Podcasts about limehouse blues

EPISODE 86 -  “ANNA MAY WONG: CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH” - 5/5/2025 Anna May Wong was once the most famous Chinese woman in the world. The trailblazing actress, philanthropist, and fashion icon appeared in over 60 films and was a celebrated star, yet, at the time, she was not allowed to kiss a Caucasian man on screen, which limited the roles she could take, and she was not allowed to buy a house in Beverly Hills. A strange dichotomy, indeed. In recent years, she has enjoyed a much-deserved resurgence. Known as a Trailblazer and a cultural icon, she paved the way for generations of Asian and Asian American actors by proving that talent and perseverance could transcend racist casting conventions. Her life and career continue to influence conversations about diversity, representation, and the politics of race in Hollywood. This week, she is our Star of the Month. SHOW NOTES:  AVA GARDNER MUSEUM: If you would like to make a donation to help support the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C. (Ava'a hometown!), please click on the following link: https://ava-gardner-museum.myshopify.com/products/donations Sources: Not Your China Doll (2924), by Katie Gee Salisbury; Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (2012), by Graham Russell Gao Hodges; Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Television, and Radio Work (2010), by Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane; Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (2003), by Anthony B. Chan; “Anna May Wong: 13 Facts About Her Trailblazing Hollywood Career,” April 30, 2024, By Minhae Shim Roth; “Anna May Wong's Long Journey from Hollywood to the Smithsonian,” March 2024, by Ryan Lintelman, Natural Museum of American History; “Anna May Wong Will Be the First Asian American on US Currency,” October 18, 2022, by Soumya Karlamangla; “Anna May Wong is Dead At 54; Actress Won Movie Fans in '24; Appeared with Fairbanks in ‘Thief of Bagdad,' Made Several Films Abroad,” February 4, 1961, The New York Times; Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IBDB.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  Phantom Of The Opera (1943), starring Claude Rains, Eddy Nelson, & Suzanna Foster; The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946), starring Gale Sondergaard & Brenda Joyce; White Savage (1943), starring Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu; Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), starring Maria Montez & Jon Hall; It Grows On Trees (1952), Irene Dunne & Dean Jagger; Impact (1949), starring Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Helen Walker, & Anna May Wong; The Red Lantern (1919), starring Alla Nazimova; The Toll of the Sea (1922), staring Kenneth Harlan & Anna May Wong; The Thief of Baghdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks & Anna May Wong; Picadilly (1929), starring Gilda Gray & Anna May Wong; Daughter of the Dragon (1931), starring Anna May Wong and Warner Orland; Shanghai Express (1932), starring Marlene Dietrich & Anna May Wong; The Hatchet Man (1932), starring Loretta Young; The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), starring Myrna Loy; The Son-Daughter (1932), starring Helen Hayes; Tiger Bay (1934), starring Anna May Wong; Chu Chen Chow (1934), starring Anna May Wong; Java Head (1934), starring Anna May Wong; Limehouse Blues (1934), starring George Raft, Jean Parker, & Anna May Wong; The Good Earth (1937), starring Paul Muni & Luise Rainer; Daughter of Shanghai (1937), starring Anna May Wong & Philip Ahn; King of Chinatown (1939), starring Anna May Wong & Sidney Toler; Dangerous to Know (1938), starring Gail Patrick & Anna May Wong;  Island of Lost Men (1939), starring Anna May Wong & J. Carrol Naish; Bombs Over Burma (1942), starring Anna May Wong; Lady From Chungking (1942), starring Anna May Wong; Portrait in Black (1960), starring Lana Turner, Anthony Quinn, & Sandra Dee; Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donna Reed is the guest DJ. Playlist: Erskine Hawkins plays, Limehouse Blues. Donna reads a few requests and dedicates Bing Crosby's song, Coming in on A Wing and a Prayer.…

Django Reinhardt: Retrospective 1. Dinah (2.39) 2. Limehouse Blues (2.47) 3. Charleston (2.54) 4. The Sheik of Araby (3.08) 5. Minor Swing (3.18) 6. Night and Day (2.43) 7. Sweet Georgia Brown (3.08) 8. Honeysuckle Rose (2.55) 9. Improvisation No. 2 (2.42) 10. Le Yeux Noir (2.19) 11. Echos de France (2.49) 12. Django's Tiger (2.40) 13. Django's Dream (Reverie) (3.44) 14. La Mer (4.17)

Tenor guitar and plectrum banjo

謙信的Mixerbox 訂閱節目：獨立思考，請大家多多捧場，支持謙信繼續提供好節目 謙信新書：戰國名女性，在Readmoo kobo 與google書店都有販售 業務合作請洽：japantraveler1@gmail.com athrunzhung@gmail.com 每年5月向來是美國的「亞太裔傳統月」，芭比娃娃製造商「美泰兒」(Mattel)2023年5月1日宣布推出「亞裔芭比」娃娃來慶祝亞太月，原型來自好萊塢傳奇華裔演員黃柳霜(Anna May Wong)；此外白宮也發布歡慶「亞太裔傳統月」的公告並舉辦一系列活動，肯定亞太裔在美國社會的貢獻。 黃柳霜芭比娃娃的設計有招牌瀏海、眉毛和精心修剪的指甲，身穿紅色長袍，胸前則有閃亮的金龍圖騰，造型靈感來自黃柳霜在1934年電影「萊姆豪斯藍調」(Limehouse Blues)中的造型。 其實在這之前半年，也就是2022年10月，根據紐約時報暴黨，美國鑄幣局（U.S. Mint）預計鑄造3億枚刻有黃柳霜頭像的25美分硬幣，是首位肖像出現在現鈔美元硬幣上的亞裔美國人。鑄幣局官網表示首批錢幣來自費城與丹佛的鑄造廠，10月24日開始配送。但謙信想應該不多朋友聽過這位比楊紫瓊更早、上世紀前半葉就在美國打出名氣的女演員黃柳霜，今天就來說她的故事。…. fb專頁：https://www.facebook.com/historysquare/ FB社團：https://www.facebook.com/groups/873307933055348 Podcast : http://kshin.co​ Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2S-492vfSw&list=PLolto1Euzd4XcbP9oX9JXI3wOlrovdgcC twitter:@alexzhung 電子書著作 Amazon : https://reurl.cc/g8lprR​ Readmoo ：https://reurl.cc/jqpYmm​ Kobo : https://reurl.cc/GdDLgW​ Google : https://reurl.cc/9ZyLyn​ －－－－以下訊息由 SoundOn 動態廣告贊助商提供－－－－ 生命旅途中，總會「遇見」不同人事物，你是否想過「預見」，預先看見生命最後一站的風景呢？ 衛生福利部製播出品《遇見，預見》Podcast第二季，持續邀請醫師、名人分享更多生命故事；加入大學生助理主持人，傾聽年輕人的心聲。用更生活的情境，陪伴聽眾深入想像告別現場，在生命最後一刻，更能與摯愛好好說再見。 收聽連結如下：https://solink.soundon.fm/mohwpodcast

Musicians include: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Leo Parker, Gerald Wiggins and Thelonious Monk. Works include: April In Paris, Coast To Coast, Fluid Drive, Limehouse Blues, Bye Bye and No Figs. 

The biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway recorded for AFRS during the war years, The American Forces Network can trace its origins back to May 26, 1942, when the War Department established the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). The U.S. Army began broadcasting from London during World War II, using equipment and studio facilities borrowed from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The first transmission to U.S. troops began at 5:45 p.m. on July 4, 1943, and included less than five hours of recorded shows, a BBC news and sports broadcast. That day, Corporal Syl Binkin became the first U.S. Military broadcasters heard over the air. The signal was sent from London via telephone lines to five regional transmitters to reach U.S. troops in the United Kingdom as they prepared for the inevitable invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Fearing competition for civilian audiences the BBC initially tried to impose restrictions on AFN broadcasts within Britain (transmissions were only allowed from American Bases outside London and were limited to 50 watts of transmission power) and a minimum quota of British produced programming had to be carried. Nevertheless AFN programmes were widely enjoyed by the British civilian listeners who could receive them and once AFN operations transferred to continental Europe (shortly after D-Day) AFN were able to broadcast with little restriction with programmes available to civilian audiences across most of Europe (including Britain) after dark. As D-Day approached, the network joined with the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to develop programs especially for the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Mobile stations, complete with personnel, broadcasting equipment, and a record library were deployed to broadcast music and news to troops in the field. The mobile stations reported on front line activities and fed the news reports back to studio locations in London. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entertainment Radio Stations Live 24/7 Sherlock Holmes/CBS Radio Mystery Theater https://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441 https://live365.com/station/CBS-Radio-Mystery-Theater-a57491 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

We're kicking off 2022 with "Limehouse Blues"! Join AJ and Johnny as they listen to and discuss versions of this lively Gypsy Jazz standard by Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt, Oscar Aleman, David Grisman, Cannonball Adderly and John Coltrane, and new-to-us artist The Mississippi Hot Club!

Show #926 Beardo's Birthday Bash 2021 This year's episode that is dedicated to Beardo with a nice variety of tunes selected by a couple of friend of Bandana Blues. It is a great show, so start listening! 01. Gwendolyn Sanford & Brandon Jay - Happy Birthday Clappy (0:38) (Weeds-Instrumentals from the Series Vol. 1, Lionsgate Records, 2008) 02. Oreo Blue - Born To Suffer (4:26) (Nuthin' But The Blues, self-release, 1998) 03. Nace Brothers Band - Space In Your Heart (5:02) (Club 15, self-release, 1994) 04. Oscar Alemán - Bye Bye Blues [1942] (3:05) (Swing Guitar Masterpieces 1938–1957, Acoustic Disc, 1998) 05. Bill Doggett - Honky Tonk (Parts 1+2) (5:32) (45 RPM Single, King Records, 1956) 06. Cassandra Wilson - 32-20 Blues (5:23) (New Moon Daughter, Blue Note Records, 2003) 07. Peter Green Splinter Group - Help Me (4:48) (Soho Session, Snapper Music, 1999) 08. Oscar Alemán - Tico Tico No Fuba [1943] (2:49) (Swing Guitar Masterpieces 1938–1957, Acoustic Disc, 1998) 09. The Kinks - Father Christmas (3:43) (Single, Arista Records, 1977) 10. Albert Collins - Don't Go Reachin' Across My Plate (3:44) (Frostbite, Alligator Records, 1980) 11. Jeff Beck - Diamond Dust (8:22) (Blow By Blow, Epic Records, 1975) 12. Johnny Meyer - Johnny's Blues (2:18) (In Swinging Amsterdam, BASF Records, 1974) 13. John Too Cool McCool - Mississippi Blue (3:27) (Digital self-release, 2002) 14. Gov't Mule - Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's Home (5:44) (Heavy Load Blues, Fantasy Records, 2021) 15. Albert Castiglia - I Been Up All Night (5:27) (Up All Night, Ruf Records, 2017) 16. Altered Five Blues Band - Holding On With One Hand (3:56) (Holler If You Hear Me, Blind Pig Records, 2021) 17. Ricci & Krown - The Jimmy Smith Strut (4:18) (City Country City, Gulf Coast Records, 2021) (#923) 18. Oscar Alemán - Limehouse Blues [1944] (2:41) (Swing Guitar Masterpieces 1938–1957, Acoustic Disc, 1998) 19. DogTown Blues Band - Cookin' In Style (3:13) (Search No More, RVL Music, 2021) 20. Fleetwood Mac - Albatross (3:06) (45 RPM Single, Blue Horizon Records, 1968) 21. Jean-Jacques Milteau - Beaumont Lafayette (2:49) (Soul Conversations, Dixiefrog Records, 2008) 22. Red Peters - Holy Shit It's Christmas(3:04) (I Laughed, I Cried, I Fudged My Undies!, 1995) 23. Paul Lamb & the King Snakes - Going For It (2:44) (I'm On A Roll, Blue Label, 2005) 24. Curtis Salgado - Too Loose (3:40) (Curtis Salgado & the Stilettos, JRS Records, 1991) 25. R.J. Mischo - Little Village (4:01) (Cool Disposition, CrossCut Records, 1997) 26. Rev. Jimmy Bratcher - Check Your Blues At The Door (3:17) (Secretly Famous, Ain't Skeert Tunes, 2013) 27. Oscar Alemán - Scartunas [1944] (2:30) (Swing Guitar Masterpieces 1938–1957, Acoustic Disc, 1998) 28. Danny B. Harvey - The Falcon (3:20) (Single, self-release, 2021) 29. Frank Zappa - Tinsel Town Rebellion (4:34) (Tinsel Town Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin Records, 1981) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

From 2005..Buck Naked & the Rawhides.. Bass..Pete Johnson..Horns..Richard Bennett Tenor guitar(CGDA ) Plectrum banjo,guitar....Craigwood Buck..Dobro.

From 2005..Buck Naked & the Rawhides.. Bass..Pete Johnson..Horns..Richard Bennett Tenor guitar(CGDA ) Plectrum banjo,guitar....Craigwood Buck..Dobro.

Hey, folks! Mackenzie here, your host for Mack & the Movies. On this episode, we take a look at the life, music, and pop culture influence of legendary guitarist, Django Reinhardt. Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=UXZNDGDH4M42W Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CinemaMack/ Twitter: @CinemaMack Contact: m.j.lambert2283@gmail.com Mack & the Movies logo by masteringsounds https://www.fiverr.com/masteringsounds Intro by androzguitar https://www.fiverr.com/androzguitar Audio Clips Used: "Limehouse Blues" - Quintette du Hot Club de France Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli - Jattendrai Swing 1939 - LIVE! (https://youtu.be/ANArGmr74u4) "Minor Swing" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "The Shiek of Araby" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Nuages" - Django Reinhardt "Sweet Georgia Brown" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Sweet Georgia Brown" - Harlem Globetrotters "Georgia On My Mind" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Georgia On My Mind" - Ray Charles "La Mer" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Beyond the Sea" - Bobby Darin "Runnin' Wild" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Jeepers Creepers" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "I'll See You In My Dreams" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Liza (And All the Clouds'll Roll Away)" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "Django's Tiger" - Quintette du Hot Club de France "The Circus of Value" (Bioshock) Sources: Django Reinhart: Le Génie vagabond by Noël Balen Django Reinhardt And The Illustrated History Of Gypsy Jazz by Michael Dregni, with Alain Antonietto and Anne Legrand Django Reinhardt by Charles Delauney Django Reinhardt: Know the Man, Play the Music by Rod Fogg La Grande Roue by Jean Tranchant Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni "Wrembel & Babik Show Both Sides of Gypsy Jazz Coin" by Mackenzie Lambert, Buffalo Rising (28 May 2010) Jeff Beck Interview - Guitar Legends magazine Tommy Iommi Interview (https://youtu.be/mWntXXhCQWw) "Obituary: Stephane Grappelli" by Geoffrey Smith, The Independent (2 December 1997) Jerry Garcia Interview - Frets magazine (June 1985) It's A Long Story: My Life by Willie Nelson, with David Ritz Wikipedia Mack & the Movies on player.fm: https://player.fm/series/2403125 Mack & the Movies on listennotes.com: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/mack-the-movies-mackenzie-lambert-Mt-xG8nakEc/

Söngkonan Dakota Stanton og félagar flytja lögin Cold Cold Feeling, Ain't No Use, The Thrill Is Gone, Your Husband's Cheating On Us, Mean To Me og I Cover The Waterfront. Annes kvintettinn leikur lögin Glóandi, UssUss, Henrik, Kusk og Skuggi rósarinnar. Fredrik Lundin og tríó hans leika lögin Darn That Dream, Here's That Rainy Day, I Fall In Love To Easily, A Weaver of Dreams og Everything Happens To Me. Cannonball Adderley og John Coltrane leika lögin Wabash, Limehouse Blues, The Sleeper og Grand Central.

  Welcome to episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Bob Wills and "Ida Red". ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I mention a PhD thesis on the history of the backbeat in the episode. Here's a link to it. Bob Wills' music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This is an expensive but exhaustive one, while this is a cheap one which seems to have most of the important hits on it. The definitive book on Bob Wills, San Antonio Rose, is available here, though it's a bit pricey. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. Clarification In the episode I talk about two tracks as being "by Django Reinhardt", but the clips I play happen to be ones featuring violin solos. Those solos are, of course, by Reinhardt's longtime collaborator Stephane Grapelli. I assume most people will know this, but just in case. Transcript "Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928! ... We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."   Bob Wills said that in 1957, and it brings up an interesting question. What's in a name?   Genre names are a strange thing, aren't they? In particular, did you ever notice how many of them had the word "and" in them? Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and western? There's sort of a reason for that.   Rock and roll is a special case, but the other two were names that were coined by Billboard, and they weren't originally meant to be descriptors of a single genre, but of collections of genres -- they were titles for its different charts. Rhythm and blues is a name that was used to replace the earlier name, of "race" records, because that was thought a bit demeaning. It was for the chart of "music made by black people", basically, whatever music those black people were making, so they could be making "rhythm" records, or they could be making "blues" records.   Only once you give a collection of things a name, the way people's minds work, they start thinking that because those things share a name they're the same kind of thing. And people start thinking about "rhythm and blues" records as being a particular kind of thing. And then they start making "rhythm and blues" records, and suddenly it is a thing.   The same thing goes for country and western. That was, again, two different genres. Country music was the music made by white people who lived in the rural areas, of the Eastern US basically -- people like the Carter Family, for example.   [Excerpt of “Keep on the Sunny Side” by the Carter Family]   We'll hear more about the Carter family in the future, but that's what country music was. Not country and western, just country. And that was the music made in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially especially Nashville.   Western music was a bit different. That was the music being made in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, and it tended to use similar instrumentation to country music -- violins and guitars and so on -- but it had different subject matter -- lots of songs about cowboys and outlaws and so on -- and at the time we're talking about, the thirties and forties, it was a little bit slicker than country music.   This is odd in retrospect, because not many years later the Western musicians influenced people like Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, who made very gritty, raw, unpolished music compared to the country music coming out of Nashville, but the thirties and forties were the heyday of singing cowboy films, with people like Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers becoming massive, massive stars, and so there was a lot of Hollywoodisation of the music, lots of crooning and orchestras and so on.   Western music was big, big business -- and so was swing music. And so it's perhaps not surprising that there was a new genre that emerged around that time. Western swing.   Western swing is, to simplify it ridiculously, swing music made in the West of the USA. But it's music that was made in the west -- largely in places like California --by the same kinds of people who in the east were making country music, and with a lot of the same influences.   It took the rhythms of swing music, but played them with the same instrumentation as the country musicians were using, so you'd get hot jazz style performances, but they'd be played on fiddle, banjo, guitar, and stand-up bass. There were a few other instruments that you'd usually get included as well -- the steel guitar, for example. Western swing usually also included a drum kit, which was one of the big ways it differed from country music as it was then. The drum kit was, in the early decades of the twentieth century, primarily a jazz instrument, and it was only because Western swing was a hybrid of jazz and Western music that it got included in those bands -- and for a long time drum kits were banned from country music shows like the Grand Ole Opry, and when they did finally relent and let Western swing bands play there, they made the drummers hide behind a curtain.   They would also include other instruments that weren't normally included in country or Western music at the time, like the piano. Less often, you'd have a saxophone or a trumpet, but basically the typical Western swing lineup would be a guitar, a steel guitar, a violin or two, a piano, a bass, and drums.   Again, as we saw in the episode about "Flying Home", where we talked about *non*-Western swing, you can see the rock band lineup starting to form. It was a gradual process though.   Take Bob Wills, the musician whose drummer had to hide behind a curtain.   Wills originally performed as a blackface comedian -- sadly, blackface performances were very, very common in the US in the 1930s (but then, they were common in the UK well into my lifetime. I'm not judging the US in particular here), but he soon became more well known as a fiddle player and occasional singer.   In 1929 Wills, the singer Milton Brown, and guitarist Herman Arnspiger, got together to perform a song at a Christmas dance party. They soon added Brown's brother Derwood on guitar and fiddle player John Dunnam, and became the Light Crust Doughboys.     [clip of the Light Crust Doughboys singing their theme]   That might seem like a strange name for a band, and it would be if that had been the name they chose themselves, but it wasn't. Their name was originally The Aladdin Laddies, as they got sponsored by the Aladdin Lamp Company to perform on WBAP radio under that name, but when that sponsorship fell through, they performed for a while as the Wills Fiddle Band, before they found a new sponsor -- Pappy O'Daniel.   You may know that name, as the name of the governor of Mississippi in the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", and that was... not an *entirely* inaccurate portrayal, though the character in that film definitely wasn't the real man. The real Pappy O'Daniel didn't actually become governor of Mississippi, but he did become the governor of Texas, in the 1940s.   But in the late 1920s and early thirties he was the head of advertising for Burrus Mill and Elevator Company, who made "Light Crust Flour", and he started to sponsor the show.   The band became immensely successful, but they were not particularly well paid -- in fact, O'Daniel insisted that everyone in the band would have to actually work a day job at the mill as well. Bob Wills was a truck driver as well as being a fiddle player, and the others had different jobs in the factory.   Pappy O'Daniel at first didn't like this hillbilly music being played on the radio show he was paying for -- in fact he wanted to cancel the show after two weeks. But Wills invited him down to the radio station to be involved in the broadcasts, and O'Daniel became the show's MC, as well as being the band's manager and the writer of their original material. O'Daniel even got his own theme song, "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy".   [insert Hillbilly Boys playing "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy"]   That's not the Light Crust Doughboys playing the song -- that's the Hillbilly Boys, another band Pappy O'Daniel hired a few years later, when Burrus Mill fired him and he formed his own company, Hillbilly Flour -- but that's the song that the Light Crust Doughboys used to play for O'Daniel, and the singer on that recording, Leon Huff, sang with the Doughboys from 1934 onwards. So you get the idea.   In 1932, the Light Crust Doughboys made their first recording, though they did so under the name the Fort Worth Doughboys -- Pappy O'Daniel didn't approve of them doing anything which might take them out of his control, so they didn't use the same name. This is "Nancy"   [insert clip of "Nancy"]   Now the music the Light Crust Doughboys were playing wasn't yet what we'd call Western Swing but they were definitely as influenced by jazz music as they were by Western music. In fact, the original lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys can be seen as the prototypical example of the singer-guitarist creative tension in rock music, except here it was a tension between the singer and the fiddle player. Milton Brown was, by all accounts, wanting to experiment more with a jazz style, while Bob Wills wanted to stick with a more traditional hillbilly string band sound. That creative tension led them to create a totally new form of music.   To see this, we're going to look forward a little bit to 1936, to a slightly different lineup of the band. Take a listen to this, for example -- "Dinah".   [insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing "Dinah"]   And this -- "Limehouse Blues".   [insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing "Limehouse Blues"]   And now listen to this -- Django Reinhardt playing "Dinah"   [insert section of Reinhardt playing "Dinah"]   And Reinhardt playing "Limehouse Blues"   [Reinhardt playing "Limehouse Blues"]   Those recordings were made a few years after the Light Crust Doughboys versions, but you can see the similarities. The Light Crust Doughboys were doing the same things as Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt, years before them, even though we would now think of the Light Crust Doughboys as being "a country band", while Grapelli and Reinhardt are absolutely in the jazz category.   Now, I said that that's a different lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys, and it is. A version of the Light Crust Doughboys continues today, and one member, Smoky Montgomery, who joined the band in 1935, continued with them until his death in 2001. Smoky Montgomery's on those tracks you just heard, but Bob Wills and Milton Brown weren't. They both left, because Pappy O'Daniel was apparently not a very good person to work for.   In particular, O'Daniel wouldn't let the Doughboys play any venues where alcohol was served, or play dances generally. O'Daniel was only paying the band members $15 a week, and they could get $40 a night playing gigs, and so Brown left in 1932 to form his own band, the Musical Brownies.   The Musical Brownies are now largely forgotten, but they're considered the first band ever to play proper Western Swing, and they introduced a lot of things that defined the genre. In particular, they introduced electric steel guitar to the Western music genre, with the great steel player Bob Dunn.   For a while, the Musical Brownies were massively popular, but sadly Brown died in a car crash in 1936.   Bob Wills stayed in the Doughboys for a while longer, as the band's leader, as O'Daniel gave him a raise to $38 a week. And he continued to make the kind of music he'd made when Brown was in the band -- both Brown and Wills clearly recognised that what they'd come up with together was something better and more interesting than just jazz or just Western.   Wills recruited a new singer, Tommy Duncan, but in 1933 Wills was fired by O'Daniel, partly because of rows over Wills wanting his brother in the band, and partly because Wills' drinking was already starting to affect his professionalism. He formed his own band and took Duncan and bass player Kermit Whalen with him. The Doughboys' steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe, soon followed, and they became Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. They advertised themselves as "formerly the Light Crust Doughboys" -- although that wasn't entirely true, as they weren't the whole band, though they were the core of it -- and Pappy O'Daniel sued them, unsuccessfully.   And the Texas Playboys then became the first Western Swing band to add a drum kit, and become a more obviously rhythm-oriented band.   The Texas Playboys were the first massively, massively successful Western swing band, and their style was one that involved taking elements from everywhere and putting them together. They had the drums and horns that a jazz band would have, the guitars and fiddles that country or Western bands would have, the steel guitar that a Hawaiian band would have, and that meant they could play all of those styles of music if they wanted to. And they did. They mixed jazz, and Western, and blues, and pop, and came up with something different from all of them.   This was music for dancing, and as music for dancing it had a lot of aspects that would later make their way into rock and roll. In particular it had that backbeat we talked about in episode two, although here it was swung less -- when you listen to them play with a heavy backbeat but with the fiddle as the main instrument, you can hear the influence of polka music, which was a big influence on all the Western swing musicians, and through them on rock and roll. Polka music is performed in 2/4 time, and there's a very, *very* strong connection between the polka beat and the backbeat.   (I won't go into that too much more here -- I already talked about the backbeat quite a bit in episode two -- but while researching these episodes I found a hugely informative but very detailed look at the development of the rock backbeat -- someone's PhD thesis from twenty years ago, four hundred pages just on that topic, which I'll link on the webpage if you want a much more detailed explanation)   Now by looking at the lineup of the Texas Playboys, we can see how the rock band lineup evolved. In 1938 the Texas Playboys had a singer, two guitars (one doubling on fiddle), three fiddlers, a banjo player, steel guitar, bass, drums, piano, trumpet, trombone, and two saxes. A *huge* band, and one at least as swing as it was Western. But around that time, Wills started to use electric guitars -- electric guitars only really became "a thing" in 1938 musically, and a lot of people started using them at the same time, like Benny Goodman's band as we heard about in the first episode. Wills' band was one of the first to use them, and Western musicians generally were more likely to use them, as they were already using amplified *steel* guitars.   We talked in episode two about how the big bands died between 1942 and 1944, and Wills was able to make his band considerably smaller with the aid of amplification, so by 1944 he'd got rid of most of his horn section apart from a single trumpet, having his electric guitars play what would previously have been horn lines.   So by 1944 the band would consist of two fiddles, two basses, two electric guitars, steel guitar, drums, and a trumpet. A smaller band, an electrified band, and one which, other than the fiddles and the trumpet, was much closer to the kind of lineups that you would get in the 50s and 60s. A smaller, tighter, band.   Now, Wills' band quickly became the most popular band in its genre, and he became widely known as "the king of Western Swing", but Wills' music was more than just swing. He was pulling together elements from country, from the blues, from jazz, from anything that could make him popular.   And, sadly, that would sometimes include plagiarism.   Now, the question of black influence on white music is a fraught one, and one that will come up a lot in the course of this history. And a lot of the time people will get things wrong. There were, of course, white people who made their living by taking black people's music and watering it down. There were also, though, plenty of more complicated examples, and examples of mutual influence.   There was a constant bouncing of ideas back and forth between country, western, blues, jazz, swing... all of these genres were coded as belonging to one or other race, but all of them had musicians who were listening to one another. This is not to say that racism was not a factor in who was successful -- of course it was, and this episode is, after all, about someone who started out as a blackface performer, race was a massive factor, and sadly still is -- but the general culture among musicians at the time was that good musicians of whatever genre respected good musicians of any other genre, and there were songs that everyone, or almost everyone, played, in their own styles, simply because a good song was a good song and at that time there wasn't the same tight association of performer and song that there is now -- you'd sometimes have five or six people in the charts with hit versions of the same song. You'd have a country version and a blues version and a swing version of a song, not because anyone was stealing anyone else's music, but because it was just accepted that everyone would record a hit song in their own style.   And certainly, in the case of Bob Wills, he was admired by -- and admired -- musicians across racial boundaries. The white jazz guitarist Les Paul -- of whom we'll almost certainly be hearing more -- used to tell a story. Paul was so amazed by Bob Wills' music that in 1938 he travelled from Waukesha Wisconsin, where he was visiting his mother, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to hear Wills' band play, after his mother made him listen to Bob Wills on the radio. Paul was himself a famous guitarist at the time, and he got drawn on stage to jam with the band.   And then, in an interval, a black man in the audience -- presumably this must have been an integrated audience, which would have been *very* unusual in 1938 in Oklahoma, but this is how Les Paul told the story, and other parts of it check out so we should probably take his word for it absent better evidence -- came up and asked for Les Paul's autograph. He told Paul that he played guitar, and Paul said for the young man to show him what he could do. The young man did, and Paul said “Jesus, you *are* good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”   And he did -- that was the first time that Les Paul met his friend Charlie Christian, shortly before Christian got the offer from Benny Goodman. Hanging out and jamming at a Bob Wills gig.   So we can, for the most part, safely put Bob Wills into the mutual respect and influence category. He was someone who had the respect of his peers, and was part of a chain of influences crossing racial and stylistic boundaries.   It gets more difficult when you get to someone like Pat Boone, a few years later, who would record soundalike versions of black musicians' hits specifically to sell to people who wouldn't buy music by black people and act as a spoiler for their records. That's ethically very, very dodgy, plus Boone was a terrible musician.   But what I think we can all agree on is that just outright stealing a black musician's song, crediting it to a white musician, and making it a massive hit is just wrong. And sadly that happened with Bob Wills' band at least once.   Now, Leon McAuliffe, the Texas Playboys' steel guitar player, is the credited composer of "Steel Guitar Rag", which is the instrumental which really made the steel guitar a permanent fixture in country and western music. Without this instrumental, country music would be totally different.   [insert a section of "Steel Guitar Rag" by Bob Wills]   That's from 1936. Now, in 1927, the guitarist Sylvester Weaver made a pioneering recording, which is now often called the first recorded country blues, the first recorded blues instrumental, and the first slide guitar recording (as I've said before, there is never a first, but Weaver's recording is definitely important). That track is called "Guitar Rag" and... well...   [insert "Guitar Rag" by Sylvester Weaver].   Leon McAuliffe always claimed he'd never heard Sylvester Weaver's song, and came up with Steel Guitar Rag independently. Do you believe him?   So, the Texas Playboys were not averse to a bit of plagiarism. But the song we're going to talk about for the rest of the episode is one that would end up plagiarised itself, very famously.   "Ida Red" is an old folk song, first recorded in 1924. In fact, structurally it's a hokum song. As is often the case with this kind of song, it's part of a massive family tree of other songs -- there are blues and country songs with the same melody, songs with different melodies but mentions of Ida Red, songs which contain different lines from the song... many folk songs aren't so much songs in themselves as they are labels you can put on a whole family. There's no one song "Ida Red", there's a whole bunch of songs which are, to a greater or lesser extent, Ida Red. "Ida Red" is just a name you can slap on that family, something you can point to.   Most versions of "Ida Red" had the same chorus -- "Ida Red, Ida Red, I'm plum fool about Ida Red" -- but different lyrics, often joking improvised ones. Here's the first version of "Ida Red" to be recorded -- oddly, this version doesn't even have the chorus, but it does have the chorus melody played on the fiddle. This is Fiddlin' Powers and Family, singing about Ida Red who weighs three hundred and forty pounds, in 1924:   [insert Fiddlin Powers version of "Ida Red"]   Wills' version is very differently structured. It has totally different lyrics -- it has the familiar chorus, but the verses are totally different and have nothing to do with the character of Ida Red -- "Light's in the parlour, fire's in the grate/Clock on the mantle says it's a'gettin' late/Curtains on the window, snowy white/The parlour's pleasant on Sunday night"   [insert Bob Wills version of "Ida Red"]   Those lyrics -- and all the other lyrics in Wills' version except the chorus, were taken from an 1878 parlour song called "Sunday Night" by George Frederick Root, a Civil War era songwriter who is now best known as the writer of the melody we now know as "Jesus Loves the Little Children". They're cut down to fit into the fast-patter do-si-do style of the song, but they're still definitely the same lyrics as Root's.   "Ida Red" was one of many massive hits for Wills and the Texas Playboys, who continued to be hugely successful through the 1940s, at one point becoming a bigger live draw than Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey, although the band's success started to decline when Tommy Duncan quit in 1948 over Wills' drinking -- Wills would often miss shows because of his binge drinking, and Duncan was the one who had to deal with the angry fans. Wills replaced Duncan with various other singers, but never found anyone who would have the same success with him.   Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys had a couple of hits in the very early 1950s -- one of them, indeed, was a sequel to Ida Red -- "Ida Red Likes The Boogie", a novelty boogie song of the type we discussed last week. (And think back to what I said then about the boogie fad persisting much longer than it should have. "Ida Red Likes The Boogie" was recorded in 1949 and went top ten in 1950, yet those boogie novelty songs I talked about last week were from 1940).   [insert "Ida Red Likes The Boogie"]   But even as his kind of music was getting more into fashion under the name rock and roll, Wills himself became less popular. The band were still a popular live attraction through most of the 1950s, but they never again reached the heights of the 30s and 40s, and Wills' deteriorating health and the band's lack of success made them split up in 1965.   But before they'd split, Wills' music had had a lasting influence on rock and roll, and not just on the people you might expect. Remember how I talked about plagiarism? Well, in 1955, a musician went into Chess studios with a slight rewrite of "Ida Red" that he called "Ida May". Leonard Chess persuaded him to change the name because otherwise it would be too obvious where he stole the tune... and we will talk about "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry in a few weeks' time.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Welcome to episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I mention a PhD thesis on the history of the backbeat in the episode. Here’s a link to it. Bob Wills’ music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This is an expensive but exhaustive one, while this is a cheap one which seems to have most of the important hits on it. The definitive book on Bob Wills, San Antonio Rose, is available here, though it’s a bit pricey. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. Clarification In the episode I talk about two tracks as being “by Django Reinhardt”, but the clips I play happen to be ones featuring violin solos. Those solos are, of course, by Reinhardt’s longtime collaborator Stephane Grapelli. I assume most people will know this, but just in case. Transcript “Rock and Roll? Why, man, that’s the same kind of music we’ve been playin’ since 1928! … We didn’t call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don’t call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it’s just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It’s the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm’s what’s important.”   Bob Wills said that in 1957, and it brings up an interesting question. What’s in a name?   Genre names are a strange thing, aren’t they? In particular, did you ever notice how many of them had the word “and” in them? Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and western? There’s sort of a reason for that.   Rock and roll is a special case, but the other two were names that were coined by Billboard, and they weren’t originally meant to be descriptors of a single genre, but of collections of genres — they were titles for its different charts. Rhythm and blues is a name that was used to replace the earlier name, of “race” records, because that was thought a bit demeaning. It was for the chart of “music made by black people”, basically, whatever music those black people were making, so they could be making “rhythm” records, or they could be making “blues” records.   Only once you give a collection of things a name, the way people’s minds work, they start thinking that because those things share a name they’re the same kind of thing. And people start thinking about “rhythm and blues” records as being a particular kind of thing. And then they start making “rhythm and blues” records, and suddenly it is a thing.   The same thing goes for country and western. That was, again, two different genres. Country music was the music made by white people who lived in the rural areas, of the Eastern US basically — people like the Carter Family, for example.   [Excerpt of “Keep on the Sunny Side” by the Carter Family]   We’ll hear more about the Carter family in the future, but that’s what country music was. Not country and western, just country. And that was the music made in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially especially Nashville.   Western music was a bit different. That was the music being made in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, and it tended to use similar instrumentation to country music — violins and guitars and so on — but it had different subject matter — lots of songs about cowboys and outlaws and so on — and at the time we’re talking about, the thirties and forties, it was a little bit slicker than country music.   This is odd in retrospect, because not many years later the Western musicians influenced people like Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, who made very gritty, raw, unpolished music compared to the country music coming out of Nashville, but the thirties and forties were the heyday of singing cowboy films, with people like Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers becoming massive, massive stars, and so there was a lot of Hollywoodisation of the music, lots of crooning and orchestras and so on.   Western music was big, big business — and so was swing music. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that there was a new genre that emerged around that time. Western swing.   Western swing is, to simplify it ridiculously, swing music made in the West of the USA. But it’s music that was made in the west — largely in places like California –by the same kinds of people who in the east were making country music, and with a lot of the same influences.   It took the rhythms of swing music, but played them with the same instrumentation as the country musicians were using, so you’d get hot jazz style performances, but they’d be played on fiddle, banjo, guitar, and stand-up bass. There were a few other instruments that you’d usually get included as well — the steel guitar, for example. Western swing usually also included a drum kit, which was one of the big ways it differed from country music as it was then. The drum kit was, in the early decades of the twentieth century, primarily a jazz instrument, and it was only because Western swing was a hybrid of jazz and Western music that it got included in those bands — and for a long time drum kits were banned from country music shows like the Grand Ole Opry, and when they did finally relent and let Western swing bands play there, they made the drummers hide behind a curtain.   They would also include other instruments that weren’t normally included in country or Western music at the time, like the piano. Less often, you’d have a saxophone or a trumpet, but basically the typical Western swing lineup would be a guitar, a steel guitar, a violin or two, a piano, a bass, and drums.   Again, as we saw in the episode about “Flying Home”, where we talked about *non*-Western swing, you can see the rock band lineup starting to form. It was a gradual process though.   Take Bob Wills, the musician whose drummer had to hide behind a curtain.   Wills originally performed as a blackface comedian — sadly, blackface performances were very, very common in the US in the 1930s (but then, they were common in the UK well into my lifetime. I’m not judging the US in particular here), but he soon became more well known as a fiddle player and occasional singer.   In 1929 Wills, the singer Milton Brown, and guitarist Herman Arnspiger, got together to perform a song at a Christmas dance party. They soon added Brown’s brother Derwood on guitar and fiddle player John Dunnam, and became the Light Crust Doughboys.     [clip of the Light Crust Doughboys singing their theme]   That might seem like a strange name for a band, and it would be if that had been the name they chose themselves, but it wasn’t. Their name was originally The Aladdin Laddies, as they got sponsored by the Aladdin Lamp Company to perform on WBAP radio under that name, but when that sponsorship fell through, they performed for a while as the Wills Fiddle Band, before they found a new sponsor — Pappy O’Daniel.   You may know that name, as the name of the governor of Mississippi in the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, and that was… not an *entirely* inaccurate portrayal, though the character in that film definitely wasn’t the real man. The real Pappy O’Daniel didn’t actually become governor of Mississippi, but he did become the governor of Texas, in the 1940s.   But in the late 1920s and early thirties he was the head of advertising for Burrus Mill and Elevator Company, who made “Light Crust Flour”, and he started to sponsor the show.   The band became immensely successful, but they were not particularly well paid — in fact, O’Daniel insisted that everyone in the band would have to actually work a day job at the mill as well. Bob Wills was a truck driver as well as being a fiddle player, and the others had different jobs in the factory.   Pappy O’Daniel at first didn’t like this hillbilly music being played on the radio show he was paying for — in fact he wanted to cancel the show after two weeks. But Wills invited him down to the radio station to be involved in the broadcasts, and O’Daniel became the show’s MC, as well as being the band’s manager and the writer of their original material. O’Daniel even got his own theme song, “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy”.   [insert Hillbilly Boys playing “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy”]   That’s not the Light Crust Doughboys playing the song — that’s the Hillbilly Boys, another band Pappy O’Daniel hired a few years later, when Burrus Mill fired him and he formed his own company, Hillbilly Flour — but that’s the song that the Light Crust Doughboys used to play for O’Daniel, and the singer on that recording, Leon Huff, sang with the Doughboys from 1934 onwards. So you get the idea.   In 1932, the Light Crust Doughboys made their first recording, though they did so under the name the Fort Worth Doughboys — Pappy O’Daniel didn’t approve of them doing anything which might take them out of his control, so they didn’t use the same name. This is “Nancy”   [insert clip of “Nancy”]   Now the music the Light Crust Doughboys were playing wasn’t yet what we’d call Western Swing but they were definitely as influenced by jazz music as they were by Western music. In fact, the original lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys can be seen as the prototypical example of the singer-guitarist creative tension in rock music, except here it was a tension between the singer and the fiddle player. Milton Brown was, by all accounts, wanting to experiment more with a jazz style, while Bob Wills wanted to stick with a more traditional hillbilly string band sound. That creative tension led them to create a totally new form of music.   To see this, we’re going to look forward a little bit to 1936, to a slightly different lineup of the band. Take a listen to this, for example — “Dinah”.   [insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing “Dinah”]   And this — “Limehouse Blues”.   [insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing “Limehouse Blues”]   And now listen to this — Django Reinhardt playing “Dinah”   [insert section of Reinhardt playing “Dinah”]   And Reinhardt playing “Limehouse Blues”   [Reinhardt playing “Limehouse Blues”]   Those recordings were made a few years after the Light Crust Doughboys versions, but you can see the similarities. The Light Crust Doughboys were doing the same things as Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt, years before them, even though we would now think of the Light Crust Doughboys as being “a country band”, while Grapelli and Reinhardt are absolutely in the jazz category.   Now, I said that that’s a different lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys, and it is. A version of the Light Crust Doughboys continues today, and one member, Smoky Montgomery, who joined the band in 1935, continued with them until his death in 2001. Smoky Montgomery’s on those tracks you just heard, but Bob Wills and Milton Brown weren’t. They both left, because Pappy O’Daniel was apparently not a very good person to work for.   In particular, O’Daniel wouldn’t let the Doughboys play any venues where alcohol was served, or play dances generally. O’Daniel was only paying the band members $15 a week, and they could get $40 a night playing gigs, and so Brown left in 1932 to form his own band, the Musical Brownies.   The Musical Brownies are now largely forgotten, but they’re considered the first band ever to play proper Western Swing, and they introduced a lot of things that defined the genre. In particular, they introduced electric steel guitar to the Western music genre, with the great steel player Bob Dunn.   For a while, the Musical Brownies were massively popular, but sadly Brown died in a car crash in 1936.   Bob Wills stayed in the Doughboys for a while longer, as the band’s leader, as O’Daniel gave him a raise to $38 a week. And he continued to make the kind of music he’d made when Brown was in the band — both Brown and Wills clearly recognised that what they’d come up with together was something better and more interesting than just jazz or just Western.   Wills recruited a new singer, Tommy Duncan, but in 1933 Wills was fired by O’Daniel, partly because of rows over Wills wanting his brother in the band, and partly because Wills’ drinking was already starting to affect his professionalism. He formed his own band and took Duncan and bass player Kermit Whalen with him. The Doughboys’ steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe, soon followed, and they became Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. They advertised themselves as “formerly the Light Crust Doughboys” — although that wasn’t entirely true, as they weren’t the whole band, though they were the core of it — and Pappy O’Daniel sued them, unsuccessfully.   And the Texas Playboys then became the first Western Swing band to add a drum kit, and become a more obviously rhythm-oriented band.   The Texas Playboys were the first massively, massively successful Western swing band, and their style was one that involved taking elements from everywhere and putting them together. They had the drums and horns that a jazz band would have, the guitars and fiddles that country or Western bands would have, the steel guitar that a Hawaiian band would have, and that meant they could play all of those styles of music if they wanted to. And they did. They mixed jazz, and Western, and blues, and pop, and came up with something different from all of them.   This was music for dancing, and as music for dancing it had a lot of aspects that would later make their way into rock and roll. In particular it had that backbeat we talked about in episode two, although here it was swung less — when you listen to them play with a heavy backbeat but with the fiddle as the main instrument, you can hear the influence of polka music, which was a big influence on all the Western swing musicians, and through them on rock and roll. Polka music is performed in 2/4 time, and there’s a very, *very* strong connection between the polka beat and the backbeat.   (I won’t go into that too much more here — I already talked about the backbeat quite a bit in episode two — but while researching these episodes I found a hugely informative but very detailed look at the development of the rock backbeat — someone’s PhD thesis from twenty years ago, four hundred pages just on that topic, which I’ll link on the webpage if you want a much more detailed explanation)   Now by looking at the lineup of the Texas Playboys, we can see how the rock band lineup evolved. In 1938 the Texas Playboys had a singer, two guitars (one doubling on fiddle), three fiddlers, a banjo player, steel guitar, bass, drums, piano, trumpet, trombone, and two saxes. A *huge* band, and one at least as swing as it was Western. But around that time, Wills started to use electric guitars — electric guitars only really became “a thing” in 1938 musically, and a lot of people started using them at the same time, like Benny Goodman’s band as we heard about in the first episode. Wills’ band was one of the first to use them, and Western musicians generally were more likely to use them, as they were already using amplified *steel* guitars.   We talked in episode two about how the big bands died between 1942 and 1944, and Wills was able to make his band considerably smaller with the aid of amplification, so by 1944 he’d got rid of most of his horn section apart from a single trumpet, having his electric guitars play what would previously have been horn lines.   So by 1944 the band would consist of two fiddles, two basses, two electric guitars, steel guitar, drums, and a trumpet. A smaller band, an electrified band, and one which, other than the fiddles and the trumpet, was much closer to the kind of lineups that you would get in the 50s and 60s. A smaller, tighter, band.   Now, Wills’ band quickly became the most popular band in its genre, and he became widely known as “the king of Western Swing”, but Wills’ music was more than just swing. He was pulling together elements from country, from the blues, from jazz, from anything that could make him popular.   And, sadly, that would sometimes include plagiarism.   Now, the question of black influence on white music is a fraught one, and one that will come up a lot in the course of this history. And a lot of the time people will get things wrong. There were, of course, white people who made their living by taking black people’s music and watering it down. There were also, though, plenty of more complicated examples, and examples of mutual influence.   There was a constant bouncing of ideas back and forth between country, western, blues, jazz, swing… all of these genres were coded as belonging to one or other race, but all of them had musicians who were listening to one another. This is not to say that racism was not a factor in who was successful — of course it was, and this episode is, after all, about someone who started out as a blackface performer, race was a massive factor, and sadly still is — but the general culture among musicians at the time was that good musicians of whatever genre respected good musicians of any other genre, and there were songs that everyone, or almost everyone, played, in their own styles, simply because a good song was a good song and at that time there wasn’t the same tight association of performer and song that there is now — you’d sometimes have five or six people in the charts with hit versions of the same song. You’d have a country version and a blues version and a swing version of a song, not because anyone was stealing anyone else’s music, but because it was just accepted that everyone would record a hit song in their own style.   And certainly, in the case of Bob Wills, he was admired by — and admired — musicians across racial boundaries. The white jazz guitarist Les Paul — of whom we’ll almost certainly be hearing more — used to tell a story. Paul was so amazed by Bob Wills’ music that in 1938 he travelled from Waukesha Wisconsin, where he was visiting his mother, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to hear Wills’ band play, after his mother made him listen to Bob Wills on the radio. Paul was himself a famous guitarist at the time, and he got drawn on stage to jam with the band.   And then, in an interval, a black man in the audience — presumably this must have been an integrated audience, which would have been *very* unusual in 1938 in Oklahoma, but this is how Les Paul told the story, and other parts of it check out so we should probably take his word for it absent better evidence — came up and asked for Les Paul’s autograph. He told Paul that he played guitar, and Paul said for the young man to show him what he could do. The young man did, and Paul said “Jesus, you *are* good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”   And he did — that was the first time that Les Paul met his friend Charlie Christian, shortly before Christian got the offer from Benny Goodman. Hanging out and jamming at a Bob Wills gig.   So we can, for the most part, safely put Bob Wills into the mutual respect and influence category. He was someone who had the respect of his peers, and was part of a chain of influences crossing racial and stylistic boundaries.   It gets more difficult when you get to someone like Pat Boone, a few years later, who would record soundalike versions of black musicians’ hits specifically to sell to people who wouldn’t buy music by black people and act as a spoiler for their records. That’s ethically very, very dodgy, plus Boone was a terrible musician.   But what I think we can all agree on is that just outright stealing a black musician’s song, crediting it to a white musician, and making it a massive hit is just wrong. And sadly that happened with Bob Wills’ band at least once.   Now, Leon McAuliffe, the Texas Playboys’ steel guitar player, is the credited composer of “Steel Guitar Rag”, which is the instrumental which really made the steel guitar a permanent fixture in country and western music. Without this instrumental, country music would be totally different.   [insert a section of “Steel Guitar Rag” by Bob Wills]   That’s from 1936. Now, in 1927, the guitarist Sylvester Weaver made a pioneering recording, which is now often called the first recorded country blues, the first recorded blues instrumental, and the first slide guitar recording (as I’ve said before, there is never a first, but Weaver’s recording is definitely important). That track is called “Guitar Rag” and… well…   [insert “Guitar Rag” by Sylvester Weaver].   Leon McAuliffe always claimed he’d never heard Sylvester Weaver’s song, and came up with Steel Guitar Rag independently. Do you believe him?   So, the Texas Playboys were not averse to a bit of plagiarism. But the song we’re going to talk about for the rest of the episode is one that would end up plagiarised itself, very famously.   “Ida Red” is an old folk song, first recorded in 1924. In fact, structurally it’s a hokum song. As is often the case with this kind of song, it’s part of a massive family tree of other songs — there are blues and country songs with the same melody, songs with different melodies but mentions of Ida Red, songs which contain different lines from the song… many folk songs aren’t so much songs in themselves as they are labels you can put on a whole family. There’s no one song “Ida Red”, there’s a whole bunch of songs which are, to a greater or lesser extent, Ida Red. “Ida Red” is just a name you can slap on that family, something you can point to.   Most versions of “Ida Red” had the same chorus — “Ida Red, Ida Red, I’m plum fool about Ida Red” — but different lyrics, often joking improvised ones. Here’s the first version of “Ida Red” to be recorded — oddly, this version doesn’t even have the chorus, but it does have the chorus melody played on the fiddle. This is Fiddlin’ Powers and Family, singing about Ida Red who weighs three hundred and forty pounds, in 1924:   [insert Fiddlin Powers version of “Ida Red”]   Wills’ version is very differently structured. It has totally different lyrics — it has the familiar chorus, but the verses are totally different and have nothing to do with the character of Ida Red — “Light’s in the parlour, fire’s in the grate/Clock on the mantle says it’s a’gettin’ late/Curtains on the window, snowy white/The parlour’s pleasant on Sunday night”   [insert Bob Wills version of “Ida Red”]   Those lyrics — and all the other lyrics in Wills’ version except the chorus, were taken from an 1878 parlour song called “Sunday Night” by George Frederick Root, a Civil War era songwriter who is now best known as the writer of the melody we now know as “Jesus Loves the Little Children”. They’re cut down to fit into the fast-patter do-si-do style of the song, but they’re still definitely the same lyrics as Root’s.   “Ida Red” was one of many massive hits for Wills and the Texas Playboys, who continued to be hugely successful through the 1940s, at one point becoming a bigger live draw than Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey, although the band’s success started to decline when Tommy Duncan quit in 1948 over Wills’ drinking — Wills would often miss shows because of his binge drinking, and Duncan was the one who had to deal with the angry fans. Wills replaced Duncan with various other singers, but never found anyone who would have the same success with him.   Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys had a couple of hits in the very early 1950s — one of them, indeed, was a sequel to Ida Red — “Ida Red Likes The Boogie”, a novelty boogie song of the type we discussed last week. (And think back to what I said then about the boogie fad persisting much longer than it should have. “Ida Red Likes The Boogie” was recorded in 1949 and went top ten in 1950, yet those boogie novelty songs I talked about last week were from 1940).   [insert “Ida Red Likes The Boogie”]   But even as his kind of music was getting more into fashion under the name rock and roll, Wills himself became less popular. The band were still a popular live attraction through most of the 1950s, but they never again reached the heights of the 30s and 40s, and Wills’ deteriorating health and the band’s lack of success made them split up in 1965.   But before they’d split, Wills’ music had had a lasting influence on rock and roll, and not just on the people you might expect. Remember how I talked about plagiarism? Well, in 1955, a musician went into Chess studios with a slight rewrite of “Ida Red” that he called “Ida May”. Leonard Chess persuaded him to change the name because otherwise it would be too obvious where he stole the tune… and we will talk about “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry in a few weeks’ time.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

This episode begins with Gina Marie singing "Squeeze Me." Then, Ethan reads an email from Gina about her adventures in Europe, which leads to an expensive musical gondola ride. Raw Press, our sponsor for the episode, requests Ethan to sing about juice, which he does. Ethan then plays a song about opium smoking (Limehouse Blues) and ends the episode with some Scott Joplin and some semi-investigative journalism about the all-powerful pineapple industry. 

jazz classic

jazz classic

jazz classic

The Missouri Prairie Foundation is celebrating 50 years of studying, growing, restoring and promoting one of the most productive  - and dwindling - ecosystems on Earth. MPF Director, Carol Davit talks with Earthworms' Jean Ponzi about these "seas of grass" and their importance to both repairing and supporting human interaction with nature. Jon Wingo also joins this conversation, adding his considerable experience as Board past-President of MPF and President of DJM Ecological Services, a landscaping firm that specializes in work with native plants (enjoy Jon's and DJM's work on any St. Louis roam around the wilder areas of Forest Park). MPF now manages Grow Native! one of the nation's most outstanding and prolifically engaging native plant promotional programs. The twofold purpose of Grow Native! is to increase supply and increase demand, working with native plants. Look for the purple tags or display areas in almost any locally-owned garden center and you'll see living evidence of Grow Native! achievements  - plus you'll be strongly tempted to try some natives on your own grounds. MPF events this spring will include plant sales, Bioblitz on an original remnant prairie near Mt. Vernon MO, a regional celebration of National Prairie Day (June 4), Grow Native! workshops - and more. Membership in MPF brings you the quarterly Missouri Prairie Journal, a delightful hybrid of public information and scholarly research.   Music:  Limehouse Blues - recorded live at KDHX by Del McCoury Band Related Earthworms Conversations:  Wes Jackson, Founder of The Land Institute: Growing Our Food in Prairies (9-2-15)  

Records left off earlier podcasts.  Songs include: Tennessee Waltz, Knock Me a Kiss, Round and Round, You're Laughing At Me and Limehouse Blues.  Performers include: Patty Page, Chu Berry, Pete Seeger, Count Basie, Kay Starr, Licia Albanese and the Memphis Jug Band.

This program presents the last tune from July 6th, 1988, then jumps back four weeks, to June 8th, with Jimmy Mazzy (banjo/vocals), Fred Lind (cornet), Paul Meymaris (clarinet), John Kafalas (trombone/tuba), and Don Frothingham (piano).  Selections are “Limehouse Blues,” an interlude by Don, “Keeping Myself for You,” “I’m Sorry, Dear,” and “Gee But I Hate … Continue reading Podcast #52: 7/6/88 and 6/8/88 →