Podcasts about Johnny Thunder

Rosetta Hightower, Ervinna, Gloria Jones, Spanky Wilson, Marsha Hunt, Sandy Shaw, Johnny Thunder, Suzi Quatro, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Kurtis Blow, Exuma, Boney M., Merry Clayton, Aretha Franklin, Pointer Sisters, Donny Hathaway, Ruth Copeland, Undisputed Truth, more. Covering Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Kinks, Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Tommy James and The Shondells, Bob Dylan, T.Rex, Van Morrison, Elton John, Neil Young, more.

It's the final episode of our month-long contribution to JSApril where we've encountered some characters who sound like they should be in the Justice Society! We travel back to the old West with Ranger Gord in our first story and meet two familiar sounding cowboys in "Johnny Thunder vs the Tarantula" from All-Star Western 81. Then Chuck and Gavin join us to cover a story from Action Comics 45 as Mr America fights "The Thunderbolt". Finally, David, Peter, Christine and Ranger Gord bring us another Western treat in the form of a "Wildcat Round-Up" from Dale Evans 24. Don't miss it!   Check out the other participants of JSApril at  https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/jsapril/   Thanks to everyone who helped us out over this mini season of episodes.   You can find Brandon "Superman" Peters at https://thebrandonpetersshow.com/   Johnny Thunder AKA Ranger Gord's excellent Vigilante Podcast can be found at  https://prairiejustice.podbean.com/   Chuck "Mr America" Loridans hosts the Boxing Glove Arrow Podcast at https://savagechuck.podbean.com/   And Kelly Blair's peek into life in Paris can be found here https://taplink.cc/presqueparisiennespodcast   Email us at theearth2podcast@gmail.com Facebook www.facebook.com/theearth2podcast Instagram www.instagram.com/theearth2podcast Twitter www.twitter.com/podcast_earth2 Leave us a Voicemail at www.speakpipe.com/theearth2podcast Find our Linktree at https://linktr.ee/theearth2podcast   #JSAPRIL #DCComics #DCMultiverse #JSA #JohnnyThunder #Tarantula #Thunderbolt #MrAmerica #Wildcat #DaleEvans

Our coverage continues of JSA in the 90s with Terry O'Malley and The Irredeemable Shag discussing JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5 (Dec 1992) by Len Strazewski, Mike Parobeck, Mike Machlan, Matt Banning, and Jeff Albrecht! JSA and friends battle against the Ultra-Humanite; Johnny Thunder reveals the mystery of his absence; and Hourman struggles with his son's illness. Finally, we wrap up with YOUR listener feedback! Have a question or comment? Looking for more great content? Leave comments on our website: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/jsa90s-05 Images from this episode: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/jsa90s-05-gallery/ Email the show at: justicesocietypresents@gmail.com Follow Terry O'Malley: Stop Calling Me Frank at BandCamp: https://rumbarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/haberdashed Other Fire & Water Network episodes with Terry: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/tag/terry-omalley/ Subscribe to JSA IN THE 90s as part of the JUSTICE SOCIETY PRESENTS Podcast: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/justice-society-presents/id1549429702 Don't use Apple Podcasts? Use this link for your podcast catcher: https://feeds.feedburner.com/jsapresents Also available on Spotify, Audible, and Amazon Music Follow JSA PRESENTS on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jsapresents Twitter/X: https://x.com/jsapresents Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jsapresents/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jsapresents.bsky.social Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jsapresents This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com Like our Fire & Water Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Follow Fire & Water on Twitter/X: https://x.com/FWPodcasts Follow Fire & Water on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fwpodcasts.bsky.social Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Thanks for listening! Join the fight... for Justice!

Our coverage continues of JSA in the 90s with Terry O'Malley and The Irredeemable Shag discussing JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5 (Dec 1992) by Len Strazewski, Mike Parobeck, Mike Machlan, Matt Banning, and Jeff Albrecht! JSA and friends battle against the Ultra-Humanite; Johnny Thunder reveals the mystery of his absence; and Hourman struggles with his son's illness. Finally, we wrap up with YOUR listener feedback! Have a question or comment? Looking for more great content? Leave comments on our website: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/jsa90s-05 Images from this episode: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/jsa90s-05-gallery/ Email the show at: justicesocietypresents@gmail.com Follow Terry O'Malley: Stop Calling Me Frank at BandCamp: https://rumbarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/haberdashed Other Fire & Water Network episodes with Terry: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/tag/terry-omalley/ Subscribe to JSA IN THE 90s as part of the JUSTICE SOCIETY PRESENTS Podcast: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/justice-society-presents/id1549429702 Don't use Apple Podcasts? Use this link for your podcast catcher: https://feeds.feedburner.com/jsapresents Also available on Spotify, Audible, and Amazon Music Follow JSA PRESENTS on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jsapresents Twitter/X: https://x.com/jsapresents Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jsapresents/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jsapresents.bsky.social Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jsapresents This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com Like our Fire & Water Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Follow Fire & Water on Twitter/X: https://x.com/FWPodcasts Follow Fire & Water on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fwpodcasts.bsky.social Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Thanks for listening! Join the fight... for Justice!

It's been a while since we went free form so today's show takes our regular breather from genre-focused explorations, theme, retrospectives and artist-inspired shows. There will be all of that found in the mix this morning. Interspersed between some fresh sounds from the likes of Dylan LeBlanc, Charley Crockett, and a newly revealed Johnny Cash nugget, we'll be sharing everything from Dave Brubeck to Los Indios Tabajaras, Marvin Rainwater, and Johnny Thunder in our show today. From a pair of Memphis Minnie covers, some country classics from Patsy Cline, swinging rhythm from Louis Jordan, and straight-ahead rock from The Doobie Brothers and The Georgia Satellites…it's a Friday morning full of Duane Eddy tributes and we've even got Slim Whitman…just for you on Sonoma County Community Radio, broadcasting on the FM airwaves out of Occidental, California, and streaming to the whole wide world on kowsfm.com/listen. KOWS-LP 92.5 FM is “Free Speech. No Bull” Community Radio.

De afgelopen tijd werden er zoveel nieuwe sets aangekondigd dat we wel drie nieuwsafleveringen hadden kunnen maken. Maar we beginnen maar eens met eentje. Bomvol mooie sets, lelijke sets en meningsverschillen over welke sets mooi en welke sets lelijk zijn. Maar er is voor ieder wat wils: ruimtevaart, kunst, Minions, Mandrakes en de terugkeer van de geliefde Johnny Thunder.Besproken sets en andere shownotes kun je vinden op steengoed.show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In der heutigen Ausgabe vom Brickcast sprechen wir u .a. über das Bricklink Designer Programm, dem Mittelalterlichen Stadtplatz, May the 4th und die Rückkehr von Johnny Thunder. Außerdem stellen wir uns die Frage, woraus eigentlich die Papiertüten von Lego bestehen.

Detective Comics #41, Adventure Comics #52, Flash Comics #8Robin has a scooby doo style adventure! The Crimson Avenger stops smugglers! Sandman stops the Amber Apple gang, whoever they are! Hourman battles a doppelganger! Flash fights poor construction quality! Hawkman kills a guy, who might not have done a crime! Johnny Thunder goes to the theatre!Remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show. Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodThreads: https://www.threads.net/@issueissuepodcastThank you for listening!

Adventure Comics #50, Flash Comics #6, Action Comics #25Hourman protects the integrity of horse racing. Sandman battles gangsters with stupid nicknames. The Flash saves Olympic runners from sabotage. (Doesn't matter the 1940 Olympics won't happen) Hawkman continues his desert adventure. Johnny Thunder tries to win at fox hunting. Superman deals with the greatest hypnotist. Zatara thwarts a criminal mastermind in his own ridiculous way.Remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show. Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodThank you for listening!

Detective Comics #38, Adventure Comics #49, Flash Comics #5Batman begins his orphan collecting. Crimson Avenger deals with a bait and switch. Hourman saves a scientist from some crooks trying to steal something, but we aren't told what. Sandman saves the cure for the common cold. Flash stops an art thief. Hawkman helps a female secret agent becuase of misogyny. Johnny Thunder helps the FBI, for some reason. Remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show. Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodThank you for listening!

Today we talk about Johnny Thunder, who was kidnapped as a child and as a result has control over the genie Thunderbolt. He ends up wishing himself onto the Justice Society, adopting some kids, sacrificing himself, and merging with the genie to create a single guy. Today's mentioned & relevant media: -All-Star Comics (1941) -Justice League of America (1960) #29 (Occasional) -Adventure Comics (1938) #416 -All-Star Squadron (1981) -Infinity Inc. (1984) #1, 21-22, 25, 30, 34-35, 39, 48, 50 -America Vs. the Justice Society (1985) -Justice Society of America (1992) #1-10 -JSA (1999) #29-82 (intermittent) -DC Universe: Rebirth (2016) #1 -The Flash (2016) #21 -Doomsday Clock (2017) -Justice Society of America (2022) -Girl Taking Over: A Lois Lane Story -Bunt! -DC introduces Wonder Woman's daughter Thanks to Victoria Watkins for our icon! Support Capes and Japes by: Checking out our Patreon or donating to the Tip jar Find out more on the Capes and Japes website.

Hey there, Crisis kids! It's time for another episode of the show! Mart has stopped by and we'll be taking a look at another early crossover between Earth 1 and Earth 2's mightiest heroes! Well, maybe the Justice League shows up for a panel or two. Shenanigans are afoot with Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt jump from Earth 2 to Earth 1, and the madness ensues! We also see the Lawless League of Earth A! Who are they and do they shave? All this and more, so join us for a ton of laughs and comic book fun! If you want to leave any feedback you can do so through email at Aworldonfirepodcast@gmail.com or to the show on Twitter @Allsquadron or on the show's FB page (just search A World on Fire podcast). You can find mart on Twitter @martgray and at his blog Too Dangerous for a Girl (dangermart.blog). Thanks for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stephen-strange02/message

Is this album a brilliant and courageous effort to create a new sound or the flat, amateurish work of a first-time producer? Does that even matter when it comes to judging an album?The Record Roulette crew is joined by returnee Gabe Pollack to discuss these and other questions about The Kinks' incredible sixth studio album - The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society - which comes in at #384 on the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list. Leave comments on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook at @rrmusicpod or visit our website at recordroulettepodcast.com.New to Record Roulette? Check out these great episodes featuring Gabe Pollock:Eli and the Thirteenth Confession - Laura Nyro (Review)Station-to-Station - David Bowie (Review)Runtime: 49 minutesMusic by lemonmusicstudio from Pixabay.

This week on Issue by Issue: Flash adds unnecessary steps! Hawkman does an homage to Perseus! Johnny Thunder begins to understand what is going on! Superman does too much stuff to talk about here and meets his greatest foe! Zatara is obsessed with glass and wasting our time! The Spectre makes the ultimate sacrifice!Remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show.Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodThank you for listening!

This week on Issue by Issue! Clark Kent deals with his own toxic behavior and a femme fatale! Zatara deals with Lunar Lunacy and his greatest weakness Birds! Batman gets a makeover! Sandman channels his inner Sam Spade! Flash deals with incoherent storytelling! Hawkman and I are confused by Shiera's actions! Johnny Thunder fights for love! And a man's death leads to God's Vengeance on Earth!Remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show.Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodThank you for listening!

This week on Issue by Issue we say so long 1939, if you only read the cover dates. Superman protects a politician and battles a plague! Zatara battles technical difficulties and gorillas! Batman does a Hindenburg and engages with the French! Sandman battles bad writing! The Flash races on scene, huffs chemical fumes, and gives a physics lesson! Hawkman is reborn and does cosplay! Johnny Thunder gets a job and is immediately fired!Check us out on our socials where we post Primo Panels and other cool old timey comic stuff.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/issueissuepodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/IssueIssuePodRemember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify to help out the show.Thank you for listening!

Although neither popular nor long-lived as a band,  the New York Dolls were one of the most influential bands of the punk and glam rock genres.  Their debut album, the eponymously named New York Dolls came out on the strength of their lower Manhattan fan base and received critical acclaim.  However, their appeal outside of New York was limited and the album was considered a commercial failure in the United States.The New York Dolls (also known as “The Dolls”) sported an androgynous look onstage, dressing in satin, high heels, dresses, and lots of makeup.  Much of their wardrobe was acquired at a local Salvation Army thrift store.  The band personnel included David Johansen on vocals, Arthur “Killer” Kane on bass, Jerry Nolan on drums, Sylvain Sylvain on keyboards, rhythm guitar and vocals, and Johnny Thunder on lead guitar and vocals.  Front man David Johansen would later perform under the name Buster Poindexter.Although the band would produce only one other album after their debut, their influence was significant for both punk rock and glam rock genres.Wayne brings us this forerunner of punk that is “too fast to live, too young to die.” FrankensteinThis song is sometimes listed as “Frankenstein (Orig.)” because Edgar Winter's song of the same name had already been released prior to the band recording their own, though it had been used in their live shows previously.  The song was inspired by how repressed kids would gravitate to Manhattan from all over.PillsThe only cover on the album was a 1963 Bo Diddley song.  “While I was laying in a hospital bed, a rock n' roll nurse went through my head.  She says, "hold out your arm, stick out yo' toungue, I got some pills, boy, I'm 'on give you one.”Jet BoyThis track has a more heavy metal sound in the guitar.  The lyrics are simply about a jet boy who stole a baby.  There is little explanation as to what a jet boy is other than to say that he flies around New York City.  “Jet Boy” was a 50's era comic superhero.Bad GirlThe vocal parts on this track hearken back to a 1950's style, and it also features a boogie rhythm.  ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Oo-De-Lally by Roger Miller (from the animated picture “Robin Hood”)Yes, it is a stark departure from the Dolls.  Disney rolled out their take on the animated Robin Hood tale in this picture featuring Robin Hood as a fox.   STAFF PICKS:Over the Hills and Far Away by Led ZeppelinRob leads out the staff picks with a great acoustic riff from Jimmy Page, layering 6- and 12-string guitars.  The lyrics were inspired by the feelings of the band touring on the road.  This is a single off Led Zeppelin's fifth studio album, Houses of the Holy, and made it to number 51 on the charts.We Can Make It Right by Sherbet Bruce's staff pick is a group that never broke into the US market in a big way, but was one of the biggest pop rock acts in Australia in the 1970's.  This track leads off the second studio album entitled “On With the Show,” which hit number 6 on the Australian charts.  The song was co-written by Sherbs keyboardist Garth Porter and guitarist Clive Shakespeare.Long Train Runnin' by The Doobie Brothers Lynch features a well known riff from the Tom Johnston vocal era of the Doobies.  The group played “Long Train Runnin'” for three years before it was recorded, and it went through a number of names an iterations before its final form was created in the studio.Still...You Turn Me On by Emerson, Lake & Palmer Wayne wraps up the staff picks with a ballad from prog rock power trio Keith Emerson (keyboards) Greg Lake (guitar and vocals) and Carl Palmer (percussion).  This is more acoustic rock with a little psychedelic rock thrown in than prog rock, but it is a hauntingly beautiful song.  The lyrics are inspired by the feeling of playing in front of an audience. COMEDY TRACK:Sister Mary Elephant by Cheech & ChongA number of comedy sketches were released by this duo, including this Catholic school class skit. 

Jesper Lindgren har ett trevligt samtal med oss om allt mellan himmel och jord. Vad är bakgrunden till Carr Jam -21, hur gick med plattan och är det sant att det kommer en ny Carr Jam -21 skiva? Vad gör Jesper Lindgren med resten av sin tid - glamrock och öl ? Gäst: Jesper Lindgren Detta har vi pratat om: Alice Cooper, Michael B Tretow, Scotch, Carr Jam-21, Jesper Lindgren, Velvet Insane, Bonafide, Dregen, Gustav Kronfelt, Martin Ekelund, Ryan Roxie, Martin Ekelund Jolle Atalagic från Electric Boys, Snowblind, Alex Bergdahl, Eyes of Love, Loretta Caravallo, Eric Carr, Eric Singer, Strutter '78, Double Platinum, Sex Pistols, AC/DC, Vinnie Vincent, Unmasked, Creatures of the Night, The Sweet, Love Gun, Peter Criss soloalbum, Alive II, Dressed to Kill, New York Dolls, Slade, ölen Riff, tuggummit Riff, Asta Kask, Nyckelbryggerier i Älvsbyn, KISS Army Sweden, Tidningen Destroyer, serietidningar, Bruce Kulick, Licks, Johnny Thunder, Keith Richards, Monsters, Carnival of Souls, Andreas Kleerup, Mats Leven, Martin Sweet, Gene Simmons, Tomorrow, Mainline, Warmachine, Rock and All Hell, Psycho Circus, Heart of Chrome, Unholy, The Elder, Dynasty, 2.000 Man, Brendon Snyder, Yngwie Malmsteen, Hässelby, Peter Criss biografi, Paul Stanley biografi, Gene Simmons biography, Chris Lendts "Kiss and Sell", Kiss på Stadion 2010, Say Yeah, Warren Zevon, Cat Stevens, Dr Hook, Rod Stewart, Black Metal, Mayhem, Into the Fire, Filippa Meissner, Ukraina, Skivsnack, Sha Boom, Sweet Andy Scott - Krugerkrands, Gary Glitter-gitarrer, Muds gitarr sound, Riff Raff

Episode 25 Notes- All-Star Comics #3- “The World's First Super-Hero Team” It's back to the Golden Age as we explore the entirety of All-Star Comics #3, the first appearance of the first superteam, the Justice Society of America! Hawkman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hourman, the Atom, Sandman, the Spectre, Dr. Fate and Johnny Thunder are all here and even Red Tornado. Plus, we learn why Superman and Batman DC's two most popular characters failed to make the roster. Also, a “SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!” You can follow the show @ComicsLloyd on Twitter or send an email to ClassicComicsMBL@gmail.com. You can find me on Twitter @MattB_Lloyd and at www.dccomicsnews.com where I write reviews and edit news stories. You can also check out my chapter in “Politics in Gotham: The Batman Universe and Political Thought.” https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Gotham-Universe-Political-Thought/dp/3030057755 And: “Black Panther and Philosophy: What Can Wakanda Offer the World?” https://www.amazon.com/Black-Panther-Philosophy-Blackwell-Culture/dp/1119635845/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2F69N3WJBZMF3&keywords=what+can+wakanda&qid=1642053514&sprefix=what+can+wakanda%2Caps%2C256&sr=8-1 All-Star Comics Links All-Star Comics #3 at DC Fandom Wiki https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/All-Star_Comics_Vol_1_3 Biff Bronson https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Biff_Bronson_(Earth-Two) Red, White and Blue https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Red,_White_and_Blue_(Earth-Two) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comics-in-motion-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/comics-in-motion-podcast/support

Episode 15. Jess and Paul are consumed by LEGO. Paul talks about finding the excitement and freedom of building a set, his brief obsession with Bionicle, and about his own experience with the weird wasteland of early LEGO properties (bring back Johnny Thunder). Jess talks about her new goth inspiration for crocheting and trying to make something new.  Links to Ethel and the Androids Soundcloud, our social media and more can be found here: https://linktr.ee/ideefixepod       

Go To Greencoastradio.com     Air Tight #7 The Stooges - 1960 Bikini Kill - New Radio Violent Femmes - Kiss Off Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi isDead Grandmaster Incongruous - Pay for the Piano Cholophonics - Cumbia Malandra Gravity Kills - Guilty Guppy Boy - Ball in the Sky Jenny and the Mexicats - Me Voy a Ir Alabama Shakes - Don't wanna fight Hank Williams III - Broke, Lovesick and Driftin' Johnny Thunder and Heartbreakers - Chinese Rock Sonido Pesao - Cuando Muera Kimbra - Settle Down The Clash - Ghetto Defender Face to Face - Dissension Peechees - Grease The Skinner Brothers - Culture Non Stop

Coarse Language: Listener Discretion is Advised G Gen¹³ 31 J J.J. Jakeem Thunder 11 Johnny Thunder 7 R The Ravagers (cont.) 20 S Static Shock 0 T Teen Titans (New 52; cont.) 13 W White Canary 17 We Think You're Special! Hashtag us as #RSPDCS Friend us on Facebook Email us at rolledspinepodcasts@gmail.com Tweet us as a group @rolledspine, or individually as Diabolu Frank & Illegal Machine. Fixit don't tweet. If the main DC Bloodlines blog isn't your thing, try the umbrella Rolled Spine Podcasts. Black Canary, DC Comics Encyclopedia, DC Special Podcast, Gen13, JSA, Milestone Media, Podcast, Teen Titans, Wildstorm,

The Ramones are one of the most influential bands of all time, and there is a mountain of great covers to prove it. Frankly, it was too many. Emma McIvor and Aaron Eikenberry join us to instead look at the songs The Ramones chose to cover during their illustrious career. By celebrating their influences, we uncover just what it means to be a Ramones song.  Featured Artists: Pet Sematary, Pinhead, Rockaway Beach, Johnny Thunder, and Ronnie Spector Listen to the featured songs in full: YouTube Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blanketingcovers/message

Tommy James was the first person in history to have two covers of his songs go to number one in back to back weeks. Joe Moore and Brad Stasell join us to talk about his legendary career and all the great covers that have come from it. Featured Artists: REM, Doctor Marigold's Prescription, Neil Diamond, Los Rockin Devils, John Wesley Harding, Joe Bataan, Sophy, Billy Idol, Amazulu, Celia and the Mutations, Female Species, Ricardo Ray Orchestra, Johnny Thunder, Tom Jones, Claude Francois, Tiffany, Wind, Franklin Pierce, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Prince, Aguaturbia, Jarvis Cocker, Jimmy Eat World, and Weird Al Yankovic Listen to the featured songs in full: YouTube Spotify Listen to the full research playlist: Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blanketingcovers/message

One of the beautiful things about music is you can never judge a bands sound by looking at them.Not to say they are ugly in any way shape, or form, but to look at photos of Greene County hard rock outfit Scattered Hamlet and you would subconsciously place them more in the bluegrass area of rock, but if you look further, and, more importantly, crank up their new album Stereo Overthrow you will awaken a very different beast indeed.In fact, that form of judgement features prominently on the upcoming album which deals with public perception and more specifically record labels and industry insiders who want to change existing bands into a set formula and structure more conducive to sales than content.Scattered Hamlet are one of those rare, unpolished gems you seldom come across that would rather go down with their integrity and moral fortitude intact than succumb to an industry machine that often values image over substance.After cracking the Billboard Heatseeker's Top 10 with 2016's Swamp Rebel Machine, the powers that be came predictably knocking with promises of fame and fortune – if the band was willing to sell their soul for the machine.Thankfully they politely told said people to stick it where the sun don't shine so to speak and pressed on with their own musical vision that has culminated in Stereo Overthrow which is due out on November 12.Combining elements of Southern rock with punk sensibilities and hard rock dismissiveness, Scattered Hamlet have delivered a definite contender for album of the year, but, more importantly, did it their way.Frontman Adam Joad sat down for an often humorous hat about the album and the steps that have led them to their current position atop heir own mountain, with their own vision well and truly alive.Without label support."It was kind of like... we've always combined classic Southern rock with punk rock like Motorhead and I was just listening to Johnny Thunder so we're a combined sum of Southern Rock and punk rock elements that we're from,” he explained. “This album, when I started writing it, was all about our experiences dealing with the industry and record labels and stuff. I've always felt like we have a couple of New York hardcore moments because I always thought those guys were good at standing up for the shit they believed in so I have a lot of breakdowns where I think that's my New York hardcore moment (laughs)."Joad admits the unexpected – but deserved – success of Swamp Rebel Machine did place a touch of pressure on Scattered Hamlet going into the follow up, but he also says the experiences learned through that run were a major motivating factor on their new material."It did,” he laughed, “because... it was so weird because every label passed on Swamp Rebel Machine. They were like, this albums not gonna work. We'll sign you, but you have to re-record the whole album. You have to sit down with our team of writers, and they offered us every bad deal in the world, and I was like no, fuck it, we're gonna finish this album and put it out, and we put it out, and it did pretty good. Our album cycle got interrupted because our drummer was in a really bad accident so basically it put us out of commission for almost a year while we were in the middle of the album cycle and we just ... our drummer is like our brother so we weren't sure what we were gonna do next and after talking to his family and stuff and him now we ended up moving on and moving forward again, then friggin COVID hit (laughs). I was like, damn, man it's a kick in the balls from every direction. We finally had momentum and it was like we're back and then it was more like no you're not (laughs).”In the full interview, Adam runs through the musical content on Stereo Overthrow, the title and opening track and how it sets the tone for the rest of the album, the film clip to Stereo Overthrow and it's funny as fuck film clip, their sound and how they shaped it into their own, the cover image and how it (inadvertently) has appeal to Australian's, the birth of Scattered Hamlet and more.

It's time for some Old West action this episode as we cover the Johnny Thunder reprint story from Showcase 72. Yes, the WESTERN Johnny Thunder! As well as our usual dramatic reading of the story, we also take a look at the history of the character, his legacy and the legacy of his horse's name, "Black Lightning"!?! We also talk about the Trigger Twins, the other story in this issue and their legacy.   So, saddle up and join David and Peter as they ride into town with Johnny Thunder.   #western #dccomics #comics #westerncomics #johnnythunder #alextoth #robertkanigher #russheath #gilkane #triggertwins #blacklightning #dcmultiverse #dcu  

Matthew and John finish up some more Justice League coverage with some surprising turn of events regarding retcons, time travel, and Johnny Thunder. "I Knew A Guy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Danny GarciaBorn and bred in Barcelona, Danny Garcia started his career writing for Spanish music magazines in the nineties and has since contributed to a number of publications, including the notorious US magazine High Times. By the year 2000, he was already writing, directing and producing a series of short documentaries for BTV, Barcelona's local TV station.In 2012, Danny Garcia directs The Rise and Fall of The Clash, a controversial film that deals with the obscure end of The Clash, and in 2014 Looking for Johnny, Garcia's documentary on the legendary New York Dolls' guitarist Johnny Thunders is released. Looking for Johnny peaked at Number 10 in the US Billboard music dvd charts and reached the Number 1 in Sweden's and Japan's dvd charts in November 2014 and September 2015 respectively. In 2016 after a successful film festival run. Sad Vacation, his documentary on Sid and Nancy is also released worldwide.The Rise and Fall of The Clash, Looking for Johnny and Sad Vacation were selected for Film Festivals around the world such as CBGB's Festival (NYC), Canadian Music Week (Toronto), CIMM (Chicago), Sound Unseen (Minneapolis), Don't Knock The Rock (LA), Doc N' Roll (London), Transmissions (Madrid), L'Etrange (Paris), GrauZone (Amsterdam), Reel Film Festival (Toronto), Portobello Film Festival (London), Coney Island Film Festival (NY), where The Rise and Fall of The Clash won the Best Feature Documentary prize in 2012 or Dock of The Bay (San Sebastian) where Sad Vacation took best Documentary prize in January 2017.In 2019, two new music documentaries see the light of day, the critically acclaimed STIV: No Compromise No Regrets and the newest Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones.Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chipbakerfilmswebsite: https://www.chipbakerfilms.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chipbakerfilms/The Vibes Broadcast Network - Podcasting for the fun of it! Thanks for tuning in, please be sure to click that subscribe button and give this a thumbs up!! Email: thevibesbroadcast@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/into_the_p.i.t.t._/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevibesbroadcastnetworkLinktree: https://linktr.ee/the_vibes_broadcastTikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeuTVRv2/

5.04 - We talk more Jupiter's Legacy, Eternals, Sweet Tooth, and Alex turns into Johnny Thunder. Leave us a Voicemail on Anchor.fm I Got 5 On It by Luniz Featurning Michael Marshall Twitter: @wednesdaycomics @alexprostrollo @garot2188 @marvin_salguero Email: wednesdaycomics605@gmail.com Visit RootsoftheSwampThing.com today and follow them online at facebook.com/rootsoftheswampthing and on Twitter @dcworldswampy Visit Rainbowcomicsandcards.com for your comic book needs! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wednesday-comics-podcast/message

Earth-2's Johnny Thunder decides to meet his Earth-1 counterpart with hilarious consequences. David and Peter bring you part one of the latest annual JLA/JSA  crossover in which the JLA barely get a look in! This story has it all, Magic, Time Travel, Evil counterparts of the Justice League (again) and if that's not good enough, it also has the Silver Age debut of cult favourite, Mr Terrific!   #dcmultiverse #jsa #jla #justicesociety #johnnythunder #mrterrific #drfate 'theflash #flash #greenlantern #hawkman #atom #gardnerfox #mikesekowsky #dccomics #earth2

BEWARE : "Free and Easy" live Radio show on O.T.R. dab+ / Sunday the 08th -2020- 8 Pm - Wydcliff ( Patryck Albert ) present : ... underground garage rock show eposode 86 ......featurin' Spot, Frankie Stein, Johnny Thunder , Screamshanders ,Nathalie Sweet , Carvels , PsychoDaisies , 1313 Mockin' Bird Lane , jingle , Geoff Palmer & Lucy Ellis , Short Fuses , spot! , Leighton & the Brainsuckers , Thingz , Hired Men , Trip, Jack Art , François Premiers , Sunny Boys , spot! ,Go-Go Killers , spot! , Jordan Christie & the Wild Ones , jingle , Peter Green .... Rock on!

Featuring Steve Cotroneo of Grimwood Hollow, Adam of the Great Pumpkin Project and music from Rezurex. PLUS: Theater of the Mind with Revenant, Shocktails with Johnny Thunder, Something Wicked with Ed Gannon, News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, and The Darkest Web with Morbid Mariah. Happy Halloween, Stay Safe and Stay Scary! Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star, Patreon or paypal.me/hauntcast for more episodes and to qualify to win prizes!

The Summer of '77 is the best season yet for punk music! R identifies the first true post-punk release while J discovers an album that instantly lands in his Punk Rock Hall of Fame. Plus: a closer look at Richard Hell, Television and Johnny Thunder and the Heartbreakers. Listen to the full playlist on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/31UmIAT

A review of the first six hours of Pathfinder: Kingmaker Definitive Edition for PS4, some final tabletop game and movie recommendation for the SUmmer Of Free 2020, and how our stewing imaginations can derail us from relationship with God, as we continue our study in Proverbs.PLUS, more assorted topics based on your questions/comments/feedback and Paeter's geek week!TIMESTAMPS00:00:30 Intro00:01:48 Pathfinder: Kingmaker Definitive Edition PS4 Review00:24:09 Free Space/Horror Movies & Fantasy Tabletop Games (The Summer Of Free)00:34:40 CGC & Christian Geek News00:42:01 Weekly Waistline00:50:18 The Danger Of Our Stewing Imaginations (Proverbs Bible Study)00:58:55 Listener/Viewer Messages (Hatred For Celebrities, New "Stunts" For Extra-Life)01:09:36 How Geeks Can Help The Church Prepare For The Future01:19:07 Paeter's Geek Week (Divinity Original Sin, JSA[Hourman, Johnny Thunder, Ultra-Humanite])01:25:38 Next Episode01:28:50 Babylon 5 SchawarmaSupport this podcast and enjoy exclusive rewards at https://www.patreon.com/spiritbladeproductionsEpisodes #0-500 of this podcast were published as "The Spirit Blade Underground Podcast" and are archived and available for download at www.spiritblade.com , Resources used to prepare the "In Search Of Truth" Bible Study include:"Expositor's Bible Commentary", Frank E. Gaebelein General Editor (ZondervanPublishing House),"The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament",by Dr. John H. Walton, Dr. Victor H. Matthews & Dr. Mark W. Chavalas (InterVarsityPress), "The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament", by Dr. Craig S. Keener (InterVarsity Press),Thayer's Greek Lexicon, Strong's Exhaustive ConcordanceBlueletterbible.org (primarily for search functionality), The Christian Geek Central Statement Of Faith can be found at: http://christiangeekcentral.blogspot.com/p/about.html The Christian Geek Central Podcast is written, recorded and produced by Paeter Frandsen, with additional segments produced by their credited authors. Logo created by Matthew Silber. Copyright 2007-2020, Spirit Blade Productions. Music by Wesley Devine, Bjorn A. Lynne, Pierre Langer, Jon Adamich, audionautix.com and Sound Ideas. Spazzmatica Polka by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Freesound.org effects provided by: FreqMan

Featuring Randy Skalos of Haunt on Williams, Paul J. Tylicki, Jr. of Royal Scare, and music from Super Monster Party. PLUS: Theater of the Mind with Revenant, Shocktails with Johnny Thunder, Something Wicked with Ed Gannon, News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, and The Darkest Web with Morbid Mariah. Stay Scary! Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star, Patreon or paypal.me/hauntcast for more episodes and to qualify to win prizes!

Episode 83: Unmasked - featuring Ben Newman of Haunted Laurianne Woods, and music from Calabrese. PLUS: Something Wicked with Ed Gannon, The Darkest Web with Morbid Mariah, Shocktails with Johnny Thunder, and Theater of the Mind with Revenant. Stay Scary! Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star, Patreon or paypal.me/hauntcast for more episodes and to qualify to win prizes!

Episode 82: Quarantined - featuring Brett Walker of The Salisbury Woods Haunted Barn & Trail, Maximus Bryant of Ohio Halloween & Haunters Convention, and music from She Wolf Dana Kain & The Mighty Incisors. PLUS: News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, Shocktails with Johnny Thunder, and Theater of the Mind with Revenant. Stay Home, Stay Safe, and Stay Scary! Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star , Patreon or paypal.me/hauntcast for more episodes and to qualify to win prizes! 

Dylan kicks off his first tour of the decade in Oregon with a scheduled show in Bend, Oregon on June 4th and then a show at Matthew Knight Arena in Eugene on June 9th. To celebrate, we play some performances form Dylan live in Eugene in 1999, along with the Pixies, Gillian Welch, and Old Crow Medicine Show live in Eugene in 2004, and also some tracks from one of Dylan's opening acts: Hot Club of Cowtown and, to get you in the mood, some vintage Western Swing.

DC's Golden Age superheroes of Earth-2 join together to form one huge team, and the results are...mixed. Featuring Johnny Quick, Liberty Belle, Plastic Man, The Shining Knight, Dr. Mid-Nite, Robotman, Hawkman, The Atom, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Johnny Thunder, The Flash, Green Lantern, Sandman, Spectre, Dr. Fate, Phantom Lady, Robin and the soon-to-be Firebrand II! Mike-DELL (of Earth-2) & Mike-EL (of Earth-1) are back for another fun-filled episode. www.ComicBookSyndicate.com

This Kinks gem has been marred by a horrible mix/mastering job but it is truly a highlight of the Village Green album.

We review Justice League of America #196 by Gerry Conway & George Perez. The Secret Society of Super-villains vs. The Justice League! Featuring Superman, Hourman, Johnny Thunder (of Earth-2), Batman, Wonder Woman, Black Canary and Firestorm(of Earth-1)! Mike-DELL crosses the aisle and picks a DC comic book. Mike-EL finds himself immersed in a paradise-like dimension where superheroes are alway fun and the women never really faint, And the villans always blink their eyes. www.ComicBookSyndicate.com

Episode 81: Fustercluck - featuring Jeff West of West FX Inc., Rob Nulton of The Haunt Rater & Chamber of Haunters, and music from 5¢ Freakshow. PLUS: News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, The Darkest Web with Morbid Mariah, Shocktails with Johnny Thunder, and Theater of the Mind with Revenant. Stay Scary! Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star , Patreon or paypal.me/hauntcast for more episodes and to qualify to win prizes! 

Episode 80: Season's Creepings -- featuring a Scream Team look back at the 2019 Halloween haunting season, and ghostly Christmas chills from Midnight Syndicate. PLUS: Theater of the Mind with Revenant, News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, Something Wicked with Ed Gannon, and Shocktails with Johnny Thunder. Happy Holidaze from all of us here at Hauntcast! Until next time -- Stay Scary!   Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star for more episodes and exclusive content!

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Lee" by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Little Bitty Pretty One", by Thurston Harris.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg's page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes' material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it's not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we've seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s -- we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there's one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we're about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on "Please Please Me", three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups -- two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals -- occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it's quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we're going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, "Mister Lee"] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we're talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women -- the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called "modern harmony" -- they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we're talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup -- you'd have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing "ooh" vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective -- with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who'd started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers -- Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma's sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We've talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it's been a while, so to refresh your memories -- at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day -- a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like "Do You Wanna Jump Children": [Excerpt: The Ospreys, "Do You Wanna Jump Children?"] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change -- the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura's sister had just had a baby, who she'd named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one -- essentially a playground chant -- that they'd been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe -- the girls gave different accounts over the years -- the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him "four-eyed" and said he was "the ugliest teacher you ever did see". Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn't want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls' melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about "the handsomest sweetie you ever did see": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in "Girl Groups, Girl Culture", claims that the saxophone solo on "Mr. Lee" was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It's possible -- and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on "Dynamite at Midnight", a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Dynamite at Midnight"] With the solo on "Mr Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] I think it more likely that the credit I've seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, "Fools Fall in Love" by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] If that's correct -- and my ears tell me it is -- then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for "Mister Lee" was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists -- so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. "Mr. Lee" became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others -- the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. "Mr. Lee" also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental "Walking with Mr. Lee" by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, "Walking With Mr. Lee"] The song also came to the notice of their teacher -- who seemed to have already known about the girls' song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He'd recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, "ecstatic" that the song had been made into a record -- which suggests that whatever the girls' intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn't stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin' circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear -- something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls' dresses himself -- which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With "Mr. Lee" a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same -- catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, "Speedy", was very much in the "Mr. Lee" style, but was also a more generic song, without "Mr. Lee"'s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Speedy"] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We'll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa's studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. "Mr. Lee", in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Mr. Lee"] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, "Music Street"] But while "Mr Lee" was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of "Mr. Lee", but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the "Mr. Lee" soundalikes weren't actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists -- they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I've read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can't find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes' time on Atlantic, but I think "You'll Be There" is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on -- it's one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes' records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can't identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it's them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, "You'll Be There"] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing "Love Power" for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, "Love Power"] And for his later minor novelty hit, "Santa Claus is a Black Man": [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, "Santa Claus is a Black Man"] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, "I Shot Mr. Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original "Mr. Lee", reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like "I Shot Mr. Lee", answer records, though answers to other people's records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos' "Have Mercy Baby", with "I Don't Like It Like That", an answer to Chris Kenner's "I Like It Like That", and finally with "Dance With Me Georgie", a reworking of "The Wallflower" that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Dance With Me Georgie"] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit -- she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn't like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn't have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on "Loop De Loop": [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, "Loop De Loop"] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, "Love That Bomb"] Reather and Emma, the group's two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, "It's All In Your Mind"] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they'd decided that twenty years on from "Mister Lee", their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name -- the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, "Check it Out"] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn't do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, "Love Rhythm": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Love Rhythm"] But then, tragedy struck -- Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with "Mr. Lee". They never did, and they never recorded again -- although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as "Mr. Lee" was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher...

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode 79: Halloween Shlock-a-thon -- featuring Chris Birkett of Haunted Graveyard AZ, Amanda Ravange of Amanda Reevenge Haunting, and Halloween Carols from Kristen Lawrence. PLUS: Theater of the Mind with Revenant, News From Beyond with Jeff Doan, Something Wicked with Ed Gannon, The Darkest Web with Morbid Mariah, and Shocktails with Johnny Thunder. Happy Halloween, Cryptlickers! Until next time -- Stay Scary!   Full show notes and feature links on our website. Support Hauntcast on Subscribe Star for more episodes and exclusive content!

The Justice Society battles Psycho Pirate, Solomon Grundy, and deals with having Johnny Thunder as a member of the team.Affiliate link included.Transcript below:Graham:The Justice Society battles Solomon Grundy, Psycho Pirate and a mysterious visitor from the future. Find out all about it as we take a look at All-Star Comics Archives Vol. 7, straight ahead. [Intro Music]Announcer:Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham. Graham:Some of the earliest collections published by D.C. were the hardcover D.C. archives. These books cost $50 each at the time of their original pressing and they started producing them in the 90s. This particular book was released in 2001 and All-Star Comics Archives Vol. 7 collects issues 29 to 33 of All-Star Comics and features the Justice Society of America, the world's first superhero team. This volume features their post-war adventures and the good news is that if you want to read the stories, you don't have to hunt down a copy of this book. You can purchase individual issues of All-Star Comics out of the comixology or Amazon Kindle comic store for $1.99 an issue and so for five issues that adds up to be $10 and if you wait for a half off or buy one get one free sale, it's even a less than that. The big advantage of this particular book is the introductions from Roy Thomas. Roy Thomas was a great comics writer in his own right and he was also noted for a lot of nostalgic comics, comics that were set in the Golden Age or fleshed out Golden Age continuity. For example, at Marvel, he wrote The Invaders and at D.C., he wrote the All Star Squadron and he just loves the Golden Age of comics, has such a wonderful appreciation and knowledge and so reading books that have his introductions on it, that is really the big benefit. So, that's the one thing you miss if you read them digitally.Alright, so let's go ahead and we will get to talking about the Justice Society and the issues. In this book the roster is set. Now, the comics are approximately forty pages an issue, which is down from the Golden Age and in accordance with that there was a shrinking of the team. At times there were as many as 9 members of the Justice Society but this was shrunk down to six plus a secretary. More on that in a moment.The team was made up of The Flash, in this case Jay Garrick, Green Lantern, who is Alan Scott and not part of any intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, Hawkman, then there's Doctor Midnite. He is a hero who was blinded but discovered that he was able to see in complete darkness and also figured out a way to make goggles so that he could see when it was light out. Some have considered him a predecessor to Daredevil. Then there's the Atom, Al Pratt. The Golden Age Atom didn't have any striking power. He was just a short guy who was also really tough and could really hit very hard, though later he would gain some super strength. Then there was Johnny Thunder, who at times I found to be annoying but sometimes, and I think mostly in this volume, I found to be amusing. He is a bit of a dope. He's a private investigator, not a whole lot of talent or fighting ability, a very comical fellow until he says the magic words “say you”, or an appropriate variation thereof and The Thunder Bolt, this magical pink creature appears and is able to do Johnny's bidding and often resolve problems. Wonder Woman is the secretary of the Justice Society at this point. This is a really odd situation that feels really, really sexist as well as a bit stupid. You send the Atom and Johnny Thunder out on missions but Wonder Woman sits back at the headquarters. So, it's a question of what's going on.Wonder Woman had met with and teamed up with the Justice Society back in All-Star comics number 13 ...

This week Scott and Mike discuss All-Star Squadron #30, which features the Justice Battalion fighting against the Black Dragon Society. It also has a cover that begs the question, “What is so wrong with that?” I mean look at that cover. Someone is trying to off Johnny Thunder. What’s the [...]