like to help us continue to create the content you love? If so, join the Super Krewe by becoming a financial supporter. Your monthly support will help us grow, and will provide you with exclusive content, early access to ticketed events, and more. If you would like to join the Super Krewe, check out our Patreon page at patreon.com/beyondbourbonst. Contact Us Got an idea for an episode, have some feedback or just want to say hi? Leave us a message at 504-475-7632 or send an email to mark@beyondbourbonst.com. Thanks for listening! Mark  

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines settler as, "a person who goes to live in a new place where usually there are few or no people". Native Americans have lived in the greater Chicago area for approximately 10,000 years dating back to the last ice age. Dependent on long lost oral histories we have no clear records of the future city's earliest peoples, though archeological efforts and early French documents seem to indicate no native villages existed within today's Chicago city limits. There have been significant native villages in the suburbs surrounding Chicago, but no evidence of native settlement on the Chicago River has ever come to light. The last seven episodes of the Windy City Historians Podcast has attempted to relate the first hundred plus years of Chicago's earliest recorded history from the first westerners to pass through the area; be it Nicolet somewhere between 1628 and 1634 or Jolliet and Marquette in 1673. We now unveil this story of Chicago's very first settler connecting us to the permanent and continuous settlement of the City of Chicago. This man, a man of color, and his family has long been swept under the rug while the trader and opportunist John Kinzie was held up as the town's founder, a man we can best describe as Chicago's first scoundrel. We hope you will enjoy this in depth conversation with historians John Swenson and professor Courtney Pierre Joseph Ph.D. relating the life, times, and impact the very first settler made on the site and city that would follow in his footsteps. This is the story of the trader, gentleman farmer, and Chicago's founder -- Jean Baptiste Point de Sable. Mr. Point de Sable, and yes, that is the proper French spelling of his full surname, is a fascinating character we hope you will enjoy learning about as much as we have. Patrick McBriarty & Dr. Courtney JosephHistorian John SwensonDr. Courtney Joseph & Chris LynchBust of Point de Sable at the DuSable MuseumFrench Villages in Illinois from the 1778 Hutchins' Map "Plan des differents Villages Francois dans le Pays des Illynois" Links to Research and History Documents Early Chicago, by Ulrich Danckers & Jane Meredith, 1999. See also the website: https://earlychicago.com/"The DuSable Myth", by John Swenson, Chicago Reader, August 1, 2002.British Trader John Orillat (1733-1779) of Montreal "the Rockefeller" of Canada in his dayChicago's Authentic Founder by Marc RosierWauban by Juliette Kinzie (1806-1870)George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) who lead American militia in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois during the Revolutionary War against the British.Battle of Fallen TimbersTranscribed Treaty of Greenville of 1795Images of the original Treaty of Greenville of 1795Jay Treaty of 1794Alexander Robinson "The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration", by Isabel Wilkerson, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016. Cahokia is one of Illinois' large towns when it was a part of the Indiana TerritoryThe Defender by Ethan MichaeliDuSable Museum of African-American Art at 740 East 56th Place, Chicago, Illinois 60637

Released Friday, May 31, 2019 - What's in a name? "Urbs in Horto" or as translated from Latin "City in the Garden" is the motto on the seal of the City of Chicago, which nicely ties together the third interview with historian and retired attorney John Swenson. Swenson presents the final and most amazing piece of early Chicago history revealing the details of this ancient place called Chicagoua and the platform mound two-leagues from the Chicagoua Portage, the area's earliest known civic and cultural center some 40 miles from today's downtown Chicago! We visit the mound, twice, and interview Adler Planetarium Astronomer Mark Hammergren regarding the astronomical significance of the mound, and learn some fascinating insights into Chicago's ancient culture and peoples. This brand-new history and discovery grew out of Swenson's passion for horticulture, history, and etymology. His initial dig into Chicago's origin story and the wild allium the city was named for has grown into an entirely new landscape for Chicago history, the City in the Garden and hence the name of our third Episode: "Urbs in Horto?" PREVIEW OF EPISODE 3: Urbs in Horto? Historian John SwensonMound at Spirit Trail ParkAstronomer Mark HammergrenRamps at the Daley Center farmers market in Downtown Chicago

Listening to the first episode you learned the ground-breaking, new story of Chicago's discovery and who truly was the first European to pass through Chicago.  In this second part of our interview with historian John Swenson, he says, "if you know where the portage is, then Marquette tells you where he was," and that is place the Indians called "Chicagoua."  And this place Chicagoua has nothing to do with the city of today.  Adding the account of Henri Joutel (La Salle's chronicler) he confirms where this place is. The Windy City Historian's interview with retired attorney and historian John Swenson will make Chicago history.    The Father Marquette Map 1673 Links to Research and History Documents In the second Episode - The Place Called Chicagoua we continue our interview with retired lawyer and historian John Swenson about the place the Indians called Chicagoua. Below are links to historic items we discussed and some additional relevant research for those interested in a deeper dive into the history. Franquelin Map of Louisiana of 1684There are several terms on the Franquelin map are helpful to know:Chicagoumeaman - refers to the northern portage route of today's Chicago River to Mud Lake (or Oak Point Lake) to the Des Plains River and the literal translation from Kaskaskian (an Algonquin dialect) is "false Chicago" for Native Americans this river was not the way to Chicagoua.Shiskikmoaskiki - refers to the Des Plains River and the literal translation from Kaskaskian (an Algonquin dialect) is the "pissing tree" referring to the swamp maples that were native to the banks of this river that could be tapped to make maple syrup.Makaregemou - refers to the Calumet and Little Calumet Rivers and the literal translation from Kaskaskian (an Algonquin dialect) is "crooked river" due to its meandering course and many tributaries.Marquette's Journal in the Jesuit RelationsHenri Joutel's Account - A Journal of the Last Voyage Perform'd by Monfr. de la Salle, written in French by Monsieur Joutel, first translation by Melville B. Anderson 1896See our website page for Episode 1 - Who Was First? for additional links, historic references, and new maps of the northern and southern portage routes commissioned by the Windy City Historians. (These maps are copyrighted for use or republishing please contact info@WindyCityHistorians.com.)

  Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print — one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post — it’s very good on the facts — but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. It’s what everyone wants, and it’s what they’ve been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that? Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Imagine that it’s a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next? For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called “Rock Around the Clock”. It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song’s two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley’s producer, didn’t want Haley to record it — to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he’d brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song. According to John Swenson’s biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn’t get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as “Rock Around the Clock” being very derivative. In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris’ “Around the Clock Blues”. Indeed, even the title “Rock Around the Clock” had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer: [excerpt “Rock Around the Clock”: Hal Singer and Orchestra] So, “Rock Around the Clock” was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller’s reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn’t like he was missing out on anything special, was it? After “Rock the Joint” and “Crazy Man Crazy”, Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but… nothing happened. He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren’t following up on the clear direction he’d set with those singles. Instead he seemed to be flailing around, recording cover versions of recent country hits, or remakes of older songs like “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. None of his follow-ups to “Crazy Man Crazy” did anything at all in the charts, and it looked for a while that he was going to be a one-hit wonder, and getting to number fifteen in the charts was going to be his highest achievement. But then, something happened — Bill Haley quit Essex Records, the label that had led him to become a rockabilly performer in the first place, and signed with Decca. And there his producer was Milt Gabler. Decca was in an interesting position in 1954, one which listeners to this podcast may not quite appreciate. You might remember that we’ve mentioned Decca quite a few times over the first few months of this podcast. That’s because in the 1940s, Decca was the only major label to sign any of the proto-rock artists we’ve talked about. In the late forties, Decca had Lucky Millinder, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, and the Mills Brothers on its roster. It also had a number of country artists who contributed a lot to the hillbilly boogie sound — people like Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, and more. But Decca was the *only* one of the major labels to sign up acts like this. The major labels were, as we’ve discussed, going mostly for a white middle-class market that wanted Doris Day and Tony Bennett — not that there’s anything wrong with Doris Day or Tony Bennett — and indeed Decca had plenty of its own acts like that too, and *mostly* dealt in that sort of music. But any artist that was working in those styles that *wasn’t* signed to Decca had to sign to tiny independent labels. And those independent labels set up their own distribution networks, which went to shops that specialised in the black or hillbilly markets. And so those speciality shops eventually just started buying from the indie distributors, and didn’t buy from the major labels at all — since Decca was the only one they’d been buying from anyway, before the indies came along. And this caused problems for a lot of Decca’s artists. The reason that Louis Jordan, say, was so big was that he’d been selling both to the R&B market — since he was, after all, an R&B artist, and one of the best — and to the pop market, because he was on a major label. You sell to both those markets, and you’d sell to a *lot* of people — the casual record buyer market was much larger than the market for speciality genres, while the speciality genre audience was loyal and would buy everything in the styles it liked. But if you were only selling to the Doris Day buyers, and not to the people who liked honking saxophones and went out of their way to buy them, then your honking-saxophone records were not going to do wonderfully in sales. This change in the distribution model of records is one of the two reasons that all the artists we talked about in the first few episodes had a catastrophic drop in their sales in the early fifties. We already talked about the other reason in the episode on “Crazy Man Crazy”, but as a reminder, when the radio stations switched to playing forty-fives, they threw out their old seventy-eights. That meant that if you were one of those Decca artists, you simultaneously lost all the radio play for your old singles — because the radio stations had chucked out their copies — and stopped having new hits because the distribution model had changed under your feet. And so pretty much all Decca’s roster of rhythm and blues or country hitmakers had lost their hit potential, all at the same time. But Decca still had Milt Gabler. We talked about Milt Gabler right back at the start of this series. He was the one who produced Lionel Hampton’s version of “Flying Home”, the one with the Ilinois Jacquet sax solo, and who produced “Strange Fruit” and most of Louis Jordan’s records and the Ink Spots’ hits. He’d been the one who put Sister Rosetta Tharpe together with pianist Sammy Price. He was largely — almost solely — responsible for the difference between Decca’s roster and that of the other major labels, and he still wanted to carry on making records in the styles he loved. But to do that, he had to find a way to sell them to the pop audience. And Bill Haley seemed like someone who could appeal to that audience. Indeed, Haley already *had* appealed to that audience once, with “Crazy Man Crazy”, and if he could do it once he could do it again. Bill Haley’s style was not very like most of the music Milt Gabler had been making — Gabler was, after all, a serious jazz fanatic — but over recent months Haley’s style had been drifting closer and closer to the sort of thing Gabler was doing. In fact, Gabler saw a way to make him even more successful, by pushing the similarity to Louis Jordan, which had already been apparent in some of Haley’s earlier records. And so the group were in the studio to record what was intended to be Bill Haley and the Comets’ latest hit, “Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town”. [excerpt: Bill Haley “Thirteen Women”] We haven’t talked enough about how much nuclear paranoia was fuelling the popular culture of the early 1950s. Remember, when this record was made, the first atomic bombs had only been dropped eight and a half years earlier, and it had been five years since the Russians had revealed that they, too, had an atom bomb. At the time, everyone was absolutely convinced that a nuclear war between America and Russia was not only likely but inevitable — yet at the same time the development of nuclear weapons was also something to be proud of — a great American technological innovation, something that was out of a science fiction film. Both of these things were true, more or less, as far as the American popular imagination went, and this led to a very odd sort of cognitive dissonance. And while it’s not a good idea to put too much weight on the lyrics of “Thirteen Women”, which is, after all, just an attempt at having a novelty hit with a Louis Jordan-style song about having thirteen women to oneself, it is notable that it does reflect that ambiguity. The dream the singer has is that the hydrogen bomb has been dropped and left only fourteen people alive in the whole town — thirteen women plus himself. Now, one might normally think that that was a devastating, horrific, thought, and that it was a prelude to some sort of Threads-esque story of post-apocalyptic terror. In this case, however, it merely becomes an excuse for a bit of casual sexism, as the thirteen women become Haley’s harem and servants, each with their own specified task. Obviously, I’m being a little facetious here. For what it is — a comedy hillbilly boogie that plays on Haley’s genial likeability, “Thirteen Women” is perfectly pleasant, if a little “of its time”. It’s very obviously influenced by Louis Jordan, but that makes sense given that Gabler was Jordan’s producer. Indeed, Gabler was also the one who introduced the H-bomb theme — the original version of the song, by the blues guitarist Dickie Thompson, makes no mention of the bomb or the dream, just treats it as something that happened to him. And, frankly, Thompson’s version is much, much better than Haley’s, and has some truly great guitar playing: [excerpt: Dickie Thompson “Thirteen Women”]  But Thompson’s record is absolutely a blues record, in the same style as people like Guitar Slim or Johnny Guitar Watson. Haley’s record is very different, and while Thompson’s sounds better to modern ears — or at least to my ears — Haley’s was in a style that was massively popular for the time. But it would probably make an unlikely massive hit. And you certainly wouldn’t expect its B-side to become that massive hit. For the B-side, Haley decided to cut that “Rock Around the Clock” song that he’d been offered a year earlier. It might have come back into his mind because, two weeks earlier, another group had released their version of it. Sonny Dae and his Knights were a band from Virginia who had never made a record before — and who never would again — but who had a regular radio spot. “Rock Around the Clock” was their only recorded legacy, and it might have had a chance at being a hit by them with some proper promotion — or maybe not, given the… experimental… nature of the intro: [excerpt Sonny Dae and his Knights: “Rock Around the Clock”] So the single did very little, and now Sonny Dae and his Knights are a footnote. But their release may have reminded Haley of the song, and he recorded his new version in two takes. But the interesting thing is that Haley *didn’t* record the song as it was written, or as the Knights recorded it. Listen again to the melody that Sonny Dae is singing: [short excerpt] Now, let’s listen to Bill Haley singing the same bit [excerpt] That’s a totally different melody. What Haley has done there is change the melody on the original to a melody that is essentially the standard boogie bassline. But I think there’s a specific reason for that. Hank Williams’ very first big hit, remember, was a comedy Western swing song called “Move it on Over”. That song has almost exactly the same melody that Haley is singing for the verse of “Rock Around the Clock” [excerpt of Hank Williams: “Move it On Over”] We know that Haley knew the song, because he later cut his own version of it, so it’s reasonable to assume that this was a very deliberate decision. What Haley and the Comets have done is take the *utterly generic* song “Rock Around the Clock”, and they’ve used it as an excuse to hang every bit of every other song that they know could be a hit on — to create an arrangement that could encapsulate everything about successful music. They kept the basic arrangement and structure they’d worked out for “Rock the Joint” right down to Danny Cedrone playing the same solo note-for-note. Compare “Rock the Joint”‘s solo [excerpt] With “Rock Around the Clock”‘s [excerpt] For the beginning, they came up with a stop-start intro that emphasised the word “rock”: [excerpt] And then, at the end, they used a variant of the riff ending you’d often get in swing songs like “Flying Home”, which one strongly suspects was Gabler’s idea. The Knights did something similar, but only for a couple of bars, in their badly-thought-out solo section. With the Comets, it’s a far more prominent feature of the arrangement. Again, compare “Flying Home”: [riff from “Flying Home”, Benny Goodman] and “Rock Around the Clock”: [riff] This was *wildly* experimental. They were trying this stuff, not with any thought to listenability, but to see what worked. It didn’t matter, no-one was going to hear it. It was something they knocked out in two takes – and the finished version had to be edited together from both of them, because they didn’t have time in the studio to get a decent take down. This was not a record that was destined to have any great success. And, indeed, it didn’t. “Rock Around the Clock” made almost no impact on its original release. It charted, but only in the lower reaches of the chart, and didn’t really register on the public’s consciousness. But Haley and his band continued making records in that style, and their next one, a cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, did rather better, and started rising up the charts quite well. Their version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” — a song which we talked about a bit in episode two, if you want to go back and refresh your memory — was nowhere near as powerful as Turner’s had been. It cleaned up parts of the lyric — though notably not the filthiest lines, presumably because the innuendo in them completely passed both Haley and Gabler by — and imposed a much more conventional structure on it. But while it was a watered-down version of the original song, it was still potent enough that for those who hadn’t heard the original, it was working some sort of magic: [excerpt: “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Bill Haley and his Comets] Haley was a real fan of Turner, and indeed the two men became close friends in later years, and the Comets were Turner’s backing band on one sixties album. But he doesn’t have the power or gravitas in his vocals that Turner did, and the result is rather lightweight. Haley’s cover was recorded the same week that Turner’s version reached number one on the R&B charts, and it’s easy to think of this as another “Sh’Boom” situation, with a white man making a more radio-friendly version of a black musician’s hit. But Haley’s version is not just a straight copy — and not just because of the changes to remove some of the more obviously filthy lines. It’s structured differently, and has a whole different feel to it. This feels to me more like Haley recasting things into his own style than him trying to jump on someone else’s bandwagon, though it’s a more ambiguous case than some. “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” became Bill Haley’s biggest hit so far, going top ten in the pop charts, and both Haley’s version and Turner’s sold a million copies. It looked like Haley was on his way to a reasonable career — not, perhaps, a massive stardom, but selling a lot of records, and doing well in shows. But then everything changed, for Bill Haley and for the world. It was only when a film, “The Blackboard Jungle”, was being made nearly a year after “Rock Around the Clock” was recorded, that the track became important. “Blackboard Jungle” was absolutely not a rock and roll film. It was a film about teenagers and rebellion and so on, yes, but in a pivotal scene when a teacher brings his old jazz records in, in order to bond with the kids, and they smash them and play their own, it’s not rock and roll they’re playing but modern jazz. Stan Kenton is the soundtrack to their rebellion, not anything more rock. But in order to make the film up-to-the-minute, the producers of the film borrowed some records from the record collection of Peter Ford, the teenage son of the film’s star. They wanted to find out what kind of records teenagers were listening to, and he happened to have a copy of the Bill Haley single. They made the decision that this was to be the theme tune to the film, and all of a sudden, everything changed. Everything. Because “The Blackboard Jungle” was a sensation. Probably the best explanation of what it did, and of what “Rock Around the Clock” did as its theme song, is in this quote from Frank Zappa from 1971. “In my days of flaming youth I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up et cetera, was nowhere when I compared it to my high school negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton.” (Again, when Zappa said this, that word was the accepted polite term for black people. Language has evolved since. The quote continues.) “But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching ‘One, Two, Three O’Clock, Four O’Clock Rock…’ It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms, across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the ‘dirty music’ of their lifestyle. (“Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap…and turn the volume all the way down”.) But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn’t tell you to turn it down. I didn’t care if Bill Haley was white or sincere…he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem, and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down.” There were reports of riots in the cinemas, with people slicing up seats with knives in a frenzy as the music played. “Rock Around the Clock” went to number one on the pop charts, but it did more than that. It sold, in total, well over twenty-five million copies as a vinyl single, becoming the best-selling vinyl single in history. When counting compilation albums on which it has appeared, the number of copies of the song that have sold must total in the hundreds of millions. Bill Haley and the Comets had become the biggest act in the world, and for the next couple of years, they would tour constantly, playing to hysterical crowds, and appearing in two films — “Rock Around the Clock” and “Don’t Knock the Rock”. They were worldwide superstars, famous at a level beyond anything imaginable before. But at the same time that everything was going right for “Rock Around the Clock”‘s sales, things were going horribly wrong for everything else in Haley’s life. Ten days after the session for “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, at the end of June 1954, Danny Cedrone, the session guitarist who had played on all Haley’s records, and a close friend of Haley, fell down the stairs and broke his neck, dying instantly. At the end of July, Haley’s baby daughter died suddenly, of cot death. And… there was no follow-up to “Rock Around the Clock”. You *can’t* follow up anything that big — there’s nothing to follow it up with. And Haley’s normal attitude, of scientifically assessing what the kids liked, didn’t work any more either. The kids were screaming at *everything*, because he was the biggest star in the world. The next few records all hit the pop charts, and all got in the top twenty or thirty — they were big hits by most standards, but they weren’t “Rock Around the Clock” big. And then in 1955, the band’s bass player, saxophone player, and drummer quit the band, forming their own group, the Jodimars: [excerpt: the Jodimars: “Well Now Dig This”] Haley soldiered on, however, and the new lineup of the band had another top ten hit in December 1955 — their first in over a year — with “See You Later Alligator”: [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets “See You Later, Alligator”] While that was no “Rock Around the Clock”, it did sell a million copies. But it was a false dawn. The singles after that made the lower reaches of the top thirty, and then the lower reaches of the top one hundred, and then stopped charting altogether. They had one final top thirty hit in 1958, with the rather fabulous “Skinny Minnie”: [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets “Skinny Minnie”] That’s an obvious attempt to copy Larry Williams’ “Bony Moronie”, but also, it’s a really good record. But the follow-up, “Lean Jean”, only reached number sixty, and that was it for Bill Haley and the Comets on the US charts. And that’s usually where people leave the story, assuming Haley was a total failure after this, but that shows the America-centric nature of most rock criticism. In fact, Bill Haley moved to Mexico in 1960. The IRS were after Haley’s money, and he found that he could make money from a Mexican record label, and if it stayed in Mexico, he didn’t have to give his new income to them. He was going through a divorce, and he’d met a Mexican woman who was to become his third wife, and so it just made sense for him to move. And in Mexico, Bill Haley became king of the Twist: [excerpt: Bill Haley y sus Cometas, “Florida Twist”] “Florida Twist” went to number one in Mexico, as did the album of the same name. Indeed, “Florida Twist”, by Bill Haley y sus Cometas, became the biggest-selling single ever up to that point in Mexico. The Comets had their own TV show in Mexico, Orfeón a Go-Go, and made three Spanish-language films in the sixties. They had a string of hits there, and Mexico wasn’t the only place they were having hits. Their “Chick Safari” went to number one in India. A warning before this bit… it’s got a bit of the comedy racism that you would find at the time in too many records: [excerpt “Chick Safari”, Bill Haley and the Comets] And even after his success as a recording artist finally dried up — in the late sixties, not the late fifties like most articles on him assume, Haley and the Comets were still a huge live draw across the world. At a rock revival show in the late sixties at Madison Square Garden, Haley got an eight-and-a-half-minute standing ovation before playing a song. He played Wembley Stadium in 1972 and the Royal Variety Performance in 1979. Haley’s last few years weren’t happy ones — he started behaving erratically shortly after Rudy Pompili, his best friend and saxophone player for over twenty years, died in 1976. He gave up performing for a couple of years — he and Pompilli had always said that if one of them died the other one wouldn’t carry on — and when he came back, he seemed to be behaving oddly and people usually put this down to his alcoholism, and blame *that* on his resentment at his so-called lack of success — forgetting that he had a brain tumour, and that just perhaps that might have led to some of the erraticness. But people let that cast a shadow back over his career, and let his appearance — a bit fat, not in the first flush of youth — convince them that because he didn’t fit with later standards of cool, he was “forgotten” and “overlooked”. Bill Haley died in 1981, just over a year after touring Britain and playing the Royal Variety Performance — a televised event which would regularly get upwards of twenty million viewers. I haven’t been able to find the figures for the 1979 show, but the Royal Variety Performance regularly hit the top of the ratings for the *year* in the seventies and eighties. Bill Haley was gone, yes, but he hadn’t been forgotten. And as long as “Rock Around the Clock” is played, he won’t be. [excerpt: “See You Later Alligator” — “so long, that’s all goodbye”]

  Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. It's what everyone wants, and it's what they've been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that? Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Imagine that it's a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next? For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called "Rock Around the Clock". It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song's two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley's producer, didn't want Haley to record it -- to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he'd brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song. According to John Swenson's biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn't get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as "Rock Around the Clock" being very derivative. In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris' "Around the Clock Blues". Indeed, even the title "Rock Around the Clock" had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer: [excerpt "Rock Around the Clock": Hal Singer and Orchestra] So, "Rock Around the Clock" was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller's reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn't like he was missing out on anything special, was it? After "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy Man Crazy", Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but... nothing happened. He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren't following up on the clear direction he'd set with those singles. Instead he seemed to be flailing around, recording cover versions of recent country hits, or remakes of older songs like "Chattanooga Choo Choo". None of his follow-ups to "Crazy Man Crazy" did anything at all in the charts, and it looked for a while that he was going to be a one-hit wonder, and getting to number fifteen in the charts was going to be his highest achievement. But then, something happened -- Bill Haley quit Essex Records, the label that had led him to become a rockabilly performer in the first place, and signed with Decca. And there his producer was Milt Gabler. Decca was in an interesting position in 1954, one which listeners to this podcast may not quite appreciate. You might remember that we've mentioned Decca quite a few times over the first few months of this podcast. That's because in the 1940s, Decca was the only major label to sign any of the proto-rock artists we've talked about. In the late forties, Decca had Lucky Millinder, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, and the Mills Brothers on its roster. It also had a number of country artists who contributed a lot to the hillbilly boogie sound -- people like Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, and more. But Decca was the *only* one of the major labels to sign up acts like this. The major labels were, as we've discussed, going mostly for a white middle-class market that wanted Doris Day and Tony Bennett -- not that there's anything wrong with Doris Day or Tony Bennett -- and indeed Decca had plenty of its own acts like that too, and *mostly* dealt in that sort of music. But any artist that was working in those styles that *wasn't* signed to Decca had to sign to tiny independent labels. And those independent labels set up their own distribution networks, which went to shops that specialised in the black or hillbilly markets. And so those speciality shops eventually just started buying from the indie distributors, and didn't buy from the major labels at all -- since Decca was the only one they'd been buying from anyway, before the indies came along. And this caused problems for a lot of Decca's artists. The reason that Louis Jordan, say, was so big was that he'd been selling both to the R&B market -- since he was, after all, an R&B artist, and one of the best -- and to the pop market, because he was on a major label. You sell to both those markets, and you'd sell to a *lot* of people -- the casual record buyer market was much larger than the market for speciality genres, while the speciality genre audience was loyal and would buy everything in the styles it liked. But if you were only selling to the Doris Day buyers, and not to the people who liked honking saxophones and went out of their way to buy them, then your honking-saxophone records were not going to do wonderfully in sales. This change in the distribution model of records is one of the two reasons that all the artists we talked about in the first few episodes had a catastrophic drop in their sales in the early fifties. We already talked about the other reason in the episode on "Crazy Man Crazy", but as a reminder, when the radio stations switched to playing forty-fives, they threw out their old seventy-eights. That meant that if you were one of those Decca artists, you simultaneously lost all the radio play for your old singles -- because the radio stations had chucked out their copies -- and stopped having new hits because the distribution model had changed under your feet. And so pretty much all Decca's roster of rhythm and blues or country hitmakers had lost their hit potential, all at the same time. But Decca still had Milt Gabler. We talked about Milt Gabler right back at the start of this series. He was the one who produced Lionel Hampton's version of "Flying Home", the one with the Ilinois Jacquet sax solo, and who produced "Strange Fruit" and most of Louis Jordan's records and the Ink Spots' hits. He'd been the one who put Sister Rosetta Tharpe together with pianist Sammy Price. He was largely -- almost solely -- responsible for the difference between Decca's roster and that of the other major labels, and he still wanted to carry on making records in the styles he loved. But to do that, he had to find a way to sell them to the pop audience. And Bill Haley seemed like someone who could appeal to that audience. Indeed, Haley already *had* appealed to that audience once, with "Crazy Man Crazy", and if he could do it once he could do it again. Bill Haley's style was not very like most of the music Milt Gabler had been making -- Gabler was, after all, a serious jazz fanatic -- but over recent months Haley's style had been drifting closer and closer to the sort of thing Gabler was doing. In fact, Gabler saw a way to make him even more successful, by pushing the similarity to Louis Jordan, which had already been apparent in some of Haley's earlier records. And so the group were in the studio to record what was intended to be Bill Haley and the Comets' latest hit, "Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town". [excerpt: Bill Haley "Thirteen Women"] We haven't talked enough about how much nuclear paranoia was fuelling the popular culture of the early 1950s. Remember, when this record was made, the first atomic bombs had only been dropped eight and a half years earlier, and it had been five years since the Russians had revealed that they, too, had an atom bomb. At the time, everyone was absolutely convinced that a nuclear war between America and Russia was not only likely but inevitable -- yet at the same time the development of nuclear weapons was also something to be proud of -- a great American technological innovation, something that was out of a science fiction film. Both of these things were true, more or less, as far as the American popular imagination went, and this led to a very odd sort of cognitive dissonance. And while it's not a good idea to put too much weight on the lyrics of "Thirteen Women", which is, after all, just an attempt at having a novelty hit with a Louis Jordan-style song about having thirteen women to oneself, it is notable that it does reflect that ambiguity. The dream the singer has is that the hydrogen bomb has been dropped and left only fourteen people alive in the whole town -- thirteen women plus himself. Now, one might normally think that that was a devastating, horrific, thought, and that it was a prelude to some sort of Threads-esque story of post-apocalyptic terror. In this case, however, it merely becomes an excuse for a bit of casual sexism, as the thirteen women become Haley's harem and servants, each with their own specified task. Obviously, I'm being a little facetious here. For what it is -- a comedy hillbilly boogie that plays on Haley's genial likeability, “Thirteen Women” is perfectly pleasant, if a little "of its time". It's very obviously influenced by Louis Jordan, but that makes sense given that Gabler was Jordan's producer. Indeed, Gabler was also the one who introduced the H-bomb theme -- the original version of the song, by the blues guitarist Dickie Thompson, makes no mention of the bomb or the dream, just treats it as something that happened to him. And, frankly, Thompson's version is much, much better than Haley's, and has some truly great guitar playing: [excerpt: Dickie Thompson "Thirteen Women"]  But Thompson's record is absolutely a blues record, in the same style as people like Guitar Slim or Johnny Guitar Watson. Haley's record is very different, and while Thompson's sounds better to modern ears -- or at least to my ears -- Haley's was in a style that was massively popular for the time. But it would probably make an unlikely massive hit. And you certainly wouldn't expect its B-side to become that massive hit. For the B-side, Haley decided to cut that "Rock Around the Clock" song that he'd been offered a year earlier. It might have come back into his mind because, two weeks earlier, another group had released their version of it. Sonny Dae and his Knights were a band from Virginia who had never made a record before -- and who never would again -- but who had a regular radio spot. "Rock Around the Clock" was their only recorded legacy, and it might have had a chance at being a hit by them with some proper promotion -- or maybe not, given the... experimental... nature of the intro: [excerpt Sonny Dae and his Knights: "Rock Around the Clock"] So the single did very little, and now Sonny Dae and his Knights are a footnote. But their release may have reminded Haley of the song, and he recorded his new version in two takes. But the interesting thing is that Haley *didn't* record the song as it was written, or as the Knights recorded it. Listen again to the melody that Sonny Dae is singing: [short excerpt] Now, let's listen to Bill Haley singing the same bit [excerpt] That's a totally different melody. What Haley has done there is change the melody on the original to a melody that is essentially the standard boogie bassline. But I think there's a specific reason for that. Hank Williams' very first big hit, remember, was a comedy Western swing song called "Move it on Over". That song has almost exactly the same melody that Haley is singing for the verse of "Rock Around the Clock" [excerpt of Hank Williams: "Move it On Over"] We know that Haley knew the song, because he later cut his own version of it, so it's reasonable to assume that this was a very deliberate decision. What Haley and the Comets have done is take the *utterly generic* song "Rock Around the Clock", and they've used it as an excuse to hang every bit of every other song that they know could be a hit on -- to create an arrangement that could encapsulate everything about successful music. They kept the basic arrangement and structure they'd worked out for "Rock the Joint" right down to Danny Cedrone playing the same solo note-for-note. Compare "Rock the Joint"'s solo [excerpt] With "Rock Around the Clock"'s [excerpt] For the beginning, they came up with a stop-start intro that emphasised the word "rock": [excerpt] And then, at the end, they used a variant of the riff ending you'd often get in swing songs like "Flying Home", which one strongly suspects was Gabler's idea. The Knights did something similar, but only for a couple of bars, in their badly-thought-out solo section. With the Comets, it's a far more prominent feature of the arrangement. Again, compare "Flying Home": [riff from "Flying Home", Benny Goodman] and "Rock Around the Clock": [riff] This was *wildly* experimental. They were trying this stuff, not with any thought to listenability, but to see what worked. It didn't matter, no-one was going to hear it. It was something they knocked out in two takes – and the finished version had to be edited together from both of them, because they didn't have time in the studio to get a decent take down. This was not a record that was destined to have any great success. And, indeed, it didn't. "Rock Around the Clock" made almost no impact on its original release. It charted, but only in the lower reaches of the chart, and didn't really register on the public's consciousness. But Haley and his band continued making records in that style, and their next one, a cover of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", did rather better, and started rising up the charts quite well. Their version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" -- a song which we talked about a bit in episode two, if you want to go back and refresh your memory -- was nowhere near as powerful as Turner's had been. It cleaned up parts of the lyric -- though notably not the filthiest lines, presumably because the innuendo in them completely passed both Haley and Gabler by -- and imposed a much more conventional structure on it. But while it was a watered-down version of the original song, it was still potent enough that for those who hadn't heard the original, it was working some sort of magic: [excerpt: "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Bill Haley and his Comets] Haley was a real fan of Turner, and indeed the two men became close friends in later years, and the Comets were Turner's backing band on one sixties album. But he doesn't have the power or gravitas in his vocals that Turner did, and the result is rather lightweight. Haley's cover was recorded the same week that Turner's version reached number one on the R&B charts, and it's easy to think of this as another "Sh'Boom" situation, with a white man making a more radio-friendly version of a black musician's hit. But Haley's version is not just a straight copy -- and not just because of the changes to remove some of the more obviously filthy lines. It's structured differently, and has a whole different feel to it. This feels to me more like Haley recasting things into his own style than him trying to jump on someone else's bandwagon, though it's a more ambiguous case than some. "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" became Bill Haley's biggest hit so far, going top ten in the pop charts, and both Haley's version and Turner's sold a million copies. It looked like Haley was on his way to a reasonable career -- not, perhaps, a massive stardom, but selling a lot of records, and doing well in shows. But then everything changed, for Bill Haley and for the world. It was only when a film, "The Blackboard Jungle", was being made nearly a year after "Rock Around the Clock" was recorded, that the track became important. "Blackboard Jungle" was absolutely not a rock and roll film. It was a film about teenagers and rebellion and so on, yes, but in a pivotal scene when a teacher brings his old jazz records in, in order to bond with the kids, and they smash them and play their own, it's not rock and roll they're playing but modern jazz. Stan Kenton is the soundtrack to their rebellion, not anything more rock. But in order to make the film up-to-the-minute, the producers of the film borrowed some records from the record collection of Peter Ford, the teenage son of the film's star. They wanted to find out what kind of records teenagers were listening to, and he happened to have a copy of the Bill Haley single. They made the decision that this was to be the theme tune to the film, and all of a sudden, everything changed. Everything. Because "The Blackboard Jungle" was a sensation. Probably the best explanation of what it did, and of what "Rock Around the Clock" did as its theme song, is in this quote from Frank Zappa from 1971. "In my days of flaming youth I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up et cetera, was nowhere when I compared it to my high school negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin' Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton.” (Again, when Zappa said this, that word was the accepted polite term for black people. Language has evolved since. The quote continues.) “But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching 'One, Two, Three O'Clock, Four O'Clock Rock…' It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms, across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the 'dirty music' of their lifestyle. ("Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap…and turn the volume all the way down".) But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere…he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem, and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down." There were reports of riots in the cinemas, with people slicing up seats with knives in a frenzy as the music played. "Rock Around the Clock" went to number one on the pop charts, but it did more than that. It sold, in total, well over twenty-five million copies as a vinyl single, becoming the best-selling vinyl single in history. When counting compilation albums on which it has appeared, the number of copies of the song that have sold must total in the hundreds of millions. Bill Haley and the Comets had become the biggest act in the world, and for the next couple of years, they would tour constantly, playing to hysterical crowds, and appearing in two films -- "Rock Around the Clock" and "Don't Knock the Rock". They were worldwide superstars, famous at a level beyond anything imaginable before. But at the same time that everything was going right for "Rock Around the Clock"'s sales, things were going horribly wrong for everything else in Haley's life. Ten days after the session for "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", at the end of June 1954, Danny Cedrone, the session guitarist who had played on all Haley's records, and a close friend of Haley, fell down the stairs and broke his neck, dying instantly. At the end of July, Haley's baby daughter died suddenly, of cot death. And... there was no follow-up to "Rock Around the Clock". You *can't* follow up anything that big -- there's nothing to follow it up with. And Haley's normal attitude, of scientifically assessing what the kids liked, didn't work any more either. The kids were screaming at *everything*, because he was the biggest star in the world. The next few records all hit the pop charts, and all got in the top twenty or thirty -- they were big hits by most standards, but they weren't "Rock Around the Clock" big. And then in 1955, the band's bass player, saxophone player, and drummer quit the band, forming their own group, the Jodimars: [excerpt: the Jodimars: "Well Now Dig This"] Haley soldiered on, however, and the new lineup of the band had another top ten hit in December 1955 -- their first in over a year -- with "See You Later Alligator": [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets "See You Later, Alligator"] While that was no "Rock Around the Clock", it did sell a million copies. But it was a false dawn. The singles after that made the lower reaches of the top thirty, and then the lower reaches of the top one hundred, and then stopped charting altogether. They had one final top thirty hit in 1958, with the rather fabulous "Skinny Minnie": [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets "Skinny Minnie"] That's an obvious attempt to copy Larry Williams' "Bony Moronie", but also, it's a really good record. But the follow-up, "Lean Jean", only reached number sixty, and that was it for Bill Haley and the Comets on the US charts. And that's usually where people leave the story, assuming Haley was a total failure after this, but that shows the America-centric nature of most rock criticism. In fact, Bill Haley moved to Mexico in 1960. The IRS were after Haley's money, and he found that he could make money from a Mexican record label, and if it stayed in Mexico, he didn't have to give his new income to them. He was going through a divorce, and he'd met a Mexican woman who was to become his third wife, and so it just made sense for him to move. And in Mexico, Bill Haley became king of the Twist: [excerpt: Bill Haley y sus Cometas, "Florida Twist"] "Florida Twist" went to number one in Mexico, as did the album of the same name. Indeed, "Florida Twist", by Bill Haley y sus Cometas, became the biggest-selling single ever up to that point in Mexico. The Comets had their own TV show in Mexico, Orfeón a Go-Go, and made three Spanish-language films in the sixties. They had a string of hits there, and Mexico wasn't the only place they were having hits. Their "Chick Safari" went to number one in India. A warning before this bit... it's got a bit of the comedy racism that you would find at the time in too many records: [excerpt "Chick Safari", Bill Haley and the Comets] And even after his success as a recording artist finally dried up -- in the late sixties, not the late fifties like most articles on him assume, Haley and the Comets were still a huge live draw across the world. At a rock revival show in the late sixties at Madison Square Garden, Haley got an eight-and-a-half-minute standing ovation before playing a song. He played Wembley Stadium in 1972 and the Royal Variety Performance in 1979. Haley's last few years weren't happy ones -- he started behaving erratically shortly after Rudy Pompili, his best friend and saxophone player for over twenty years, died in 1976. He gave up performing for a couple of years -- he and Pompilli had always said that if one of them died the other one wouldn't carry on -- and when he came back, he seemed to be behaving oddly and people usually put this down to his alcoholism, and blame *that* on his resentment at his so-called lack of success -- forgetting that he had a brain tumour, and that just perhaps that might have led to some of the erraticness. But people let that cast a shadow back over his career, and let his appearance -- a bit fat, not in the first flush of youth -- convince them that because he didn't fit with later standards of cool, he was "forgotten" and "overlooked". Bill Haley died in 1981, just over a year after touring Britain and playing the Royal Variety Performance -- a televised event which would regularly get upwards of twenty million viewers. I haven't been able to find the figures for the 1979 show, but the Royal Variety Performance regularly hit the top of the ratings for the *year* in the seventies and eighties. Bill Haley was gone, yes, but he hadn't been forgotten. And as long as “Rock Around the Clock” is played, he won't be. [excerpt: "See You Later Alligator" -- "so long, that's all goodbye"]

Released Friday, March 29, 2019 - On the 344 Anniversary of Father Marquette getting flooded out of his winter camp in 1675, at the place the Indians called Chicaogua. In real estate it's all about "Location, Location, Location."  So what happens if our Chicago isn't really in Chicago? Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored a land that Native Americans called "Chicagoua" in 1673 and left clues to where this place can be found. It took historian John Swenson over three decades to unravel the mystery of the location of Chicago, and the evidence he found - remarkably - calls into question the story told by most 19th century historians. This first episode chronicles a brand new history for Chicago as co-hosts Chris Lynch and Patrick McBriarty talk with John Swenson sharing a new spin on the European discovery of the Windy City.  You will hear his story of digging into original French manuscripts, early maps, and travel accounts to determine Marquette and Jolliet were not the first western Europeans to the Chicago area.   It is the first of a new and fascinating origin story of this place we call Chicago, in two parts. John Swensonat variousinterviews "Cheagoumema" or "False-Chicago" Map of Northern Portage Route ©Windy City Historians The map to the left illustrates the Northern Chicago Portage Route from Lake Michigan to the Chicago River to Mud Lake and portage to the easterly bend in the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers. This is "Cheagoumema." "Makarigemou" or Crooked River and the "River Chekago" Map of the Southern Portage Route ©Windy City Historians The map at right illustrates the Southern Chicago Portage Route from Lake Michigan to the Calumet and Little Calumet Rivers to Butterfield Creek and portage to Hickory Creek to the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers. This is what early French explorers referred to as the Chicago River. Links to Research & History Documents In this first Episode - Who Was First?  John Swenson makes reference to a variety of historic documents and sources and we offer links below in the order in which they are mentioned. Please note in 17th Century French the "t" is pronounced as with "Jolliet" and "Nicolet," while French pronunciations today do not usually enunciate the "t". The Taunton Map of Nouvelle FranceThe 1632 Maps of Samuel Champlain (1567 - 1635) Eastern half of Nouvelle France (Canada)Western half of Nouvelle France (Canada) Henri Joutel (c. 1643 - c. 1745) accounts from the La Salle Expedition of 1684-1688:A Journal of the Last Voyage Preform'd by Monfr. de la Salle, written in French by Monsieur Joutel, translated by Melville B. Anderson, 1896, "visits Chicago," p. 178-79.   Murder of "La Salle" or Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle near Nacogdoches, Texas in Joutel's journal of La Salle's last voyage, 1684-1687, Appleton P.C. Griffin (1906) p. 150. Isosavage or Ramps or as the French called it "wild-garlic"John Swenson's article on the etymology of Chicago "Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning, and Etymology of a Place Name," by John F. Swenson, Illinois Historical Journal, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Winter 1991) pp. 235-248. Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, Chicago's first non-native settlerTaunton Map of c. 1640Robert Hall citation only: "Rethinking Jean Nicolet's Route to the Ho-Chunks in 1634," by Robert Hall in Theory, Method, and Practice in Modern Archaeology, edited by Robert J. Jeske and Douglas K. Charles, Praeger (2003), Westport, Connecticut, pp. 238-251. Index to Jesuit Relations

  Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Crazy Man Crazy" by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I've excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", but it has everything else.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We've talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name "rock and roll". There's rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We've looked at most of these – and the ones we haven't we'll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven't looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that's the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it's the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it's also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it's the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets' music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn't set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn't a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills' band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt "Blue Yodel (T For Texas)": Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that's the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of "Yodel Your Blues Away" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That's how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn't sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You'd expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like "Foolish Questions". [Excerpt of "Foolish Questions" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley's future career, it's unlikely there'd be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don't really make a dent in country music history, and didn't have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn't even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn't leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his... Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren't Haley's idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley's band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they'd showed up to discover that he didn't have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band's manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn't make much money at first -- they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station's recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio's recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like "Ten Gallon Stetson", and in one case the single wasn't even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show "Make Believe Ballroom", in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet -- in this case aided by the Musicians' Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians' strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels -- especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners -- realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations -- and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming -- and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced "high fidelity" records -- the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn't have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we've talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later -- their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you'd never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn't have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn't. And the time we're talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man -- but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA -- all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren't given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley's country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. "Judge Rhythm's Court" was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of "Shorty the Bailiff". Reeves' theme was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt "Rock the Joint", Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing -- in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown -- and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen's setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn't record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley's earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians' union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn't too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band's success. Haley would try things like turning up the band's amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn't hear themselves talking, they'd be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn't buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn't afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn't work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it's a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist's. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis' records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley's band was "Rocket 88" This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, "Rocket 88" was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn't sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] Obviously it's not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there's the drum sound.... Oh wait, there's no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let's listen again... [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] There are no drums there. It's what's called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I'd better explain that there's some terminological confusion, because "slap bass" is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word "slapback" is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about "rockabilly slapback bass" can end up a bit like "Who's on first?" But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It's used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley's band, and because of the playing style Haley's bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you're playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don't just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you'd never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn't particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley's band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen's version of "Rocket 88" had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston's original, as "the first rock and roll record". As we've said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley's recording makes an attractive candidate – it's the mythical "merging of black R&B with white country music", which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it's the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. "Rocket 88" wasn't that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of "Wabash Cannonball" retitled "Jukebox Cannonball", and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with "Rock the Joint", which had been in Haley's setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves' programme. The original "Rock the Joint" had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris' version of "Good Rockin' Tonight", but it hadn't done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo... [excerpt "Rock the Joint" – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley's early records. He wasn't a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound -- but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after "Rocket 88" but before "Rock the Joint" – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie", would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time -- instead, he didn't record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie" by The Esquire Boys) "Rock the Joint" was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after "Rock the Joint", the problems continued. Haley's next two records were "Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin')" – which was to the tune of "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight?" – and "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush", which was a rewrite of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" as a hillbilly boogie. But "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush" was notable for one reason – it was the first record by "Bill Haley and Haley's Comets", rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley's comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn't pick up on the term "rock and roll" til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn't familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in "Crazy Man Crazy", which became the Comets' first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band's success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn't go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande's count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers' favourite slang expression was "crazy", and so he wrote... [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets' bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it's the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it's the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. "Crazy Man Crazy" is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan's records. With Danny Cedrone's solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn't stay successful very long – he wasn't part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we're talking about in this series, you'll see that they're all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the "lone genius" is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There's a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn't have any kind of peer group or community. They weren't part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we'll see when we return to them in a few weeks...

  Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print — one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post — it’s very good on the facts — but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I’ve excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, but it has everything else.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name “rock and roll”. There’s rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We’ve looked at most of these – and the ones we haven’t we’ll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven’t looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that’s the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it’s the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it’s also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it’s the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets’ music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn’t set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn’t a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills’ band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt “Blue Yodel (T For Texas)”: Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that’s the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of “Yodel Your Blues Away” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That’s how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn’t sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You’d expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like “Foolish Questions”. [Excerpt of “Foolish Questions” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley’s future career, it’s unlikely there’d be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don’t really make a dent in country music history, and didn’t have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn’t even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn’t leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his… Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren’t Haley’s idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley’s band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they’d showed up to discover that he didn’t have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band’s manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn’t make much money at first — they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station’s recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio’s recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like “Ten Gallon Stetson”, and in one case the single wasn’t even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show “Make Believe Ballroom”, in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet — in this case aided by the Musicians’ Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians’ strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels — especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners — realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations — and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming — and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced “high fidelity” records — the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn’t have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we’ve talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later — their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you’d never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn’t have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn’t. And the time we’re talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man — but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA — all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren’t given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley’s country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. “Judge Rhythm’s Court” was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of “Shorty the Bailiff”. Reeves’ theme was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt “Rock the Joint”, Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing — in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown — and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen’s setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn’t record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley’s earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians’ union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn’t too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band’s success. Haley would try things like turning up the band’s amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn’t hear themselves talking, they’d be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn’t buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn’t afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn’t work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it’s a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist’s. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis’ records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley’s band was “Rocket 88” This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, “Rocket 88” was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn’t sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] Obviously it’s not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there’s the drum sound…. Oh wait, there’s no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let’s listen again… [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] There are no drums there. It’s what’s called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I’d better explain that there’s some terminological confusion, because “slap bass” is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word “slapback” is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about “rockabilly slapback bass” can end up a bit like “Who’s on first?” But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It’s used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley’s band, and because of the playing style Haley’s bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you’re playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don’t just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you’d never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn’t particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley’s band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen’s version of “Rocket 88” had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston’s original, as “the first rock and roll record”. As we’ve said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley’s recording makes an attractive candidate – it’s the mythical “merging of black R&B with white country music”, which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it’s the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. “Rocket 88” wasn’t that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of “Wabash Cannonball” retitled “Jukebox Cannonball”, and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with “Rock the Joint”, which had been in Haley’s setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves’ programme. The original “Rock the Joint” had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris’ version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but it hadn’t done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo… [excerpt “Rock the Joint” – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley’s early records. He wasn’t a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound — but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after “Rocket 88” but before “Rock the Joint” – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie”, would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time — instead, he didn’t record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie” by The Esquire Boys) “Rock the Joint” was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after “Rock the Joint”, the problems continued. Haley’s next two records were “Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin’)” – which was to the tune of “Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” – and “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush”, which was a rewrite of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” as a hillbilly boogie. But “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush” was notable for one reason – it was the first record by “Bill Haley and Haley’s Comets”, rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley’s comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn’t pick up on the term “rock and roll” til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn’t familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in “Crazy Man Crazy”, which became the Comets’ first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band’s success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn’t go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande’s count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers’ favourite slang expression was “crazy”, and so he wrote… [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets’ bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it’s the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it’s the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. “Crazy Man Crazy” is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan’s records. With Danny Cedrone’s solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn’t stay successful very long – he wasn’t part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we’re talking about in this series, you’ll see that they’re all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the “lone genius” is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There’s a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn’t have any kind of peer group or community. They weren’t part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we’ll see when we return to them in a few weeks…

SUPPORT THIS PODCAST FOR $1 PER MONTH Doug interviews Trump voters like John Swenson from Zeeland, Michigan and Trump haters including New York "Elite" Wesley Vincent Zappatah and B-Movie Star Bambi Morrell. We also hear from call-in guest Philadelphia homemaker Joan Smith.

Racing season has begun, and the Troubled Men are chomping at the bit. They go all in with the veteran Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Offbeat writer, author, sports journalist, and horse racing handicapper for the hot tips on everything from Dylan and Bob Marley to picking a horse by scent. It smells like another winner. Topics include vaccinations, the McRib, shower cap fashion, airport curlers, John's career path to New Orleans, losing the war on Christmas, CBGB, a blindfolded interview, Lennon behaving badly, the Atlantic City Pop Festival, Doug Sahm, being embedded with the Who, Canter's Deli and the Kibitz Room, Marty and Elayne at the Dresden, the Bill Haley biography, Bohemian Rhapsody, Live Aid, MTV, Tom Petty, Danny Fields, Keith Richards, the Stones at Jazz Fest, the Fairgrounds, Altamont, Watkins Glen, and much more. Subscribe, review, and Rate on Apple Podcasts. Share and spread the word.

Racing season has begun, and the Troubled Men are chomping at the bit. They go all in with the veteran Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Offbeat writer, author, sports journalist, and horse racing handicapper for the hot tips on everything from Dylan and Bob Marley to picking a horse by scent. It smells like another winner. Topics include vaccinations, the McRib, shower cap fashion, airport curlers, John's career path to New Orleans, losing the war on Christmas, CBGB, a blindfolded interview, Lennon behaving badly, the Atlantic City Pop Festival, Doug Sahm, being embedded with the Who, Canter's Deli and the Kibitz Room, Marty and Elayne at the Dresden, the Bill Haley biography, Bohemian Rhapsody, Live Aid, MTV, Tom Petty, Danny Fields, Keith Richards, the Stones at Jazz Fest, the Fairgrounds, Altamont, Watkins Glen, and much more. Subscribe, review, and Rate on Apple Podcasts. Share and spread the word.

Tom Russell is a painter, essayist, and critically lauded singer-songwriter in the Western folk tradition, All Music Guide called him “perhaps the finest American folk-roots artist that most Americans never heard of,” while Rolling Stone’s John Swenson dubbed him “the greatest living folk-country songwriter.” Russell was discovered by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter in New York in the early 1980s and launched his solo artist career soon after. His songs “Blue Wing” and “Black Pearl” each reached the Top 40 on the Canadian country charts, while Suzy Bogguss took “Outbound Plane,” which Tom co-wrote with Nanci Griffith, to the Top 10 in the US. The hyper-literate and historically-minded troubadour poet has found loyal devotees including cultural icons ranging from Johnny Cash, who recorded his songs, to David Letterman, who invited Russell on his late night show on at least five different occasions. Songs such as “Gallo del Cielo” and “Navajo Rug” have become fan favorites, while “Tonight We Ride” was selected by the Western Writers of America as one of the Top 100 Western Songs of all time. Tom’s songs have been recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Dave Alvin, Doug Sahm, Joe Ely, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ian Tyson, k.d. lang,  and others. Mojo magazine called his conceptual LP The Rose of Roscrae “the top Folk album of 2015. That same year, Russell won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. His most recent work is Ceremonies of the Horsemen, a collection of essays he has written for Ranch & Reata, the Journal of the American West.

Chris Cajoleas, Founder and Manager of Swimming Entertainment; John Swenson, Consulting Editor of Offbeat Magazine; Dr. Jean Montès, Artistic Director of Greater Youth Orchestra of New Orleans

Blues rocker Lynn Drury talks about growing up in Mississippi and goat tying. Then she plays "Tell Me" from her latest album "Come To My House" which has been called "An absolute triumph," by John Swenson, Offbeat Magazine. Here's a few links to help you get the most out of Story Worthy- if you're listening on an iPhone, all you need to do is tap the cover art while the show is playing, and you'll see the episode notes, including the links. There is one to subscribe, http://bit.ly/2eSlJZw please do! There's one to our Facebook page and to our email address. We'd love to hear from you, either there, or on our survey at wondery.com/survey. You'll also find some special deals courtesy of our sponsors like Hello Fresh (promo code STORY30) Casper Mattress, and Audible (promo code STORYWORTHY). It's good karma guys! See our Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and our California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Blues rocker Lynn Drury talks about growing up in Mississippi and goat tying. Then she plays "Tell Me" from her latest album, Come To My House, which has been called “An absolute triumph,” by John Swenson, Offbeat Magazine.

Blues rocker Lynn Drury talks about growing up in Mississippi and goat tying. Then she plays "Tell Me" from her latest album "Come To My House" which has been called "An absolute triumph," by John Swenson, Offbeat Magazine. Here’s a few links to help you get the most out of Story Worthy- if you’re listening on an iPhone, all you need to do is tap the cover art while the show is playing, and you’ll see the episode notes, including the links. There is one to subscribe, http://bit.ly/2eSlJZw please do! There’s one to our Facebook page and to our email address. We’d love to hear from you, either there, or on our survey at wondery.com/survey. You’ll also find some special deals courtesy of our sponsors like Hello Fresh (promo code STORY30) Casper Mattress, and Audible (promo code STORYWORTHY). It’s good karma guys!

Cyril Neville, youngest brother of the famed Neville Brothers talks to John Swenson, music editor of Twisted South Magazine. Hear tracks from Cyril's new album, "Magic Honey" and listen while he shares his thoughts about the environmental challenges of New Orleans. Twisted South Radio Podcast. 

Cyril Neville, youngest brother of the famed Neville Brothers talks to John Swenson, music editor of Twisted South Magazine. Hear tracks from Cyril's new album, "Magic Honey" and listen while he shares his thoughts about the environmental challenges of New Orleans. Twisted South Radio Podcast. 

Part 2- How Piety St Studios started; paradox of a successful studio starting in 2001;...still using analog; how the studio gained wide renown; Cash Money; Vida Blue; changes in musical styles since the Boiler Room- collage/mashup/jazz; Kidd Jordan; about offending people with music; Lukas Ligeti; bringing the spirit world in; John Swenson's book; transcending style; unspoken, secret language amongst musicians; changes in new orleans culture; the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival's problems with artist relations; the changes on Frenchmen St; the Williamsburg-ing of The Bywater; deep wishes; the rise of the cool St. Claude music scene- Allways Lounge; what he's currently interested in locally and what's going through the studio now; looking for a happy ending to the way things are in relation to recording now.

Racing season has begun, and the Troubled Men are chomping at the bit. They go all in with the veteran Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Offbeat writer, author, sports journalist, and horse racing handicapper for the hot tips on everything from Dylan and Bob Marley to picking a horse by scent. It smells like another winner. Topics include vaccinations, the McRib, shower cap fashion, airport curlers, John's career path to New Orleans, losing the war on Christmas, CBGB, a blindfolded interview, Lennon behaving badly, the Atlantic City Pop Festival, Doug Sahm, being embedded with the Who, Canter's Deli and the Kibitz Room, Marty and Elayne at the Dresden, the Bill Haley biography, Bohemian Rhapsody, Live Aid, MTV, Tom Petty, Danny Fields, Keith Richards, the Stones at Jazz Fest, the Fairgrounds, Altamont, Watkins Glen, and much more. Subscribe, review, and Rate on Apple Podcasts. Share and spread the word.