Podcasts about little esther

friend boys drinks little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2022 52:43

The Boys make some new drinks with LITTLE ESTHER POVITSKY. Watch the video recording of this episode at Patreon.com/TheFlagrantOnes.

Roots Of Rock - Johnny Otis & Little Esther

The Roger Ashby Oldies Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 23, 2021 1:49

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.

rock roots johnny otis little esther roger ashby

Episode 114: “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2021

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. 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/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode — a content warning applies for the song “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won’t link to because of the paywall). Millie’s early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to “Barbara Gaye” when I should say “Barbie Gaye” Transcript Today, we’re going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we’re looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We’re going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We’re going to look at “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] Most of the music we’ve looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I’m afraid that that’s going to remain largely the case — while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock’s detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we’re going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations — I’m trying to give as much information about Jamaica’s musical culture in one episode as I’ve given about America’s in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I’m missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn’t even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience. Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around sound systems — big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people — in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked. The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a “rhumba box”, and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle — this form of mento is often still called “country music” in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, “Matilda”] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it’s a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don’t know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like “Hoola Hoop Calypso”, and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music — people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on — and I honestly can’t hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, “Strip Tease”] But I’ll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there’s a difference I’m not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first — there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris — the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris’ “Bloodshot Eyes”. I’m going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Bloodshot Eyes”] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair — a musician we’ve not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz — Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren’t widely available in Jamaica — indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The “sound man” was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records — they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound — usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had — if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he’d scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious — it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ — one of the few in Jamaica — presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith’s “My Mother’s Eyes”, would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, “My Mother’s Eyes”] Reid’s Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd’s system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn’t perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well — one important one being that he knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid’s shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be — he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid’s edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties — as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, “Later For Gator” by Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it “Coxsone Hop”: [Excerpt: Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, “Later For Gator”] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested — Reid wanted Dodd to know he’d been beaten. Now, here I’m going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we’re likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I’m mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent — which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I’m choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: “So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him.” There was a second problem with using American records, as well — American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren’t. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn’t keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious — they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds — a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn’t have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn’t touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience — if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was “Lollipop Girl”, a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record — and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd’s assistants to get hold of Dodd’s copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash — a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over — and Reid played his own copy of “Lollipop Girl”, Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of “Lollipop Girl”, he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing — he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, “Lollipop Girl”] Reid didn’t make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress “ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and”. In mento, though, you’d often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be “one AND two AND three AND four AND”. Seaga had the guitarist on “Manny Oh” by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, “Manny Oh”] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term “ska” came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying “play it ska… ska… ska…” Where “Manny Oh” had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, “Easy Snappin'” is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, “Easy Snappin'”] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single “Oh Carolina”, incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, “Oh Carolina”] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska’s first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on “Ko Ko Mo”, but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, pairing Leonard Lee’s baritone voice with Shirley Goodman’s soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists — for example Shirley and Lee’s “Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Sweethearts”] bears a very strong resemblance to “Double-Crossing Blues”: [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, “Double-Crossing Blues”] But they’d soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like “Feel So Good” showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Feel So Good”] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille’s voice sounded enough like Shirley’s that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like “Sit and Cry”, a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of “The Twist”: [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, “Sit and Cry”] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and “We’ll Meet” by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, “We’ll Meet”] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country — there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean. Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men — Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn’t performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming’s mistress — Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there — according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming’s death, his wife instructed the villa’s manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He’d started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents’ money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, “Boogie in My Bones”, by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Boogie in My Bones”] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He’d been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time — there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain “bluebeat” became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, “King of Kings”, performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, “King of Kings”] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came “Mockingbird Hill”, a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts’ uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, “Mockingbird Hill”] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that “Mockingbird Hill” was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to “I Call Your Name”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Call Your Name”] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie’s mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn’t have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie’s first British single, “Don’t You Know”, was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, “Don’t You Know”] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye’s biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she’d briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. “My Boy Lollipop” had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game — and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, “My Boy Lollipop”] That hadn’t been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording “Night of the Vampire”: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions’ harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] “My Boy Lollipop” came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, “Sweet William”, only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, “Sweet William”] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of “Bloodshot Eyes”, without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, “Bloodshot Eyes”] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, “Pledging My Love”] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “I’m Blue (the Gong Gong Song)”: [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, “I’m Blue (The Gong Gong Song)”] But the Spencer Davis Group didn’t revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track “Enoch Power”, in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, “Enoch Power”] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of “My Boy Lollipop”: [Excerpt: Bad Manners, “My Girl Lollipop”] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

america american black english uk england americans british dj kings price north america night new orleans island harris britain vampires beatles caribbean james bond manchester liverpool birmingham elvis jamaica edwards phantom eyes prime minister twist scratch djs commander jamaican trinidad willis black americans cry watts domino levy bob marley tina turner boogie motown fleming distinction cadillac ska buster sweetheart british empire goldeneye rod stewart robins tilt tobago ike trojan blackwell mille mixcloud deep south fontana goldmine dodd british isles duke ellington higgs lollipops jerry lee lewis charlie watts my mother ian fleming anglo american rasta harrow dizzy gillespie striptease les paul uk tv sarah vaughan island records downbeat fats domino hey girl rastafari errol flynn jimmy cliff bobby darin biographical noel coward robert spencer feel so good roaring lion bad manners patois louis jordan moonglow mento launchers dave thompson chris blackwell lloyd price pussy galore spencer davis group american r peter asher my bones prince buster professor longhair five dimensions joe meek record collector mary ford crosse hey boy rico rodriguez ernest ranglin johnny otis caribbean music sweet william ellie greenwich leonard lee roy jenkins mighty sparrow morris levy little esther i call your name new orleans r new york r coxsone my boy lollipop coxsone dodd count ossie jesse belvin mockingbird hill duke reid cosimo matassa derrick harriott tilt araiza

Episode 114: "My Boy Lollipop" by Millie

servant robert knight little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2021 47:11

This week's episode looks at "My Boy Lollipop" and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul. 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/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode -- a content warning applies for the song "Bloodshot Eyes" by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won't link to because of the paywall). Millie's early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to "Barbara Gaye" when I should say "Barbie Gaye" Transcript Today, we're going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we're looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We're going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We're going to look at "My Boy Lollipop" by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] Most of the music we've looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I'm afraid that that's going to remain largely the case -- while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock's detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we're going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations -- I'm trying to give as much information about Jamaica's musical culture in one episode as I've given about America's in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I'm missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn't even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience. Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around sound systems -- big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people -- in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked. The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a "rhumba box", and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle -- this form of mento is often still called "country music" in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, "Matilda"] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it's a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don't know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like "Hoola Hoop Calypso", and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music -- people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on -- and I honestly can't hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, "Strip Tease"] But I'll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there's a difference I'm not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first -- there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris -- the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes". I'm going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes"] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair -- a musician we've not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz -- Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren't widely available in Jamaica -- indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The "sound man" was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records -- they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound -- usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had -- if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he'd scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious -- it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ -- one of the few in Jamaica -- presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith's "My Mother's Eyes", would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, "My Mother's Eyes"] Reid's Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd's system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn't perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well -- one important one being that he knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid's shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be -- he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid's edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties -- as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, "Later For Gator" by Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it "Coxsone Hop": [Excerpt: Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, "Later For Gator"] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested -- Reid wanted Dodd to know he'd been beaten. Now, here I'm going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we're likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I'm mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent -- which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I'm choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: "So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him." There was a second problem with using American records, as well -- American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren't. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn't keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious -- they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds -- a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn't have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn't touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience -- if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was "Lollipop Girl", a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record -- and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd's assistants to get hold of Dodd's copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash -- a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over -- and Reid played his own copy of "Lollipop Girl", Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of "Lollipop Girl", he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing -- he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, "Lollipop Girl"] Reid didn't make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress "ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and". In mento, though, you'd often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be "one AND two AND three AND four AND". Seaga had the guitarist on "Manny Oh" by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, "Manny Oh"] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term "ska" came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying "play it ska... ska... ska..." Where "Manny Oh" had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, "Easy Snappin'" is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, "Easy Snappin'"] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single "Oh Carolina", incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, "Oh Carolina"] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska's first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on "Ko Ko Mo", but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio, pairing Leonard Lee's baritone voice with Shirley Goodman's soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists -- for example Shirley and Lee's "Sweethearts": [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Sweethearts"] bears a very strong resemblance to "Double-Crossing Blues": [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, "Double-Crossing Blues"] But they'd soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like "Feel So Good" showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Feel So Good"] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille's voice sounded enough like Shirley's that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like "Sit and Cry", a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of "The Twist": [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, "Sit and Cry"] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and "We'll Meet" by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, "We'll Meet"] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country -- there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean. Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men -- Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn't performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming's mistress -- Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there -- according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming's death, his wife instructed the villa's manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He'd started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents' money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, "Boogie in My Bones", by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Boogie in My Bones"] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He'd been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time -- there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain "bluebeat" became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, "King of Kings", performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, "King of Kings"] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came "Mockingbird Hill", a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts' uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, "Mockingbird Hill"] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that "Mockingbird Hill" was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to "I Call Your Name": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Call Your Name"] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie's mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn't have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie's first British single, "Don't You Know", was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, "Don't You Know"] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye's biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she'd briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. "My Boy Lollipop" had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game -- and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, "My Boy Lollipop"] That hadn't been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording "Night of the Vampire": [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions' harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] "My Boy Lollipop" came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, "Sweet William", only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, "Sweet William"] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of "Bloodshot Eyes", without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, "Bloodshot Eyes"] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, "Hey Boy, Hey Girl"] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, "Pledging My Love"] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner's "I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song)": [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] But the Spencer Davis Group didn't revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track "Enoch Power", in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, "Enoch Power"] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of "My Boy Lollipop": [Excerpt: Bad Manners, "My Girl Lollipop"] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

america american black english uk england americans british dj kings price north america night new orleans island harris britain beatles caribbean james bond manchester liverpool birmingham elvis jamaica edwards phantom eyes prime minister djs commander jamaican trinidad black americans cry watts domino levy bob marley tina turner boogie motown fleming distinction cadillac ska buster sweetheart british empire goldeneye rod stewart robins tilt tobago ike trojan blackwell mille mixcloud deep south fontana goldmine dodd british isles duke ellington higgs lollipops jerry lee lewis charlie watts my mother ian fleming anglo american rasta harrow dizzy gillespie les paul uk tv sarah vaughan island records downbeat fats domino hey girl rastafari errol flynn jimmy cliff bobby darin lee scratch perry biographical noel coward robert spencer feel so good roaring lion bad manners patois moonglow louis jordan mento launchers dave thompson chris blackwell pussy galore lloyd price spencer davis group peter asher my bones prince buster professor longhair five dimensions joe meek record collector american r b mary ford crosse hey boy rico rodriguez ernest ranglin johnny otis caribbean music sweet william ellie greenwich leonard lee roy jenkins mighty sparrow morris levy little esther coxsone my boy lollipop coxsone dodd count ossie mockingbird hill jesse belvin duke reid derrick harriott cosimo matassa new orleans r b tilt araiza

The Story of the Little Servant - Chapter 2

AcreSoft Story Classic:

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2020 13:04

Little Esther keeps showing up to watch the gardener Robert Knight. He finds out that she doesn't have her mother anymore either. She is living with her grandparents. Find out what else happens in this episode. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Chester Esther and Manny Annie’s Christmas Ep // Meanspiration #49

Meanspiration with Annie Lederman

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2020 55:21

Little Esther is back with Annie are back! They talk about the drama that unfolded on the previous episode, Christmas times, dealing with rage issues and life's challenges. For more Annie: Buy one of Annie’s controversial masks at www.annie-lederman-merch.myshopify.com Join her Patreon to watch the behind the scenes vlog of her crazy week and get other fun extras here www.patreon.com/annielederman Follow Annie on instagram/twitter: @annielederman Like her on facebook.com/annieledz And did I mention join her patreon at www.patreon.com/annielederman Oh and she has a patreon! You should join it! p a t r e o n Let's get it patreon! Special Thanks to guest producer/editor. Follow him on instagram: @toddwalker.mp4 and follow absentee Anthony on insta: @anthonyypacheco PATREON #annielederman #meanspiration #podcast

christmas manny chester little esther

lupe's living room - episode 20 (blue christmas)

Lupe's Living Room

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 96:30

ft. Bobby Timmons, Mosaic, Caetano Veloso, Marvin Gaye, Little Esther & Mel Walker, Nathaniel Mayer, The Poets, Michel Petrucciani, The Pretenders, Margo Guryan, Richard Marks, Tatsuro Yamashita, Greenwood Curlee & Clyde, Hallelujahs, Brenda Lee, João Gilberto, The Rocky Fellers, Felix Gross, Barrington Levy, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Ferrante & Teicher, Norris the Troubador, Nancy Sinatra, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dolly Parton, Cara Stewart

S1-EP34: A Wine "D"Canter

The Commercial Break

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2020 56:38

This Episode available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uR4br_ZEK04 Bryan and Hoadley discuss "the laughing plague" of 1518, Bryan explains his D-pick history to Hoadley and The Soy Sauce Balls Tasting Challenge...hand on to your pantalones..this one is a doozy! Join The Break Room to get access to the TCB Aftershow: www.TCBpodcast.com The Commercial Break Podcast available on your favorite podcast provider!! Podcast on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-commercial-break/id1506436093 Video and Audio Recorded Live from the TCB Studios! Instagram: @thecommercialbreak Twitter: TCBbryan Facebook The Commercial Break Podcast email: info@tcbpodcast.com

apple los angeles comedy funny wine comedians standup saturday night live joe rogan would you rather late night seinfeld el camino talkshow mock draft comedy central stand up comedy david letterman howard stern jimmy kimmel bill burr stephen colbert late show joe rogan experience adult swim little girls curb your enthusiasm best podcasts life advice stand up comedians larry david comedy podcasts viral videos christian mccaffrey comedy store comedy clubs comedy shows atc family friendly pauly shore jimmy kimmel live bert kreischer talkshows great questions funny podcasts theo von laugh factory bobby lee bad friends joe rogan podcast mark normand chris d'elia late night shows ultimate fighting championship brendan schaub michael richards breaking bad movie funny people canter situation room top podcasts all things comedy f is for family tigerbelly funny videos take your shoes off podcast comedy best comedy podcasts rick glassman gas digital network ymh comedian podcast monday morning podcast dom irrera hand model tim and eric whiskey ginger tfatk real ass podcast out to lunch comedy video funny comedy tuesdays with stories funny show comedy sketches little esther tpw jeremiah wonders binge podcast rad dudecast paulie shore comedy central stand up jamie masada spitballers weird adults

S1-EP33: Such A Ball Buffer!!

The Commercial Break

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2020 54:09

This episode is available on YouTube at:https://youtu.be/nm-sMMq62_s New Episodes every Tuesday! Visit: www.TCBpodcast.com to watch full episodes on Youtube, to join the Break Room for access to live shows, extra content and more... Email your questions: info@tcbpodcast.com Twitter: TCB Bryan Instagram/Facebook: @thecommercialbreak Bryan and Hoadley scatting, Cap Calloway, bad supermarket music, swingers parties, Rudi Guliani's shoes and why men age so poorly and hang so low...this episode is a grower so stick with it!

los angeles voice comedy funny comedians standup saturday night live joe rogan would you rather late night seinfeld el camino talkshow mock draft comedy central stand up comedy david letterman tonight show daily show howard stern jimmy kimmel bill burr seth rogen stephen colbert late show joe rogan experience daylight savings adult swim little girls curb your enthusiasm best podcasts life advice larry david comedy podcasts viral videos christian mccaffrey gwen stefani comedy store buffer comedy clubs daylight savings time daylight saving time blake shelton comedy shows atc family friendly pauly shore jimmy kimmel live talkshows great questions tom segura funny podcasts theo von laugh factory bobby lee bad friends joe rogan podcast chris d'elia eric andre comedy movies late night shows ultimate fighting championship brendan schaub michael richards breaking bad movie funny people breakroom situation room top podcasts andrew santino commercial break all things comedy f is for family eric andre show al madrigal late shift tigerbelly funny videos podcast comedy best comedy podcasts ymh comedian podcast monday morning podcast dom irrera hand model tim and eric whiskey ginger tfatk late night comedy comedy video funny comedy tuesdays with stories best stand up funny show comedy sketches little esther tpw binge podcast paulie shore comedy central stand up jamie masada spitballers weird adults

"Twins" starring Esther DeVito & Annie Schwarzenegger // Meanspiration #42

Meanspiration with Annie Lederman

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2020 49:06

We're back with Little Esther on another episode of Meanspiration! We talk about our week together and answer YOUR questions from the internet! To see more of Esther: Subscribe to www.youtube.com/estherclub Buy her tie dye at www.instagram.com/sleepoverbyesther Watch her 1hr comedy special on Comedy Central or stream it for free here https://on.cc.com/2WCVETw For more Annie: Buy one of Annie’s controversial masks at www.annie-lederman-merch.myshopify.com Join her Patreon to watch the behind the scenes vlog of her crazy week and get other fun extras here www.patreon.com/annielederman Follow Annie on instagram/twitter: @annielederman Like her on facebook.com/annieledz And did I mention join her patreon at www.patreon.com/annielederman Oh and she has a patreon! You should join it! p a t r e o n Let's get it patreon! Special Thanks to guest producer/editor. Follow him on instagram: @toddwalker.mp4 and follow absentee Anthony on insta: @anthonyypacheco PATREON #annielederman #meanspiration #podcast #littleesther

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E178 Sex Is Off The Table With Esther Povitsky

The Viall Files

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2020 72:34

Today on The Viall Files we are joined by actress and stand up comedian Esther Povitsky. Her comedy special Hot For My Name is out on CC.com and we decided to get Esther’s hot takes on relationships, dating, friend zones, breakups, parents, sex positivity, talking dirty and so much more. She has a lot of thoughts on a lot of things, especially Nick, so strap in as Little Esther doesn’t hold back. ”It’s so offensive that you run, I feel personally attacked.” Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and as always send in your relationship questions to asknick@kastmedia.com to be a part of our Monday episodes. THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: STORYWORTH: http://www.storyworth.com/viall for $10 off your first purchase CROSSROPE: http://www.crossrope.com/viall for $40 off the Get Fit Bundle plus FREE shipping BUBS NATURALS: http://www.bubsnaturals.com code: VIALL for 20% off AMAZON MUSIC: http://www.amazon.com/viall to try Amazon Music Unlimited for free for 30 days Episode Socials: @viallfiles @nickviall @esthermonster See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Little Esther and Dave King, Our Couples Goals Friends

friends dave king couples goals little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2020 48:42

LITTLE ESTHER and DAVE KING return to share the true meaning of love.

100. Dollface : Episode One (Hulu)

The Episode One Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2019 62:51

It's finally here. The show Steve checked for screeners Daily. also it happens to be our 100th episode. cool. Dollface, with Shay Mitchell, Kat Dennings, and Little Esther! We didn't get Becca's opinion in time for recording, but post recording she watched it and enjoyed it. Not sure what else we have to say, it's Dollface! no show has been better suited for this podcast. Enjoy!

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The Teams: 1950

MGoBlog: The MGoPodcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2019 137:03

Seth and Dr. Sap bring you a podcast about Michigan's greatest teams. This episode: certainly the weirdest season ever. Previously: 1901, 1925, 1947, 1964, 1976, 1980, 1999 THE SPONSOR: It is sponsored by HomeSure Lending. If you're buying or refinancing your home, this is the guy to talk to. He'll work on your loan directly and walk you through a process that can get really confusing really fast. I used him. Brian used him. Everyone else who used him is glad they did. [Description, diagrams, some video after the JUMP] -------------------------------------------- 1. MIDCENTURY FOOTBALL (starts at 1:00) From T-Formations to the Korean War and replacing rosters of war heroes with regular ol' sophomores, we look at football as it stood in 1950. Southern football is on the map, and programs are spending insane (for that time) amounts of G.I. Bill money on building projects, especially for their football teams. Recruiting is a thing, but not at Michigan. New facilities are a thing, but not at Michigan. Revamped passing games, War babies, bowl games, the new Coaches Poll, and your fists have to be in on your chest now. 2. THE TEAM THE TEAM THE TEAM (starts at 20:41) BACKS: Bill “ol' One-Play" Putich for his 1 TD pass vs MSU. Not a great QB but smart. Was later moved to HB and was captain in 1951. VERY young--he turned 18 this season, as a junior. Real concern that Army was going to draft him ahead of the game. FB: Don Dufek: Chicago. Dad of Don, Bill, and Joe. Team MVP. They know him at Grand Valley as the AD who turned around the department. 702 yards on 174 carries (4 YPC) and 8 TDs--really he was averaging 5 YPC except that OSU game when he had 14 carries for 9 yards. LHB Chuck Ortmann: Star in ‘49 until he was concussed against Army. Hampered by back injury in ‘50 (could hardly bend over). RHB Leo Koceski: Was more of a slot role, see interview. Backups: HB Don Peterson (5’10/175) charging for Leo's job from the start. LHB: Super sophomores: “mighty mites” Frank Howell (5’8/155) (also 3rd string LHB), Wes Bradford (5’6/155) and Don Oldham (5’8/166). Oldham in for Ortmann but awful fumble. Also Dan Hill who was compared to the shifty return specialist Gene Derricotte. QB: Ted Topor, blocking type, converted fullback. Bill Billings (Flint), passer, go-to signal caller, good punter. Tom Witherspoon is a defensive specialist. ENDS: Sophs expected to take over. Nervous about this position though there’s hope for Perry. LE Lowell Perry (Ypsilanti, teammate of Hill), Fastest guy on the team, end-around maven, quick passing games, and makes guys miss. Also an excellent safety. RE Harry Allis: Longtime starter, stalwart. LE on defense is Ozzie Clark who's also a good TE, a big quasi-tackle. Big game against Ohio State. Backups: Sophs Fred Pickard, a combo TE, and Merrit Green on defense. LINE: Offensive C Carl Kreager. 6’4/220. Won’t wear gloves. Backup: John Padjen 5’9/180, plays C and G. Started football program at TF South in Chicago, his son Tom was HC for 40 years, and grandson John is now HC. RT Al “Brick” Wahl. Star of the team, captain, All-American. Nephew of Herb Stager. He came to Michigan in 1945 from Chicago but joined the Army that summer and missed the ‘46 and ‘47 seasons so he’s now 23 years old and a vet. LT Tom “Big Gun” Johnson born in Chicago but from Muskegon heights. Washed dishes, competed in football and track. Was Alvin Wistert’s backup but by the time he graduated he was one of the greatest tackles in Michigan history (more on defense than offense). Second African-American to play for the Packers, after former teammate Bob Mann a year prior. LT Bill Ohlenroth: Plays when Johnson needs a breather. Defensive RG Tom Kelsey (a converted end) and later soph Jim Wolter are playing a hybrid DL/LB position. Swing OL John Hess Sprained ankle vs Minneosta. OL Ralph Stribe moved to G this year because T was strong. Defensive LG Dick McWilliams: best MG in the country. 6’3/248 and immovable. LINEBACKERS: C Roger Zatkoff (Hamtramck), super sophomore, Meyer Morton Award, has to replace Dick Kempthorn “a 215-pound converted fullback, is a bone-crusher of the Kempthorn school. FB Tony Momsen, moved over from center, punted, blocked OSU punt and recovered it. Backups: Ted Topor (6’0/215) the blocking fullback, and Dick Strowzewski, who also plays T. 3. INTERVIEW WITH HALFBACK LEO KOCESKI (starts at 38:10) Recruiting in the late '40s, the training table rules, coming up under the Mad Magicians, Fritz Crisler's retirement, the Korean War, Dan Dworsky on the piano. The time he tried kicking. The '49 team and the comedown as the next wave takes over. 4. THE GAMES, THE GAMES, THE GAMES (starts at 1:17:33) Toughest season you can get, with most of the Top 10 on the docket, starting with #9 Michigan State College, "The Football Factory" which had recently been admitted to the Big Ten and immediately placed on some kind of double-secret probation, but beat us . Dartmouth was a good team in '49 but lost a lot of guys, Michigan wins 27-7. #2 Army at Yankee Stadium began the cascade of injuries, beat Michigan 6-27. #16 Wisconsin was a nice homecoming game after the 1-2 start, a 26-13 win. But then a trip to #14 Minnesota ends in a 7-7 tie with Michigan routinely stuck on the doorstep, and an 0-7 loss to #10 Illinois in the snow is a season-killer. Or is it? Indiana goes away 20-7, and Michigan defeats a tough Northwestern team 34-23, the only giant not to lose to them. And then there's the snow bowl. 5. ROSE BOWL (1:51:01) Michigan takes the train to Pasadena and beats #5 Cal. Why yes of course Sap has video of it! Cal controls play in the first half but has their first huge run called back for an illegal formation, and misses an extra point try. Michigan figures out the trick to a team that cut blocks all the time: step back a yard at the snap then go over them. Michigan also learns the short passing game and takes it down the field to deep in Bear territory. Dufek took over from there. 6. WRAP (2:04:18) It will be some time (1964) before we have another Michigan team to profile, so Sap and I go into the future, where Michigan's facilities and hamstrung recruiting are falling behind the rivals, Woody Hayes is building a dynasty in Columbus that still hasn't really gone away, and we preview a coming fight over the Athletic Department head job that'll set the course of Michigan history for the rest of the century. -------------------------------------------- MUSIC "The Third man Theme"—Anton Karas (you should see this film if you haven't) "Double Crossin' Blues"—Johnny Otis with Little Esther & the Robins "If I knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake"—Al Hoffman, Bob Merrill, and Clem Watts, performed by Eileen Barton "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!"—Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, performed by Frank Sinatra "Yipsee-I-O"—Ray Gilbert, performed by Carmen Miranda with the Andrews Sisters “Across 110th Street” THE USUAL LINKS Helpful iTunes subscribe link General podcast feed link What's with the theme music? Clearly the ball either had the plague or halitosis

Esther Povitsky with DK

Talk More with DK

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2019 22:15

Comedienne Esther Povitsky aka "Little Esther" came by ALT 105.3 before her shows at Punchline Comedy Club 9/25/19 -9/28/19. She and DK talked about what kinky thing an ex-boyfriend made her do, the best things to order at Taco Bell, which porn star she thinks DK looks like and her experience working with Dave Chappelle. She and DK are now best friends and plan on finding a little apartment together in the city.

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Episode 49: “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2019

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.

love new york history europe business internet walking drive south modern fake hip hop strange grammy fame blues sun rain mama atlantic daddy columbia cd federal delta elvis rock and roll david bowie shake john lennon frank sinatra groove chess jubilee tina turner cadillac rainbows ike ray charles mixcloud george r robert johnson pillow talk rock music rca al green buddy holly rattle atlantic records rpm savoy dearest drifters doris day wyatt earp les paul lenoir vik money honey bo diddley decca ike turner sam phillips sun records coleman hawkins louis jordan jazz guitar shame shame shame joe robinson i went king curtis alomar honkers crayton big joe turner iannis xenakis so glad lavern baker mary ford sylvia robinson jody williams love is strange your wedding johnny otis little willie john jimmy witherspoon johnnie ray carlos alomar doc pomus morris levy diddley don covay billy stewart little esther nappy brown mickey baker rose marie mccoy piano red

Episode 49: “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2019

love new york history europe business internet walking drive nashville south modern fake hip hop strange grammy fame blues sun rain mama atlantic daddy columbia cd federal delta elvis rock and roll david bowie shake bob dylan john lennon frank sinatra groove chess elvis presley jubilee tina turner tom petty cadillac rainbows george harrison ike ray charles mixcloud george r robert johnson pillow talk rock music rca al green buddy holly rattle atlantic records rpm savoy roy orbison dearest drifters doris day wyatt earp les paul lenoir vik money honey bo diddley everly brothers weavers decca ike turner jeff lynne sam phillips chet atkins sun records coleman hawkins louis jordan bob moore jazz guitar shame shame shame joe robinson i went king curtis alomar honkers crayton big joe turner iannis xenakis so glad lavern baker mary ford sylvia robinson jody williams love is strange your wedding johnny otis little willie john jimmy witherspoon carlos alomar johnnie ray doc pomus morris levy diddley don covay monument records billy stewart little esther fred foster nappy brown mickey baker rose marie mccoy nashville a team piano red

Episode 49: "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia

singer black history vocalists recording artists kenny rogers randb esther phillips little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2019 36:50

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "Ain't Nobody's Business" by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley's side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia's releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we're going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won't properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that's a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure -- a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we're looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, "If You See Mary Lee"] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, "Billy's Blues", featured both Diddley and Diddley's guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, "Billy's Blues"] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker's birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn't know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: "Blues After Hours"] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton's Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, "I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then." Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker's comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on "Need Your Love So Bad" by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, "Need Your Love So Bad"] That's some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we've talked about in previous episodes. That's him on guitar on "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean": [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] And "Shake, Rattle, and Roll": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] and "Money Honey" [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Money Honey"] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of "I Went to Your Wedding": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name "Little Sylvia" -- inspired by "Little Esther", who like her was making records for Savoy records -- and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like "I Went to Your Wedding" there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like "Drive, Daddy, Drive": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "Drive Daddy Drive"] That was the other side of the same single as "I Went to Your Wedding", and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she'd been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters -- nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia's manager. While Sylvia's career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson's idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one -- a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry -- at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success -- he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, "I'm So Glad". It's not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work -- just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, "Se De Boom Run Dun", while it's also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Se De Boom Run Dun"] Unsurprisingly, it didn't sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we've talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops -- usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers -- had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels -- their customers weren't interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren't shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn't buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his "Jump Man Jump": [Excerpt: Piano Red, "Jump Man Jump"] They hadn't had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic's sessions. Mickey and Sylvia's first single on Groove, "Walking in the Rain", had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Walking in the Rain"] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Just Walking in the Rain"] That's a totally different song, of course -- it's a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia's song tanked. They still didn't have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called "Love is Strange", and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley's band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he'd reused the licks he had used for "Billy's Blues" on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Love is Strange"] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play "Love is Strange" for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song's publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith's name made the credits, Williams' didn't, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn't surprise him that they'd missed Williams' name off. We'll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley's contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn't prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn't speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song -- Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley's demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker's lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange", spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, "Love is Strange" was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It's one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Love is Strange". All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Love is Strange"] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, "Love is Strange"] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, "probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world", and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Dearest"] But even though that wasn't a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly -- a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both "Love is Strange" and "Dearest" -- demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Dearest"] But "Dearest" was so obscure that when Holly's single came out, the song was titled "Umm Oh Yeah", and credited to "unknown" for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit... as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat "King" Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool -- who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn't been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record -- and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record -- Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken "Ike" vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren't the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia's recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn't want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: "South of France Blues"] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, "The Blues Suite". Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can't excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called "Mississippi Delta Dues", released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he'd looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It's an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues": [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Terraplane Blues"] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he's using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir's "Alabama Blues", rewritten as "Alabama March", which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Alabama March"] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included "Shame Shame Shame" for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, "Shame Shame Shame"] That's the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called "Footstompin'", into "Fame". Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called "Pillow Talk" that she'd written for Al Green, but which he'd turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, "Pillow Talk"] But I'm afraid we're going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia's biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband's gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock's cultural place.

love new york history europe business internet walking drive modern fake hip hop strange grammy fame blues sun rain mama atlantic daddy columbia cd federal delta elvis rock and roll david bowie shake john lennon frank sinatra groove chess jubilee tina turner cadillac rainbows ike ray charles mixcloud george r robert johnson pillow talk rock music rca al green buddy holly rattle atlantic records rpm savoy nat king cole dearest drifters doris day les paul lenoir vik bo diddley decca ike turner sam phillips sun records louis jordan jazz guitar shame shame shame joe robinson i went king curtis alomar honkers crayton big joe turner iannis xenakis so glad lavern baker mary ford sylvia robinson jody williams love is strange your wedding johnny otis little willie john jimmy witherspoon johnnie ray carlos alomar doc pomus morris levy diddley don covay billy stewart little esther nappy brown mickey baker rose marie mccoy piano red

08.07_Recording Artist "Little" Esther Phillips

This Day in Quiztory

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2019 1:12

Today we celebrate the life and legacy of recording artist Esther Phillips

08.07_Recording Artist "Little" Esther Phillips

This Day in Quiztory

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2019 1:12

Today we celebrate the life and legacy of recording artist Esther Phillips

singer black history vocalists recording artists kenny rogers randb esther phillips little esther

The Best French Nipple Cream w/ special guest Esther Povitsky

Bunny Ears

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2019 73:58

Mack sits down with "Little Esther" to chat about things like breaking into standup and French nipple cream. They also tease Mack's appearance on Esther's new Hulu show, Dollface (which also stars Brenda Song and Kat Dennings!). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

french hulu cream nipple kat dennings dollface brenda song esther povitsky little esther

Train to Nowhere 235 – Fine Brown Sugar & Rock-A-Billy

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2019 60:17

Je hoort vandaag Fine Brown Sugar & Rockit-Billy met Lula Reed, Ronnie Self, Little Esther, The Nobletones en Max Rebennack.

rock brown sugar train to nowhere little esther ronnie self

Episode 23; “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2019

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.

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Episode 23; "Pledging My Love" by Johnny Ace

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2019 36:55

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.

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Episode 22: “The Wallflower” by Etta James

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “The Wallflower” by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m halfway 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 used a few books for this podcast, most of which I’ve mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James’ early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* “The Wallflower”. “The Wallflower”, though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we’ve already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning — there’s some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I’d mention it. If you’re worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We’ve talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about “Hound Dog” and “Bear Cat”, but we didn’t really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” is an answer song to Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man”, partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But “I’m A Man” was, in itself, a response to Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”. And, the “Bear Cat” debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric — you’d do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. “Bear Cat” might have gone to number three, but “Hound Dog” went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons — this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band’s members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn’t become the lead singer straight away — Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton’s old backing vocal parts — but he slowly became more important to the band’s sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways — particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn’t sound like anyone else’s before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard — most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes — but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out — a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band’s manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear… [excerpt The Royals “Every Beat of My Heart”] That’s a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there’s nothing about that track that really stands out — it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with “Get It” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Get It”] “Get It” was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it’s the band’s second hit that we’re most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit “Sixty Minute Man”, which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. “Get It” had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to “Sixty Minute Man”, and so he came up with a song that he initially titled “Sock It To Me, Mary”. Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer’s wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called “Work With Me Annie” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Work With Me Annie”] That’s certainly suggestive, but it wouldn’t set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. “Give me all my meat?” That’s… well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct — “Sexy Ways” [excerpt of The Midnighters, “Sexy Ways”] That, too, went right up the charts. But “Work With Me Annie” had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups — “Annie Had A Baby” and “Annie’s Aunt Fanny”. And they weren’t the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them — even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how “Annie’s been working on the midnight shift”. But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of “Annie” herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn’t singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn’t want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her — so long as she got her parents’ permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn’t know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call — “calling her mother” while keeping a finger on the phone’s button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis’ former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they’d ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”. Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative — this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song “Jailhouse Rock” — with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You’ve undoubtedly heard it before if you’ve heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters’ “Mannish Boy” [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] The Robins’ record came out in May 1954. So it’s likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem — Bobby Nunn, the Robins’ bass singer, simply couldn’t get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed — he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn’t do that scary growl. Or at least, that’s the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said “We didn’t understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn’t do it.” But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they’d recorded a single called “She Wants to Rock”, which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller’s work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. “Riot in Cell Block #9” became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry’s life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that “Riot in Cell Block #9” did was cement Berry’s reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else’s record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for “Work With Me Annie”, and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of “Work With Me Annie”, but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: “The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)”] The record was called “The Wallflower”, but everyone knew it as “Roll With Me Henry”. The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible — Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It’s also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn’t go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. “The Wallflower” went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn’t become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we’re looking at a white person copying a black person’s record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs’ version is one of those ones which we can’t possibly justify as being a creative response. It’s closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley — it’s a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from “Roll With Me Henry” to the much less interesting “Dance With Me Henry”. [excerpt Georgia Gibbs “Dance With Me Henry”] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations — the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James’ version — “The Wallflower” may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women’s sexuality, and most especially *black* women’s sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn’t the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman’s record — her cover version of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” also outsold Baker’s original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn’t write her record. And again, this is something we’ve talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more — it’s people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we’ll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of “That’s All Right, Mama”, or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle’s original “Whole Lotta Shakin'” but it’s an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren’t just white people cashing in on black musicians’ talent, they’re part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians — a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person’s. You can’t say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn’t an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one — at least no-one who isn’t so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase “roll with me” — listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren’t. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James “Dance With Me Henry”] If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I suppose. After all, “Dance With Me Henry” was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs’ version, not Etta James’ – when they recorded “Henry’s Got Flat Feet, Can’t Dance No More” [excerpt “Henry’s Got Flat Feet”, The Midnighters] And “Dance With Me Henry” got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello’s last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we’re going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn’t properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and “Dance With Me Henry” was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians — though there wouldn’t be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons — but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times – – and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons’ love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single — Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing “Unchained Melody”, which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt “Unchained Melody” by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn’t see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of “Unchained Melody” wouldn’t allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren’t released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin’s old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to “Unchained Melody”. And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was… well… this… [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan “Dance With Me Henry”] Whether that’s a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs’, I’ll let you decide… Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of “Dance With Me Henry” would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn’t record for two years, but “Louie Louie” didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] We’ll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years’ time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to “the Wallflower”, “Hey Henry”, but that wasn’t a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, “Hey Henry”] But her third single, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”, was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn’t happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we’re unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on — her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis — she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

history uk man rock british modern detroit blues mama britain atlantic daddy cd midnight kickstarter rock and roll rhythm waters atlanta falcons riot paul mccartney royals elvis presley hawkins abbott monty python excerpt gibbs ballard costello robins mixcloud my heart goon rock music buddy holly muddy waters rpm jerry lee lewis gladys knight dominoes spoonful wallflower etta james nunn goons pips peter sellers george martin les paul bo diddley all right cell block stoller chubby checker hound dog bill haley jackie wilson gene autry jailhouse rock louie louie leiber unchained melody willie dixon moonglow spike milligan chess records tweedledee honkers richard berry goon show midnighters flairs lavern baker king records mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis big maybelle diddley clyde mcphatter georgia gibbs little esther she wants hoochie coochie man every beat sock it to me george lipsitz arthur crudup

Episode 22: "The Wallflower" by Etta James

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2019 33:15

Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "The Wallflower" by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I'm halfway 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 used a few books for this podcast, most of which I've mentioned before: Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. This collection of Etta James' early work has all the songs by her I excerpted here *except* "The Wallflower". "The Wallflower", though, can be found on this excellent and cheap 3-CD collection of Johnny Otis material, which also includes two other songs we've already covered, three more we will be covering, and a number which have been excerpted in this and other episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick content warning -- there's some mention of child abuse here. Nothing explicit, and not much, but it could cause some people to be upset, so I thought I'd mention it. If you're worried, there is, like always a full transcript of the episode at 500songs.com so you can read it as text if that might be less upsetting. We've talked a little about answer songs before, when we were talking about "Hound Dog" and "Bear Cat", but we didn't really go into detail there. But answer songs were a regular thing in the 1950s, and responsible for some of the most well-known songs of the period. In the blues, for example, Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" is an answer song to Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man", partly mocking Diddley for being younger than Waters. But "I'm A Man" was, in itself, a response to Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man". And, the "Bear Cat" debacle aside, this was an understood thing. It was no different to the old blues tradition of the floating lyric -- you'd do an answer song to a big hit, and hopefully get a little bit of money off its coattails, but because everyone did it, nobody complained about it being done to them. Especially since the answer songs never did better than the original. "Bear Cat" might have gone to number three, but "Hound Dog" went to number one, so where was the harm? But there was one case where an answer song became so big that it started the career of a blues legend, had a film named after it, and was parodied across the Atlantic. The story starts, just like so many of these stories do, with Johnny Otis. In 1953, Otis discovered a Detroit band called the Royals, who had recently changed their name from the Four Falcons to avoid confusion with another Detroit band, the Falcons -- this kind of confusion of names was common at the time, given the way every vocal group in the country seemed to be naming themselves after birds. Shortly after Otis discovered them, their lead singer was drafted, and Sonny Woods, one of the band's members, suggested that as a replacement they should consider Hank Ballard, a friend of his who worked on the same Ford assembly line as him. Ballard didn't become the lead singer straight away -- Charles Sutton moved to the lead vocal role at first, while Ballard took over Sutton's old backing vocal parts -- but he slowly became more important to the band's sound. Ballard was an interesting singer in many ways -- particularly in his influences. While most R&B singers of this time wanted to be Clyde McPhatter or Wynonie Harris, Ballard was a massive fan of Gene Autry, the country and western singer who was hugely influential on Bill Haley and Les Paul. Despite this, though, his vocals didn't sound like anyone else's before him. You can find singers later on who sounded like Ballard -- most notably both Jackie Wilson and Chubby Checker started out as Hank Ballard soundalikes -- but nobody before him who sounded like that. Once Ballard was one of the Mindighters, they had that thing that every band needed to stand out -- a truly distinctive sound of their own. Otis became the band's manager, and got them signed to King Records, one of the most important labels in the history of very early rock and roll. Their first few singles were all doo-wop ballads, many of them written by Otis, and they featured Sutton on lead. They were pleasant enough, but nothing special, as you can hear... [excerpt The Royals "Every Beat of My Heart"] That's a song Johnny Otis wrote for them, and it later became a million seller for Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there's nothing about that track that really stands out -- it could be any of a dozen or so vocal groups of the time. But that started to change when Hank Ballard became the new lead singer on the majority of their records. Around that time, the band also changed its name to The Midnighters, as once again they discovered that another band had a similar-sounding name. And it was as the Midnighters that they went on to have their greatest success, starting with "Get It" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Get It"] "Get It" was the first of a string of hits for the band, but it's the band's second hit that we're most interested in here. Hank Ballard had been a fan of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and their hit "Sixty Minute Man", which had been considered a relatively filthy song for the time period. "Get It" had been mildly risque for the period, but Ballard wanted to write something closer to "Sixty Minute Man", and so he came up with a song that he initially titled "Sock It To Me, Mary". Ralph Bass, the producer, thought the song was a little too strong for radio play, and so the group reworked it in the studio, with the new title being taken partially from the name of the engineer's wife, Annie. The song they eventually recorded was called "Work With Me Annie" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Work With Me Annie"] That's certainly suggestive, but it wouldn't set too many people on the warpath in 2019. In 1954, though, that kind of thing was considered borderline pornographic. "Give me all my meat?" That's... well, no-one seemed sure quite what it was, but it was obviously filthy and should be banned. So of course it went to number one in the R&B chart. Getting banned on the radio has always been a guaranteed way to have a hit. And it helped that the song was ridiculously catchy, the kind of thing that you keep humming for weeks The Midnighters followed up with a song that was even more direct -- "Sexy Ways" [excerpt of The Midnighters, "Sexy Ways"] That, too, went right up the charts. But "Work With Me Annie" had been such a success that the band recorded two direct followups -- "Annie Had A Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fanny". And they weren't the only ones to record answer songs to their record. There were dozens of them -- even a few years later, in 1958, Buddy Holly would be singing about how "Annie's been working on the midnight shift". But we want to talk about one in particular, here. One sung from the perspective of "Annie" herself. Jamesetta Hawkins did not have the easiest of lives, growing up. She went through a variety of foster homes, and was abused by too many of them. But she started singing from a very early age, and had formal musical training. Sadly, that training was by another abuser, who used to punch her in the chest if she wasn't singing from the diaphragm. But she still credited that training with the powerful voice she developed later. Jamesetta was another discovery of Johnny Otis. When she was introduced to Otis, at first he didn't want a new girl singer, but she impressed him so much that he agreed to sign her -- so long as she got her parents' permission, because she was only sixteen. There was one problem with that. She didn't know her father, and her mother was in jail. So she faked a phone call -- "calling her mother" while keeping a finger on the phone's button to ensure there was no actual call. She later provided him with a forged letter. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Otis' former colleagues, were working on their own records with the Robins. The Robins had been through a few lineup changes, recorded for half a dozen small labels, and several of them had, on multiple occasions, had run-ins with the law. But they'd ended up recording for Spark Records, the label Leiber and Stoller had formed with their friend Lester Sill. Their first record to become really, really big, was "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine". Like many Leiber and Stoller songs, this combined a comedy narrative -- this time about a riot in a jail, a storyline not all that different from their later song "Jailhouse Rock" -- with a standard blues melody. [Excerpt "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" by the Robins] That is, incidentally, probably the first record to incorporate the influence of the famous stop-time riff which Willie Dixon had come up with for Muddy Waters. You've undoubtedly heard it before if you've heard any blues music at all, most famously in Waters' "Mannish Boy" [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] But it had first been used (as far as I can tell – remembering that there is never a true “first”) in Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man", which first hit the R&B charts in March 1954: [Excerpt, Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] The Robins' record came out in May 1954. So it's likely that Leiber and Stoller heard “Hoochie Coochie Man” and immediately wrote “Riot”. However, they had a problem -- Bobby Nunn, the Robins' bass singer, simply couldn't get the kind of menacing tones that the song needed -- he was great for joking with Little Esther and things of that nature, but he just couldn't do that scary growl. Or at least, that's the story as Leiber and Stoller always told it. Other members of the Robins later claimed that Nunn had refused to sing the lead, finding the lyrics offensive. Terrell Leonard said "We didn't understand our heritage. These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn't do it." But they knew someone who would. Richard Berry was a singer with a doo-wop group called The Flairs, who recorded for Modern and RPM records. In particular, they'd recorded a single called "She Wants to Rock", which had been produced by Leiber and Stoller: [excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] That song was written by Berry, but you can hear a very clear stylistic connection with Leiber and Stoller's work. They were obviously sympathetic, musically, and clearly Leiber and Stoller remembered him and liked his voice, and they got him to sing the part that Nunn would otherwise have sung. "Riot in Cell Block #9" became a massive hit, though Berry never saw much money from it. This would end up being something of a pattern for Richard Berry's life, sadly. Berry was one of the most important people in early rock and roll, but his work either went uncredited or unpaid, or sometimes both. But one thing that "Riot in Cell Block #9" did was cement Berry's reputation within the industry as someone who would be able to turn in a good vocal, at short notice, on someone else's record. And so, when it came time for Jamesetta Hawkins to record the new answer song for "Work With Me Annie", and they needed someone to be Henry, who Annie was engaging in dialogue, Johnny Otis called in Berry as well. Otis always liked to have a bit of saucy, sassy, back-and-forth between a male and female singer, and that seemed particularly appropriate for this song. The record Otis, Hawkins, and Berry came up with was a fairly direct copy of "Work With Me Annie", but even more blatant about its sexuality. [excerpt Etta James: "The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)"] The record was called "The Wallflower", but everyone knew it as "Roll With Me Henry". The song was credited to Jamesetta, under the new name Johnny Otis had given her, a simple reversal of her forename. Etta James was on her way to becoming a star. The song as recorded is credited to Hank Ballard, Etta James, and Johnny Otis as writers, but Richard Berry always claimed he should have had a credit as well, claiming that his vocal responses were largely improvised. This is entirely plausible -- Berry was a great songwriter himself, who wrote several classic songs, and they sound like the kind of thing that one could come up with off the cuff. It's also certainly the case that there were more than a few records released around this time that didn't go to great lengths to credit the songwriters accurately, especially for contributions made in the studio during the recording session. "The Wallflower" went to number one on the R&B charts, but it didn't become the biggest hit version of that song, because once again we're looking at a white person copying a black person's record and making all the money off it. And Georgia Gibbs' version is one of those ones which we can't possibly justify as being a creative response. It's closer to the Crew Cuts than to Elvis Presley -- it's a note-for-note soundalike cover, but one which manages to staggeringly miss the point, not least because Gibbs changes the lyrics from "Roll With Me Henry" to the much less interesting "Dance With Me Henry". [excerpt Georgia Gibbs "Dance With Me Henry"] On the other hand, it did have two advantages for the radio stations -- the first was that Gibbs was white, and the second was that it was less sexually explicit than Etta James' version -- "The Wallflower" may not sound particularly explicit to our ears, but anything that even vaguely hinted at sexuality, especially women's sexuality, and most especially *black* women's sexuality, was completely out of the question for early-fifties radio. This wasn't the only time that Georgia Gibbs ripped off a black woman's record -- her cover version of LaVern Baker's "Tweedle Dee" also outsold Baker's original, and was similarly insipid compared to its inspiration. But at least in this case Etta James got some of the songwriting royalties, unlike Lavern Baker, who didn't write her record. And again, this is something we've talked about a bit and we will no doubt talk about more -- it's people like Georgia Gibbs who created the impression that all white rock and roll stars of the fifties merely ripped off black musicians, because there were so many who did, and who did it so badly. Some of the records we'll be talking about as important in this series are by white people covering black musicians, but the ones that are actually worth discussing were artists who put their own spin on the music and made it their own. You might argue about whether Elvis Presley or Arthur Crudup recorded the better version of "That's All Right, Mama", or whether Jerry Lee Lewis improved on Big Maybelle's original "Whole Lotta Shakin'" but it's an argument you can have, with points that can be made on both sides. Those records aren't just white people cashing in on black musicians' talent, they're part of an ongoing conversation between different musicians -- a conversation which, yes, has a racial power dynamic which should not be overlooked and needs to be addressed, but not an example of an individual white person deliberately using racism to gain success which should rightfully be a black person's. You can't say that for this Georgia Gibbs record. It was an identical arrangement, the vocal isn't an interpretation as much as just existing, and the lyrics have been watered down to remove anything that might cause offence. No-one -- at least no-one who isn't so prudish as to actually take offence at the phrase "roll with me" -- listening to the two records could have any doubt as to which was by an important artist and which was by someone whose only claim to success was that she was white and the people she was imitating weren't. Etta James later rerecorded the track with those lyrics herself. [excerpt: Etta James "Dance With Me Henry"] If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I suppose. After all, "Dance With Me Henry" was an absolutely massive, huge hit. It was so popular that it spawned answer songs of its own. Indeed, even the Midnighters themselves recorded an answer to the answer – Gibbs' version, not Etta James' – when they recorded "Henry's Got Flat Feet, Can't Dance No More" [excerpt "Henry's Got Flat Feet", The Midnighters] And "Dance With Me Henry" got into the popular culture in a big way. The song was so popular that Abbott and Costello's last film was named after it, in a hope of catching some of its popularity. And it inspired other comedy as well. And here, again, we're going to move briefly over to the UK. Rock and roll hadn't properly hit Britain yet, though as it turns out it was just about to. But American hit records did get heard over here, and "Dance With Me Henry" was popular enough to come to the notice of the Goons. The Goon Show was the most influential radio show of the 1950s, and probably of all time. The comedy trio of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe are namechecked as an influence by every great British creative artist of the 1960s and 70s, pretty much without exception. Not just comedians -- though there wouldn't be a Monty Python, for example, without the Goons -- but musicians, poets, painters. To understand British culture in the fifties and sixties, you need to understand the Goons. And they made records at times - - and one of the people who worked with them on their records was a young producer named George Martin. George Martin had a taste for sonic experimentation that went well with the Goons' love of sound effects and silly voices, and in 1955 they went into the studio to record what became a legendary single -- Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers performing "Unchained Melody", which had been one of the biggest hits of the year in a less comedic version. [excerpt "Unchained Melody" by the Goons] That track became legendary because it didn't see a legal release for more than thirty years. The publishers of "Unchained Melody" wouldn't allow them to release such a desecration of such a serious, important, work of art, and it and its B-side weren't released until the late 1980s, although the record was widely discussed. It became something of a holy grail for fans of British comedy, and was only finally released at all because George Martin's old friend, and Goon fan, Paul McCartney ended up buying the publishing rights to "Unchained Melody". And because that single was left unreleased for more than thirty years, so was its B-side. That B-side was... well... this... [excerpt, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan "Dance With Me Henry"] Whether that's a more or less respectful cover version than Georgia Gibbs', I'll let you decide... Of course, in the context of a British music scene that was currently going through the skiffle craze, that version of "Dance With Me Henry" would have seemed almost normal. Back in the US, Richard Berry was back at work as a jobbing musician. He wrote one song, between sets at a gig, which he scribbled down on a napkin and didn't record for two years, but "Louie Louie" didn't seem like the kind of thing that would have any commercial success, so he stuck to recording more commercial material, like "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] We'll pick back up with Richard Berry in a couple of years' time, when people remember that song he wrote on the napkin. Meanwhile, Etta James continued with her own career. She recorded a follow-up to "the Wallflower", "Hey Henry", but that wasn't a hit, and was a definite case of diminishing returns: [excerpt: Etta James, "Hey Henry"] But her third single, "Good Rockin' Daddy", was a top ten R&B hit, and showed she could have a successful career. But after this, it would be five years before she had another hit, which didn't happen until 1960, when after signing with Chess Records she released a couple of hit duets with Harvey Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows. [excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, "Spoonful"] Those duets saw the start of an incredible run of hits on the R&B charts, including some of the greatest records ever made. While we're unlikely to be covering her more as the story goes on -- her work was increasingly on the borderline between blues and jazz, rather than being in the rock and roll style of her early recordings with Johnny Otis -- she had an incredible career as one of the greatest blues singers of her generation, and continued recording until shortly before her death in 2011. She died three days after Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her all those decades earlier.

history uk man rock british modern detroit blues mama britain atlantic daddy cd midnight kickstarter rock and roll rhythm waters atlanta falcons riot paul mccartney royals elvis presley hawkins abbott monty python excerpt gibbs ballard costello robins mixcloud goon rock music buddy holly muddy waters rpm jerry lee lewis gladys knight dominoes wallflower etta james nunn goons pips peter sellers george martin les paul bo diddley all right cell block stoller chubby checker hound dog bill haley jackie wilson gene autry jailhouse rock louie louie leiber unchained melody willie dixon moonglow spike milligan chess records tweedledee richard berry goon show midnighters flairs lavern baker king records mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis big maybelle diddley clyde mcphatter georgia gibbs little esther she wants hoochie coochie man sock it to me george lipsitz arthur crudup

Train to Nowhere 205 – Ladies Weekend (1)

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2019 59:32

Het is Ladies Weekend! Je hoort Shirley Bassey, Little Esther, Caterina Caselli, Nancy Sinatra en ZAZ

nancy sinatra shirley bassey zaz train to nowhere little esther ladies weekend

“Money Honey” by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters

music history rock hell sound tools hall of fame night songs blues stone kansas atlantic kansas city michael jackson southern idaho rock and roll ship ward latino rhythm flip ravens shake northeast john lennon flop bells domino neil young james brown excerpt rock and roll hall of fame eric clapton orioles nothin james baldwin robins ray charles mixcloud italian americans calhoun unsung heroes rock music rattle atlantic records checkers dominoes drifter theseus rat pack drifters juilliard school searchers cole porter count basie money honey james johnson screamin abramson benny goodman doo wop ben e king stoller dum razzle dazzle treadwell jackie wilson bill brown leiber apollo theatre louis jordan jay hawkins shake rattle ruth brown ink spots william anderson honkers big joe turner guy lombardo charlie white mills brothers ahmet ertegun chick webb smack dab billy ward jesse stone johnny otis clyde mcphatter david baldwin little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2019

Welcome to episode seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Money Honey” by the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Erratum At one point in the podcast I say “Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records”. Obviously I meant “Stone was…” — Charles Calhoun was only a pen name, and I refer to Jesse Stone as Jesse Stone everywhere else in the episode. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. In this case, two tracks are slightly different from the versions I used in the podcast — I accidentally used copies of Clyde McPhatter’s 1960s solo rerecordings of “Money Honey” and “Such a Night” in the Mixcloud. The versions I excerpt in the podcast are the originals. Some of the material here comes from Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. It’s not a book that I like to recommend, as I’ve said before. Other material comes from Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, and The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. But given the absence of any books on the Drifters or McPhatter, the resource I’ve leaned on most for this is Marv Goldberg’s website. There are many compilations of McPhatter and the Drifters. This one is a decent one. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There’s a thought experiment, popular with the kind of people for whom philosophical thought experiments are popular, called the Ship of Theseus. It asks if you have a ship, and you replace every plank of wood in it as each plank rots away, so eventually you have a ship which doesn’t share a single plank with the original — is that still the same ship that you had at the start, or is it a totally new ship? A little while ago, I saw a Tweet from a venue I follow on Twitter, advertising The Drifters, singing “all their great hits”. There’s only one problem with this, which is that no-one currently in the Drifters has ever had a hit, and none of them have even ever been in a band with anyone who had a hit as a member of the Drifters. Indeed, I believe that none of them have even been in a band with someone who has been in a band with someone who was in a version of the Drifters that had a hit. This kind of thing is actually quite common these days, as old band members die off — I’ve seen a version of The Fourmost which had no members of the Fourmost, a version of the Searchers with none of the original members (though it did have the bass player who joined in 1964 — and it would have had an original member had he not been sick that day), The New Amen Corner (with no members of the old Amen Corner), all on package tours with other, more “authentic”, bands. And of course we talked back in the episode on the Ink Spots about the way that some old bands lose control of their name and end up being replaced on stage by random people who have no connection with the original act. It’s sad, but we expect that kind of thing with bands of a certain age. A band like the Drifters, who started nearly seventy years ago now, should be expected to have had some personnel changes. But what’s odd about the Drifters is that this kind of thing has been the case right from the beginning of their career. The Drifters formed in May 1953. By July 1955, the band that was touring as the Drifters had no original members left. And by June 1958, the band touring as the Drifters had no members of the July 1955 version. An old version of the band’s website, before someone realised that it might be counterproductive to show how little connection there was between the people on stage and the people on their famous records, lists fifty-two different lineups between 1953 and 2004. In the future, everyone will have been lead singer of the Drifters for fifteen minutes. We’re going to look at the Drifters quite a bit over the course of this series — they had hits in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and some of them were among the most important records of their time. And so the thing to remember when we do that is that whenever we’re talking about the Drifters, we’re not talking about the same band as we had been the time before. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (for what this is worth — I value their opinion fairly low, but in this case it’s an interesting indicator – actually inducted the Drifters as *two separate groups*. They’re in as “The Drifters” and as “Ben E King and the Drifters”, because the Hall of Fame didn’t consider them as being the same group. Today, we’re mostly going to talk about the second lineup of the Drifters, the one that was together from July through October 1953, and which had only one member in common with the May 1953 lineup of the band. That member was Clyde McPhatter, and he was already something of a star before the Drifters formed, as the lead singer of Billy Ward and his Dominoes. [excerpt “Do Something For Me” — Billy Ward and his Dominoes] Billy Ward was an exceptional man in many ways — he was one of the first black people to graduate from the Juilliard School of Music, and he was a hugely talented pianist and arranger. And while he wasn’t a particularly strong singer, he *was* a great vocal coach, and so when he noticed that vocal groups were becoming the new big thing in rhythm and blues, he hit upon a surefire way to make money. He’d form a group, featuring his best students, and pay them a salary. He and his agent would own the band name, and they could hire and fire people as they wished. And the students would all work for cheap, because… well, that’s what young people do. Indeed, it would go further than them working for low pay. If you were a member of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and you messed up, you got fined — and of course the money went straight into Ward’s pocket. The Dominoes started out as an integrated group — their name was because they were black and white, like the spots on a domino. But soon Ward had fired all of the white members, and put together a group that was entirely made up of black people. The music they were performing was in the style that would later become known as doo-wop, but that wasn’t a term that anyone used at the time. Back then, this new vocal group sound was just one of the many things that were lumped together under the rhythm and blues label. And as this was still the early stages of the music’s development, it was a little different from the music that would later characterise the genre. Doo-Wop started as a style that was strongly influenced by the Ink Spots — and by acts before them like the Mills Brothers. It was music made by impromptu groups on street corners, sung by people who had no instruments to accompany them, and so it relied on the techniques that had been used by the coffee-pot groups of the twenties and thirties — imitating musical instruments with one’s mouth. These days, thanks largely to its late-fifties and early-sixties iteration in which it was sung by Italian-American men in sharp suits, there’s a slight aura of sophistication and class around doo-wop music. It’s associated in a very general sort of way with the kind of music that the Rat Pack and their ilk made, though in reality there’s little connection other than the ethnicity of some of its more famous performers. But doo-wop in its early years was the music of the most underprivileged groups — it was music made by people who couldn’t afford any other kind of entertainment, who couldn’t afford instruments, who had nothing else they could do. It was the music of the streets, in a very literal way — people, usually black people but also Latino and Italian-Americans, would stand on street corners and sing. Doo-wop would later become a very formalised genre, and thus of less interest, but early on some of the music in the genre was genuinely innovative. Precisely because it was made by untutored teenagers, it was often astoundingly inventive in its harmonies and rhythms. And the particular innovation that the Dominoes introduced was bringing in far more gospel flavour than had previously been used in vocal group music. The earlier vocal groups, like the Ravens or the Orioles, had had very little in the way of gospel or blues influence — they mostly followed the style set by the Ink Spots, of singing very clean, straight, melody lines with no ornamentation or melisma. The Dominoes, on the other hand, were a far more gospel-tinged band, and that was mostly down to Clyde McPhatter. Clyde McPhatter was the lead singer on most of the band’s biggest records — although he was billed as Clyde Ward, with the claim that he was Ward’s brother, in order to stop him from becoming too much of a star in his own right, and possibly deserting the Dominoes. McPhatter was actually a church singer first and foremost, and had expressed extreme reluctance to move into secular music, but eventually he agreed, and became the Dominoes’ star performer. Their biggest hit, though, didn’t have McPhatter singing lead, and was very different from their other records. “Sixty Minute Man” was, for the time, absolutely filthy. [Excerpt of “Sixty Minute Man”] Now, that doesn’t sound like anything particularly offensive to our ears, but in the early 1950s, that was absolutely incendiary stuff. And again, along with the fact that radio stations were more restrained in the early fifties than they are these days, there is cultural context that it’s easy to miss. For example, the line “they call me loving Dan” — Dan was often the name of the “back door man” in blues or R&B songs — the man who’d be going out of the back door when the husband was coming in the front. (And “back door man” itself was a phrase that could be taken to have more meanings than the obvious…) The song was popular enough in the R&B field that it inspired other artists to change their songs. Ruth Brown’s big hit “five-ten-fifteen hours” was originally written to have her asking for “five-ten-fifteen minutes of loving” until someone pointed out that in the era of “sixty minute man” fifteen minutes of loving didn’t seem very much. “Sixty Minute Man” was remarkable in another way — it crossed over from the rhythm and blues charts to the pop charts, which was something that basically *never* happened in 1951. I’ve seen claims that it was the first rock and roll record to do so, and I suppose that depends on what you count as a rock and roll record — Louis Jordan had had several crossover hits over the previous few years — but if you’re counting rock and roll musicians as only being people who started recording around 1948 or later, then it may well be. If it’s not the first, it was certainly *one* of the first, and like all big hits at the time it inspired a wave of imitators. However, Bill Brown, the lead singer on the song, quit in 1952 to form his own band, the Checkers. He took with him Charlie White, who had sung lead on an early Dominoes track, this duet with Little Esther: [excerpt: Little Esther and the Dominoes “The Deacon Moves In”] With both the other main singers having left the band more or less simultaneously, Clyde McPhatter was left as the default star of the show. There was no-one else who was even slightly challenging him for the role by this point, and the Dominoes’ records became a showcase for his vocals. Once McPhatter was the star, the band moved away from the more uptempo rock style to a more ballad-based style which suited McPhatter’s voice better. But they still had a knack for controversial subject matter and novelties, as one of their biggest hits shows: [excerpt: “The Bells”, Billy Ward and his Dominoes] That kind of over-the-top display of emotion, taken well past the point of caricature, would soon become one of the hallmarks of the more interesting black vocalists of the period. You can hear in that song the seeds of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, for example — and James Brown would often perform “The Bells” in his early shows, even pushing a pram containing a doll, representing the dead woman in the song, across the stage. But what’s also obvious from that record is that McPhatter was clearly a remarkable singer. He was the star of the show, and the reason that people came to see Billy Ward and the Dominoes — and soon he decided that it was unfair that he was making $100 a week, minus costs, while Ward was becoming rich. He didn’t want to be an interchangeable Domino any more, he was going to make his own career and become a star himself. He stayed in the band for long enough to train his replacement, a new young singer named Jackie Wilson who had been discovered by Johnny Otis, and then left. (At the same time a couple of other band members left. One of their replacements was Cliff Givens, who had previously been a temporary Ink Spot for five months between Hoppy Jones dying and Herb Kenny replacing him). The Dominoes continued on for quite some time after McPhatter left them, but while they scored a few more hits, the way the band’s career progressed can probably best be summed up by their sequel to “Sixty Minute Man” from 1955: [excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes “Can’t Do Sixty No More”] Jackie WIlson, of course, was a fantastic singer and if you had to replace Clyde McPhatter with anyone he was as good a choice as you could make, but McPhatter was sorely missed in their shows. Shortly after the lineup change — indeed, some have claimed on the very first day after McPhatter left — Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records went to see the Dominoes live, and saw that McPhatter wasn’t there. When he discovered that the lead singer of the biggest vocal group in the North-East was no longer with them, he left the venue immediately and went running from bar to bar looking for McPhatter. As soon as he found him, he signed him that night to Atlantic Records, and it was agreed that McPhatter would put together his own backing group — which became the first lineup of the Drifters. That first lineup was made up of people from McPhatter’s church singing group — one of whom, incidentally, was the brother of the author James Baldwin. That lineup — Clyde McPhatter, David Baughan, William Anderson, David Baldwin, and James Johnson — recorded four tracks together, but only one was ever released, “Lucille”: [excerpt “Lucille”, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters] Hearing that, it doesn’t sound like there was anything wrong with the band, but clearly Atlantic disagreed — I’ve heard it claimed by some of the later members of the group that Atlantic thought this first version of the Drifters had voices that were too light for backing McPhatter. Either way, there was a new lineup in place by a few weeks later, with only McPhatter of the original band, and that lineup would last a whole four months and get a hit record out. Their first session included versions of five songs, including the other three that were recorded but never released by the initial lineup. But one of the two new songs was the one that would make the band stars. That song, “Money Honey”, was written by Jesse Stone, or Charles Calhoun to give him his pen-name. You’ll remember we discussed him in episode two, talking about how he wrote “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, and in episode four, talking about how Louis Jordan ended up taking Stone’s entire band and making them into the Tympany Five. Stone was a fascinating man, who lived a long, long, life that spanned the twentieth century almost completely — he was born in 1901 and died in 1999 — and his entertainment career lasted almost as long. He’d started performing professionally in 1905, at the age of four, in a trained dog act — he’d sing and the dogs would perform. Apparently the dogs were so well trained that they could perform the act without him, but that’s the kind of thing that passed for entertainment in 1905 — a singing four-year-old and some dogs. By 1920 he was the best piano player in Kansas City – and that was the opinion of Count Basie, a man who knew a thing or two about piano playing — and he was making a living as a professional arranger — he later claimed that he’d written a large number of classical pieces but that no-one was interested in playing them, but he could make money off the music that became rock and roll. It’s been claimed by some jazz historians that he was the first person ever to write out proper horn charts for a jazz band’s horn section, rather than having them play head arrangements, and while I don’t *think* the timeline works for that, I’m not enough of an expert in early jazz to be confident he wasn’t. If he was, then that makes him responsible for the birth of swing, and specifically for the kind of swing that later ended up becoming rhythm and blues — the kind with an emphasis on rhythm and groove, with slickly arranged horn parts, which came out of Kansas. Stone worked as an arranger in the thirties and forties with Chick Webb, Louis Jordan, and others, and also started dabbling in songwriting. It was a discussion with Cole Porter that he later credited as the impetus for him becoming a serious songwriter. Porter had discovered that Stone was writing some songs, and he asked what tools Stone used. Stone didn’t even understand the question. He later said “I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had never even heard of a rhyming dictionary..I didn’t know what a homonym was. I didn’t know the difference between assonance and alliteration. ‘Tools?’ I said. ‘Hell’, he said, ‘if you’re gonna dig a ditch you use a shovel, don’t you?’ I began to approach songwriting more professionally”. And the results paid off. His first big hit was “Idaho”, recorded by among others Guy Lombardo and Benny Goodman: [excerpt: Benny Goodman “Idaho”] But unlike most of the successful songwriters of the 1940s, he managed to continue his career into the rock and roll era. Stone wrote a huge number of early rock and roll classics, such as “Shake Rattle and Roll”, “Flip, Flop and Fly”, “Smack Dab in the Middle”, “Razzle Dazzle” and “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ But Trash”, many of them recorded by Atlantic Records artists such as Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner. This was because Stone was one of the founders of Atlantic. He’d worked with Herb Abramson before the formation of Atlantic Records, and moved with Abramson to Atlantic when the label started, and he was the only black person on the label’s payroll at first. Stone was credited by Ahmet Ertegun as having been the arranger who had most to do with the early rock and roll sound, and it certainly seems likely that it was Jesse Stone, more than all the other staff producers and writers at Atlantic, who pushed Atlantic Records in a rock and roll direction. According to Stone himself, he took a trip down to the Southern states to see why Atlantic’s records weren’t selling there as well as they were in the coastal states, and he realised that the bands playing in bars were playing with far more emphasis on rhythm than the bands Atlantic had. At first, he wasn’t impressed with this music — as he put it later “I considered it backward, musically, and I didn’t like it until I started to learn that the rhythm content was the important thing. Then I started to like it and began writing tunes.” He adapted the rhythms that those bands were playing, especially the bassline — he later said “I designed a bass pattern, and it sort of became identified with rock’n’roll – doo, da-DOO, DUM; doo, da-DOO, DUM – that thing. I’m the guilty person that started that.” But, other than “Shake Rattle and Roll”, the most well-known song Stone wrote — under his Calhoun pseudonym — was “Money Honey” [excerpt “Money Honey”, the Drifters] That song and arrangement owes a lot to the work that Leiber and Stoller had been doing with the Robins, and like those records the song is very, very funny. And this is something I’ve not emphasised enough when I’ve been talking about rhythm and blues records in this series so far — the sense of humour that so many of them had. From Louis Jordan on, the R&B genre wasn’t just about rhythm, though it was of course about that, but it was often uproariously funny. And it was funny in a very particular way — it was funny about the experience of black people living in poverty in cities. Almost all the R&B acts we’ve discussed so far — especially the ones around Johnny Otis — had a very earthy sense of humour, which was expressed in all their recordings. Songs would be about infidelity, being out of work, being drunk, or, as in this case, being desperate for money to pay the landlord and having your girlfriend leave you for someone who had more money. This is something that was largely lost in the transition from R&B to rock and roll, as the music became more escapist and more focused on the frustrations and longings of horny adolescents, but even where rhythm and blues records were about dancing and escapism, they were from a notably more adult and witty perspective than those that followed only a few years later. While Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records, however, he quit by 1956. Atlantic’s bosses wouldn’t agree to make their first black employee and co-founder of the company an equal partner. In July 1953, though, he was working with the Drifters. The lineup on “Money Honey” was a six-piece group — McPhatter, backing singers Bill Pinkney, Andrew and Gerhardt Thrasher, and Willie Ferbee, and guitarist Walter Adams — who was the third guitarist the group had had. They signed to a management contract with George Treadwell, who was at the time also the manager of another Atlantic Records star, Ruth Brown. They also signed to Moe Gale’s booking agency, but by the time of their first show, on October 9 1953, at the Apollo Theatre supporting Lucky Millinder, there’d already been another lineup change — Ferbee had been in an accident and could no longer perform, and the group decided to carry on with just four voices. And by the end of October, tragedy had struck again, as Walter Adams died of a heart attack. So by the time “Money Honey” started to get noticed and went to number one on the R&B charts, the band was already very different from the one that had recorded the song. This new lineup still had McPhatter, though, and quickly followed up their first hit with another, “Such A Night”, which wasn’t as funny as “Money Honey”, but was raunchy and controversial enough that it got banned from the radio, which made people rush to buy it — that one went to number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: “Such A Night”] Things were going well for the Drifters… but then McPhatter got drafted. He could still record with the band — he was stationed in the US — and the band continued to tour without him. They got David Baughan from the original lineup to rejoin — he could sound enough like McPhatter that he could sing his parts on stage — and when McPhatter’s armed services commitments meant that he couldn’t make a recording session, they’d record duets with other famous acts, like this one with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown: “Oh What A Dream”] But eventually the band’s management and Atlantic Records decided that they didn’t need McPhatter to be the lead singer, and it might be more profitable to have the band not be reliant on any particular star — and McPhatter, for his part, was quite keen to start a solo career on his discharge. The Drifters and Clyde McPhatter were going to part. While McPhatter had formed his own group because he didn’t want to be an employee and wanted to have the rights over his own work, he had decided to set things up so that he owned fifty percent of the band’s name, while George Treadwell owned the other fifty percent. When he left the group, he decided to sell his fifty percent stake in the band’s name to Treadwell — which of course meant that the other Drifters were now in precisely the same position as McPhatter had been with the Dominoes, except that there at least the name’s owner had been a band member. Bill Pinkney did later manage to get ownership of the name “the Original Drifters” and many of the fifties members would tour with him under that name in the sixties, but the band name “the Drifters” now belonged not to any of the performers, but to their management. The Drifters went through many, many, lineup changes, and we’ll be picking up their story later, but sadly we won’t be picking up McPhatter’s. McPhatter’s solo career started well, with a duet with Ruth Brown: [excerpt “Love Has Joined Us Together”: Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown] Something certainly had joined them together, as Ruth Brown later revealed that McPhatter was the father of her son, Ronald, who now tours as “Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters”. And for a while, McPhatter looked like he would continue being a major star — he had a string of hits between 1955 and 1958, but then the hits started to dry up. He changed labels a few times and would have the occasional one-off hit, but had far more flops than successes. By the early 70s, he was an alcoholic, and Marv Goldberg (whose website I have used as a major resource for this episode) describes him telling someone introduced to him as a fan “I have no fans”, and seeing a show with a drunk McPhatter sitting on the edge of the stage and saying “I’m not used to coming on third; I used to be a star.” He died in 1972, aged thirty-nine, completely unaware of how important his music had been to millions. I said near the start of this episode that I don’t consider the rock and roll hall of fame important, and that’s true, but McPhatter was the first person to be inducted into the hall of fame twice — once as a Drifter and once as a solo artist. Anyone since him who’s been inducted multiple times — people like John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, and Michael Jackson — are referred to as members of “the Clyde McPhatter club”.

"Money Honey" by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters

music history rock hell sound tools hall of fame night songs blues stone kansas atlantic kansas city michael jackson southern idaho rock and roll ship ward latino rhythm flip ravens shake northeast john lennon flop bells domino neil young james brown excerpt rock and roll hall of fame eric clapton orioles nothin james baldwin robins ray charles mixcloud italian americans calhoun unsung heroes rock music rattle atlantic records checkers dominoes drifter theseus rat pack drifters juilliard school searchers cole porter count basie money honey james johnson screamin abramson benny goodman doo wop ben e king stoller dum razzle dazzle dan dan treadwell jackie wilson bill brown leiber apollo theatre louis jordan jay hawkins shake rattle ruth brown ink spots william anderson big joe turner guy lombardo charlie white mills brothers ahmet ertegun chick webb smack dab billy ward jesse stone johnny otis clyde mcphatter david baldwin little esther

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2019 37:04

Welcome to episode seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Money Honey" by the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Erratum At one point in the podcast I say "Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records". Obviously I meant "Stone was..." -- Charles Calhoun was only a pen name, and I refer to Jesse Stone as Jesse Stone everywhere else in the episode. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. In this case, two tracks are slightly different from the versions I used in the podcast -- I accidentally used copies of Clyde McPhatter's 1960s solo rerecordings of "Money Honey" and "Such a Night" in the Mixcloud. The versions I excerpt in the podcast are the originals. Some of the material here comes from Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. It's not a book that I like to recommend, as I've said before. Other material comes from Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, and The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. But given the absence of any books on the Drifters or McPhatter, the resource I've leaned on most for this is Marv Goldberg's website. There are many compilations of McPhatter and the Drifters. This one is a decent one. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a thought experiment, popular with the kind of people for whom philosophical thought experiments are popular, called the Ship of Theseus. It asks if you have a ship, and you replace every plank of wood in it as each plank rots away, so eventually you have a ship which doesn't share a single plank with the original -- is that still the same ship that you had at the start, or is it a totally new ship? A little while ago, I saw a Tweet from a venue I follow on Twitter, advertising The Drifters, singing "all their great hits". There's only one problem with this, which is that no-one currently in the Drifters has ever had a hit, and none of them have even ever been in a band with anyone who had a hit as a member of the Drifters. Indeed, I believe that none of them have even been in a band with someone who has been in a band with someone who was in a version of the Drifters that had a hit. This kind of thing is actually quite common these days, as old band members die off -- I've seen a version of The Fourmost which had no members of the Fourmost, a version of the Searchers with none of the original members (though it did have the bass player who joined in 1964 -- and it would have had an original member had he not been sick that day), The New Amen Corner (with no members of the old Amen Corner), all on package tours with other, more "authentic", bands. And of course we talked back in the episode on the Ink Spots about the way that some old bands lose control of their name and end up being replaced on stage by random people who have no connection with the original act. It's sad, but we expect that kind of thing with bands of a certain age. A band like the Drifters, who started nearly seventy years ago now, should be expected to have had some personnel changes. But what's odd about the Drifters is that this kind of thing has been the case right from the beginning of their career. The Drifters formed in May 1953. By July 1955, the band that was touring as the Drifters had no original members left. And by June 1958, the band touring as the Drifters had no members of the July 1955 version. An old version of the band's website, before someone realised that it might be counterproductive to show how little connection there was between the people on stage and the people on their famous records, lists fifty-two different lineups between 1953 and 2004. In the future, everyone will have been lead singer of the Drifters for fifteen minutes. We're going to look at the Drifters quite a bit over the course of this series -- they had hits in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and some of them were among the most important records of their time. And so the thing to remember when we do that is that whenever we're talking about the Drifters, we're not talking about the same band as we had been the time before. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (for what this is worth -- I value their opinion fairly low, but in this case it's an interesting indicator – actually inducted the Drifters as *two separate groups*. They're in as "The Drifters" and as "Ben E King and the Drifters", because the Hall of Fame didn't consider them as being the same group. Today, we're mostly going to talk about the second lineup of the Drifters, the one that was together from July through October 1953, and which had only one member in common with the May 1953 lineup of the band. That member was Clyde McPhatter, and he was already something of a star before the Drifters formed, as the lead singer of Billy Ward and his Dominoes. [excerpt "Do Something For Me" -- Billy Ward and his Dominoes] Billy Ward was an exceptional man in many ways -- he was one of the first black people to graduate from the Juilliard School of Music, and he was a hugely talented pianist and arranger. And while he wasn't a particularly strong singer, he *was* a great vocal coach, and so when he noticed that vocal groups were becoming the new big thing in rhythm and blues, he hit upon a surefire way to make money. He'd form a group, featuring his best students, and pay them a salary. He and his agent would own the band name, and they could hire and fire people as they wished. And the students would all work for cheap, because... well, that's what young people do. Indeed, it would go further than them working for low pay. If you were a member of Billy Ward and his Dominoes, and you messed up, you got fined -- and of course the money went straight into Ward's pocket. The Dominoes started out as an integrated group -- their name was because they were black and white, like the spots on a domino. But soon Ward had fired all of the white members, and put together a group that was entirely made up of black people. The music they were performing was in the style that would later become known as doo-wop, but that wasn't a term that anyone used at the time. Back then, this new vocal group sound was just one of the many things that were lumped together under the rhythm and blues label. And as this was still the early stages of the music's development, it was a little different from the music that would later characterise the genre. Doo-Wop started as a style that was strongly influenced by the Ink Spots -- and by acts before them like the Mills Brothers. It was music made by impromptu groups on street corners, sung by people who had no instruments to accompany them, and so it relied on the techniques that had been used by the coffee-pot groups of the twenties and thirties -- imitating musical instruments with one's mouth. These days, thanks largely to its late-fifties and early-sixties iteration in which it was sung by Italian-American men in sharp suits, there's a slight aura of sophistication and class around doo-wop music. It's associated in a very general sort of way with the kind of music that the Rat Pack and their ilk made, though in reality there's little connection other than the ethnicity of some of its more famous performers. But doo-wop in its early years was the music of the most underprivileged groups -- it was music made by people who couldn't afford any other kind of entertainment, who couldn't afford instruments, who had nothing else they could do. It was the music of the streets, in a very literal way -- people, usually black people but also Latino and Italian-Americans, would stand on street corners and sing. Doo-wop would later become a very formalised genre, and thus of less interest, but early on some of the music in the genre was genuinely innovative. Precisely because it was made by untutored teenagers, it was often astoundingly inventive in its harmonies and rhythms. And the particular innovation that the Dominoes introduced was bringing in far more gospel flavour than had previously been used in vocal group music. The earlier vocal groups, like the Ravens or the Orioles, had had very little in the way of gospel or blues influence -- they mostly followed the style set by the Ink Spots, of singing very clean, straight, melody lines with no ornamentation or melisma. The Dominoes, on the other hand, were a far more gospel-tinged band, and that was mostly down to Clyde McPhatter. Clyde McPhatter was the lead singer on most of the band's biggest records -- although he was billed as Clyde Ward, with the claim that he was Ward's brother, in order to stop him from becoming too much of a star in his own right, and possibly deserting the Dominoes. McPhatter was actually a church singer first and foremost, and had expressed extreme reluctance to move into secular music, but eventually he agreed, and became the Dominoes' star performer. Their biggest hit, though, didn't have McPhatter singing lead, and was very different from their other records. "Sixty Minute Man" was, for the time, absolutely filthy. [Excerpt of "Sixty Minute Man"] Now, that doesn't sound like anything particularly offensive to our ears, but in the early 1950s, that was absolutely incendiary stuff. And again, along with the fact that radio stations were more restrained in the early fifties than they are these days, there is cultural context that it's easy to miss. For example, the line "they call me loving Dan" -- Dan was often the name of the "back door man" in blues or R&B songs -- the man who'd be going out of the back door when the husband was coming in the front. (And "back door man" itself was a phrase that could be taken to have more meanings than the obvious...) The song was popular enough in the R&B field that it inspired other artists to change their songs. Ruth Brown's big hit "five-ten-fifteen hours" was originally written to have her asking for "five-ten-fifteen minutes of loving" until someone pointed out that in the era of "sixty minute man" fifteen minutes of loving didn't seem very much. "Sixty Minute Man" was remarkable in another way -- it crossed over from the rhythm and blues charts to the pop charts, which was something that basically *never* happened in 1951. I've seen claims that it was the first rock and roll record to do so, and I suppose that depends on what you count as a rock and roll record -- Louis Jordan had had several crossover hits over the previous few years -- but if you're counting rock and roll musicians as only being people who started recording around 1948 or later, then it may well be. If it's not the first, it was certainly *one* of the first, and like all big hits at the time it inspired a wave of imitators. However, Bill Brown, the lead singer on the song, quit in 1952 to form his own band, the Checkers. He took with him Charlie White, who had sung lead on an early Dominoes track, this duet with Little Esther: [excerpt: Little Esther and the Dominoes "The Deacon Moves In"] With both the other main singers having left the band more or less simultaneously, Clyde McPhatter was left as the default star of the show. There was no-one else who was even slightly challenging him for the role by this point, and the Dominoes' records became a showcase for his vocals. Once McPhatter was the star, the band moved away from the more uptempo rock style to a more ballad-based style which suited McPhatter's voice better. But they still had a knack for controversial subject matter and novelties, as one of their biggest hits shows: [excerpt: "The Bells", Billy Ward and his Dominoes] That kind of over-the-top display of emotion, taken well past the point of caricature, would soon become one of the hallmarks of the more interesting black vocalists of the period. You can hear in that song the seeds of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, for example -- and James Brown would often perform "The Bells" in his early shows, even pushing a pram containing a doll, representing the dead woman in the song, across the stage. But what's also obvious from that record is that McPhatter was clearly a remarkable singer. He was the star of the show, and the reason that people came to see Billy Ward and the Dominoes -- and soon he decided that it was unfair that he was making $100 a week, minus costs, while Ward was becoming rich. He didn't want to be an interchangeable Domino any more, he was going to make his own career and become a star himself. He stayed in the band for long enough to train his replacement, a new young singer named Jackie Wilson who had been discovered by Johnny Otis, and then left. (At the same time a couple of other band members left. One of their replacements was Cliff Givens, who had previously been a temporary Ink Spot for five months between Hoppy Jones dying and Herb Kenny replacing him). The Dominoes continued on for quite some time after McPhatter left them, but while they scored a few more hits, the way the band's career progressed can probably best be summed up by their sequel to "Sixty Minute Man" from 1955: [excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes "Can't Do Sixty No More"] Jackie WIlson, of course, was a fantastic singer and if you had to replace Clyde McPhatter with anyone he was as good a choice as you could make, but McPhatter was sorely missed in their shows. Shortly after the lineup change -- indeed, some have claimed on the very first day after McPhatter left -- Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records went to see the Dominoes live, and saw that McPhatter wasn't there. When he discovered that the lead singer of the biggest vocal group in the North-East was no longer with them, he left the venue immediately and went running from bar to bar looking for McPhatter. As soon as he found him, he signed him that night to Atlantic Records, and it was agreed that McPhatter would put together his own backing group -- which became the first lineup of the Drifters. That first lineup was made up of people from McPhatter's church singing group -- one of whom, incidentally, was the brother of the author James Baldwin. That lineup -- Clyde McPhatter, David Baughan, William Anderson, David Baldwin, and James Johnson -- recorded four tracks together, but only one was ever released, "Lucille": [excerpt "Lucille", Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters] Hearing that, it doesn't sound like there was anything wrong with the band, but clearly Atlantic disagreed -- I've heard it claimed by some of the later members of the group that Atlantic thought this first version of the Drifters had voices that were too light for backing McPhatter. Either way, there was a new lineup in place by a few weeks later, with only McPhatter of the original band, and that lineup would last a whole four months and get a hit record out. Their first session included versions of five songs, including the other three that were recorded but never released by the initial lineup. But one of the two new songs was the one that would make the band stars. That song, "Money Honey", was written by Jesse Stone, or Charles Calhoun to give him his pen-name. You'll remember we discussed him in episode two, talking about how he wrote "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", and in episode four, talking about how Louis Jordan ended up taking Stone's entire band and making them into the Tympany Five. Stone was a fascinating man, who lived a long, long, life that spanned the twentieth century almost completely -- he was born in 1901 and died in 1999 -- and his entertainment career lasted almost as long. He'd started performing professionally in 1905, at the age of four, in a trained dog act -- he'd sing and the dogs would perform. Apparently the dogs were so well trained that they could perform the act without him, but that's the kind of thing that passed for entertainment in 1905 -- a singing four-year-old and some dogs. By 1920 he was the best piano player in Kansas City - and that was the opinion of Count Basie, a man who knew a thing or two about piano playing -- and he was making a living as a professional arranger -- he later claimed that he'd written a large number of classical pieces but that no-one was interested in playing them, but he could make money off the music that became rock and roll. It's been claimed by some jazz historians that he was the first person ever to write out proper horn charts for a jazz band's horn section, rather than having them play head arrangements, and while I don't *think* the timeline works for that, I'm not enough of an expert in early jazz to be confident he wasn't. If he was, then that makes him responsible for the birth of swing, and specifically for the kind of swing that later ended up becoming rhythm and blues -- the kind with an emphasis on rhythm and groove, with slickly arranged horn parts, which came out of Kansas. Stone worked as an arranger in the thirties and forties with Chick Webb, Louis Jordan, and others, and also started dabbling in songwriting. It was a discussion with Cole Porter that he later credited as the impetus for him becoming a serious songwriter. Porter had discovered that Stone was writing some songs, and he asked what tools Stone used. Stone didn't even understand the question. He later said "I didn't know what he was talking about. I had never even heard of a rhyming dictionary..I didn't know what a homonym was. I didn't know the difference between assonance and alliteration. 'Tools?' I said. 'Hell', he said, 'if you're gonna dig a ditch you use a shovel, don't you?' I began to approach songwriting more professionally". And the results paid off. His first big hit was "Idaho", recorded by among others Guy Lombardo and Benny Goodman: [excerpt: Benny Goodman "Idaho"] But unlike most of the successful songwriters of the 1940s, he managed to continue his career into the rock and roll era. Stone wrote a huge number of early rock and roll classics, such as "Shake Rattle and Roll", "Flip, Flop and Fly", "Smack Dab in the Middle", "Razzle Dazzle" and "Your Cash Ain't Nothin' But Trash", many of them recorded by Atlantic Records artists such as Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner. This was because Stone was one of the founders of Atlantic. He'd worked with Herb Abramson before the formation of Atlantic Records, and moved with Abramson to Atlantic when the label started, and he was the only black person on the label's payroll at first. Stone was credited by Ahmet Ertegun as having been the arranger who had most to do with the early rock and roll sound, and it certainly seems likely that it was Jesse Stone, more than all the other staff producers and writers at Atlantic, who pushed Atlantic Records in a rock and roll direction. According to Stone himself, he took a trip down to the Southern states to see why Atlantic's records weren't selling there as well as they were in the coastal states, and he realised that the bands playing in bars were playing with far more emphasis on rhythm than the bands Atlantic had. At first, he wasn't impressed with this music -- as he put it later "I considered it backward, musically, and I didn't like it until I started to learn that the rhythm content was the important thing. Then I started to like it and began writing tunes." He adapted the rhythms that those bands were playing, especially the bassline -- he later said "I designed a bass pattern, and it sort of became identified with rock'n'roll - doo, da-DOO, DUM; doo, da-DOO, DUM - that thing. I'm the guilty person that started that." But, other than "Shake Rattle and Roll", the most well-known song Stone wrote -- under his Calhoun pseudonym -- was "Money Honey" [excerpt "Money Honey", the Drifters] That song and arrangement owes a lot to the work that Leiber and Stoller had been doing with the Robins, and like those records the song is very, very funny. And this is something I've not emphasised enough when I've been talking about rhythm and blues records in this series so far -- the sense of humour that so many of them had. From Louis Jordan on, the R&B genre wasn't just about rhythm, though it was of course about that, but it was often uproariously funny. And it was funny in a very particular way -- it was funny about the experience of black people living in poverty in cities. Almost all the R&B acts we've discussed so far -- especially the ones around Johnny Otis -- had a very earthy sense of humour, which was expressed in all their recordings. Songs would be about infidelity, being out of work, being drunk, or, as in this case, being desperate for money to pay the landlord and having your girlfriend leave you for someone who had more money. This is something that was largely lost in the transition from R&B to rock and roll, as the music became more escapist and more focused on the frustrations and longings of horny adolescents, but even where rhythm and blues records were about dancing and escapism, they were from a notably more adult and witty perspective than those that followed only a few years later. While Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records, however, he quit by 1956. Atlantic's bosses wouldn't agree to make their first black employee and co-founder of the company an equal partner. In July 1953, though, he was working with the Drifters. The lineup on "Money Honey" was a six-piece group -- McPhatter, backing singers Bill Pinkney, Andrew and Gerhardt Thrasher, and Willie Ferbee, and guitarist Walter Adams -- who was the third guitarist the group had had. They signed to a management contract with George Treadwell, who was at the time also the manager of another Atlantic Records star, Ruth Brown. They also signed to Moe Gale's booking agency, but by the time of their first show, on October 9 1953, at the Apollo Theatre supporting Lucky Millinder, there'd already been another lineup change -- Ferbee had been in an accident and could no longer perform, and the group decided to carry on with just four voices. And by the end of October, tragedy had struck again, as Walter Adams died of a heart attack. So by the time "Money Honey" started to get noticed and went to number one on the R&B charts, the band was already very different from the one that had recorded the song. This new lineup still had McPhatter, though, and quickly followed up their first hit with another, "Such A Night", which wasn't as funny as "Money Honey", but was raunchy and controversial enough that it got banned from the radio, which made people rush to buy it -- that one went to number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: "Such A Night"] Things were going well for the Drifters... but then McPhatter got drafted. He could still record with the band -- he was stationed in the US -- and the band continued to tour without him. They got David Baughan from the original lineup to rejoin -- he could sound enough like McPhatter that he could sing his parts on stage -- and when McPhatter's armed services commitments meant that he couldn't make a recording session, they'd record duets with other famous acts, like this one with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown: "Oh What A Dream"] But eventually the band's management and Atlantic Records decided that they didn't need McPhatter to be the lead singer, and it might be more profitable to have the band not be reliant on any particular star -- and McPhatter, for his part, was quite keen to start a solo career on his discharge. The Drifters and Clyde McPhatter were going to part. While McPhatter had formed his own group because he didn't want to be an employee and wanted to have the rights over his own work, he had decided to set things up so that he owned fifty percent of the band's name, while George Treadwell owned the other fifty percent. When he left the group, he decided to sell his fifty percent stake in the band's name to Treadwell -- which of course meant that the other Drifters were now in precisely the same position as McPhatter had been with the Dominoes, except that there at least the name's owner had been a band member. Bill Pinkney did later manage to get ownership of the name "the Original Drifters" and many of the fifties members would tour with him under that name in the sixties, but the band name "the Drifters" now belonged not to any of the performers, but to their management. The Drifters went through many, many, lineup changes, and we'll be picking up their story later, but sadly we won't be picking up McPhatter's. McPhatter's solo career started well, with a duet with Ruth Brown: [excerpt "Love Has Joined Us Together": Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown] Something certainly had joined them together, as Ruth Brown later revealed that McPhatter was the father of her son, Ronald, who now tours as "Clyde McPhatter's Drifters". And for a while, McPhatter looked like he would continue being a major star -- he had a string of hits between 1955 and 1958, but then the hits started to dry up. He changed labels a few times and would have the occasional one-off hit, but had far more flops than successes. By the early 70s, he was an alcoholic, and Marv Goldberg (whose website I have used as a major resource for this episode) describes him telling someone introduced to him as a fan "I have no fans", and seeing a show with a drunk McPhatter sitting on the edge of the stage and saying "I'm not used to coming on third; I used to be a star." He died in 1972, aged thirty-nine, completely unaware of how important his music had been to millions. I said near the start of this episode that I don't consider the rock and roll hall of fame important, and that's true, but McPhatter was the first person to be inducted into the hall of fame twice -- once as a Drifter and once as a solo artist. Anyone since him who's been inducted multiple times -- people like John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, and Michael Jackson -- are referred to as members of "the Clyde McPhatter club".

“Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2019

Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton. 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 (along with one, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, that got cut out of the eventual episode) I used three main resources for this podcast. 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. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, is an invaluable book on the most important songwriting team of their generation. And Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz is the definitive biography of Otis. This collection has most of Big Mama Thornton’s fifties recordings on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript One of the things that is easy to miss when talking about early rock and roll is that much of the development of the genre is about the liminal spaces in race in America. (Before I start talking about this, a disclaimer I have to make — I’m a white person, from a different country, born decades after the events I’m talking about. I’m trying to be as accurate as I can here, and as sensitive as I can, but I apologise if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of the people who were actually affected). “Black” and “white” are two categories imposed by culture, and like all culturally-imposed binaries, they’re essentially arbitrary and don’t really map very well onto really existing people. There have always been people who don’t fit neatly into the boxes that a racist society insists everyone fits into — and part of the reason that rock and roll happened when it did was that in the 1950s America was in the process of redefining those boxes, and moving some people who would have previously fit into one category into the other. The lines were being redrawn, and that led to some interesting art happening at the borders. (That sounds like I’m doing the “at least some good art came from this terrible event” thing. I’m really, really, not. Racism in all its forms is nothing but negative, and its distortions of culture are all negative too. But they do exist, and need noting when talking about culture subject to those distortions). There were a lot of groups who would now be regarded as white in the USA but which back in the 1940s and 1950s weren’t, quite. Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places (unlike now, when they’re merely *illegally* discriminated against). They weren’t black, but they weren’t quite white either. The same went for several other ethnic minorities, like Greek people. So it’s perhaps not all that surprising that one of the most successful blues records of all time, which later inspired an even more successful rock and roll record, was the result of a collaboration between a black singer, a Greek-American producer who said “As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black”, and two Jewish songwriters. Willie Mae Thornton was big in every sense — she weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, or about twenty-five stone, and she had a voice to match it — she would often claim that she didn’t need a microphone, because she was louder than any microphone anyway. We’ve talked in this series about blues shouters, and how they were mostly men, but she was at least the equal of any man as a shouter. She became a blues singer when she was fourteen, thanks to her mentor, a singer called “Diamond Teeth Mary”. [excerpt: “Keep Your Hands Off Of Him” · Diamond Teeth Mary] That’s a recording of Diamond Teeth Mary from the 1990s — when she was *in* her nineties. She performed constantly until her death aged ninety-seven, but she only made her first record when she was ninety-two. “Diamond Teeth Mary” was the half-sister of the great blues singer Bessie Smith — Mary had four stepmothers, one of whom was Smith’s mother — and she was a powerful singer herself, singing with the Hot Harlem Revue around Alabama. She was called “Diamond Teeth Mary” because she had diamonds embedded in her front teeth, so she’d be more imposing on stage. Diamond Teeth Mary heard the young Willie Mae Thornton singing while she was working on a garbage truck, got her to get off the garbage truck, and got her a job with the revue. Mary probably felt a kinship with the fourteen-year-old Willie Mae, a girl who only wore boy’s clothes — Mary had, herself, become a performer when she was only thirteen, having run away from her abusive family, dressed in boy’s clothes, and joined the circus. Willie Mae Thornton stayed with that revue for most of the next decade, playing with musicians like Richard Penniman, who would later become known as Little Richard, playing to audiences that were mostly black and also (according to Little Richard) exclusively gay. The Hot Harlem Revue was not exactly respectable — Sammy Green, who managed it, made most of his money from owning several brothels — but it was somewhere that a young singer could very quickly learn how to be an entertainer. You had to be impressive as a female blues singer in the 1940s, especially if, as with Willie Mae Thornton, you were also not conventionally attractive and not of a societally-approved sexuality or gender identity. I’ve seen suggestions from people who would know that Thornton was bisexual, but from others like Johnny Otis that she showed no interest in men or women (though she did have a child in her teens), and I’ve also seen suggestions that she may have been trans (though I’m going to refer to her using she and her pronouns here as that’s what she used throughout her life). She was a remarkable figure in many ways. One of her favourite drinks was embalming fluid and grape juice (just in case anyone was considering doing this, please don’t. It’s really not a good idea, at all, even a little bit. Don’t drink embalming fluid.) According to Jerry Leiber she had razor scars all over her face. She was a very, very, intimidating person. At the very least, she didn’t fit into neat boxes. But you see, all that stuff I just said… *that* is putting her into a box — the caricature angry, aggressive, black woman. And that was a box she never liked to be put in either, but which she was put in by other people. What I just said, you’ll notice, is all about what other people thought of her, and that’s not always what she thought of herself. She would get very upset that people would say she used to fight promoters, saying “I never did fight the promoters. All I ever did was ask them for my money. Pay me and there won’t be no hard feelings.” And while she is uniformly described as “masculine-looking” (whatever *that* means), she put it rather differently, saying “I don’t go out on stage trying to look pretty. I was born pretty.” Thornton is someone who didn’t get to tell her own story much — much of what we know about her is from other people’s impressions of her, and usually the impressions of men. People who knew her well described her as intelligent, kind, charming, funny, and hugely talented, while people who only spent a brief time around her tend to have talked about the razor scars on her face or how aggressive she seemed. Depending on which narrative you choose, you can make a very good case for her being either a loud, swaggering, vulgar, aggressive stereotype of unfeminine black femininity, or a rather sweet, vulnerable, person who intimidated men simply by her physical size, her race, and her loud voice, and who may have played up to their expectations at times, but who never liked that, and who used alcohol and other substances to cope with what wasn’t a very happy life, while remaining outwardly happy. But because we as a society value black women so little, most of this story is filtered through the white men who told it, so be aware that in what follows, you may find yourself picturing a caricature figure, seeing Big Mama as the angry sassy black woman you’ve seen in a million films. She was a real person, and I wish we had more of her own words to set against this. While the Hot Harlem Revue was a good place to learn to be an entertainer, it wasn’t necessarily the best place to work if you actually wanted to earn a living, and Willie Mae had to supplement her income by shining shoes. She often had to sleep in all-night restaurants and bars, because she couldn’t afford to pay rent, and go begging door to door for food. But she would pretend to everyone she knew that everything was all right, and smile for everyone. She became pregnant in her teens, and tried to be a good mother to the child, but she was deemed an unfit mother due to poverty and the child was taken away from her. After several years with the Harlem Revue, she quit them because she was being cheated out of money, and decided to stay in Houston, Texas, which is where she really started to build an audience. Around this time she recorded her first single, “All Right Baby”, credited to “the Harlem Stars” — it’s a song she wrote herself, and it’s a boogie track very much in the vein of Big Joe Turner: [excerpt “All Right Baby”, the Harlem Stars] Shortly after moving to Houston, she began working for Don Robey, who ran Peacock Records and the Bronze Peacock Club. Robey had a mixed reputation — most singers and musicians he worked with thought highly of him, but most songwriters he worked with were less enamoured of his penchant for stealing their money and credit. Robey had a reputation as a thug, too, but according to Little Richard he was too scared of Thornton to beat her up like he would his other acts. She recorded several singles for Peacock, starting with “I’m All Fed Up”, but her talents weren’t really suited to the slick Texas blues backing she was given: [excerpt “I’m All Fed Up”, Willie Mae Thornton] The kind of music Peacock put out was in the smoother style that was becoming prominent in the southwestern US — the kind of music that people like Lightnin’ Hopkins made — and that wasn’t really suited to Thornton’s louder, more emotional style. But after a run of unsuccessful singles, things started to change. Peacock Records was in the process of expanding. Don Robey acquired another label, Duke Records of Memphis, and merged them, and he got distributors working with him in different areas of the country. And he started working with Johnny Otis. Otis came to Texas, and he and Robey made a deal — Otis would audition several of the acts that were on Duke and Peacock records, people like Thornton who had not had much success but clearly had talent, and he would incorporate them into his Johnny Otis Revue. Otis would take charge of producing their records, which would be cut in Los Angeles with Otis’ band, and he would let Robey release the results. Some of the artists still couldn’t find their commercial potential even with Otis producing. For example, Little Richard’s recordings with Otis, while interesting, are an artistic dead-end for him: [excerpt: “Little Richard Boogie”, Little Richard] Of course, Little Richard went on to do quite well for himself later… But in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, something clicked. The two became lifelong friends, and also began a remarkable collaboration, with Otis being the first person to encourage Thornton to play harmonica as well as sing. On her first show with the Johnny Otis Revue, Willie Mae Thornton sang “Have Mercy Baby”, the then-current hit by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and the audience went so wild that they had to stop the show. After that point, they had to put Thornton at the top of the bill, after even Little Esther, so the audience would allow the other performers to come on. And with the top billing came a change of name. Johnny Otis had a knack for giving artists new names — as well as Little Esther, he also gave Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto their stage names — and in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, for the rest of her career she was known as “Big Mama” Thornton. At the time we’re talking about, Otis was, as much as a musician, a fixer, a wheeler-dealer, a person who brought people together. And this was a role that those people on the margins of whiteness – like Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who chose to live among black culture – excelled in. The people who were on the borderline between the two different conceptions of race often ended up as backroom facilitators, bringing white money to black artists — people like Milt Gabler or Ahmet Ertegun or Cosimo Matassa, people of ethnicities that didn’t quite fit into the black/white binary, people who were white enough to use white privilege to get financing, but not so white they identified with the majority culture. And in 1952, the people Otis brought together were Big Mama Thornton and two young songwriters who would change the world of music. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were Jewish teenagers, both of whom had moved to California from elsewhere — Stoller from New York and Leiber from Maryland. Mike Stoller was a musician, who was into modern jazz and modern art music — he loved Bartok and Thelonius Monk — but he also had a background in stride and boogie woogie. After he found normal piano lessons uncongenial, he’d been offered lessons by the great James P Johnson, who had taught him how to play boogie. James P Johnson was essentially the inventor of jazz piano — he’d started out playing ragtime, and had invented the stride piano style that Johnson had taught to Fats Waller. He’d been one of the performers at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, and was also a major composer of serious music, but what he taught young Mike Stoller was how to play a boogie bassline, how to understand twelve-bar blues structure and other rudiments of the blues pianist’s art. As Stoller later put it, “it was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson—except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fats Waller”. After moving to LA, Stoller started studying with Arthur Lange, a composer of film soundtracks, and playing piano for jazz bands, jamming with people like Chet Baker. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber was a blues fanatic, who had had a minor epiphany after hearing Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do”: [excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”] Leiber had heard Witherspoon’s song, and realised that he could do that, and he decided he was going to. He was going to become a songwriter, and he started working on song lyrics immediately, although he had no idea how to go about getting anyone to perform them. The first song he wrote was called “Real Ugly Woman”. The lyrics went “She’s a real ugly woman, don’t see how she got that way/Every time she comes ’round, she runs all my friends away”. He didn’t have much knowledge of the music business, but luckily that knowledge walked right through the door. Leiber was working at a small record store, and one day Lester Sill, who was the national sales manager for Modern Records, walked into the shop. Modern Records was one of the dozens of tiny blues labels that were springing up across the country, usually run by Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs who could see the potential in black music even if the owners of the major labels couldn’t, and Sill was a real enthusiast for the music he was selling. He started pitching records to Jerry Leiber, telling him he’d love them, acting as if Leiber was the most important person in the world, even though Leiber kept explaining he didn’t make the buying decisions for the shop, he was only a shop assistant. Eventually, after playing a record called “Boogie Chillen”, by a new artist called John Lee Hooker, which excited Leiber enormously, Sill asked Leiber what he was going to do when he grew up. Leiber replied that he was already grown up, but he planned to become a songwriter. Sill asked to hear one of the songs, and Leiber sang “Real Ugly Woman” to him. Sill liked it, and asked for copies of his songs. When Leiber explained that he didn’t know how to write music, Sill told him to find a partner who did. Leiber found Stoller through a mutual friend, who told Leiber that Stoller knew about music. Leiber phoned Stoller, who was unimpressed by the idea of writing songs together, because to his mind “songs” were the kind of thing that was dominating the pop charts at the time, the kind of thing that Patti Page or someone would record, not something someone who was into hard bop music would like. But Leiber eventually persuaded him to at least take a look at the lyrics he’d been writing. Stoller looked at the lyrics to “Real Ugly Woman”, and said “These are blues! You didn’t tell me you were writing blues. I love the blues.” They started collaborating together that day, in 1950, and worked together for the rest of their lives. Soon Jimmy Witherspoon himself was singing “Real Ugly Woman”, just like Leiber had hoped when he’d started writing: [Excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon “Real Ugly Woman”] Soon after, Ralph Bass moved to LA from New York. He’d got to know Leiber and Stoller on their trips East and when he moved west he introduced them to Johnny Otis, who Bass had kept in touch with after leaving Savoy Records. Through the connection with Otis and Bass, they wrote many songs for Little Esther, and they also started a partnership with Little Esther’s former backing vocalists The Robins, who put out the very first single with a Leiber and Stoller writing credit: “That’s What the Good Book Says”. [Excerpt: The Robins “That’s What the Good Book Says”] The partnership between the Leiber and Stoller team and the Robins would end up defining all their careers. But right now, Leiber and Stoller were a couple of teenagers who were working with their heroes. And at least one of those heroes was not very impressed. Johnny Otis had introduced them to Big Mama Thornton and asked if they had a song for her. They said “we don’t, but we will have in a few minutes”, ran back to Stoller’s house, and quickly knocked out “Hound Dog” in a style that they thought would suit Thornton. “Hound dog” was, at the time, black slang for a gigolo, and what Leiber and Stoller wanted to do was have a song that was as aggressive as possible, with their singer demeaning the man she was singing to, while also including sexual undertones. (Those undertones were strengthened in the follow-up Thornton recorded, “Tom Cat”, where she told a “tom cat” “I ain’t going to feed you fish no more”). Leiber and Stoller had very strong ideas about how their new song should be performed, and they made the mistake of telling her about them. Big Mama Thornton was not about to let two white teenagers teach her how to sing the blues. In truth, Big Mama Thornton was only a few years older than those kids — they were in their late teens, and she was in her mid twenties — but that kind of gap can seem like a big difference, and it might well also be that Thornton was offended by the fact that these white men were telling her, a black woman, how to do her job. So when Jerry Leiber insisted that rather than croon the song as she had been doing, she should “attack it”, her response was to point to her crotch and say “attack this!” Johnny Otis didn’t help by playing a rimshot right after Thornton said that. But he then suggested that Leiber sing it for Thornton, and she did listen, and agreed to try it that way. Once the communication problem had been sorted, Thornton turned in the definitive performance of the song. [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”] “Hound Dog” is also notable as being one of the last times Johnny Otis played drums on a record. While he could still play the vibraphone, he could no longer hold his drumsticks properly, and so he’d largely given up drumming. But when they were working out the arrangement for the recording session, Otis played the drums in the rehearsals, playing with a style of his own — turning the snare off on his snare drum so it sounded more like a tom-tom. When it came to the actual recording, though, Otis was in the control room, while a session drummer was playing in the studio. But Leiber and Stoller both agreed that he simply wasn’t playing the part properly, and enticed Otis into the studio and got him to play the part as he’d been playing it in rehearsal. What happened next is a subject of much debate. What everyone is agreed on is that Otis was credited as a co-writer early on, but that he wasn’t credited later. The story as Otis told it is that he did actually help Leiber and Stoller pull the song together, rewriting it with them, as well as doing the arrangement in the studio (which no-one disputes him doing). He claimed specifically that he’d come up with the lines “You made me feel so blue, you make me weep and moan/You ain’t looking for a woman, you’re just looking for a home”, because Leiber and Stoller had had, quote, “some derogatory crap” in there, that he’d had to remove references to chicken and watermelon, and that he constantly had to edit their songs. He said that Leiber and Stoller acknowledged he was a co-writer right up until the point where Elvis Presley wanted to record the song a few years later. Leiber and Stoller, on the other hand, claimed that Otis had no involvement with the songwriting, and that he’d misrepresented himself to Don Robey. They claimed that Otis had falsely claimed he had power of attorney for them, as well as falsely claiming to have co-written the song, and deliberately defrauded them. On the other hand, it’s only because of Otis that Leiber and Stoller got credit at all — Don Robey, who as I’ve mentioned was a notorious thief of writing credits, originally put himself and Thornton down as the writers, and it was Otis who got the credits amended. Either way, Leiber and Stoller have, for more than sixty years, had the sole songwriting credits for the track, and Otis never bothered to dispute their claim in court. Indeed, they don’t appear to have had any particular animosity — they all repeatedly praised the others’ abilities. Although as Otis put it “I could have sent my kids to college, like they sent theirs. But, oh well, if I dwell on that I get quite unhappy, so we try to move on.” What’s most ridiculous about the whole credit mess is that Elvis’ version bore almost no resemblance to the song Leiber and Stoller wrote. Elvis’ version was a cover of a version by the white Vegas lounge band Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, which was more or less a parody of the original. [excerpt: Freddie Bell and the Bellboys – “Hound Dog”] But still, Elvis came later, as did the money. In 1953, all Leiber and Stoller got for a record that sold over a million copies was a cheque for one thousand two hundred dollars. A cheque which bounced. As a result of their experience getting ripped off by Robey, Leiber and Stoller formed their own record label with Lester Sill, and we’ll be hearing more about that later… Big Mama Thornton did actually get paid for her million-seller — a whole five hundred dollars — but she never had the success she deserved. She later wrote the song “Ball and Chain”: [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, “Ball and Chain”] Janis Joplin later had a hit with that, and you can hear from Thornton’s version just how much Joplin took from Thornton’s vocal style. But due to a bad contract Thornton never made a penny in royalties from the song she wrote (which is a far more egregious injustice than the one people complain about, that Elvis had a hit with “Hound Dog” — she didn’t write that one, and Elvis did pay the writers). She continued performing until a few days before she died, in July 1984, despite getting so sick and losing so much weight (she was under a hundred pounds at the end) that she was almost unrecognisable. She died two weeks before Little Esther, and like Esther, she had asked Johnny Otis, now the Reverend Johnny Otis, to give her eulogy. Otis said, in part “Mama always told me that the blues were more important than having money. She told me: Artists are artists and businessmen are businessmen. But the trouble is the artist’s money stays in the businessmen’s hands. […] Don’t waste your sorrow on Big Mama. She’s free. Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent.”

united states america music new york california history texas black english business los angeles las vegas dogs spiritual italian alabama racism jewish greek east maryland mama artists elvis rock and roll bass shake depending swing peacock chain ludwig van beethoven elvis presley hopkins thornton hound robins race in america mixcloud janis joplin little richard rock music rattle joplin dominoes etta james witherspoon sill chet baker john lee hooker big mama stoller bessie smith tomcat bartok hound dog greek americans fats waller lightnin leiber big mama thornton robey thelonius monk big joe turner patti page ahmet ertegun mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis jimmy witherspoon james p johnson sugar pie desanto little esther peacock records george lipsitz savoy records cosimo matassa don robey

"Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2019 35:09

Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton. 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 (along with one, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", that got cut out of the eventual episode) I used three main resources for this podcast. 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. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, is an invaluable book on the most important songwriting team of their generation. And Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz is the definitive biography of Otis. This collection has most of Big Mama Thornton's fifties recordings on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript One of the things that is easy to miss when talking about early rock and roll is that much of the development of the genre is about the liminal spaces in race in America. (Before I start talking about this, a disclaimer I have to make -- I'm a white person, from a different country, born decades after the events I'm talking about. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can here, and as sensitive as I can, but I apologise if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of the people who were actually affected). "Black" and "white" are two categories imposed by culture, and like all culturally-imposed binaries, they're essentially arbitrary and don't really map very well onto really existing people. There have always been people who don't fit neatly into the boxes that a racist society insists everyone fits into -- and part of the reason that rock and roll happened when it did was that in the 1950s America was in the process of redefining those boxes, and moving some people who would have previously fit into one category into the other. The lines were being redrawn, and that led to some interesting art happening at the borders. (That sounds like I'm doing the "at least some good art came from this terrible event" thing. I'm really, really, not. Racism in all its forms is nothing but negative, and its distortions of culture are all negative too. But they do exist, and need noting when talking about culture subject to those distortions). There were a lot of groups who would now be regarded as white in the USA but which back in the 1940s and 1950s weren't, quite. Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places (unlike now, when they're merely *illegally* discriminated against). They weren't black, but they weren't quite white either. The same went for several other ethnic minorities, like Greek people. So it's perhaps not all that surprising that one of the most successful blues records of all time, which later inspired an even more successful rock and roll record, was the result of a collaboration between a black singer, a Greek-American producer who said "As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black", and two Jewish songwriters. Willie Mae Thornton was big in every sense -- she weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, or about twenty-five stone, and she had a voice to match it -- she would often claim that she didn't need a microphone, because she was louder than any microphone anyway. We've talked in this series about blues shouters, and how they were mostly men, but she was at least the equal of any man as a shouter. She became a blues singer when she was fourteen, thanks to her mentor, a singer called "Diamond Teeth Mary". [excerpt: "Keep Your Hands Off Of Him" · Diamond Teeth Mary] That's a recording of Diamond Teeth Mary from the 1990s -- when she was *in* her nineties. She performed constantly until her death aged ninety-seven, but she only made her first record when she was ninety-two. "Diamond Teeth Mary" was the half-sister of the great blues singer Bessie Smith -- Mary had four stepmothers, one of whom was Smith's mother -- and she was a powerful singer herself, singing with the Hot Harlem Revue around Alabama. She was called "Diamond Teeth Mary" because she had diamonds embedded in her front teeth, so she'd be more imposing on stage. Diamond Teeth Mary heard the young Willie Mae Thornton singing while she was working on a garbage truck, got her to get off the garbage truck, and got her a job with the revue. Mary probably felt a kinship with the fourteen-year-old Willie Mae, a girl who only wore boy's clothes -- Mary had, herself, become a performer when she was only thirteen, having run away from her abusive family, dressed in boy's clothes, and joined the circus. Willie Mae Thornton stayed with that revue for most of the next decade, playing with musicians like Richard Penniman, who would later become known as Little Richard, playing to audiences that were mostly black and also (according to Little Richard) exclusively gay. The Hot Harlem Revue was not exactly respectable -- Sammy Green, who managed it, made most of his money from owning several brothels -- but it was somewhere that a young singer could very quickly learn how to be an entertainer. You had to be impressive as a female blues singer in the 1940s, especially if, as with Willie Mae Thornton, you were also not conventionally attractive and not of a societally-approved sexuality or gender identity. I've seen suggestions from people who would know that Thornton was bisexual, but from others like Johnny Otis that she showed no interest in men or women (though she did have a child in her teens), and I've also seen suggestions that she may have been trans (though I'm going to refer to her using she and her pronouns here as that's what she used throughout her life). She was a remarkable figure in many ways. One of her favourite drinks was embalming fluid and grape juice (just in case anyone was considering doing this, please don't. It's really not a good idea, at all, even a little bit. Don't drink embalming fluid.) According to Jerry Leiber she had razor scars all over her face. She was a very, very, intimidating person. At the very least, she didn't fit into neat boxes. But you see, all that stuff I just said... *that* is putting her into a box -- the caricature angry, aggressive, black woman. And that was a box she never liked to be put in either, but which she was put in by other people. What I just said, you'll notice, is all about what other people thought of her, and that's not always what she thought of herself. She would get very upset that people would say she used to fight promoters, saying "I never did fight the promoters. All I ever did was ask them for my money. Pay me and there won’t be no hard feelings." And while she is uniformly described as "masculine-looking" (whatever *that* means), she put it rather differently, saying "I don’t go out on stage trying to look pretty. I was born pretty." Thornton is someone who didn't get to tell her own story much -- much of what we know about her is from other people's impressions of her, and usually the impressions of men. People who knew her well described her as intelligent, kind, charming, funny, and hugely talented, while people who only spent a brief time around her tend to have talked about the razor scars on her face or how aggressive she seemed. Depending on which narrative you choose, you can make a very good case for her being either a loud, swaggering, vulgar, aggressive stereotype of unfeminine black femininity, or a rather sweet, vulnerable, person who intimidated men simply by her physical size, her race, and her loud voice, and who may have played up to their expectations at times, but who never liked that, and who used alcohol and other substances to cope with what wasn't a very happy life, while remaining outwardly happy. But because we as a society value black women so little, most of this story is filtered through the white men who told it, so be aware that in what follows, you may find yourself picturing a caricature figure, seeing Big Mama as the angry sassy black woman you've seen in a million films. She was a real person, and I wish we had more of her own words to set against this. While the Hot Harlem Revue was a good place to learn to be an entertainer, it wasn't necessarily the best place to work if you actually wanted to earn a living, and Willie Mae had to supplement her income by shining shoes. She often had to sleep in all-night restaurants and bars, because she couldn't afford to pay rent, and go begging door to door for food. But she would pretend to everyone she knew that everything was all right, and smile for everyone. She became pregnant in her teens, and tried to be a good mother to the child, but she was deemed an unfit mother due to poverty and the child was taken away from her. After several years with the Harlem Revue, she quit them because she was being cheated out of money, and decided to stay in Houston, Texas, which is where she really started to build an audience. Around this time she recorded her first single, "All Right Baby", credited to "the Harlem Stars" -- it's a song she wrote herself, and it's a boogie track very much in the vein of Big Joe Turner: [excerpt "All Right Baby", the Harlem Stars] Shortly after moving to Houston, she began working for Don Robey, who ran Peacock Records and the Bronze Peacock Club. Robey had a mixed reputation -- most singers and musicians he worked with thought highly of him, but most songwriters he worked with were less enamoured of his penchant for stealing their money and credit. Robey had a reputation as a thug, too, but according to Little Richard he was too scared of Thornton to beat her up like he would his other acts. She recorded several singles for Peacock, starting with "I'm All Fed Up", but her talents weren't really suited to the slick Texas blues backing she was given: [excerpt "I'm All Fed Up", Willie Mae Thornton] The kind of music Peacock put out was in the smoother style that was becoming prominent in the southwestern US -- the kind of music that people like Lightnin' Hopkins made -- and that wasn't really suited to Thornton's louder, more emotional style. But after a run of unsuccessful singles, things started to change. Peacock Records was in the process of expanding. Don Robey acquired another label, Duke Records of Memphis, and merged them, and he got distributors working with him in different areas of the country. And he started working with Johnny Otis. Otis came to Texas, and he and Robey made a deal -- Otis would audition several of the acts that were on Duke and Peacock records, people like Thornton who had not had much success but clearly had talent, and he would incorporate them into his Johnny Otis Revue. Otis would take charge of producing their records, which would be cut in Los Angeles with Otis' band, and he would let Robey release the results. Some of the artists still couldn't find their commercial potential even with Otis producing. For example, Little Richard's recordings with Otis, while interesting, are an artistic dead-end for him: [excerpt: "Little Richard Boogie", Little Richard] Of course, Little Richard went on to do quite well for himself later... But in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, something clicked. The two became lifelong friends, and also began a remarkable collaboration, with Otis being the first person to encourage Thornton to play harmonica as well as sing. On her first show with the Johnny Otis Revue, Willie Mae Thornton sang "Have Mercy Baby", the then-current hit by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and the audience went so wild that they had to stop the show. After that point, they had to put Thornton at the top of the bill, after even Little Esther, so the audience would allow the other performers to come on. And with the top billing came a change of name. Johnny Otis had a knack for giving artists new names -- as well as Little Esther, he also gave Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto their stage names -- and in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, for the rest of her career she was known as "Big Mama" Thornton. At the time we're talking about, Otis was, as much as a musician, a fixer, a wheeler-dealer, a person who brought people together. And this was a role that those people on the margins of whiteness – like Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who chose to live among black culture – excelled in. The people who were on the borderline between the two different conceptions of race often ended up as backroom facilitators, bringing white money to black artists -- people like Milt Gabler or Ahmet Ertegun or Cosimo Matassa, people of ethnicities that didn't quite fit into the black/white binary, people who were white enough to use white privilege to get financing, but not so white they identified with the majority culture. And in 1952, the people Otis brought together were Big Mama Thornton and two young songwriters who would change the world of music. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were Jewish teenagers, both of whom had moved to California from elsewhere -- Stoller from New York and Leiber from Maryland. Mike Stoller was a musician, who was into modern jazz and modern art music -- he loved Bartok and Thelonius Monk -- but he also had a background in stride and boogie woogie. After he found normal piano lessons uncongenial, he'd been offered lessons by the great James P Johnson, who had taught him how to play boogie. James P Johnson was essentially the inventor of jazz piano -- he'd started out playing ragtime, and had invented the stride piano style that Johnson had taught to Fats Waller. He'd been one of the performers at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, and was also a major composer of serious music, but what he taught young Mike Stoller was how to play a boogie bassline, how to understand twelve-bar blues structure and other rudiments of the blues pianist's art. As Stoller later put it, "it was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson—except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fats Waller". After moving to LA, Stoller started studying with Arthur Lange, a composer of film soundtracks, and playing piano for jazz bands, jamming with people like Chet Baker. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber was a blues fanatic, who had had a minor epiphany after hearing Jimmy Witherspoon's "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do": [excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon "Ain't Nobody's Business"] Leiber had heard Witherspoon's song, and realised that he could do that, and he decided he was going to. He was going to become a songwriter, and he started working on song lyrics immediately, although he had no idea how to go about getting anyone to perform them. The first song he wrote was called "Real Ugly Woman". The lyrics went "She’s a real ugly woman, don’t see how she got that way/Every time she comes ’round, she runs all my friends away". He didn't have much knowledge of the music business, but luckily that knowledge walked right through the door. Leiber was working at a small record store, and one day Lester Sill, who was the national sales manager for Modern Records, walked into the shop. Modern Records was one of the dozens of tiny blues labels that were springing up across the country, usually run by Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs who could see the potential in black music even if the owners of the major labels couldn't, and Sill was a real enthusiast for the music he was selling. He started pitching records to Jerry Leiber, telling him he'd love them, acting as if Leiber was the most important person in the world, even though Leiber kept explaining he didn't make the buying decisions for the shop, he was only a shop assistant. Eventually, after playing a record called "Boogie Chillen", by a new artist called John Lee Hooker, which excited Leiber enormously, Sill asked Leiber what he was going to do when he grew up. Leiber replied that he was already grown up, but he planned to become a songwriter. Sill asked to hear one of the songs, and Leiber sang "Real Ugly Woman" to him. Sill liked it, and asked for copies of his songs. When Leiber explained that he didn't know how to write music, Sill told him to find a partner who did. Leiber found Stoller through a mutual friend, who told Leiber that Stoller knew about music. Leiber phoned Stoller, who was unimpressed by the idea of writing songs together, because to his mind "songs" were the kind of thing that was dominating the pop charts at the time, the kind of thing that Patti Page or someone would record, not something someone who was into hard bop music would like. But Leiber eventually persuaded him to at least take a look at the lyrics he'd been writing. Stoller looked at the lyrics to "Real Ugly Woman", and said "These are blues! You didn’t tell me you were writing blues. I love the blues.” They started collaborating together that day, in 1950, and worked together for the rest of their lives. Soon Jimmy Witherspoon himself was singing "Real Ugly Woman", just like Leiber had hoped when he'd started writing: [Excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon "Real Ugly Woman"] Soon after, Ralph Bass moved to LA from New York. He'd got to know Leiber and Stoller on their trips East and when he moved west he introduced them to Johnny Otis, who Bass had kept in touch with after leaving Savoy Records. Through the connection with Otis and Bass, they wrote many songs for Little Esther, and they also started a partnership with Little Esther's former backing vocalists The Robins, who put out the very first single with a Leiber and Stoller writing credit: "That's What the Good Book Says". [Excerpt: The Robins "That's What the Good Book Says"] The partnership between the Leiber and Stoller team and the Robins would end up defining all their careers. But right now, Leiber and Stoller were a couple of teenagers who were working with their heroes. And at least one of those heroes was not very impressed. Johnny Otis had introduced them to Big Mama Thornton and asked if they had a song for her. They said "we don't, but we will have in a few minutes", ran back to Stoller's house, and quickly knocked out "Hound Dog" in a style that they thought would suit Thornton. "Hound dog" was, at the time, black slang for a gigolo, and what Leiber and Stoller wanted to do was have a song that was as aggressive as possible, with their singer demeaning the man she was singing to, while also including sexual undertones. (Those undertones were strengthened in the follow-up Thornton recorded, "Tom Cat", where she told a "tom cat" "I ain't going to feed you fish no more"). Leiber and Stoller had very strong ideas about how their new song should be performed, and they made the mistake of telling her about them. Big Mama Thornton was not about to let two white teenagers teach her how to sing the blues. In truth, Big Mama Thornton was only a few years older than those kids -- they were in their late teens, and she was in her mid twenties -- but that kind of gap can seem like a big difference, and it might well also be that Thornton was offended by the fact that these white men were telling her, a black woman, how to do her job. So when Jerry Leiber insisted that rather than croon the song as she had been doing, she should "attack it", her response was to point to her crotch and say "attack this!" Johnny Otis didn't help by playing a rimshot right after Thornton said that. But he then suggested that Leiber sing it for Thornton, and she did listen, and agreed to try it that way. Once the communication problem had been sorted, Thornton turned in the definitive performance of the song. [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] "Hound Dog" is also notable as being one of the last times Johnny Otis played drums on a record. While he could still play the vibraphone, he could no longer hold his drumsticks properly, and so he'd largely given up drumming. But when they were working out the arrangement for the recording session, Otis played the drums in the rehearsals, playing with a style of his own -- turning the snare off on his snare drum so it sounded more like a tom-tom. When it came to the actual recording, though, Otis was in the control room, while a session drummer was playing in the studio. But Leiber and Stoller both agreed that he simply wasn't playing the part properly, and enticed Otis into the studio and got him to play the part as he'd been playing it in rehearsal. What happened next is a subject of much debate. What everyone is agreed on is that Otis was credited as a co-writer early on, but that he wasn't credited later. The story as Otis told it is that he did actually help Leiber and Stoller pull the song together, rewriting it with them, as well as doing the arrangement in the studio (which no-one disputes him doing). He claimed specifically that he'd come up with the lines "You made me feel so blue, you make me weep and moan/You ain't looking for a woman, you're just looking for a home", because Leiber and Stoller had had, quote, "some derogatory crap" in there, that he'd had to remove references to chicken and watermelon, and that he constantly had to edit their songs. He said that Leiber and Stoller acknowledged he was a co-writer right up until the point where Elvis Presley wanted to record the song a few years later. Leiber and Stoller, on the other hand, claimed that Otis had no involvement with the songwriting, and that he'd misrepresented himself to Don Robey. They claimed that Otis had falsely claimed he had power of attorney for them, as well as falsely claiming to have co-written the song, and deliberately defrauded them. On the other hand, it's only because of Otis that Leiber and Stoller got credit at all -- Don Robey, who as I've mentioned was a notorious thief of writing credits, originally put himself and Thornton down as the writers, and it was Otis who got the credits amended. Either way, Leiber and Stoller have, for more than sixty years, had the sole songwriting credits for the track, and Otis never bothered to dispute their claim in court. Indeed, they don't appear to have had any particular animosity -- they all repeatedly praised the others' abilities. Although as Otis put it "I could have sent my kids to college, like they sent theirs. But, oh well, if I dwell on that I get quite unhappy, so we try to move on." What's most ridiculous about the whole credit mess is that Elvis' version bore almost no resemblance to the song Leiber and Stoller wrote. Elvis' version was a cover of a version by the white Vegas lounge band Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, which was more or less a parody of the original. [excerpt: Freddie Bell and the Bellboys - “Hound Dog”] But still, Elvis came later, as did the money. In 1953, all Leiber and Stoller got for a record that sold over a million copies was a cheque for one thousand two hundred dollars. A cheque which bounced. As a result of their experience getting ripped off by Robey, Leiber and Stoller formed their own record label with Lester Sill, and we'll be hearing more about that later... Big Mama Thornton did actually get paid for her million-seller -- a whole five hundred dollars -- but she never had the success she deserved. She later wrote the song "Ball and Chain": [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball and Chain"] Janis Joplin later had a hit with that, and you can hear from Thornton's version just how much Joplin took from Thornton's vocal style. But due to a bad contract Thornton never made a penny in royalties from the song she wrote (which is a far more egregious injustice than the one people complain about, that Elvis had a hit with "Hound Dog" -- she didn't write that one, and Elvis did pay the writers). She continued performing until a few days before she died, in July 1984, despite getting so sick and losing so much weight (she was under a hundred pounds at the end) that she was almost unrecognisable. She died two weeks before Little Esther, and like Esther, she had asked Johnny Otis, now the Reverend Johnny Otis, to give her eulogy. Otis said, in part “Mama always told me that the blues were more important than having money. She told me: Artists are artists and businessmen are businessmen. But the trouble is the artist’s money stays in the businessmen’s hands. [...] Don’t waste your sorrow on Big Mama. She’s free. Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent."

united states america music new york california history texas black english business los angeles las vegas dogs spiritual italian alabama racism jewish greek east maryland mama artists elvis rock and roll bass shake depending swing peacock chain ludwig van beethoven elvis presley hopkins thornton hound robins race in america mixcloud little richard rock music rattle joplin dominoes etta james witherspoon sill chet baker john lee hooker big mama stoller tomcat bartok hound dog greek americans fats waller lightnin leiber big mama thornton robey thelonius monk big joe turner patti page ahmet ertegun mike stoller david ritz jerry leiber billy ward johnny otis jimmy witherspoon james p johnson sugar pie desanto little esther peacock records george lipsitz savoy records cosimo matassa don robey

"Jambalaya" by Hank Williams

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2019 32:07

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- First, a brief apology -- this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott's is generally considered the best. Williams' recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I'm talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche -- which we've already established as being very wrong -- is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that's very far from being the actual truth, we've also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we've only looked at one country and western star -- Bob Wills, back in episode three. Now, this is probably the correct balance -- early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records -- but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven't heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It's music that combined country music instruments -- guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily -- with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we've already seen in the Western Swing genre -- that's still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we're going to talk about a song that was -- as far as we can tell -- a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You've probably heard of Hank Williams, but you've probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn't sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican "What's the Matter with the Mill?"] That's a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it's absolutely country and western in Mullican's performance. We're again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career -- we'll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do -- the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration's song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That's the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it's what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he's not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There's a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I'm not the best person to talk about -- I'm likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don't know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are -- or certainly were at this point -- looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture -- they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It's Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That's not the only factor, of course, but it's a big one. We've talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you're interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I'd recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I'll link that in the show notes, and it's definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I'm going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name "zydeco" itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word's origins, but the one I prefer is that it's a mispronunciation of the phrase "les haricots" -- French for "the beans" -- as used in the Cajun French phrase "Les haricots ne sont pas salés" -- "the beans aren't salty", a phrase which idiomatically meant "things are difficult" or "I'm tired". “Zydeco ne sont pas salés" was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt "Zydeco ne sont pas sales": Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre -- fais dos dos music. This is music that's mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in "Bosco Stomp" by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt "Bosco Stomp", Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit "New Jole Blon" which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt "New Jole Blon" by Moon Mullican] That's a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You've got that high "ahh" sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you've also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you've got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It's a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he'll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican's records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let's talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I'm talking about -- for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there's someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I'm going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I'll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I've dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics -- "I Saw the Light", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Lovesick Blues", "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Cold Cold Heart", "Hey Good Lookin'" and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 -- though he'd been a live performer for quite a few years already by then -- and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn't do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman -- not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician -- was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I've talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: "Blue Yodel Number 9"] That's Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That's the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, "Move it on Over" in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we'll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: "Move it on Over" by Hank Williams] But that wasn't the only style that Williams could do -- he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered -- a lot -- to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams' appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther -- and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther's mother asked Esther who she'd been speaking to, and she said "Just some cowboy", but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther's mother screamed "you turn this bus round right now!" -- she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don't let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience -- and even they were listening to WIlliams' songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett "Cold Cold Heart"] At the time we're talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records -- and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" I say "probably", because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn't given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican's version had slightly different lyrics. Let's take a listen to Mullican's version -- the less successful of the two -- first. [excerpt "Jambalaya" by Moon Mullican] Now let's hear an extract from Hank Williams' version: [excerpt: "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators' sound on them. Mullican's has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them -- this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated -- their food, their music, and their dancing. "Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo", "pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we're gonna be gay-o". And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There's a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams' record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll -- though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was "a guitarist, period" -- but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of "Jambalaya" is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you'd think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we'll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But "Jambalaya" is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya" would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music -- it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that's largely because he died before the rock and roll craze -- had he lived, it's entirely possible we'd now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: "Jambalaya" by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis -- short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording "Jambalaya" he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he'd developed even more of a dependency on pills, he'd developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows -- he was a mess. And on New Year's Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year's Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he'd been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive". He was twenty-nine years old.

“Jambalaya” by Hank Williams

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2019

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- First, a brief apology — this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott’s is generally considered the best. Williams’ recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I’m talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche — which we’ve already established as being very wrong — is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that’s very far from being the actual truth, we’ve also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we’ve only looked at one country and western star — Bob Wills, back in episode three. Now, this is probably the correct balance — early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records — but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven’t heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It’s music that combined country music instruments — guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily — with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we’ve already seen in the Western Swing genre — that’s still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: “Shotgun Boogie” by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we’re going to talk about a song that was — as far as we can tell — a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You’ve probably heard of Hank Williams, but you’ve probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn’t sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican “What’s the Matter with the Mill?”] That’s a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it’s absolutely country and western in Mullican’s performance. We’re again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career — we’ll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do — the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration’s song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That’s the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it’s what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he’s not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There’s a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I’m not the best person to talk about — I’m likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don’t know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are — or certainly were at this point — looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture — they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It’s Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That’s not the only factor, of course, but it’s a big one. We’ve talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you’re interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I’d recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I’ll link that in the show notes, and it’s definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I’m going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name “zydeco” itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word’s origins, but the one I prefer is that it’s a mispronunciation of the phrase “les haricots” — French for “the beans” — as used in the Cajun French phrase “Les haricots ne sont pas salés” — “the beans aren’t salty”, a phrase which idiomatically meant “things are difficult” or “I’m tired”. “Zydeco ne sont pas salés” was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt “Zydeco ne sont pas sales”: Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre — fais dos dos music. This is music that’s mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in “Bosco Stomp” by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt “Bosco Stomp”, Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit “New Jole Blon” which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt “New Jole Blon” by Moon Mullican] That’s a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You’ve got that high “ahh” sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you’ve also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you’ve got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It’s a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he’ll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican’s records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let’s talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I’m talking about — for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there’s someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I’m going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I’ll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I’ve dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics — “I Saw the Light”, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Lovesick Blues”, “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, “Cold Cold Heart”, “Hey Good Lookin'” and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 — though he’d been a live performer for quite a few years already by then — and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn’t do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman — not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician — was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I’ve talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: “Blue Yodel Number 9”] That’s Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That’s the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, “Move it on Over” in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we’ll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: “Move it on Over” by Hank Williams] But that wasn’t the only style that Williams could do — he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered — a lot — to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams’ appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther — and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther’s mother asked Esther who she’d been speaking to, and she said “Just some cowboy”, but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther’s mother screamed “you turn this bus round right now!” — she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don’t let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience — and even they were listening to WIlliams’ songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett “Cold Cold Heart”] At the time we’re talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records — and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” I say “probably”, because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn’t given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican’s version had slightly different lyrics. Let’s take a listen to Mullican’s version — the less successful of the two — first. [excerpt “Jambalaya” by Moon Mullican] Now let’s hear an extract from Hank Williams’ version: [excerpt: “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators’ sound on them. Mullican’s has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them — this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated — their food, their music, and their dancing. “Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo”, “pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we’re gonna be gay-o”. And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There’s a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams’ record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll — though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was “a guitarist, period” — but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of “Jambalaya” is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you’d think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we’ll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But “Jambalaya” is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya” would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music — it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that’s largely because he died before the rock and roll craze — had he lived, it’s entirely possible we’d now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: “Jambalaya” by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis — short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording “Jambalaya” he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he’d developed even more of a dependency on pills, he’d developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows — he was a mess. And on New Year’s Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year’s Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he’d been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”. He was twenty-nine years old.

"Double Crossin' Blues", by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2018 30:02

Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Double Crossin' Blues" by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis' material -- this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I'm almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther's first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn't contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we're going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues. When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what's called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll. Rock and roll when it started -- the music of the mid fifties -- is not really a guitar-based music. It's dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We've already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as "rhythm and blues", and that in turn fed into rock and roll. There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we'll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It's probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different. We're going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there'll be several more after that. Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with "Harlem Nocturne", which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano: [excerpt of "Harlem Nocturne"] After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star. At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period -- he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet's version of "Flying Home", and on "Jamming With Lester" by Lester Young. He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who'd all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others -- while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows. One thing that's very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We'll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry -- in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially. He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience -- both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis' show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love. He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops -- though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn't play drums easily. But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn't sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk. He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who'd played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner. On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn't win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band. That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities -- we'll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we're talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips. At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther's biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike. But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins. We haven't talked much about doo-wop yet, but we're at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we've discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people -- this was a time when Italian-Americans weren't considered fully "white" according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said "Charlie's not white, he's Italian!") But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists -- usually three or four of them -- would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts. And in the tradition of the Ink Spots' "top and bottom", these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal -- though the bass singer wouldn't speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name "doo wop", which was only applied later, comes from -- from the singer singing things like this: [excerpt "Count Every Star", by the Ravens] That's the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We're not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties -- and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more. And The Robins were another of these "bird groups". They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis -- "My Baby Done Told Me": [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds "My Baby Done Told Me"] However, they didn't like the name, and soon settled on the Robins. The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, "Around About Midnight", was a remake of Roy Brown's earlier "Long About Midnight", and it's really rather good. Take a listen: ["Around About Midnight"] A quick note there -- that's noted as their first single on some discographies I've seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren't released until a few months after they were recorded. It's definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though. That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we've touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I'm sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins -- and Esther Mae Washington -- would all go on to another label, Savoy. Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he's another one we'll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he'd been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he'd taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs. He'd always had a love of music -- he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager -- and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered -- Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren't certain that they could use him, but they'd give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA. Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer -- he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing "The Honeydripper". But he still didn't actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn't have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn't do wonderfully (for reasons we'll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records. Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including "Stormy Monday" by T-Bone Walker and "Open the Door, Richard" by Jack McVea: [excerpt: "Open the Door, Richard"] That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton's band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others -- six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947. But the problem with "Open the Door, Richard" was that it was actually too successful -- the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn't, Bass had to find another label to work with. Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music. And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* -- Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis' band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact -- the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he'd triple the royalty rate after Otis' first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky's promises, this proved to be false. When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn't get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute -- twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like "Open the Door Richard", based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita -- Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines. [excerpt "Double Crossin' Blues"] Those lines "How come you ain't in the forest?" "I'm a lady", "they got lady bears out there!" take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that "lady bear" was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman. Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass "I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid's expenses -- lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted 'Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?' He wouldn't give me the five bucks". Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song's name, which is where the title "Double Crossing Blues" comes from. Although as Bass said "Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it." Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass' time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther's stage name was decided upon -- Lubinsky said to Otis "you need a stage name for that girl," to which Otis replied "which girl? Little Esther?" and Lubinsky said "that's perfect!" And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon. The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth But the record's success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people "who hummed behind Little Esther". They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis' future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused. The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we'll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well -- "Mistrustin' Blues", "Deceivin' Blues", "Dreamin' Blues", "Wedding Boogie", "Rockin' Blues"... Otis also had a 1951 hit with "All Nite Long", which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads: [excerpt "All Nite Long": Johnny Otis] We'll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we'll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including "Double Crossin' Blues") going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future. She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass -- not that Bass didn't have them (and not necessarily that he did, either -- I don't know) -- but that he didn't mix his business and personal lives. He didn't hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him. So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass' wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row. Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy. Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren't as successful as the work they'd done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin. She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we'll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips. Most impressive of these was "Home is Where the Hatred is", a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972: [excerpt "Home is Where the Hatred is": Esther Phillips] That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive -- and to be fair, that's one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it's possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn't deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right -- she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance. She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.

love history black hollywood los angeles dj home italian open detroit grammy blues cuba cd midnight federal west coast scream rock and roll east coast bass rhythm phillips ravens castro billboard djs aladdin chess watts hatred aretha franklin newark penguins rockin excerpt orioles batista talking heads robins flamingos frank zappa mixcloud italian americans robert johnson rock music brian wilson muddy waters savoy ma rainey dreamin gil scott heron count basie charles mingus bessie smith mcneely jackie wilson mingus lionel hampton grammies dinah washington lester young doggett big mama thornton louis jordan johnny ace ink spots arthur lee t bone walker johnny guitar watson apus flying home esther phillips mills brothers stormy mondays chick webb this cd king records roy brown atomics lubinsky johnny otis savoy ballroom little willie john little esther harlem nocturne white records big jay mcneely federal records george lipsitz mel walker savoy records

“Double Crossin’ Blues”, by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2018

history racism blues disability robins rock music talent show doo wop dinah washington ink spots esther phillips johnny otis illinois jacquet little esther savoy records mel walker

“Double Crossin’ Blues”, by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins

Succotash, The Comedy Soundcast Soundcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2018

Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Double Crossin’ Blues” by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis’ material — this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I’m almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther’s first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn’t contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we’re going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues. When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what’s called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll. Rock and roll when it started — the music of the mid fifties — is not really a guitar-based music. It’s dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We’ve already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as “rhythm and blues”, and that in turn fed into rock and roll. There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we’ll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It’s probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different. We’re going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there’ll be several more after that. Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with “Harlem Nocturne”, which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano: [excerpt of “Harlem Nocturne”] After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star. At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period — he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet’s version of “Flying Home”, and on “Jamming With Lester” by Lester Young. He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who’d all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others — while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows. One thing that’s very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We’ll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry — in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially. He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience — both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis’ show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love. He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops — though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn’t play drums easily. But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn’t sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk. He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who’d played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner. On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn’t win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band. That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities — we’ll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we’re talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips. At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther’s biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike. But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins. We haven’t talked much about doo-wop yet, but we’re at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we’ve discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people — this was a time when Italian-Americans weren’t considered fully “white” according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said “Charlie’s not white, he’s Italian!”) But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists — usually three or four of them — would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts. And in the tradition of the Ink Spots’ “top and bottom”, these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal — though the bass singer wouldn’t speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name “doo wop”, which was only applied later, comes from — from the singer singing things like this: [excerpt “Count Every Star”, by the Ravens] That’s the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We’re not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties — and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more. And The Robins were another of these “bird groups”. They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis — “My Baby Done Told Me”: [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds “My Baby Done Told Me”] However, they didn’t like the name, and soon settled on the Robins. The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, “Around About Midnight”, was a remake of Roy Brown’s earlier “Long About Midnight”, and it’s really rather good. Take a listen: [“Around About Midnight”] A quick note there — that’s noted as their first single on some discographies I’ve seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren’t released until a few months after they were recorded. It’s definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though. That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we’ve touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I’m sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins — and Esther Mae Washington — would all go on to another label, Savoy. Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he’s another one we’ll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he’d been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he’d taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs. He’d always had a love of music — he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager — and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered — Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren’t certain that they could use him, but they’d give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA. Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer — he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing “The Honeydripper”. But he still didn’t actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn’t have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn’t do wonderfully (for reasons we’ll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records. Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker and “Open the Door, Richard” by Jack McVea: [excerpt: “Open the Door, Richard”] That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton’s band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others — six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947. But the problem with “Open the Door, Richard” was that it was actually too successful — the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn’t, Bass had to find another label to work with. Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music. And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* — Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis’ band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact — the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he’d triple the royalty rate after Otis’ first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky’s promises, this proved to be false. When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn’t get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute — twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like “Open the Door Richard”, based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita — Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines. [excerpt “Double Crossin’ Blues”] Those lines “How come you ain’t in the forest?” “I’m a lady”, “they got lady bears out there!” take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that “lady bear” was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman. Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass “I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid’s expenses — lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted ‘Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?’ He wouldn’t give me the five bucks”. Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song’s name, which is where the title “Double Crossing Blues” comes from. Although as Bass said “Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it.” Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass’ time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther’s stage name was decided upon — Lubinsky said to Otis “you need a stage name for that girl,” to which Otis replied “which girl? Little Esther?” and Lubinsky said “that’s perfect!” And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon. The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth But the record’s success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people “who hummed behind Little Esther”. They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis’ future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused. The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we’ll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well — “Mistrustin’ Blues”, “Deceivin’ Blues”, “Dreamin’ Blues”, “Wedding Boogie”, “Rockin’ Blues”… Otis also had a 1951 hit with “All Nite Long”, which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads: [excerpt “All Nite Long”: Johnny Otis] We’ll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we’ll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including “Double Crossin’ Blues”) going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future. She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass — not that Bass didn’t have them (and not necessarily that he did, either — I don’t know) — but that he didn’t mix his business and personal lives. He didn’t hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him. So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass’ wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row. Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy. Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren’t as successful as the work they’d done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin. She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we’ll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips. Most impressive of these was “Home is Where the Hatred is”, a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972: [excerpt “Home is Where the Hatred is”: Esther Phillips] That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive — and to be fair, that’s one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it’s possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn’t deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right — she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance. She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.

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Succotash Clips Epi183: Decoratin' with Festive Clippage

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2018 55:01

Saluton, estas mi Tyson Saner, your host for this early December holiday season edition of Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast, and have I got clips for you! (As I'm typing this I'm noticing that "have I got clips for you" feels like a question but if I were to put a question mark at the end of that sentence it feels…well, just wrong. I understand it's a rhetorical question but I never really stopped to think about what it looks like on paper or, in this case, a computer monitor…) Have I got clips for you? Of course I do — this is a clips addition of Succotash. It would be misleading and, frankly, weird if I didn't. I've got clips from: Maltin on Movies, Christal Clear The Podcast, Master Manual, High Content Pod, Unstructured, Shenk, and Weird Adults with Little Esther. We've also got a double dose of raging moderate Will Durst's Burst O' Durst segment. Plus a reading from the website of our still-fairly-new sponsor TrumPoetry.com. Ready? Let's go! CLIPS Master ManualHarmontown's "Dungeon Master to the Stars" Spencer Crittenden and game designer Cohen Edenfield discuss the finer points of leading a role-playing session in this surprisingly accessible advice show. Our clip is from the inaugural episode of Master Manual. In the episode, Spencer and Cohen answer questions and riff up a fresh new take on vampires, while the clip is from a segment called "Alternate Monster Lore". Maltin on Movies This soundcast should perhaps be entitled Maltins On Movies, as legendary film critic Leonard Maltin AND his daughter Jessie are the ultimate movie fans. They love talking about movies, especially with people who share their enthusiasm. In the epi released on November 2nd this year, their guest was comedian Dennis Miller, who is a diehard film buff. In the snippet we feature, Dennis recounts a past encounter with Leonard Maltin seasoned with references, and a discussion of The McCarthy Era of Hollywood History, as well as the beginning of a discussion about character actors. Unstructured Unstructured is a chat with people who are changing the world around them, through teaching, creating, or just living as an example. And when meeting folks, we can learn from each other, be inspired, and maybe even make a new friend, together. OUr clip is from Epi84 of the show, which dropped on October 25th of this year and featured Susan Bennett, who furnished the original voice of Siri, Apple's voice UI. She describes the recording process that when into creating Siri's voice. ShenkComedian Sara Weinshenk interviews comedians, musicians & artists living in LA. Topics include food, fashion, cannabis & comedy. The clip we're featuring comes from the episode entitled, "Mango Juul Pods, Snail Essence & Feet Pics W/ Comedian Brandon Wardell", from this past November. Sara and Brandon yack about fashion and speculate on life as a gamer. Weird Adults with Little Esther"Little Esther" Povitsky finds out what makes her fellow comedian friends both weird and adult with an irreplaceable quirk and charm not found anywhere else. This show seems to have largely gone away but it popped back on the radar last March following a live edition performed as part of the San Francisco Sketchfest. Esther was joined by Nick Wiger of Doughboys soundcast fame where they mostly talked about food. In the clip, the host mentions she has jaw pain and that leads to a conversation about strange interactions with a few medical professionals. Christal Clear The PodcastSeeking clarity in life, to make the most of my life. "Christal Clear" is my affirmation. Our clip comes from the "Be My Guest" episode from last October, where host Christal discusses the adjustments one makes when one receives feedback on their shows and guest Jae (who has been running the Pod Dealer Network for almost a year as of this recording) explores the anxieties of being the sole host of a show. High Content Hosted by Iraj Lopez and Joe Buratti, High Content had its first live episode last month at the Savage Henry Comedy Club in Eureka, California. After local comedians Jessica Grant and Nando Molina gave interviews the hosts of HiC unexpectedly invited me up on stage for a segment. Here is a bit that I clipped off for you from the "Would You Rather" portion of the interview. And there you have it... or rather here you had it... "it" being another "Succotash The Comedy Soundcast Soundcast" clips edition... ...that is still underway now that I think about it so (ahem) here you are having it, another edition of "Succotash The Comedy Soundcast Soundcast". Thank you for listening, thank you for retweeting us when you see our links ,and thank you for visiting www.succotashshow.com, clicking the Amazon banner right near the top of the page, and shopping as you normally would because when you do that, Amazon cuts us a small portion of that which goes to our server costs. (If you haven't done that before It's perfectly fine because we love you anyway…) If you are listening…we also love those who don't listen as long as they are also reasonably good people…and by "We" I mean "Me". I need to clarify that because I don't wish to speak on behalf of other people when it pertains to love. It's not a healthy habit to get into…and as an expectant father I need to maintain my health in as many areas as I can. So anyway, thank you for listening and if you like us a little you might tell your friends about us...which is one of the best ways of helping us out, and what we mean when we gently urge you to (Please) Pass the Succotash… — Tyson Saner

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Little Esther, Our Brand Ambassador

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2018 58:47

LITTLE ESTHER joins The Boys again to become the show's brand ambassador.This episode is sponsored by Mack Weldon ( www.mackweldon.com code: THE BOYS) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( www.NHTSA.gov ).

1.21 gigawatts - 1950 Episode 88

1.21 gigawatts – BFF.fm

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2018

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Boogie chillen #2 by John Lee Hooker on Blues brother (Ace records) 3′14″ Rollin' stone by Muddy Waters on The Chess Box (Geffen) 6′49″ Hard luck blues by Roy Brown on Roy Brown, Hurry hurry babe (Wnts) 9′10″ C.C. rider by Ray Charles on All that jazz (Jube pops) 12′24″ Please send me someone to love by Percy Mayfield on Poet of the blues (Specialty records) 15′17″ Tennesse Waltz by Patti Page on Tennesse Waltz (Sun) 18′16″ My son calls another man daddy by Hank Williams on The Lost Highway (All American Tunes) 20′56″ Hymne à l'amour by Édith Piaf on The voice of the sparrow (EMI) 26′23″ Huckle up baby by John Lee Hooker on Blues brother (Ace Records) 28′31″ Double Crossin the Blues by Little Esther on I Paid My Dues (Proper) 33′07″ Everyday I have the blues by Lowell Fulson on The Best Of (Goldenlane Records) 35′41″ Patricia by Perry Como on The Essential Perry Como (Sony Music) 38′42″ Pink Champagne by Joe Liggins on Specialty profiles (Concord) 41′10″ I almost lost my mind by Ivory Joe Hunter on The Blues Effect (Reloaded music) 45′49″ Someone to watch over me by Ella Fitzgerald on Ella sings Gershwin (Verve) 47′49″ September in the rain by George Shearing on September in the rain (Verve) 51′03″ I'll keep loving you by Bud Powell on Piano (UMG) 55′04″ The Fat Man by Fats Domino on Greatest hits (Capitol records) 57′40″ Cupid boogie by Esther Philips on Lookin' for a man (Entertain me) Check out the full archives on the website.

Train to Nowhere 115 – Het Tempo Team

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2018 63:18

Het muzikaal thema is Tempo Team. Je hoort Little Esther, Dusty Springfield, Doc Martin en In Memoriam Nokie Edwards van The Ventures.

Train to Nowehere 102 – Covers (beter dan het origineel!)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2018 59:16

Thema vandaag is Covers (Beter dan het origineel…) Muziek van Patti Smith, Little Esther, I Corvi & Dolly Parton en Memphis Meets The Beatles.

Arizona Vibes (Featuring Little Esther)

Plz Advise

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2017 84:11

NEW SHOOOOOOW! This week, comedian/actor/podcaster Esther Povitsky aka Little Esther (twitter.com/littleesther) drops by the show to chat with Molls (twitter.com/molls) about her favorite beauty YouTubers, why no one gets the internet right in movies and more. Then these two dynamic women tackle your calls about friends who hook up with dudes that fat shame you, tips for starting a new website, helping a loved one deal with an alcoholic parent, and more. We pretty much cover it all in this episode, folks! ****Give us a call. We'd love to hear from you for any advice, if you wanna say what's up, or if you want us to roast you. Hit us up at (323) 450-7408 or send us a voice note or letter at askplzadvise [at] gmail dot com.**** See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Episode 56: Esther the Friendly Ghost

TigerBelly

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2016 77:43

Little Esther burns a can of beans. Bobo discovers Reddit. Khaly catches a predator. Gilbert crushes on gymnast feet. We talk HD quality vids, trigger warnings, and tragedy porn. Recorded August 29, 2016 Music by Bobby Lee Instagram: @tigerbelly Twitter: @thetigerbelly YouTube.com/tigerbelly Facebook: thetigerbelly www.thetigerbelly.com

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Ep. 36 - Jay Weingarten

Synchronicity with Noah Lampert

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2016 78:39

Jay Weingarten is my most excellent guest this week. Jay is a comedian. Jay is funny. Jay is cool. Jay is nice. Find out more about Jay here. Listen to Jay's comedy "album" "Big Laughs" here. Check out Jay's episode of Weird Adults with Little Esther here. This week's book giveaway is "Mind Beyond Death" by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Want a chance to get a book every week forever? Join the Synchronicity Community today and you'll get that chance. Be sure to subscribe to Synchronicity on iTunes. Topics Discussed Jay's Comedy Flying Fish Expressing Yourself via Comedy Power Point as a comedic tool The importance of keeping an open mind Being authentic in life and comedy The importance of loving everything around you Jay's chihuahua "The Baby" Karma and Reincarnation Multidimensional realities - Simultaneous other lives Tim Heidecker and Vic Berger 2 Wet Crew Laughing Mushrooms L.A Comedy Scene Jay's Unique Path Using Life as a Path Jazz man! The internet being awesome Reducing Fear, Increasing Love

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Ski Trips, Mean Girls and Special Guest Little Esther

Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2016 114:47

Little Esther joins us while Greg becomes one with the sea this week for an episode in which we determine the worst age and discuss who was a mean girl and who was tormented by mean girls. We also chatted about Daniel and my recent ski trip, the burden of being God's gift to the slopes, Southern Utah accents, the road trip from hell, tampon strings, super uncomfortable layers, Jeff waking up with a bug up his butt and so much more. Plus we did a round of just me or everyone and talked about this week's adoptable dog Cameron who's waiting for you at the Downey Shelter.

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Ep. 27 - MIKE STOLLER ("Hound Dog")

Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2016 87:05

Mike Stoller has written more than 60 songs that have appeared on the Billboard charts, including the #1 hits “Hound Dog,” “Kansas City,” “Yakety Yak,” “Searchin’,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Poison Ivy,” “Stand By Me,” “Young Blood,” “Don’t,” and “Ruby, Baby." After Stoller and songwriting partner Jerry Leiber found early R&B success with recordings by Little Esther, Charles Brown, Ray Charles, and Big Mama Thornton, Elvis Presley turned their song "Hound Dog" into a #1 single on the pop, R&B, and country charts in 1956. Elvis went on to record more than 20 Leiber and Stoller titles, including the hits "Love Me," "Loving You," "Jailhouse Rock," "Treat Me Nice," "She's Not You," and "Bossa Nova Baby." Mike and Jerry signed an independent production deal with Atlantic Records in the mid-1950s, where they wrote and produced a series of hits for several artists, including the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby," "Dance With Me," and "On Broadway." Additionally, the pair wrote and produced all the Coasters' singles, including "Young Blood," "Searchin'," "Charlie Brown," "Along Came Jones," and "Poison Ivy." Other highlights from the Leiber and Stoller songbook include "Love Potion No. 9," which was a hit for both the Clovers and the Searchers, and "Is That All There Is," which was a hit for Peggy Lee. Eleven different versions of their song “Stand By Me” appeared on the Billboard charts over the span of 50 years, with the original version by Ben E. King hitting the Top 10 in both 1961 and 1986. Smokey Joe's Cafe, which included 40 Leiber and Stoller songs, opened in 1995 and became the longest running musical revue in Broadway history. Stoller received the prestigious ASCAP Founders Award in 1991, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and is a member of both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Esther "Little Esther" Povitsky

Dom Irrera Live from the Laugh Factory

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2015 48:52

This week on Dom Irrera Live from the Laugh Factory, Dom is joined by comedian Esther "Little Esther" Povitsky.

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Actor/Comedian Esther Povitsky from PARKS AND RECREATION, KEY & PEELE, and THE NEW GIRL!!!

Kahnversations Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2015 60:10

New "Kahnversations" Podcast with Standup Comedian/Actor Esther Povitsky! So many inspiring podcasts out there allow us to hear all about how well-established stars got to where they are today. But those actors are so faaaaaaar away from where so many of us are today! Wouldn’t it be great to hear from the guy who just booked his first pilot? Or the kid finally doing a studio pic after a bunch of low budget indies? Or the woman who’s been a series regular a few times but is only now becoming a name? What about the guy who’s been on a show for years and you know his face but what’shisnameagain? Or that actress who is now a freakin’ showrunner???? How’d THEY do it, right? How did they transition from relative obscurity, bartending and bottle service, to buying that house in the hills? We’re producing “Kahnversations,” a podcast that provides access to THOSE people -- your immediate predecessors -- so that you can learn from them while their battle scars are still fresh. In “Kahnversations,” our own Ryan Bailey interviews some of Lesly Kahn & Company’s working actors, directors, and writers in order to learn how they got started in Hollywood, the challenges and hurdles they faced, and how they overcame the odds. (They also dish out some crazy stories!) Listen in and enjoy as these entertainers speak candidly about their paths, processes, and experiences. You might even hear a bit about how Lesly and the Kahnstitute have influenced and shaped their careers. In this installation of "Kahnversations," Ryan interviews Esther Povitsky. Esther, more commonly known as Little Esther, is a comedian, actor, podcast host, and writer. She is a regular at numerous comedy clubs, has her own podcast, "Weird Adults with Little Esther," and has been seen on Comedy Central's @MIDNIGHT, KEY & PEELE, Adam Devine’s HOUSE PARTY, Brody Steven’s ENJOY IT, PARKS AND RECREATION, and THE NEW GIRL. She was most recently named by Entertainment Weekly and KEY & PEELE as part of their “Ones To Watch” list. Check her out at @littleesther (she’s verified). You can download or subscribe to the podcast for FREE by clicking below. If you like “Kahnversations,” feel free to leave a rating or review on our iTunes page!

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Little Esther

Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2014 80:03

Esther Povitsky stops by this episode of Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend to talk about appealing to the same people as Alison, growing up in Illinois, not drinking, college, relationships, early days of reality TV, Esther with Hot Chicks, Ebola and other fears, meeting her boyfriend, dogs, comedy, ballet, how she met Deathsquad and so much more. We also did a round of Just Me Or Everyone

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Will Comedian Little Esther Be Our New Friend?

All New Friends

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2014 66:26

This week we hear how Tatti got VIP airport treatment thanks to a senior citizen and what happened when Katie came face to face with a SyFy Face Off contestant. Their suprise guest is comedian/actress Esther Povitsky (@littleesther) who comes through with good Britney Jean Spears knowledge and some solid dating and beauty advice. She's dangerously funny but will she be an all new friend? Follow Esther on TWITTER:@littleesther to find out where/when she's performing. Check out her podcast Weird Adults with Little Esther & her MTV series Esther With Hot Chicks too

KILL TONY #53

KILL TONY

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2014 91:45

Little Esther, Benji Aflalo, Tony Hinchcliffe, Sara Weinshenk, Kimberly Congdon, Iron Jesus, Brian Redban - Date: 06/02/2014 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Little Esther, Our Close Friend