Podcasts about Junior Parker

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    After Gurdip & Justin discuss the latest FTDs: The Making of King Creole, The Last Tour Volume 2 and The Girl Happy Sessions, the guys answer a handful of listener emails, landing on one from fellow patron Robin, whose visit back to an early TCBCast episode that touched upon the subject of Elvis's Black influences, which conveniently leads us right into our main topic. For the main discussion, John Michael Heath of EAP Society taps in as we're joined by Preston Lauterbach, author of acclaimed books such as "The Chitlin' Circuit," "Beale Street Dynasty," "Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers" and several others about Black musicians in the early 20th century, whose latest book, "Before Elvis: The African-American Musicians Who Made The King" is being published by Hachette Books on January 7, 2025. Keen-eared Elvis fans may also recognize Preston's voice as an interviewee from 2018's "Elvis Presley: The Searcher."  Preston's new book examines the life stories of Arthur Crudup, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, Junior Parker and Calvin and Phineas Newborn and numerous other major and minor figures that factor into their stories and complicated, nuanced relationships with Elvis both as a person and as a phenomenon as they impacted him, and he in turn impacted them. It's a book for Elvis fans and non-fans alike, even Elvis skeptics are sure to find it extremely revealing as Preston thoroughly dispels many rumors and accusations thrown at Elvis over the decades, with receipts, while centering his narrative around lifting and celebrating the voices and life stories of these figures far beyond a mere connection to Elvis. Yet it never shies away from hard truths, all informed by a history of Memphis, the political landscape of the Deep South in the 1950s, inner workings of the record and music publishing industries, and the ways both white and black audiences responded to changing perceptions of artists, genres and influences across the decades. It's likely to be the most in-depth discussion about the book to be done in its release media cycle, as Preston was extraordinarily generous with his time, answering all our questions, geeking out with us about Memphis music history, and having a thorough discussion that we hope will help this episode stand on its own, well into the future beyond the publication date. You can learn more about "Before Elvis" and where to buy it at: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/preston-lauterbach/before-elvis/9780306833083/?lens=hachette-books And you can follow Preston's blog on Substack at: https://thechitlincircuit.substack.com/  If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.

Styx is approaching the height of their popularity and a bit of a turning point when they released their ninth studio album, Cornerstone.  Keyboardist and vocalist Dennis DeYoung, and lead guitarist and vocalist Tommy Shaw take the lion's share of the songwriting duites, with one or both developing all tracks save one.  The lead vocalist duties also alternate between DeYoung and Shaw, again with the sole exception being a song written and sung by guitarist James "JY" Young.This album finds the group shifting from a more prog rock sound to a pop rock orientation.  This transition would create a commercial success, with Cornerstone becoming the groups first top 5 album on the US charts - peaking at number 2.  The album would produce the groups first and only number 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in the power ballad "Babe."  It would also be a critical success, earning a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group.  Not bad for a self-produced album.The successes, however would be tempered with the first fractures appearing between the group's primary singers and songwriters.  Dennis DeYoung wanted to see the group move in a more pop direction, while Tommy Shaw preferred the rock orientation of previous albums.  James Young sided with Shaw in this dispute.  It would eventually cause a rift in the band in the mid-80's, with Shaw and DeYoung splitting up.Friend of the show Steve Hardin presents this classic rock and pop sensation in today's podcast. Borrowed TimeThe third single from the album was the lead track to side 2.  The song is a political one, portraying a United States in trouble, but oblivious to its decline.  DeYoung and Shaw co-wrote this song, and Dennis DeYoung takes lead vocal duties on this high energy track.Boat on the RiverThis more folk-oriented tune was a charting single in the UK and hit number 5 on the German charts, but was not released as a single in the US.  Tommy Shaw wrote and sings lead on this track, as well as playing mandolin.  It began as an experiment when Shaw first acquired a mandolin, but the band thought it sounded good enough to make it on the album.Why MeThe second single was a compromise choice.  Originally DeYoung wanted the power ballad "First Time" to be released as the second single, but when Tommy Shaw objected so strenuously to releasing two ballads in a row that he threated to leave the band over it, "Why Me" became the single.  Also written and sung by DeYoung, it is about feeling depressed even in the midst of success.  BabeThe band's sole number 1 single is a ballad about having to leave the one you love for a period of time.  Dennis DeYoung wrote it as a birthday present for his wife Suzanne.  Despite its success, it was not originally intended to appear on the album.  Tommy Shaw and James Young convinced DeYoung to put it on the album. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Rawhide by the Blues BrothersThe band performs behind a protective fence in a country bar in one scene, and this is the single song from the Country AND Western genre they can play. STAFF PICKS:Mystery Train by UFOWayne launches the staff picks with a cover of a song originally recorded by Junior Parker in 1953.  UFO were an English rock band originally formed in 1968.  This song is off their eighth studio album which was produced by George Martin of Beatles fame. Love Stinks by the J. Geils BandLynch's staff pick is a description of a love triangle in which no one gets what they want.  Lead Singer Peter Wolf was married to actress Faye Dunaway at the time, and was headed towards a divorce which may have inspired the lyrics.  Many will remember this song from Adam Sandler's performance in "The Wedding Singer."Even It Up by HeartRob brings us the first single from Heart's fifth studio album, "Bebe le Strange."  It features the Tower of Power horn section in the instrumentation.  The lyrics call for reciprocity in a relationship, and also a subtle rant against the obstacles women face in the rock world.Run Like Hell by Pink FloydSteve Hardin wraps up the staff picks with a song written by David Gilmour and Roger Waters.  The song is used in the film "The Wall" to depict rock anti-hero Pink as a fascist dictator turning the audience into a lynch mob.   INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Seduction by Giorgio MoroderThis instrumental love theme from the movie "American Gigolo" was on the charts at the time. Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock-worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

STAN GETZ STAN GETZ – 1950 out of a dream, The lady in red Stan Getz (ts) Tony Aless (p) Percy Heath (b) Don Lamond (d) New York, January 6, 1950 What's new ?Stan Getz (ts) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) Junior Parker (vcl) 1950 – New York, May 17, 1950 Sweetie pieStan Getz (ts) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) New York, December 10, 1950 Out of nowhereStan Getz (ts) Horace Silver (p) Joe Calloway (b) Walter Bolden (d) MILT JACKSON THE BIG THREE Los Angeles, August 25, 1975Nuages, Come Sunday, Moonglow, You stepped out of a dreamMilt Jackson (vib) Joe Pass (g) Ray Brown (b) VIC DICKENSON VIC'S BOSTON STORY Boston, MA, 1956In a sentimental mood, Love me or leave me, Yesterdays, All too soon (1) A cottage for sale (1)Vic Dickenson (tb,vcl) George Wein (p) Jimmy Woode (b) Arvell Shaw (b-1) Buzzy Drootin (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 18 de junio 2024 at PuroJazz.

STAN GETZ STAN GETZ – 1950 out of a dream, The lady in red Stan Getz (ts) Tony Aless (p) Percy Heath (b) Don Lamond (d) New York, January 6, 1950 What's new ?Stan Getz (ts) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) Junior Parker (vcl) 1950 – New York, May 17, 1950 Sweetie pieStan Getz (ts) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) New York, December 10, 1950 Out of nowhereStan Getz (ts) Horace Silver (p) Joe Calloway (b) Walter Bolden (d) MILT JACKSON THE BIG THREE Los Angeles, August 25, 1975Nuages, Come Sunday, Moonglow, You stepped out of a dreamMilt Jackson (vib) Joe Pass (g) Ray Brown (b) VIC DICKENSON VIC'S BOSTON STORY Boston, MA, 1956In a sentimental mood, Love me or leave me, Yesterdays, All too soon (1) A cottage for sale (1)Vic Dickenson (tb,vcl) George Wein (p) Jimmy Woode (b) Arvell Shaw (b-1) Buzzy Drootin (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 18 de junio 2024 at PuroJazz.

We've got vintage movers, shakers, and dance floor destroyers from Benny Latimore, Junior Parker, The Untamed, Jimmy Hughes, the Detroit Wheels with and without Mitch Ryder, a great cover of a Roy Orbison hit, and tunes from two different Tom Jones! Originally broadcast May 26, 2024 Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatThe Wheels / Dancing In The StreetThe Olympics / Bounce AgainLaddins / Dream BabyPeggy March / This Heart Wasn't Made To Kick AroundTimothy Carr / A Stop Along The WayMitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels / Baby Jane (Mo Jo Jane)The Henchmen / The James BrownJo Armstead / I've Been Turned OnBenny Latimore / Girl I Got News for YouThe Peermonts / You Gotta Love Me TooTom Jones / Sixteen TonsThe Sapphires / Gotta Be More Than FriendsBobby Brooks / Wise Like SolomanJunior Parker / I'm In LoveNella Dodds / You Don't Love Me AnymoreTommy Brown / Ain't SoJimmy Hughes / It Ain't What You GotLee Rogers / Love For A LoveTom Jones / Nothing But FineJerry Palmer / Walking the DogSam Hawkins / Hold On BabyThe Marvelettes / Strange I KnowThe Debs / Sloopy's Gonna Hang OnThe Untamed / Gimme, Gimme Some ShadeJoe Perkins / Movin' In The GrooveThe Amazers / Without A WarningWillie Walker / You're Running Too FastThe Heartbeats / I Found A JobThe McCoys / Beat The ClockThe Paramours / That's The Way We LoveSam Hawkins / Let Me DreamBad Boys / You're Not Alone AnymoreGarnet Mimms / It Was Easier To Hurt HerDan & The Clean Cuts / One Love, Not TwoNella Dodds / Come See About MeThe Temptations / Beauty Is Only Skin DeepThe Capitols / Ain't That Terrible Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Biographical - Junior Parker & Saundra Wang

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of  "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend,  who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a  few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going.  After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style".  This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time  sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech.  He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

"Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream It is not dying, it is not dying Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void It is shining, it is shining"Please join me this afternoon on the Sunday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing as we welcome Spring and the promise of a bright season ahead for the 1st time in 2 years. Joining me are Bruce Cockburn, Pat Benatar, Frank Sinatra, The Black Keys, Bob Dylan, Junior Parker, War, Orleans, Gerry Rafferty, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Amboy Dukes, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Ace, The Knack, Them, The Doors, Yardbirds, John Mayalls Bluesbreakers, The Tradewinds, Little Walter, Little River Band, Butterfield Blues Band, Moody Blues, Electric Prunes, Beach Boys and Beatles...

L.A. WOMAN: 50TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION includes the original album newly remastered by The Doors' longtime engineer and mixer Bruce Botnick, two bonus discs of unreleased studio outtakes, and the stereo mix of the original album on 180-gram virgin vinyl. For this new collection, the original album has been expanded with more than two hours of unreleased recordings taken from the sessions for L.A. Woman, allowing the listener to experience the progression of each song as it developed in the studio. An early demo for “Hyacinth House” recorded at Robby Krieger's home studio in 1969 is also included.  The outtakes feature Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Ray Manzarek working in the studio with two additional musicians. The first was rhythm guitarist Marc Benno, who worked with Leon Russell in The Asylum Choir. The other was bassist Jerry Scheff, who was a member of Elvis Presley's TCB band.Among the outtakes of album tracks, you can also hear the band joyously ripping through the kinds of classic blues songs that Morrison once described as “original blues.” There are great takes of Junior Parker's “Mystery Train,” John Lee Hooker's “Crawling King Snake,” Big Joe Williams' “Baby Please Don't Go,” and “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” Lee Dorsey's funky 1966 classic, written by his producer Allen Toussaint.In the collection's extensive liner notes, veteran rock journalist David Fricke explores the whirlwind making of the album, which would be the last with Morrison, who died in Paris a few months after its release. “Morrison may never have come back to The Doors,” he writes. “But with his death, L.A. Woman became rebirth, achievement, and finale, all at once. It's the blues too – original blues, as Morrison promised. Fifty years later, there is still nothing like it.”This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. Source: https://robbykrieger.comSource: https://store.thedoors.com/products/l-a-woman-50th-anniversary-deluxe-edition-3-cd-1-lpSupport the show

Roger Ashby does a deep dive into the artists that shaped the future of music. Listen to the Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.

ג'וניור פרקר • 50 שנים למותו • Junior Parker

ג'וניור פרקר • 50 שנים למותו • Junior Parker

Taxes, man! Entrepreneurs have to deal with that stuff for sure. We're talking "Taxman" by The Beatles in the last episode of the first half of Entrepreneur Summer 2: Pro Sex Summer. We catch up with the Pokemon 25 music thing in our bonus segment, What's Pokemonning On, or whatever we called it. Covers by: Junior Parker, Black Oak Arkansas, Chilly, Ruder Than You, Saga, Besonegros, Tok Tok Tok, Randy Bachman Spotify playlist here

Lucero "On My Way Downtown"The Who "Young Man Blues"Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers "55th Street Boogie"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Keep Knockin' (But You Can't Come In)"Junior Parker "Mystery Train"Johnny Cash "Hey Porter"Bonnie Raitt "Write Me a Few of Your Lines / Kokomo Blues"Otis Redding "Shake"Howlin' Wolf "Smokestack Lightin'"Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin "Rattlesnakin’ Daddy"Valerie June "Wanna Be On Your Mind"Aimee Mann "Hold On"King Oliver's Jazz Band "Sobbin' Blues"Jolie Holland "Darlin Ukelele"The Wandering "Mr. Spaceman"Mississippi John Hurt "Sliding Delta"Louis Jordan "Choo Choo Ch 'Boogie"Jimmy Bryant "Stratosphere Boogie"The Who "A Quick One While He's Away"Built to Spill "You Were Right"John Prine "Pistol Packin' Mama"Guy Clark "Desperados Waiting For A Train"Gillian Welch "Georgia Road"Drag the River "Marooned"The Animals "Rock Me Baby"Lou Reed "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"Mississippi Fred McDowell "The Train I Ride"Otis Rush "Groaning the Blues"The Mountain Goats "Some Swedish Trees"Two Cow Garage "Camaro"Tuba Skinny "Freight Train Blues"Jimmie Rodgers "Train Whistle Blues"Lucille Bogan "I Hate That Train Called the M. and O."Little Junior Parker "Drivin' Wheel"The Who "Baby Don't You Do It"Sugar Britches "The Worst"Lula Reed "Going Back to Mexico"Hank Williams "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive"Georgia White "Panama Limited Blues"Ranie Burnette "Hungry Spell"Sam Baker "Sweet Little Angel"Ruth Brown & Her Rhythmakers "Love Me"Bob Dylan "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"

Where did the title "Rubber Soul" come from?  Which song did a distinguished panel of songwriters in 2000 name as the greatest of all time? Which song did Jerry Lieber hold in the same esteem? Join Stevie Nix as he answers all of these questions and more on this episode that celebrates two of The Beatles' best albums: Rubber Soul and Revolver.WARNING: This episode contains traces of America (the band, obviously ).Featured songs [in chronological order]:We Can Work It Out [Stevie Wonder, Deep Purple]Day Tripper [Otis Redding]Drive My Car [Humble Pie]Norwegian Wood [Cornershop, Bob Dylan]You Won't See Me [Bryan Ferry]The Word [Lisa Lauren]Michelle [Iggy Pop]In My Life [Cynthia Lennon]Taxman [The Jam, Junior Parker, Cypress Hill]Eleanor Rigby [Ray Charles, America, Joe Jackson]I'm Only Sleeping [Holly Cole]Yellow Submarine [Roots Manuva]She Said She Said [Mark Mulcahy, The Black Keys]Tomorrow Never Knows [Junior Parker, Jason McNiff]20 Beatles Covers With Soul [Not Just Rubber Soul]Paul McCartney's best lyricsJoin Stevie on Spotify and Instagramwww.songsungnew.com

The year was 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee and record producer Sam Phillips launched his record company, Sun Records. Two years later he found the one and only Elvis Presley. He went on to record Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Junior Parker, James Cotton and on and on. Join us as we talk about where rock and roll was born.   Read about the recent sale of Sun Records, here.   Check out Sun Studio Sessions on YouTube   If you’d like to hear about Southern Rock and how Muscle Shoals ties into this timeline of music, check out Season 1 Episode 4.    Follow us on Instagram @SteelMagnoliasPodcast

No band defines modern acoustic music any better than the Acoustic Syndicate. I set down with Steve and Bryon and discussed the world. At the time Rolling Stone Magazine had said “ Steve “Big Daddy” McMurry's incendiary, wailing version of Junior Parker's “Mystery Train.” one of the 10 best things they hear at Floydfest 2019. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandy-carlton/message

Resumimos en esta edición una serie de nueve sesiones dedicadas al dj de radio blanco.

Vers ses 9 ans Paul reçoit pour Noël une guitare et commence à apprendre à jouer avec l’aide d’un professeur Gustave Sermier, qui lui apprend aussi à chanter, mais le répertoire imposé, celui des ‘’Compagnons de la chanson’’ ne lui convient pas; Paul souhaitait jouer du Rock. Il casse sa guitare afin de ne plus suivre les cours. Après l’école primaire, Paul rentre au Collège à Saint Maurice, mais les études ne sont pas sa tasse de thé; après une deuxième année non réussie son père lui demande : ‘’Es-tu fier de toi ? Tu veux faire quoi dans la vie ? Je t’ai trouvé un travail comme apprenti cuisinier’’. C’est ainsi que Paul apprend la cuisine, un métier qu’il fera pratiquement toute la vie, en particulier pendant une dizaine d’années au ‘’Buffet de la Gare’’ à Sienne, jusqu’au seuil d’une retraite bien méritée qu’il prendra en 2016. 1969: un premier concert est donné, Paul a tout juste 15 ans, le répertoire est constitué avec des reprises de Joe Dassin. Puis c’est le Rock ‘n’ Roll, le style préféré du jeune chanteur qui va interpréter quelques succés de ses artistes référents tels que : Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, BB King, Carl Perkins, Junior Parker et Johnny Cash. En 1979, un copain de Paul, Bernie Constantin, pense que ‘’Paul Bonvin’’ comme nom de scène ce n’est pas assez ‘’ Choc ‘’ alors il rajoute Mac et depuis, cette désignation est restée. De 1969 à1988, Paul Mac Bonvin joue au sein de diverses formations avant de former le groupe à tendance résolument Hard Rock, qui portera définitivement son nom : Paul Mac Bonvin.

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Worldwide by Allen Toussaint on Southern Nights (Warner) 12′44″ Sweet Honey Wine by Lonnie Smith on Gotcha (LRC) 13′11″ Doin' It by Herbie Hancock on Secrets (Columbia) 19′25″ Super Stupid by Funkadelic on Maggot Brain (Westbound) 23′38″ One Rainy Wish by Jimi Hendrix on Axis: Bold As Love (Sony) 27′49″ Blood And Rockets: Movement I, Saga Of Jack Parsons _movement II, Too The Moon by The Claypool Lennon Delirium (Prawn Song Records) 30′40″ Kinda Bonkers by Animal Collective on The Painters EP (Domino) 33′58″ Lose Your Love by Dirty Projectors (Domino) 37′42″ Cherry Pie Jam by Hollow Clouds (Ingenius Jams) 40′33″ Puff Lah by Kaytranada on BUBBA (RCA Records) 43′22″ Around The Sun (ft. Amo Amo) by Poolside (Pacific Standard Records) 45′25″ You Are In My System by AM & Shawn Lee on - (Sounds) 48′11″ Int'l Players Anthem by UGK on The Essential UGK (RCA Records) 57′15″ Project Baby by Kamaiyah (Empire) 57′44″ Easy Rider by Action Bronson on Mr. Wonderful (Atlantic) 60′20″ I Wanna Get High by Cypress Hill on Black Sunday (Sony BMG) 63′13″ Taxman by Junior Parker on Funny How Time Slips Away (LRC Ltd.) 64′46″ Horse Pills by The Du-Rites on Gamma Ray Jones (Old Maid Entertainment) 68′19″ Baby That's Backatcha by Smokey Robinson on A Quiet Storm (Motown Records) 71′03″ Texas Sun by Khruangbin, Leon Bridges on Texas Sun (Dead Oceans) 80′16″ Reaching The Highest Pleasure by Roy Ayers on single (BBE) 84′08″ Paper Thin by Lianne La Havas (Warner) 87′06″ Thank You by Rexx Life Raj (Empire) 92′05″ 304 (feat. Kossisko) by ALLBLACK on 304 (feat. Kossisko) (Play Runners Association) 95′14″ Ladders by Mac Miller on Swimming (Warner) 99′47″ Coffee by Kelly Rowland (KTR Records) 101′40″ Cocaine Model by Zhu on The Nightday (Columbia) 110′18″ City Of Sound by Big Wild on City of Sound (Counter Records) 112′48″ Your Way by Jai Wolf on Static-2020 (YvNG Jai) 116′10″ Ordinary Pleasure by Toro Y Moi on Ordinary Pleasure (Carpark Records) Check out the full archives on the website.

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Worldwide by Allen Toussaint on Southern Nights (Warner) 12′44″ Sweet Honey Wine by Lonnie Smith on Gotcha (LRC) 13′11″ Doin' It by Herbie Hancock on Secrets (Columbia) 19′25″ Super Stupid by Funkadelic on Maggot Brain (Westbound) 23′38″ One Rainy Wish by Jimi Hendrix on Axis: Bold As Love (Sony) 27′49″ Blood And Rockets: Movement I, Saga Of Jack Parsons _movement II, Too The Moon by The Claypool Lennon Delirium (Prawn Song Records) 30′40″ Kinda Bonkers by Animal Collective on The Painters EP (Domino) 33′58″ Lose Your Love by Dirty Projectors (Domino) 37′42″ Cherry Pie Jam by Hollow Clouds (Ingenius Jams) 40′33″ Puff Lah by Kaytranada on BUBBA (RCA Records) 43′22″ Around The Sun (ft. Amo Amo) by Poolside (Pacific Standard Records) 45′25″ You Are In My System by AM & Shawn Lee (Sounds) 48′11″ Int'l Players Anthem by UGK on The Essential UGK (RCA Records) 57′15″ Project Baby by Kamaiyah (Empire) 57′44″ Easy Rider by Action Bronson on Mr. Wonderful (Atlantic) 60′20″ I Wanna Get High by Cypress Hill on Black Sunday (Sony BMG) 63′13″ Taxman by Junior Parker on Funny How Time Slips Away (LRC Ltd.) 64′46″ Horse Pills by The Du-Rites on Gamma Ray Jones (Old Maid Entertainment) 68′19″ Baby That's Backatcha by Smokey Robinson on A Quiet Storm (Motown Records) 71′03″ Texas Sun by Khrungbin, Leon Bridges on Texas Sun (Dead Oceans) 80′16″ Reaching The Highest Pleasure by Roy Ayers on single (BBE) 84′08″ Paper Thin by Lianne Le Havas (Warner) 87′06″ Thank You by Rexx Life Raj (Empire) 92′05″ 304 (feat. Kossisko) by ALLBLACK on 304 (feat. Kossisko) (Play Runners Association) 95′14″ Ladders by Mac Miller on Swimming (Warner) 99′47″ Coffee by Kelly Rowland (KTR Records) 101′40″ Cocaine Model by Zhu on The Nightday (Columbia) 110′18″ City Of Sound by Big Wild on City of Sound (Counter Records) 112′48″ Your Way by Jai Wolf on Static-2020 (YvNG Jai) 116′10″ Ordinary Pleasure by Toro Y Moi on Ordinary Pleasure (Carpark Records)

Lee and Daniel are still in the 1920s this week, and they each have a ticket good for one hell of a crazy train ride with Buster Keaton, in "The General" (1926). Much is said about Keaton's talents, especially his amazing (and very dangerous) stunt work, which is on display front and center here in a film that is very much part of the DNA of the modern action film. Other things brought up include films from this era's continued romantic revisionist take on the South's role in the Civil War; Keaton as a performer outside of just his brilliant stunt work; continued threats of doing a "Wings"-related podcast; listener comments; and what Lee has watched as of late. "The General" IMDB A Trip Through New York City in 1911 neural network restoration Featured Music: "I've Got a Thing About Trains" by Johnny Cash; "Mystery Train" by Junior Parker; and "The First Train Heading South" by Johnny Horton.

Today's program features tuneage from (not in order of appearance) Otis Redding, Yes, Junior Parker, Bruce Springsteen, The Kinks, Paul Simon, Rhinoceros, Johnny Rivers, Sam Cooke, Blood Sweat & Tears, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Renaissance,Beatles, Meatloaf, Marvin Gaye, Simon & Garfunkel, Pink Floyd, Eurythmics, Procol Harum, Art Garfunkel, The Byrds, Annie Lennox and Three Dog Night.

Alors que Noël fait traditionnellement fumer votre carte de crédit, le jour de l'an ne devrait pas vous ruiner. En effet, jusqu'à présent, on a pas encore réussi à taxer les vœux ni les bonnes résolutions. Alors n'hésitons pas, souhaitons nous le meilleur : Bonne année, bonne santé et du feu dans la cheminée cette semaine dans Bon Temps Rouler !     Playlist :  Auld Lang Syne, B.B. King, A Christmas Celebration Of Hope Starting All over Again, Al Green, Greatest Hits: The Best of Al Green Happy New Year Darling, Lonnie Johnson, Christmas Blues New Year's Resolution, Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, King & Queen Resolution Blues, Dinah Washington, Cootie Williams Orchestra, The Keynote, Decca And Mercury Singles 1943-19 Thank You (Remastered), Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Raitt (Remastered Version) Broken Promise, B.B. King, Blues On The Bayou Next Time I See You, Little Milton, 50s Blues Next Time You See Me, Junior Parker, Call the Midwife (Music from the TV Series) Drinking Again, Aretha Franklin, Unforgettable: A Tribute To Dinah Washington (Expanded Edition) Everybody's Gonna Have a Wonderful Time up There, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel Songs Wonderful Time, John Lee Williamson, Saga Blues: The Original Sonny Boy Happy New Year, Lightnin? Hopkins, BD Music Presents Christmas Blues Counting The Days, John Mayall, Empty Rooms When You Broke Your Promise, Snowy White, Bird of Paradise    Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

FRIDAYS CRUCIAL CUTS 11AM-1PM EST 8AM-11AM PDT4PM-5PM BSTBombshell Radio​Earl Crown​ Crucial Cuts an award-winning, syndicated radio show that originates from Loyola University Radio in Baltimore. Earl Crown plays selections from his personal record collection, including the best of #soul, #garage, #reggae, #rocksteady, #punk, #classicrock, #glam, #funk, #Afrobeat, #jazz, and more.Repeats Saturdays 1am -3am EST 10pm-12pm PDT— with Earl Crown.Featuring: Spanky Wilson, Great Bear,Ty Segall, The Gories, Blondie, The SonicsMarcia Griffiths, Junior Parker, The Isrealite, Susan Cadogan, The Vast Majority, Nina Simone, Alton Ellis, Tina Britt, The Shirelles,Phyllis Dillon , Vanilla Fudge , Isaac Hayes, Gabor SzaboBarbara Acklin, Shannon and the Clams, Thee HeadcoateeThe Husbands, Them, David Bowie +++

Little Junior Parker var ekki gamall þegar hann byrjaði að syngja í gospelsönghópi, en sneri sér að blústónlist. Hann er frægastur fyrir lagið Mystery Train sem Elvis Presley hljóðritaði síðar. Sálarsöngvarinn Al Green minntist þessa frænda síns þegar hann féll frá langt um aldur fram.

Little Junior Parker var ekki gamall þegar hann byrjaði að syngja í gospelsönghópi, en sneri sér að blústónlist. Hann er frægastur fyrir lagið Mystery Train sem Elvis Presley hljóðritaði síðar. Sálarsöngvarinn Al Green minntist þessa frænda síns þegar hann féll frá langt um aldur fram.

Little Junior Parker var ekki gamall þegar hann byrjaði að syngja í gospelsönghópi, en sneri sér að blústónlist. Hann er frægastur fyrir lagið Mystery Train sem Elvis Presley hljóðritaði síðar. Sálarsöngvarinn Al Green minntist þessa frænda síns þegar hann féll frá langt um aldur fram.

Little Junior Parker var ekki gamall þegar hann byrjaði að syngja í gospelsönghópi, en sneri sér að blústónlist. Hann er frægastur fyrir lagið Mystery Train sem Elvis Presley hljóðritaði síðar. Sálarsöngvarinn Al Green minntist þessa frænda síns þegar hann féll frá langt um aldur fram.

 On this weeks MisterStorch Music Playlist/Podcast the music of The Beatles, via deep covers of Fab Four's songs. Hear The Beatles covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Sellers, Count Basie, Alvin & Chipmunks, Michael Buble, Junior Parker, Jack Nitzche, Julie London, Johnny Cash, Iggy Pop, Tony, Frank, James Brown, Tiny Tim, Jimi, Patti Smith, Jerry Garcia, George Burns & many more.Also live (on delay) from Borderline Studios, MisterStorch play by play of Greenwood Village's annual fireworks show.Thank you Beatles fans. 

On this episode we are talking about the blues, specifically the ‘Delta Blues’ and all that happened around Clarksdale, MS! Many now-legendary musical artists were born and raised in and around Clarksdale: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Ike Turner, Jackie Brenston, Sam Cooke, Junior Parker, and W. C. Handy, among them. Clarksdale was a major market for the Delta’s constantly traveling musicians, and the likes of Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Charley Patton are also associated with the city. Today, that historic blues culture is preserved for visitors while contemporary musicians carry on the great Delta blues tradition. Resources mentioned: Field Guide: American South (see “Roadtrips")- https://amzn.to/2KZfTH4 The Southerner's Handbook (see “5 Essential Venues”)- https://amzn.to/2LCRLJJ Delta Blues Museum- https://www.deltabluesmuseum.org Pinetop Perkins (Keeping the Blues Alive)- https://www.pinetopperkinsfoundation.org Music Maker.org (Preserving the Soul of America’s Music) - https://musicmaker.org Music Maker Foundation YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUk8c_gGP94 King Fish - check out this prodigy of the blues! - https://christonekingfishingram.com/shows Follow us @steelmagnoliaspodcast

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I’m also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick — Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll — for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here — the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we’re not going to stop there. Today we’re going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records — and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We’re going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we’re going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin’ Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we’ve talked about — for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we’ll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips’ studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames’ first single, “You’re My Angel”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, “You’re My Angel”] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn’t particularly interesting — “Feelin’ Good” was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior’s Blue Flames: “Feelin’ Good”] But it’s their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames’ second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, “Love my Baby”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Love My Baby”] That record was one that Sam Phillips — a man who made a lot of great records — considered among the greatest he’d ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn’t. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called “Mystery Train”. That song actually dates back to the old folk song, “Worried Man Blues”, which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: “Worried Man Blues”, the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we’ll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. “Worried Man Blues” was one of those, and those lyrics, “the train arrived, sixteen coaches long” became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker’s song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Mystery Train”] That song’s composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title “Mystery Train”, which has been a big part of the song’s appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen — Parker had been singing “fifty coaches long”. And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on “Tiger Man”, a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with “Mystery Train” in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, “Tiger Man”] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over “Bear Cat”, the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to “Hound Dog”, and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips’ artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn’t stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let’s talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we’re going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we’ll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel’s footsteps. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character — as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren’t so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people — except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny — working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he’d put a hot-plate under a chicken’s feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don’t know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot — it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn’t matter what the show was — what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would “get married” at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “Ain’t She Sweet?”] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn’t actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who’d been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven”] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, “For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.” But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff’s career thus far. In particular, he’d tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He’d cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff’s manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn’t want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker — though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising — Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold’s second single, in 1945, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”, reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers’ songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes’ bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold’s manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel’s commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as “Colonel”, even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up — Parker was originally meant to be Arnold’s exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the “exclusive” manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Of course, Parker didn’t leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed — he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously — with Snow later saying “I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I’ve ever had dealings with.” The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners — right up until he discovered they weren’t. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula — a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay — songs like “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis’ own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future — whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else — even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips — the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn’t as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis’ last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn’t play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band — Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis’ fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”] That’s a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of “Mystery Train”, was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker’s single, as “Love My Baby” provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis’ version of “Mystery Train”. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters — as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn’t a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters — B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it’s likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn’t understand at all why those girls were screaming at him — he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis’ music — but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis’ family — and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis’ family. Elvis’ parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn’t work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he’d do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn’t mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We’ll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn’t seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label — a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’ contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn’t want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis’ success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That’s great! Except they will not pay you for several months — if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you’ve been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips’ money, and he didn’t have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn’t have any artists who could take Elvis’ place. He’d found the musician he’d been looking for — the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips’ dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis’ contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted — but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount for Elvis’ contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist’s contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips’ view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn’t — as seemed likely — he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus — of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker’s pocket. RCA quickly reissued “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train”, while they were waiting for Elvis’ first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I’m also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick — Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll — for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here — the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we’re not going to stop there. Today we’re going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records — and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We’re going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we’re going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin’ Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we’ve talked about — for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we’ll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips’ studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames’ first single, “You’re My Angel”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, “You’re My Angel”] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn’t particularly interesting — “Feelin’ Good” was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior’s Blue Flames: “Feelin’ Good”] But it’s their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames’ second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, “Love my Baby”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Love My Baby”] That record was one that Sam Phillips — a man who made a lot of great records — considered among the greatest he’d ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn’t. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called “Mystery Train”. That song actually dates back to the old folk song, “Worried Man Blues”, which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: “Worried Man Blues”, the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we’ll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. “Worried Man Blues” was one of those, and those lyrics, “the train arrived, sixteen coaches long” became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker’s song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Mystery Train”] That song’s composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title “Mystery Train”, which has been a big part of the song’s appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen — Parker had been singing “fifty coaches long”. And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on “Tiger Man”, a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with “Mystery Train” in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, “Tiger Man”] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over “Bear Cat”, the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to “Hound Dog”, and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips’ artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn’t stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let’s talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we’re going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we’ll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel’s footsteps. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character — as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren’t so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people — except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny — working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he’d put a hot-plate under a chicken’s feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don’t know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot — it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn’t matter what the show was — what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would “get married” at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “Ain’t She Sweet?”] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn’t actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who’d been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven”] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, “For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.” But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff’s career thus far. In particular, he’d tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He’d cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff’s manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn’t want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker — though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising — Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold’s second single, in 1945, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”, reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers’ songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes’ bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold’s manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel’s commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as “Colonel”, even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up — Parker was originally meant to be Arnold’s exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the “exclusive” manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Of course, Parker didn’t leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed — he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously — with Snow later saying “I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I’ve ever had dealings with.” The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners — right up until he discovered they weren’t. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula — a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay — songs like “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis’ own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future — whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else — even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips — the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn’t as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis’ last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn’t play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band — Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis’ fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”] That’s a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of “Mystery Train”, was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker’s single, as “Love My Baby” provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis’ version of “Mystery Train”. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters — as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn’t a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters — B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it’s likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn’t understand at all why those girls were screaming at him — he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis’ music — but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis’ family — and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis’ family. Elvis’ parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn’t work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he’d do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn’t mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We’ll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn’t seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label — a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’ contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn’t want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis’ success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That’s great! Except they will not pay you for several months — if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you’ve been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips’ money, and he didn’t have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn’t have any artists who could take Elvis’ place. He’d found the musician he’d been looking for — the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips’ dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis’ contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted — but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount for Elvis’ contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist’s contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips’ view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn’t — as seemed likely — he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus — of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker’s pocket. RCA quickly reissued “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train”, while they were waiting for Elvis’ first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I'm using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I'm also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll -- for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here -- the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we're not going to stop there. Today we're going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records -- and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We're going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we're going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin' Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we've talked about -- for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we'll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips' studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames' first single, "You're My Angel": [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, "You're My Angel"] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn't particularly interesting -- "Feelin' Good" was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior's Blue Flames: "Feelin' Good"] But it's their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames' second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, "Love my Baby": [Excerpt: Junior Parker, "Love My Baby"] That record was one that Sam Phillips -- a man who made a lot of great records -- considered among the greatest he'd ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn't. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called "Mystery Train". That song actually dates back to the old folk song, "Worried Man Blues", which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: "Worried Man Blues", the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we'll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. "Worried Man Blues" was one of those, and those lyrics, "the train arrived, sixteen coaches long" became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker's song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, "Mystery Train"] That song's composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title "Mystery Train", which has been a big part of the song's appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen -- Parker had been singing "fifty coaches long". And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on "Tiger Man", a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with "Mystery Train" in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Tiger Man"] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over "Bear Cat", the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to "Hound Dog", and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips' artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn't stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let's talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we're going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we'll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel's footsteps. It's difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character -- as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren't so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people -- except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny -- working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he'd put a hot-plate under a chicken's feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don't know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot -- it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn't matter what the show was -- what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would "get married" at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, "Ain't She Sweet?"] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn't actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who'd been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, "You're the Only Star in My Blue Heaven"] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, "For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God." But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff's career thus far. In particular, he'd tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He'd cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff's manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn't want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker -- though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising -- Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold's second single, in 1945, "Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years", reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years"] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers' songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes' bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold's manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel's commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as "Colonel", even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up -- Parker was originally meant to be Arnold's exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the "exclusive" manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Of course, Parker didn't leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed -- he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously -- with Snow later saying "I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I've ever had dealings with." The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners -- right up until he discovered they weren't. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula -- a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay -- songs like "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone". [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis' own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future -- whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else -- even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips -- the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn't as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis' last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn't play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band -- Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis' fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget"] That's a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of "Mystery Train", was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker's single, as "Love My Baby" provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis' version of "Mystery Train". Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Mystery Train"] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters -- as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn't a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters -- B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it's likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn't understand at all why those girls were screaming at him -- he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis' music -- but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis' family -- and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis' family. Elvis' parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn't work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he'd do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn't mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We'll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn't seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label -- a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis' contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn't want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis' success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That's great! Except they will not pay you for several months -- if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you've been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips' money, and he didn't have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn't have any artists who could take Elvis' place. He'd found the musician he'd been looking for -- the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips' dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis' contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted -- but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn't sound like a huge amount for Elvis' contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist's contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips' view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn't -- as seemed likely -- he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus -- of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker's pocket. RCA quickly reissued "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" and "Mystery Train", while they were waiting for Elvis' first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Welcome to episode twenty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m three-quarters of the way through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used two main books for the information in this episode — The Late Great Johnny Ace and Transition from R&B to Rock ‘n’ Roll by James Salem is an exemplary biography, which gets far more detail about its subject than I would have though possible given his short, underdocumented, life, and which also provided some of the background material about Memphis. Big Mama Thornton: Her Life and Music by Michael Spörke  is the only biography of Thornton. It’s very well researched, but suffers somewhat from English not being its author’s first language. I got some additional details about the overlap between Ace and Thornton, and some of the information about Don Robey, from that. The Patreon-only Christmas episode I mention is here, for Patreon backers. Normally when I’m recommending a way to buy the music I discuss, I link to things available as a CD. This time, I’m going to link to a digital-only release, but it’s worth it. Ace’s Wild! The Complete Solo Sides and Sessions contains every track ever recorded and released by Ace, including the posthumous overdubbed tracks; every released track he played on for other Beale Streeters including classics from B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland; and a selection of the tribute records I talk about. I know of no physical release that’s anywhere near as comprehensive. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A content warning: this episode contains a description of a death by gunshot. I am not using any of the more explicit descriptions of this death, though I do describe some aspects of it, but talking about that subject at all can be upsetting, so if you’re likely to be disturbed by that, please turn off now. If you’re unsure whether you’ll be upset, remember that there are blog posts at 500songs.com containing the full text of every episode, and you can read the text there before listening if you wish. Johnny Ace was born John Alexander Jr — he used a stage name because his mother didn’t approve of secular music — and he was part of a group of musicians called the Beale Streeters. To understand the importance of this group of people, you have to understand Memphis and why it was important. American regional musical culture could be incredibly specific, and different cities had different specialities. That’s changed somewhat now, as transport and communications have got so much better, but certainly in the first half of the twentieth century you’d find that cities a hundred or so miles apart had taken a lot of the same musical influences but put them together in radically different ways. And Memphis, in particular, was an unusual city for the southern US. It was still an intensely racist city by any normal standards, and it was segregated, and thus still home to countless horrors and crimes against humanity. But for the Southern US black people led comparatively comfortable lives, simply because Memphis was very close to fifty percent black in the early decades of the twentieth century — and was actually majority-black in the late nineteenth. In 1878, there was a plague — yellow fever swept the city — and it took an immense toll. Before the 1878 plague, there were fifty-five thousand people living in Memphis. Afterward there were fourteen thousand, and twelve thousand of those were black. The plague killed seventy-five percent of the white people living in Memphis, but only seven percent of the black people. Even though white people moved back into the city and eventually became the majority again, and even though they had all the institutional power of a racist state on their side, there was less of a power imbalance in Memphis, and the white ruling classes simply couldn’t keep black people down as thoroughly as in other Southern cities. Memphis’ regional speciality is the blues, and its first great musical hero was W.C. Handy. Even though Handy only lived in Memphis for a few years, having been born in Alabama and later moving to New York, he is indelibly associated with Memphis, and with Beale Street in particular. Handy claimed to have invented the blues, though his blues wasn’t much like what we’d call “the blues” these days, and often had an element of the tango about it. And he was certainly the first person to have any kind of hit with blues songwriting, back in a time when hits in music were measured by sheet music sales, before recorded music had become more than an interesting novelty. [excerpt: “Beale Street Blues” by W.C. Handy] So Memphis was, as far as the wider world was concerned, and certainly as far as anyone in Memphis itself was concerned, the birthplace of the blues. And Beale Street, more than any other part of Memphis, was the blues area. Everyone knew it. Beale Street was the centre of black culture, not just for Memphis, but for the whole of Tennessee, in the late forties and early fifties. It wasn’t actually called Beale Street on the maps until 1955, but everyone referred to it as “Beale Street” anyway. By 1950 people were already complaining about the fact that the “old” Beale Street had gone. Beale Street was where Lansky’s was — the place where the coolest people bought their clothes. There was Schwab’s Dry Good Store, where you could buy everything you wanted. And there was the Beale Street Blues Boys, or the Beale Streeters — accounts vary as to what they actually called themselves. They weren’t a band in a traditional sense, but there were a few of them who got together a lot, and when they would make records, they would often play on each others tracks. There was the harmonica player Junior Parker, who would go on to record for every Memphis-based label, often recording in the Sun Studios, and who would write songs like “Mystery Train”. There was the piano player Roscoe Gordon, who had a unique off-beat way of playing that would later go on to be a massive influence on ska and reggae music. There was the singer Bobby “Blue” Bland, one of the most important blues singers of all time, and there was guitarist Riley King, who would later be known as “the blues boy”, before shortening that and becoming just “B.B.” King. And there was Johnny Ace, another piano player and singer. But the Beale Street Blues Boys slowly drifted apart. Riley King went off and started cutting his own records for RPM, one of the myriad tiny labels that had sprung up to promote R&B music. And Bobby Bland got drafted, but before he had to go off to be in the armed forces, he went into Sam Phillips’ studio and cut a few sides, which were released on Duke Records, backed by the Beale Streeters: [excerpt “Lovin’ Blues” by Bobby “Blue” Bland and the Beale Streeters] That has BB King on guitar and Johnny Ace on the piano, along with George Joyner on bass, Earl Forest on drums, and Adolph Billy Duncan on the saxophone. Shortly after this, Ace’s first single came out almost by accident. He was playing piano at a session for Bobby Bland, and Bland couldn’t get the lyrics to his song right. In the session downtime, Ace started singing Ruth Brown’s hit “So Long”: [excerpt: Ruth Brown, “So Long”] Dave Mattis, Duke Records’ owner, thought that what Ace was doing sounded rather better than the song they were meant to be recording, and so they changed it up just enough for it to count as “an original”, with Ace coming up with a new melody and Mattis writing new lyrics, and “My Song” by Johnny Ace was created: [Excerpt Johnny Ace: “My Song”] This would be how all Ace’s records would be created from that point on. They would take a pop standard or another song that Ace knew, someone would write new lyrics, and then Ace would come up with a new melody while keeping the chord progression and general feel the same. It was a formula that would lead to a string of hits for Ace. “My Song” might not sound very rock and roll, but the B-side was a jump boogie straight out of the Big Joe Turner style — “Follow The Rules” [Excerpt Johnny Ace: “Follow the Rules”] The A-side went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the first of eight hits in a row. Ace’s singles would typically have a ballad on the A-side and a boogie number on the B-side. This was a typical formula for the time — you might remember that Cecil Gant had a similar pattern of putting a ballad on one side and a boogie on the other. The idea was to maximise the number of buyers for each single by appealing to two different audiences. And it seemed to work. Ace became very, very popular. In fact, he became too popular. Duke Records couldn’t keep up with the demand for his records, and Don Robey, the owner of Peacock Records, stepped in, buying them out. Don Robey had a reputation for violence. He was also, though, one of the few black businessmen in a white-dominated industry, and it might be argued that you can only get to that kind of status with a certain amount of unethical practices. Robey’s business manager and unacknowledged partner, Evelyn Johnson, was by all accounts a far nicer person than Robey. She did the day-to-day running of the businesses, drew up the business plans, and basically did everything that an owner would normally be expected to, while Robey took the money. Johnson did everything for Robey. When he’d decided to put out records, mostly to promote the blues singer Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, who he managed, Johnson asked him how they were going to go about this, and Robey said “Hell, I don’t know! That’s for you to find out!” So Johnson figured out what to do — you call the Library of Congress. They had all the forms necessary for copyright registration, and whenever they didn’t have something, they would give her the details of the organisation that did. She got every copyright and record-related form from the Library of Congress, BMI, and other organisations, and looked over them all. Everything that looked relevant, she filled out. Everything that didn’t, she kept in case it was useful later, in a file labelled “It could be in here”. Johnson ran the record label, she ran the publishing company, and she ran *and owned* the booking agency. The booking agency started the model that companies like Motown would later use — cleaning the acts up, giving them lessons in performance, buying them clothes and cars, giving them spending money. She lost money on all the artists that were recording for Robey’s labels, where the performances turned into a loss-leader for the record labels, but she made the money back on artists like B.B. King or Ike and Tina Turner, who just turned up and did their job and didn’t have to be groomed by the Johnson/Robey operation. She never got the credit, because she was a black woman, while Don Robey was a man, but Evelyn Johnson pretty much single-handedly built up the careers of every black artist in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi or California during the early part of the 1950s. From this point on, Duke became part of the Don Robey empire, run by Evelyn Johnson. For a while, Dave Mattis was a silent partner, but when he noticed he was getting neither money nor a say, he went to see Robey to complain. Robey pulled a gun on Mattis, and bought out Mattis for a tiny fraction of what his share of the record company was actually worth. Once Robey had bought Duke, Ace started working with Johnny Otis as many of the other Duke and Peacock artists did, and his records from then on were recorded in Houston, usually with the Johnny Otis band, and with Otis producing, though sometimes Ace’s own touring band would play on the records instead. Ace’s formula owed a lot to Charles Brown’s sophisticated West Coast blues. For those who haven’t heard the Patreon-only bonus Christmas episode of this podcast, Brown was the missing link between the styles of Nat King Cole and Ray Charles, and his smooth lounge blues was an important precursor to a lot of the more laid back kinds of soul music. Here’s a clip of “Merry Christmas Baby” by Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, with Brown on lead vocals, so you can see what I mean about the resemblance: [Excerpt “Merry Christmas Baby” Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers] Now, there is a very important point to be made here, and that is that Johnny Ace’s music was extremely popular with a black audience. He didn’t get a white audience until after his death, and that audience was largely only interested in one record — “Pledging My Love”. It’s important to point this out because for much of the time after his death his music was dismissed by white music critics precisely because it didn’t fit their ideas of what black music was, and they assumed he was trying to appeal to a white audience. In fact there’s a derogatory term for the smooth-sounding blues singers, which I won’t repeat here, but which implies that they were “white on the inside”. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Johnny Otis said, Ace was “too smooth for the white critics and white writers for a long time.” He pointed out that this was “white arrogance”, suggesting that “black people are not the best judge of what was the best art to come out of the community, but the white writers are.” Otis’ point, which I agree with, was that, in his words, “you have to take your cue from the people of the community. They know better than you what they like and what is black artistry.” Ace’s music — yearning ballads about unrequited love, sung in a smooth, mellow, voice — didn’t fit with white preconceptions about the proper music that black men should be making, and so for decades his work was more or less airbrushed out of history. It was inconvenient for the white mythmakers to have a black man playing sophisticated music. But that music was hugely popular among black audiences. “The Clock”, for example, went to number one on the R&B charts, and stayed on the charts from June through October 1953. [excerpt: Johnny Ace: “The Clock”] His follow-ups to “The Clock” weren’t as big, and there was a sign he was entering diminishing returns, but his records stayed on the charts for longer than most, and as a result his releases were also less frequent. Don Robey stockpiled his recordings, putting out just one single every six months, waiting for the previous single to fall off the charts before releasing the next one. This stockpiling would prove very lucrative for him. Because while Ace was a sophisticated performer, he lived a less sophisticated life. One of his hobbies was to drive at top speed, while drunk, and shoot the zeroes out of road signs. With a lifestyle like that, it is probably not all that surprising that Ace didn’t live to a ripe old age, but the story of his death is still one that might be shocking or upsetting, and one that is still sad even though it was probably inevitable. The last song Johnny Ace played live was “Yes, Baby” — a duet with Big Mama Thornton, who had been his regular touring partner for quite a while. The two would tour together and Thornton would be backed by Ace’s band, with another pianist. Ace would take over from the pianist for his own set, and then the two of them would duet together: [excerpt “Yes Baby” — Johnny Ace and Big Mama Thornton] As you can hear, that wasn’t one of his mellow ballads. Ace’s live shows were a big draw. Evelyn Johnson said on several occasions that Ace was so popular that she used his popularity to make deals on less popular acts — if you wanted to book Johnny Ace you had to book B.B. King or Bobby “Blue” Bland as well, and those acts built their own followings through playing those gigs, often on the same bill as Ace and Big Mama Thornton. By all accounts the show in Houston on Christmas Day was a massively enjoyable one — right up until the point that it very suddenly wasn’t. The rumour that went round in the days after his death was that he was killed playing Russian roulette. That’s still what most people who talk about him think happened. This would have been a tragic way to go, but at least he would have known the possible consequences, and you have to think that no-one is going to play Russian roulette unless they have some sort of death wish. And there were other rumours that went around — one that persists to this day, and that I inadvertantly repeated in episode ten, is that Little Esther was present. She wasn’t, as far as I can tell. And the darkest rumours, repeated by people who like to sensationalise things, claim that it was a hit from Don Robey, that Ace was planning on changing record labels. But that’s not what actually happened. What happened is much more upsetting, and even more pointlessly tragic. Johnny Ace was backstage in Houston with a bunch of people — Big Mama Thornton and the band’s bass player Curtis Tilman were there, as were Ace’s girlfriend and some other people. It was Christmas day, they were killing time between sets, and they’d been drinking. Ace was waving a gun around and making people nervous. He was in a bad mood because he had a toothache, and he was feeling tired and annoyed. Accounts vary slightly as to what happened next, but Big Mama Thornton’s was given as a legal deposition only a couple of hours after his death, before exaggeration set in. “Johnny was pointing this pistol at Mary Carter and Joe Hamilton. He was kind of waving it around. I asked Johnny to let me see the gun. He gave it to me and when I turned the chamber a .22 cal. Bullet fell out in my hand. Johnny told me to put it back in where it wouldn’t fall out. I put it back and gave it to him. I told him not to snap it to nobody. After he got the pistol back, Johnny pointed the pistol at Mary Carter and pulled the trigger. It snapped. Olivia was still sitting on his lap. I told Johnny again not to snap the pistol at anybody. Johnny then put the pistol to Olivia’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped. Johnny said, ‘I’ll show you that it won’t shoot.’ He held the pistol up and looked at it first and then put it to his head. I started towards the door and heard the pistol go off. I turned around and saw Johnny falling to the floor. I saw that he was shot and I run on stage and told the people in the band about it.” According to Evelyn Johnson, Ace’s hair stood on end from the shock, and he died with “a smirky little grin on his face, and his expression was ‘What’d I say?'” He was only twenty-five, and he’d been the most successful rhythm and blues singer of the previous year. When Cash Box, the trade paper, polled disc jockeys in December 1954 to find out who the most played artist of 1954 had been, Ace was the clear favourite. Shortly after his death, Duke Records announced that he had had three records top one and three quarter million sales the previous year. That is, to put it bluntly, a ludicrous amount — almost nothing sold that much, and one is tempted to believe that Duke were slightly manipulating the figures — but that it’s at all plausible says a lot about how popular Johnny Ace was at the time. After Ace’s death, “Pledging My Love” instantly became his biggest hit: [excerpt: “Pledging My Love”, Johnny Ace] “Pledging My Love” is credited to Fats Washington, the lyricist behind many of B.B. King’s songs from this period, and Don Robey as songwriters, but it’s safe to say that Ace himself wrote the music, with Robey taking the credit. Robey apparently never wrote a song in his life, but you wouldn’t believe it from the songwriting credits of any record that was put out by Duke or Peacock records. There, Don Robey, or his pseudonym Deadric Malone, would appear to be one of the most prolific songwriters of all time, writing in a whole variety of different styles — everything from “Love of Jesus” to “Baby, What’s Your Pants Doing Wet?” In total, he’s credited as writer for 1200 different songs. “Pledging My Love” was released only days before Ace’s death, and the initial expectation was that it would follow the diminishing returns that had set in since “The Clock”, becoming a modest but not overwhelming hit. Instead, it became a massive smash hit, and his biggest record ever, and it gained him a whole new fanbase — white teenagers, who had previously not been buying his records in any large numbers. Black people in the fifties mostly still bought 78s, because they tended to be poorer and so not buying new hi-fi equipment when they could still use their old ones. 45s, in the R&B market, were mostly for jukeboxes. But for the first time ever, the pressing plant that dealt with Duke’s records couldn’t keep up with the demand for 45s — so much so that the record was held back on the jukebox charts, because the label couldn’t service the demand. The records were being bought by young white teenagers, instead of his previous older black audiences — although that other audience still bought the record. Ace’s death came at a crucial transition point for the acceptance of rhythm and blues among white record buyers, and “Pledging My Love” acted as a catalyst. Until a couple of years earlier, songs owned by ASCAP, the performing rights society that dealt only with “respectable” composers for the Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, made up about eight times as many hits as songs owned by BMI, who dealt with the blues and hillbilly musicians. But in early 1955, eight of the ten biggest hits were BMI songs. “Pledging My Love” came at precisely the right moment to pick up on that new wave. There were white cover versions of the record, but people wanted the original, and Johnny Ace’s version made the *pop* top twenty. What none of this did was give Ace’s family any money. Don Robey told them, after Ace’s death, that Ace owed him money rather than the other way round. And Ace and his family didn’t receive even the songwriting royalties Ace was owed for the few songs he was credited with. While Robey was registered with BMI, and registered the songs with them, he had a policy of keeping his artists as ignorant as possible of the business side of things, and so he didn’t let Ace know that Ace would also have to register with BMI to receive any money. Because of this, his widow didn’t even know that BMI existed until James Salem, Ace’s biographer, told her in the mid-nineties, and it was only then that she started to get some of the songwriting royalties she and her children had been entitled to for forty-plus years worth of sales and radio play. Robey wasn’t the only one making money from Ace. Cash-in tribute records were released, including two separate ones by Johnny Moore’s Blazers, and records by Johnny Fuller, Vanetta Dillard, the Five Wings and the Rovers. All of these records were incredibly tasteless — usually combining a bunch of quotes from Ace’s lyrics to provide his “last letter” or a letter from heaven or similar, and backing them with backing tracks that were as close as possible to the ones Ace used. This is a typical example, “Why Johnny Why” by Linda Hayes with Johnny Moore’s Blazers [excerpt: “Why Johnny Why” by Linda Hayes] And after Don Robey had completely scraped the barrel of unreleased Ace recordings, he tried to sign Johnny Ace’s brother, St. Clair Alexander, to a record deal, but eventually decided that Alexander wasn’t quite good enough (though Alexander would spend the next few decades performing a tribute show to his brother, which many people thought was quite decent). Instead, Robey persuaded a blues singer named Jimmie Lee Land to perform as “Buddy Ace” in the hope of milking it some more, and put out press releases claiming that “Buddy” was Johnny Ace’s brother. Buddy Ace’s first record was released simultaneously with the last tracks from Johnny that were in the vault, putting out adverts talking about “the last record on the immortal Johnny Ace to complete your collection” and “the first record on the versatile Buddy Ace to start your collection”. Buddy Ace actually made some very strong records, but he didn’t really sound much like Johnny: [excerpt: Buddy Ace: “What Can I Do”] Buddy Ace did not duplicate Johnny’s success, though he continued as a moderately successful performer until the day he died – which was, rather eerily, while performing in Texas, forty years to the day after Johnny Ace died. But Robey wanted to milk the catalogue, and tried in 1957 to resuscitate the career of his dead star by getting the Jordanaires, famous for backing Elvis Presley, to overdub new backing vocals on Ace’s hits: [excerpt: Johnny Ace with the Jordanaires: “Pledging My Love”] This musical graverobbing was not successful, and all it did was sour Johnny Otis on Robey, as Robey had agreed that Otis’ productions would remain untouched. Even forty years afterwards — and twenty years after Robey’s death — it would still infuriate Otis. But probably the most well-known of all the posthumous releases to do with Johnny Ace came in 1983, when Paul Simon wrote and recorded “The Late Great Johnny Ace”, a song which linked Ace with two other Johns who died of gunshot wounds — Lennon and Kennedy: [excerpt: Paul Simon “The Late Great Johnny Ace”] That’s from Simon’s “Hearts and Bones”, an album that was steeped in nostalgia for the music of the period when rhythm and blues was just starting to turn into rock and roll. The period defined by the late, great, Johnny Ace.

Welcome to episode twenty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m three-quarters of the way through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. (more…)

Welcome to episode twenty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Pledging My Love" by Johnny Ace Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I'm three-quarters of the way through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I've used two main books for the information in this episode -- The Late Great Johnny Ace and Transition from R&B to Rock 'n' Roll by James Salem is an exemplary biography, which gets far more detail about its subject than I would have though possible given his short, underdocumented, life, and which also provided some of the background material about Memphis. Big Mama Thornton: Her Life and Music by Michael Spörke  is the only biography of Thornton. It's very well researched, but suffers somewhat from English not being its author's first language. I got some additional details about the overlap between Ace and Thornton, and some of the information about Don Robey, from that. The Patreon-only Christmas episode I mention is here, for Patreon backers. Normally when I'm recommending a way to buy the music I discuss, I link to things available as a CD. This time, I'm going to link to a digital-only release, but it's worth it. Ace's Wild! The Complete Solo Sides and Sessions contains every track ever recorded and released by Ace, including the posthumous overdubbed tracks; every released track he played on for other Beale Streeters including classics from B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland; and a selection of the tribute records I talk about. I know of no physical release that's anywhere near as comprehensive. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A content warning: this episode contains a description of a death by gunshot. I am not using any of the more explicit descriptions of this death, though I do describe some aspects of it, but talking about that subject at all can be upsetting, so if you're likely to be disturbed by that, please turn off now. If you're unsure whether you'll be upset, remember that there are blog posts at 500songs.com containing the full text of every episode, and you can read the text there before listening if you wish. Johnny Ace was born John Alexander Jr -- he used a stage name because his mother didn't approve of secular music -- and he was part of a group of musicians called the Beale Streeters. To understand the importance of this group of people, you have to understand Memphis and why it was important. American regional musical culture could be incredibly specific, and different cities had different specialities. That's changed somewhat now, as transport and communications have got so much better, but certainly in the first half of the twentieth century you'd find that cities a hundred or so miles apart had taken a lot of the same musical influences but put them together in radically different ways. And Memphis, in particular, was an unusual city for the southern US. It was still an intensely racist city by any normal standards, and it was segregated, and thus still home to countless horrors and crimes against humanity. But for the Southern US black people led comparatively comfortable lives, simply because Memphis was very close to fifty percent black in the early decades of the twentieth century -- and was actually majority-black in the late nineteenth. In 1878, there was a plague -- yellow fever swept the city -- and it took an immense toll. Before the 1878 plague, there were fifty-five thousand people living in Memphis. Afterward there were fourteen thousand, and twelve thousand of those were black. The plague killed seventy-five percent of the white people living in Memphis, but only seven percent of the black people. Even though white people moved back into the city and eventually became the majority again, and even though they had all the institutional power of a racist state on their side, there was less of a power imbalance in Memphis, and the white ruling classes simply couldn't keep black people down as thoroughly as in other Southern cities. Memphis' regional speciality is the blues, and its first great musical hero was W.C. Handy. Even though Handy only lived in Memphis for a few years, having been born in Alabama and later moving to New York, he is indelibly associated with Memphis, and with Beale Street in particular. Handy claimed to have invented the blues, though his blues wasn't much like what we'd call "the blues" these days, and often had an element of the tango about it. And he was certainly the first person to have any kind of hit with blues songwriting, back in a time when hits in music were measured by sheet music sales, before recorded music had become more than an interesting novelty. [excerpt: "Beale Street Blues" by W.C. Handy] So Memphis was, as far as the wider world was concerned, and certainly as far as anyone in Memphis itself was concerned, the birthplace of the blues. And Beale Street, more than any other part of Memphis, was the blues area. Everyone knew it. Beale Street was the centre of black culture, not just for Memphis, but for the whole of Tennessee, in the late forties and early fifties. It wasn't actually called Beale Street on the maps until 1955, but everyone referred to it as "Beale Street" anyway. By 1950 people were already complaining about the fact that the "old" Beale Street had gone. Beale Street was where Lansky's was -- the place where the coolest people bought their clothes. There was Schwab's Dry Good Store, where you could buy everything you wanted. And there was the Beale Street Blues Boys, or the Beale Streeters -- accounts vary as to what they actually called themselves. They weren't a band in a traditional sense, but there were a few of them who got together a lot, and when they would make records, they would often play on each others tracks. There was the harmonica player Junior Parker, who would go on to record for every Memphis-based label, often recording in the Sun Studios, and who would write songs like "Mystery Train". There was the piano player Roscoe Gordon, who had a unique off-beat way of playing that would later go on to be a massive influence on ska and reggae music. There was the singer Bobby "Blue" Bland, one of the most important blues singers of all time, and there was guitarist Riley King, who would later be known as "the blues boy", before shortening that and becoming just "B.B." King. And there was Johnny Ace, another piano player and singer. But the Beale Street Blues Boys slowly drifted apart. Riley King went off and started cutting his own records for RPM, one of the myriad tiny labels that had sprung up to promote R&B music. And Bobby Bland got drafted, but before he had to go off to be in the armed forces, he went into Sam Phillips' studio and cut a few sides, which were released on Duke Records, backed by the Beale Streeters: [excerpt "Lovin' Blues" by Bobby "Blue" Bland and the Beale Streeters] That has BB King on guitar and Johnny Ace on the piano, along with George Joyner on bass, Earl Forest on drums, and Adolph Billy Duncan on the saxophone. Shortly after this, Ace's first single came out almost by accident. He was playing piano at a session for Bobby Bland, and Bland couldn't get the lyrics to his song right. In the session downtime, Ace started singing Ruth Brown's hit "So Long": [excerpt: Ruth Brown, "So Long"] Dave Mattis, Duke Records' owner, thought that what Ace was doing sounded rather better than the song they were meant to be recording, and so they changed it up just enough for it to count as "an original", with Ace coming up with a new melody and Mattis writing new lyrics, and "My Song" by Johnny Ace was created: [Excerpt Johnny Ace: "My Song"] This would be how all Ace's records would be created from that point on. They would take a pop standard or another song that Ace knew, someone would write new lyrics, and then Ace would come up with a new melody while keeping the chord progression and general feel the same. It was a formula that would lead to a string of hits for Ace. "My Song" might not sound very rock and roll, but the B-side was a jump boogie straight out of the Big Joe Turner style -- "Follow The Rules" [Excerpt Johnny Ace: "Follow the Rules"] The A-side went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the first of eight hits in a row. Ace's singles would typically have a ballad on the A-side and a boogie number on the B-side. This was a typical formula for the time -- you might remember that Cecil Gant had a similar pattern of putting a ballad on one side and a boogie on the other. The idea was to maximise the number of buyers for each single by appealing to two different audiences. And it seemed to work. Ace became very, very popular. In fact, he became too popular. Duke Records couldn't keep up with the demand for his records, and Don Robey, the owner of Peacock Records, stepped in, buying them out. Don Robey had a reputation for violence. He was also, though, one of the few black businessmen in a white-dominated industry, and it might be argued that you can only get to that kind of status with a certain amount of unethical practices. Robey's business manager and unacknowledged partner, Evelyn Johnson, was by all accounts a far nicer person than Robey. She did the day-to-day running of the businesses, drew up the business plans, and basically did everything that an owner would normally be expected to, while Robey took the money. Johnson did everything for Robey. When he'd decided to put out records, mostly to promote the blues singer Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, who he managed, Johnson asked him how they were going to go about this, and Robey said "Hell, I don't know! That's for you to find out!" So Johnson figured out what to do -- you call the Library of Congress. They had all the forms necessary for copyright registration, and whenever they didn't have something, they would give her the details of the organisation that did. She got every copyright and record-related form from the Library of Congress, BMI, and other organisations, and looked over them all. Everything that looked relevant, she filled out. Everything that didn't, she kept in case it was useful later, in a file labelled "It could be in here". Johnson ran the record label, she ran the publishing company, and she ran *and owned* the booking agency. The booking agency started the model that companies like Motown would later use -- cleaning the acts up, giving them lessons in performance, buying them clothes and cars, giving them spending money. She lost money on all the artists that were recording for Robey's labels, where the performances turned into a loss-leader for the record labels, but she made the money back on artists like B.B. King or Ike and Tina Turner, who just turned up and did their job and didn't have to be groomed by the Johnson/Robey operation. She never got the credit, because she was a black woman, while Don Robey was a man, but Evelyn Johnson pretty much single-handedly built up the careers of every black artist in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi or California during the early part of the 1950s. From this point on, Duke became part of the Don Robey empire, run by Evelyn Johnson. For a while, Dave Mattis was a silent partner, but when he noticed he was getting neither money nor a say, he went to see Robey to complain. Robey pulled a gun on Mattis, and bought out Mattis for a tiny fraction of what his share of the record company was actually worth. Once Robey had bought Duke, Ace started working with Johnny Otis as many of the other Duke and Peacock artists did, and his records from then on were recorded in Houston, usually with the Johnny Otis band, and with Otis producing, though sometimes Ace's own touring band would play on the records instead. Ace's formula owed a lot to Charles Brown's sophisticated West Coast blues. For those who haven't heard the Patreon-only bonus Christmas episode of this podcast, Brown was the missing link between the styles of Nat King Cole and Ray Charles, and his smooth lounge blues was an important precursor to a lot of the more laid back kinds of soul music. Here's a clip of "Merry Christmas Baby" by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, with Brown on lead vocals, so you can see what I mean about the resemblance: [Excerpt "Merry Christmas Baby" Johnny Moore's Three Blazers] Now, there is a very important point to be made here, and that is that Johnny Ace's music was extremely popular with a black audience. He didn't get a white audience until after his death, and that audience was largely only interested in one record -- "Pledging My Love". It's important to point this out because for much of the time after his death his music was dismissed by white music critics precisely because it didn't fit their ideas of what black music was, and they assumed he was trying to appeal to a white audience. In fact there's a derogatory term for the smooth-sounding blues singers, which I won't repeat here, but which implies that they were "white on the inside". Nothing could be further from the truth. As Johnny Otis said, Ace was "too smooth for the white critics and white writers for a long time." He pointed out that this was "white arrogance", suggesting that "black people are not the best judge of what was the best art to come out of the community, but the white writers are." Otis' point, which I agree with, was that, in his words, "you have to take your cue from the people of the community. They know better than you what they like and what is black artistry." Ace's music -- yearning ballads about unrequited love, sung in a smooth, mellow, voice -- didn't fit with white preconceptions about the proper music that black men should be making, and so for decades his work was more or less airbrushed out of history. It was inconvenient for the white mythmakers to have a black man playing sophisticated music. But that music was hugely popular among black audiences. "The Clock", for example, went to number one on the R&B charts, and stayed on the charts from June through October 1953. [excerpt: Johnny Ace: "The Clock"] His follow-ups to “The Clock” weren't as big, and there was a sign he was entering diminishing returns, but his records stayed on the charts for longer than most, and as a result his releases were also less frequent. Don Robey stockpiled his recordings, putting out just one single every six months, waiting for the previous single to fall off the charts before releasing the next one. This stockpiling would prove very lucrative for him. Because while Ace was a sophisticated performer, he lived a less sophisticated life. One of his hobbies was to drive at top speed, while drunk, and shoot the zeroes out of road signs. With a lifestyle like that, it is probably not all that surprising that Ace didn't live to a ripe old age, but the story of his death is still one that might be shocking or upsetting, and one that is still sad even though it was probably inevitable. The last song Johnny Ace played live was "Yes, Baby" -- a duet with Big Mama Thornton, who had been his regular touring partner for quite a while. The two would tour together and Thornton would be backed by Ace's band, with another pianist. Ace would take over from the pianist for his own set, and then the two of them would duet together: [excerpt "Yes Baby" -- Johnny Ace and Big Mama Thornton] As you can hear, that wasn't one of his mellow ballads. Ace's live shows were a big draw. Evelyn Johnson said on several occasions that Ace was so popular that she used his popularity to make deals on less popular acts -- if you wanted to book Johnny Ace you had to book B.B. King or Bobby "Blue" Bland as well, and those acts built their own followings through playing those gigs, often on the same bill as Ace and Big Mama Thornton. By all accounts the show in Houston on Christmas Day was a massively enjoyable one -- right up until the point that it very suddenly wasn't. The rumour that went round in the days after his death was that he was killed playing Russian roulette. That's still what most people who talk about him think happened. This would have been a tragic way to go, but at least he would have known the possible consequences, and you have to think that no-one is going to play Russian roulette unless they have some sort of death wish. And there were other rumours that went around -- one that persists to this day, and that I inadvertantly repeated in episode ten, is that Little Esther was present. She wasn't, as far as I can tell. And the darkest rumours, repeated by people who like to sensationalise things, claim that it was a hit from Don Robey, that Ace was planning on changing record labels. But that's not what actually happened. What happened is much more upsetting, and even more pointlessly tragic. Johnny Ace was backstage in Houston with a bunch of people -- Big Mama Thornton and the band's bass player Curtis Tilman were there, as were Ace's girlfriend and some other people. It was Christmas day, they were killing time between sets, and they'd been drinking. Ace was waving a gun around and making people nervous. He was in a bad mood because he had a toothache, and he was feeling tired and annoyed. Accounts vary slightly as to what happened next, but Big Mama Thornton's was given as a legal deposition only a couple of hours after his death, before exaggeration set in. "Johnny was pointing this pistol at Mary Carter and Joe Hamilton. He was kind of waving it around. I asked Johnny to let me see the gun. He gave it to me and when I turned the chamber a .22 cal. Bullet fell out in my hand. Johnny told me to put it back in where it wouldn’t fall out. I put it back and gave it to him. I told him not to snap it to nobody. After he got the pistol back, Johnny pointed the pistol at Mary Carter and pulled the trigger. It snapped. Olivia was still sitting on his lap. I told Johnny again not to snap the pistol at anybody. Johnny then put the pistol to Olivia’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped. Johnny said, ‘I’ll show you that it won’t shoot.’ He held the pistol up and looked at it first and then put it to his head. I started towards the door and heard the pistol go off. I turned around and saw Johnny falling to the floor. I saw that he was shot and I run on stage and told the people in the band about it." According to Evelyn Johnson, Ace's hair stood on end from the shock, and he died with "a smirky little grin on his face, and his expression was 'What'd I say?'" He was only twenty-five, and he'd been the most successful rhythm and blues singer of the previous year. When Cash Box, the trade paper, polled disc jockeys in December 1954 to find out who the most played artist of 1954 had been, Ace was the clear favourite. Shortly after his death, Duke Records announced that he had had three records top one and three quarter million sales the previous year. That is, to put it bluntly, a ludicrous amount -- almost nothing sold that much, and one is tempted to believe that Duke were slightly manipulating the figures -- but that it's at all plausible says a lot about how popular Johnny Ace was at the time. After Ace's death, "Pledging My Love" instantly became his biggest hit: [excerpt: "Pledging My Love", Johnny Ace] "Pledging My Love" is credited to Fats Washington, the lyricist behind many of B.B. King's songs from this period, and Don Robey as songwriters, but it's safe to say that Ace himself wrote the music, with Robey taking the credit. Robey apparently never wrote a song in his life, but you wouldn't believe it from the songwriting credits of any record that was put out by Duke or Peacock records. There, Don Robey, or his pseudonym Deadric Malone, would appear to be one of the most prolific songwriters of all time, writing in a whole variety of different styles -- everything from "Love of Jesus" to "Baby, What's Your Pants Doing Wet?" In total, he's credited as writer for 1200 different songs. “Pledging My Love” was released only days before Ace's death, and the initial expectation was that it would follow the diminishing returns that had set in since "The Clock", becoming a modest but not overwhelming hit. Instead, it became a massive smash hit, and his biggest record ever, and it gained him a whole new fanbase -- white teenagers, who had previously not been buying his records in any large numbers. Black people in the fifties mostly still bought 78s, because they tended to be poorer and so not buying new hi-fi equipment when they could still use their old ones. 45s, in the R&B market, were mostly for jukeboxes. But for the first time ever, the pressing plant that dealt with Duke's records couldn't keep up with the demand for 45s -- so much so that the record was held back on the jukebox charts, because the label couldn't service the demand. The records were being bought by young white teenagers, instead of his previous older black audiences -- although that other audience still bought the record. Ace's death came at a crucial transition point for the acceptance of rhythm and blues among white record buyers, and "Pledging My Love" acted as a catalyst. Until a couple of years earlier, songs owned by ASCAP, the performing rights society that dealt only with "respectable" composers for the Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, made up about eight times as many hits as songs owned by BMI, who dealt with the blues and hillbilly musicians. But in early 1955, eight of the ten biggest hits were BMI songs. "Pledging My Love" came at precisely the right moment to pick up on that new wave. There were white cover versions of the record, but people wanted the original, and Johnny Ace's version made the *pop* top twenty. What none of this did was give Ace's family any money. Don Robey told them, after Ace's death, that Ace owed him money rather than the other way round. And Ace and his family didn't receive even the songwriting royalties Ace was owed for the few songs he was credited with. While Robey was registered with BMI, and registered the songs with them, he had a policy of keeping his artists as ignorant as possible of the business side of things, and so he didn't let Ace know that Ace would also have to register with BMI to receive any money. Because of this, his widow didn't even know that BMI existed until James Salem, Ace's biographer, told her in the mid-nineties, and it was only then that she started to get some of the songwriting royalties she and her children had been entitled to for forty-plus years worth of sales and radio play. Robey wasn't the only one making money from Ace. Cash-in tribute records were released, including two separate ones by Johnny Moore's Blazers, and records by Johnny Fuller, Vanetta Dillard, the Five Wings and the Rovers. All of these records were incredibly tasteless -- usually combining a bunch of quotes from Ace's lyrics to provide his "last letter" or a letter from heaven or similar, and backing them with backing tracks that were as close as possible to the ones Ace used. This is a typical example, "Why Johnny Why" by Linda Hayes with Johnny Moore's Blazers [excerpt: "Why Johnny Why" by Linda Hayes] And after Don Robey had completely scraped the barrel of unreleased Ace recordings, he tried to sign Johnny Ace's brother, St. Clair Alexander, to a record deal, but eventually decided that Alexander wasn't quite good enough (though Alexander would spend the next few decades performing a tribute show to his brother, which many people thought was quite decent). Instead, Robey persuaded a blues singer named Jimmie Lee Land to perform as "Buddy Ace" in the hope of milking it some more, and put out press releases claiming that "Buddy" was Johnny Ace's brother. Buddy Ace's first record was released simultaneously with the last tracks from Johnny that were in the vault, putting out adverts talking about "the last record on the immortal Johnny Ace to complete your collection" and "the first record on the versatile Buddy Ace to start your collection". Buddy Ace actually made some very strong records, but he didn't really sound much like Johnny: [excerpt: Buddy Ace: "What Can I Do"] Buddy Ace did not duplicate Johnny's success, though he continued as a moderately successful performer until the day he died – which was, rather eerily, while performing in Texas, forty years to the day after Johnny Ace died. But Robey wanted to milk the catalogue, and tried in 1957 to resuscitate the career of his dead star by getting the Jordanaires, famous for backing Elvis Presley, to overdub new backing vocals on Ace's hits: [excerpt: Johnny Ace with the Jordanaires: "Pledging My Love"] This musical graverobbing was not successful, and all it did was sour Johnny Otis on Robey, as Robey had agreed that Otis' productions would remain untouched. Even forty years afterwards -- and twenty years after Robey's death -- it would still infuriate Otis. But probably the most well-known of all the posthumous releases to do with Johnny Ace came in 1983, when Paul Simon wrote and recorded "The Late Great Johnny Ace", a song which linked Ace with two other Johns who died of gunshot wounds -- Lennon and Kennedy: [excerpt: Paul Simon "The Late Great Johnny Ace"] That's from Simon's "Hearts and Bones", an album that was steeped in nostalgia for the music of the period when rhythm and blues was just starting to turn into rock and roll. The period defined by the late, great, Johnny Ace.

In celebration of the incredible 50th-anniversary edition of The White Album, we are bringing back Cover to Cover for The Fab Four. Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ I Want To Hold Your Hand by Al Green on Love Ritual (Hi Records) 2′53″ Can't Buy Me Love by Scary Pockets on Kitsch Funk 4′26″ A Hard Day's Night by The Supremes on A Bit of Liverpool 6′54″ I Feel Fine by Chet Atkins on Picks On The Beatles 8′20″ Ticket to Ride by Vanilla Fudge on Vanilla Fudge 11′41″ Day Tripper by Otis Redding on Complete 15′14″ We Can Work It Out by Stevie Wonder on Signed, Sealed, and Delivered (Motown) 18′15″ Eleanor Rigby by The Four Tops on Four Tops Now (Motown) 21′08″ Come Together by The Meters on Kickback (Warner Bros) 24′32″ Strawberry Fields Forever by Richie Havens on 20th Century Masters 27′07″ Norwegian Wood by Waylon Jenning on Nashville Rebel (Sony) 30′40″ Fixing A Hole by The Wood Brothers on Up Above My Head (Indirecto) 33′19″ With A Little Help From My Friends by Steve Cropper on Dedicated 38′11″ Jealous Guy by Hurray For The Riff Raff on My Dearest Darkest Neighbor (This is American Music) 41′37″ Let Me Roll It by Lake Street Dive on Fun Machine 44′18″ All Things (Must) Pass by Billy Preston on Encouraging Words (Apple) 48′09″ Cold Turkey by The Soft Boys on A Can of Bees (Yep Roc) 51′54″ Instant Karma by Midnight Oil on King of the Mountain (Midnight Oil) 54′29″ Working Class Hero by Green Day on Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur (Warner Bros.) 60′02″ Happiness is a Warm Gun by The Breeders on Pod (Rough Trade) 64′19″ Mother Nature's Son by John Denver on Best Of 68′01″ Michelle by Ben Harper on This Bird Has Flown (Concord) 74′39″ Run For Your Life by Thee Headcoatees on The Kids Are All Square 77′16″ Help by The Damned on Damned Damned Damned (MCA Records) 80′04″ I'm Looking Through You by Mark Heard on Second Hand 84′43″ And Your Bird Can Sing by The Jam on Sound Affects (Polydor) 89′16″ She's Leaving Home by Billy Bragg on Reaching to the Converted (Cooking Vinyl) 94′40″ Got To Get You Into My Life by Daniel Johnston on 1990 99′14″ What Goes On by Sufjan Stevens on This Bird Has Flown (Concord) 103′44″ Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by Jimi Hendrix on Atlanta Pop Festival (Sony) 107′12″ Taxman by Junior Parker on Funny How Time Slips Away (LRC Ltd.) 111′32″ In My Life by Johnny Cash on American VI: Ain't No Grave (American) 113′00″ Because by Elliott Smith on American Beauty (Geffen) 117′38″ Medley: Sun King / Mean Mister Mustard ... by Booker T. & The M.G.'s on McLemore Avenue (Stax)

La locomotora Watusi es posa en marxa. En el primer programa de la temporada, escoltarem una selecci

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Buenas tardes a todos. Aquí os dejamos el 5º programa dedicado a lo mejor del Blues, con gente como Stevie Ray Vaughan, BB King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Junior Parker, Luther Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Williams, Allman Brothers Band, Johnny Winter...entre otros. Ayúdanos a compartir, si te gusta. Muchas gracias!!Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de La Gran Travesía. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/489260

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Buenos días. Aquí os dejamos el segundo programa dedicado a lo mejor del Blues, en la Gran Travesía. Con Albert King, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, Otis Rush, Guitar Slim, Big Joe Turner, Junior Parker, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Witherspoon, Charles Brown...y muchos más. Ayúdanos a compartir, si te gusta. Muchas gracias!!Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de La Gran Travesía. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/489260

Mister and Height Keech talk Dr. Hook And The Medicine Show, Junior Parker and Ted Nugent.

The Blues Foundation Podcast - Season 1: Blues Hall of Fame    We continue our series with one of the most electrifying individuals in the history of popular music, maverick producer Sam Phillips. Sam was an audio engineer, a talent scout, a producer, a studio owner, and a record label owner. He approached all these endeavors with unbridled enthusiasm, an unparalleled sense of showmanship, and keen understanding of the levers of human psychology. His "laboratory" (aka Memphis Recording Service) delivered groundbreaking efforts from B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Rufus Thomas, Junior Parker, James Cotton, and countless others. In fact, Sam Phillips' legacy was established long before Elvis walked through his front door. This is his story.    Sam Phillips inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1998. 

Om 21:00 uur Radio Ritmundo met Stan Rijven. Charlie Gillet staat vandaag centraal in show. Hij werd 75 jaar geleden geboren en heeft een grote stempel op de muziek gedrukt. Hij ontdekte onder andere Dire Straits en Ian Dury. In de show muziek van Junior Parker, Johnnie Allan, Dire Straits. African Connexion en Gaada Diwane de Béchar.

Authors Steve Bergsman and R. Gary Patterson discuss the mysterious death of Johnny Ace. Johnny Ace was considered one of the first African-American pop stars with a string of eight consecutive hits on the R&B Charts and becoming the most radio programmed artist of his day. Before launching his solo career, he was a member of the Beale Streeters with some of the biggest artist of the time, including B.B. King, Junior Parker, Willie Nix, Rosco Gordon and Earl Forest. At the height of his career, on Christmas evening, Johnny mysteriously died backstage from a single gunshot wound to the head. The cause of death was reported as Russian roulette and one police detective stated he succumbed to “pistolitis.”

Over the course of 13 or 14 tracks, this hour of The Roadhouse get focused with a set of blues from the 1970s and another of great soul blues. Dr. John, Son Seals, Bobby Rush, Junior Parker, and Tommy Castro help round out the hour. The hour will absolutely have you moving. It's an hour with a focus an, of course, absolutely another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 605th Roadhouse.

Over the course of 13 or 14 tracks, this hour of The Roadhouse get focused with a set of blues from the 1970s and another of great soul blues. Dr. John, Son Seals, Bobby Rush, Junior Parker, and Tommy Castro help round out the hour. The hour will absolutely have you moving. It's an hour with a focus an, of course, absolutely another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 605th Roadhouse.

In this expanded edition, Robert and Richard present an array of African-American talent; artists who brought their own unique voices to The Beatles’ material and made it their own, utterly. Talents range from Junior Parker to Stevie Wonder; from Nina Simone to Syreeta Wright. (You’ll even hear the Beatles’ own idols pay them the ultimate compliment.) Songs include: “I’ve Got A Feeling,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide” and “Savoy Truffle.” February 2016 is here and so is the Something About The Beatles 2016 calendar – getone of the copies in stock now here and specially priced! The post 41: A Beatles Salute to Black History Month (or do you say “R & Beatles”?) appeared first on Something About The Beatles.

In this expanded edition, Robert and Richard present an array of African-American talent; artists who brought their own unique voices to The Beatles’ material and made it their own, utterly. Talents range from Junior Parker to Stevie Wonder; from Nina Simone to Syreeta Wright. (You’ll even hear the Beatles’ own idols pay them the ultimate compliment.) Songs include: “I’ve Got A Feeling,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide” and “Savoy Truffle.” February 2016 is here and so is the Something About The Beatles 2016 calendar – getone of the copies in stock now here and specially priced! The post 41: A Beatles Salute to Black History Month (or do you say “R & Beatles”?) appeared first on Something About The Beatles.

Playlist: Curley Taylor & Zydeco Trouble- Country Girl, Curley Taylor & Zydeco Trouble- Blue Jeans, Lisa Mann- Gamblin’ Virgin Mary, Diane Blue-Don’t Stop, Sugar Ray & the Blue Tones, Jr. Krauss & the Shakes- Box of Letters, Alan James- You Da Loudest Thang, Mystic Horns- Bloodshot Eyes, Danny Draher- Big Fun Tonight, Doug Deming & the Jewel Tones- Bella’s Boogie, Dennis Gruenling- Saturday Night Fish Fry, Kal David & the Real DEal- I Idolize You, Mojomatics- Soy Baby. Win $100 in the "Feed Our Friends" Contest: There was no winner in our Feed Our Friends Contest this week . To win a $100 gift card from Black-Eyed Sally’s in Hartford simply simply Friend our Facebook Fan page and you’re in the running. Good luck next week!! Black-Eyed News: The first story this week was the passing of the great singer Bobby “Blue” Bland at his home in Memphis due to complications from an ongoing illness. Bland was born in 1930 in Rosemark, Tennessee, outside Memphis. He began his career singing with a gospel group before joining the blues group the Beale Streeters, which included such future stars as B.B. King, Junior Parker and others. Bland was drafted into the Army in 1952. After his release from the service in 1954, he resumed his musical career as a solo act and established a long-term professional relationship with Duke Records. Soon he had hits racing up the R&B charts, including "I Pity the Fool" and "That's the Way Love Is." Bland often toured with his former bandmate King, and King was on hand to help induct the singer into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Bobby Bland was 83. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/bobby-blue-bland-dead-blues-singer-obituary_n_3488362.html The next story of the night is our friend singer/ songwriter/guitarist Chris Bergson is recording his first live album tonight and tomorrow June 25 & 26 at the Jazz Standard in NYC.The band will have a full horn section led by Jay Collins of the Gregg Allman Band. Chris Bergson Band with special guest Ellis Hooks Jazz Standard Tuesday, June 25 Wednesday, June 26 Sets at 7:30 PM & 9:30 PM $20 cover, no minimum Next up two great interviews the first is with Guitarist Junior Watson who talks about recording his latest cd and the 45 rpm that changed his life you can find the link to the interview in tomorrow’s write up: http://thebluesblast.com/Archive/BluesBlasts/2013/BluesBlast6_20_13.htm The second interview is with pedal steel player Robert Randolph from Robert Randolph & the Family Band’s new album and going back to the things that he likes to write songs about. It’s a short interview but still worth the read and the link will also be in tomorrow’s write up: http://theinterrobang.com/2013/06/robert-randolph-is-revived-reborn-and-feeling-good-again/ Bronze Radio Return’s New cd Up on & Over was released today look for it on itunes! The last piece of the week is from an article I was sent from a friend about the 20 worst bands of all times. You’ve heard me say before I love lists as they are great for discussions like this so Let’s discuss. 1)They have to be known most of this list is not. 2) They have to have released more than 1 cd. http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2012/02/top_20_worst_bands_ever_complete_list.php?print=true 6/27 THURSDAY SONNY LANDRETH / DELTA GENERATORS - THE NARROWS CENTER FOR THE ARTS (8PM) - FALL RIVER, MA DAN STEVENS - THE LEIF NILSSON SPRING ST. STUDIO (8PM) - CHESTER, CT OTIS & THE HURRICANES - THE BAYOU NORTH (9PM) - RIDGEFIELD, CT 6/28 FRIDAY MYSTIC BLUES FESTIVAL - VARIOUS VENUES 6/28-6/30, SEE BELOW - MYSTIC, CT WITH: SHIPYARD VENUE: JAMES COTTON RUFUS "BABY GRAND" DAVI DEBBIE DAVIES THE ZINGERZ MYSTICK ART CINEMAS VENUE: JIM WEIDER & PROJECT PERCOLATOR DAN STEVENS THE KNICKERBOCKER CAFE MATT MURPHY & JERRY PORTNOY W/RICK RUSSELL & THE CADILLAC HORNS RYAN HARTT & THE BLUE HEARTS HIGH TIMES MS. MARCI & THE LOVESICK HOUNDS INFO: WWW.MYSTICBLUESFESTIVAL.COM KAL DAVID - BLACK-EYED SALLY'S (9PM) - HARTFORD CHRIS SMITHER - THE KATHERINE HEPBURN CENTER FOR THE ARTS (8PM) - OLD SAYBROOK, CT JOHNNY NICHOLAS - CAFE NINE - NEW HAVEN, CT JOE MOSS - THEODORES' - SPRINGFIELD, MA JEFF PITCHELL - CHAN'S (8PM) - WOONSOCKET, RI THE MOJOMATICS - THE FEZ - STAMFORD, CT THE TOM SANDERS BAND - MATTY'S NEXT DOOR SPORTS BAR (8PM) - MIDDLETOWN, CT SHAKA & THE SOULSHAKERS - JUNE'S OUTBACK (8PM) - KILLINGWORTH, CT BRANDT TAYLOR - THE AMERICAN EAGLE SALOON (5PM) - WILLINGTON, CT CHRIS D'AMATO - THE TAUTUG TAVERN (9PM) - BRIDGEPORT, CT 6/29 SATURDAY MYSTIC BLUES FESTIVAL - VARIOUS VENUES 6/28-6/29, SEE BELOW - MYSTIC, CT WITH: SHIPYARD VENUE: THE JAMES MONTGOMERY BAND LISA MARIE & JOHNNY JUXO CHRISTINE OHLMAN & REBEL MONTEZ JOSI DAVIS JOHNNY & THE EAST COAST ROCKERS THE TALL KING BLUES REVIEW JEFF PITCHELL CHRIS MACKAY & THE TONESHIFTERS THE MYSTIC HORNS THE SIDEWINDERS MYSTICK ART CINEMAS VENUE: GREG PICCOLO & HEAVY JUICE AL COPLEY THE KNICKERBOCKER CAFE: JOHNNY NICHOLAS & HELL BENT FEAT. CINDY CASHDOLLAR THE GREG SHERROD BLUES BAND NEAL & THE VIPERS FEAT. DAVE HOWARD JOHN FRIES TRAVIS MOODY EASY BABY BLUES LEGENDS OF THE FUTURE FEAT. TESSA STEWART, NOLAN LEITE, BOBBY PALTAUF & JACOB GRAHAM INFO:WWW.MYSTICBLUESFESTIVAL.COM JAMES COTTON - BRIDGE STREET LIVE (7:30PM) - COLLINSVILLE, CT WITH: JUNIOR KRAUSS & THE SHAKES THE DELTA GENERATORS MITCH WOODS & HIS ROCKET 88'S - CHAN'S (8PM) - WOONSOCKET, RI BENEFIT POKER RUN - THE BRISTOL SWEDISH SOCIAL CLUB (38 BARLOW ST.) - BRISTOL, CT WITH: DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR SKELETON CREW PROCEEDS BENEFIT DISABLED VETS REGISTRATION 9AM-11AM MUSIC AND FOOD AT 3PM BAD ROOSTER - THE DOWNTOWN CAFE - BRISTOL, CT THE RICH BADOWSKI BLUES BAND - LOUIE B'S (6-10PM) - SOUTHWICK, MA THE COBALT RHYTHM KINGS - SAM THE CLAM'S (8:30PM) - SOUTHINGTON, CT THE WALTER LEWIS BLUES TRIO - GREENWOOD'S GRILLE & ALE HOUSE (9PM) - BETHEL, CT MIKE LAW & THE PLAYBOYS - BLACK-EYED SALLY'S (9PM) - HARTFORD EASY BABY - THE DOGWATCH (7:30PM) - STONINGTON, CT BRANDT TAYLOR - GINA MARIE'S (5PM) - HEBRON, CT THE MIGHTY SOUL DRIVERS - SNEEKERS CAFE (9PM) - GROTON, CT OTIS & THE HURRICANES - THE LEVITT PAVILLION (8PM) - WESTPORT, CT 6/30 SUNDAY MYSTIC BLUES FESTIVAL - VARIOUS VENUES, SEE BELOW - MYSTIC, CT WITH: SHIPYARD VENUE: JAIMOE'S JASSSZ BAND BRANDT TAYLOR ROOMFUL OF BLUES TIM GARTLAND THE CHRIS LEIGH BAND WOOLY MAMMOTH FEAT. GRAY HALLBERG THE KNICKERBOCKER CAFE: AL KOOPER SUGAR RAY & THE BLUETONES THE DON'T TASER ME BRO BAND FEAT. FRAN & BOB CHRISTINA W/SAM GENTILE, STEVE BURKE & GARY GRAMOLINI JELLY ROLL SOUL LISA MARIE & ALL SHOOK UP INFO: WWW.MYSTICBLUESFESTIVAL.COM DAN STEVENS - THE LYME TAVERN (5PM) - EAST LYME, CT THE SWAMPSHAKA DUO W/TONY C. - THE VOODOO GRILL (2PM) - MYSTIC, CT SONNY LANDRETH - INDIAN RANCH - WEBSTER, MA BLUES JAM W/WILDCAT O'HALLORAN - CITY SPORTS GRILL (4-8PM) - NORTHAMPTON, MA Blues in the Area: Black-Eyed Sally’s Weekly Rundown: Tues Jun 25 Mike Palin’s Other Orchestra Wed Jun 26 Blues Open Mic hosted by Tim MacDonald Fri Jun 28 Kal David & the REal Deal Sat Jun 29 Mike Law & the Playboys Mon July 1 Monday Night Jazz I hope to see you out and about this week but if not please continue to support live music wherever you are.

Listen[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-Bopst-Show-19-for-me-Episode-232.mp3|titles=The Bopst Show -- 19 For Me -- Episode 232]SubscribeiTunes: The Bopst show podcastEverything else: The Bopst show podcastDownloadThe Bopst Show -- 19 For Me -- Episode 232— ∮∮∮ —Title: The Bopst Show: "19 For Me (Episode 232)"Rating: PG-13 (Adult Situations & Language)Intent: To connect on 4th and long…Random Richmond Diversion: We have not been able to generate enough revenueRandom USA Diversion: Bob J. Perry, provided at least $100,000 to help start the veterans group at the urging of his friend John O’Neill, a Houston attorney who co-wrote "Unfit for Command," a book which attacks Kerry’s military record. Random World Diversion: My wallet firstRandom Image: U.S. Discretionary Spending: Fiscal Year 2012Random Music Blog: The ‘SpillRandom Bopst Show: The Bopst Show: "Confusing The Public Mind (Episode 195)"Black Sea Hotel play at Balliceaux Thursday April 18th, 2013 with The Resonant Rogues. Doors open at 9:30PM, 21+ and admission is $5:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kulkldir5agConstruction Date: Sunday April 14th, 2013Equipment: Mac G5, Free Audio Editor & Recorder Software from Audacity, Frontier US-122 USB Audio/MIDI Interface, Shure SM57 MicrophonePosted: Monday April 15th, 2013Artists and Groups in order of appearance: Junior Parker, Bombino, Fran Jeffries, Apple & The Three Oranges, Skull Kontrol, The Black Keys, Mikey Dread, Commercial Break, Down For Life, Jimmy Bryant & Speedy West, Amazing Ghost, Lena Hughes, Mao Tse Helen, Commercial Break, Jamie Lidell, ZedasheLiner Notes Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars. Franklin D. RooseveltHere are some shows I’m hustling at Balliceaux this week...NEXT NEW SHOW: 04/22/13 (Promise) New show times. The Bopst Show airs Sundays, 11PM and Tuesdays, 6PM (EST-USA) on KAOS Radio Austin.Until Next Time:Stay clean,BOPSTHo there, reader of RSS feeds! Do you ever want to support RVANews in a real and tangible way? Or at least pay a small penance for reading ad-free content? If so, support us on Patreon for a couple bucks a month!

show#30710.10.09John Hartford - Holding (1:47)Cheapskate (3:07)Too Slim & the Taildraggers - I Get Real High (4:03)Alabama Mike - Death Letter Blues (3:56)Spinner's Section:a blast from the past on vinylJesse "Ed" Davis: natural anthem (J.E.Davis) (keep Me Comin', Epic, 1973)Billy Boy Arnold: just got to know (McCracklin, Geddins) (Checkin' It Out, Red Lightnin, 1979)John Mayall: looking back (Watson) (So Many Roads, Decca, 1967)Sonny Boy Williamson: I don't know (Williamson) (Down And Out Blues, Chess, 196?)Esther Phillips: cherry red (Confessin' The Blues, Atlantic, 1976)Zoots: feel so good (S.Maghett) (Bad Days Are Gone, Blue Sting, 1985)Junior Parker: that's alright (H.Parker) (You Don't Have To Be Black To Love The Blues, Groove Merchant, 1974)Barrelhouse: let me love you (trad.) (Got To Get Together, Ariola, 1981)Johnny Copeland: I de go now (J.Copeland) (Texas Twister, Rounder 1983)Spencer Davis Group: on the green light (S.Winwood) (Gimme Some Lovin', Island, 196?)Back to Beardo:Chico Banks - Down the Road I Go (3:54)Beverly "Guitar" Watkins - Melody Midnight Cruise (3:00)Jimmie Bratcher - Bad Religion (3:27)Lee McBee & the Passions - Everybody Loves My Baby (4:45)Michelle Willson - Responsibility (5:00)Little Jimmy King & The Memphis Soul Survivors - Lovin' Someone Else (5:34)Andy J. Forest - Voodoo Lips (4:03)William Clarke - The Complainer's Boogie Woogie (4:53)Bo Diddley - Down Home Special (2:45)Denny Freeman - Steelin' Berry's (3:29)Blues Survivors - 100 Years (6:39)Hall, Ricky Gene And The Goods - Stranger in My Own Hometown (3:07)Otis Taylor - House of the Crosses (4:05)Rod Piazza and The Mighty Flyers Blues Quartet - Queen Bee (4:08)Iceman Robinson - Workin' Man (4:51)Frank Goldwasser with The Alastair Greene Band - Be Bop A-Lula (4:53)David Maxwell - Twisted Tendons (3:43)Lynwood Slim - Say It (2:26)Does your music make the cut?Contact Beardo at thebeardo@gmail.com and we we'll talk..Meanwhile, Bandana Blues archives at http://beardo1.libsyn.com

show#17112.10.06Jason Ricci and New Blood - Reverse Technology (from Live at Checkers Tavern 2004 http://www.jasonricci.com )Spinner's Section:George Smith: California blues (1956) (oopin' doopin' doopin', Ace, 1982)Sonny Boy Williamson: cross my heart (Down And Out Blues, Chess, 1959)Walter 'Shakey' Horton: good moanin' blues (The Soul Of Blues Harmonica, Chess, 1964)Little Walter: just your fool (Boss Blues Harmonica, Chess, 1972)Junior Parker: blue shadows falling (You Don't Have To Be Black To Love The Blues, Groove Merchant, 1974)Back to Beardo:Michael Burks - Too Hard To Please (from From The Inside Out Independent 1999 http://www.michaelburks.com/music.html )Otis Spann and Fleetwood Mac - She Needs Some Lovin' (from The Biggest Thing Since Colossus on Vinyl LP Blue Horizon 1969 )Roy Buchanan - Five String Blues (from Sweet Dreams:The Anthology on Polygram 1992 )Tom Principato - Blue Lights (from I Know What Yo're Thinkin'.... Powerhouse Records 1988 http://www.tomprincipato.com )Steven Lynch - Retarded Christmas ( from ????)http://www.bandanablues.comHear all Beardo's podcasts at iTunes....