Podcasts about Lowell Fulson

Today's show features music performed by Virginia Liston, Lowell Fulson, and Ray Charles

It's time for another journey through the heart and soul of the blues on Blues is the Truth, hosted by Ian McHugh. This week's episode delivers a fresh and fiery mix of timeless legends and modern masters, with all the regular features you love—plus a spotlight on the inimitable Blues Driver section presented by Paul Michal, bringing you high-octane blues every week. On the playlist this time around: the raw power of Albert King, the soulful picking of Muireann Bradley, the spiritual swagger of Reverend Freakchild, and the deep London groove of Errol Linton. We've also got Joe Bonamassa delivering his signature style, Brooks Williams with his smooth Americana-blues blend, and Andrea De Luca holding down the contemporary Italian blues scene. Bob Stroger and The Headcutters give us a taste of classic Chicago tones, while Lachy Doley shakes the room with his powerhouse organ work. There's slide-driven fire from Dave Arcari, timeless licks from T-Bone Walker, and some British humour and grit from The British Bluescasting Corporation. Jimmie Rogers and Lowell Fulson roll back the years, David M'ore brings some serious edge, Cathy Lemons adds smoky soul, and Jerron Paxton continues to charm with his rootsy authenticity. Bywater Call brings soaring vocals and searing guitar, Ian McHugh gets in on the act himself, Samantha Fish turns it up as only she can, and Amy Helm brings soulful serenity. Rounding things out are Travellin' Blue and the always electric Ruzz Guitar's Blues Revue. Whether you're a blues purist or a curious newcomer, this episode has something to lift your spirit and stir your soul. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and review the podcast wherever you listen. Your support keeps the blues alive and well!

Doug MacLeod performs live at the 2024 Blues Music Awards on Edition 681 of Blues Radio International, with Vanessa Collier, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Lowell Fulson, Clarence Gatemouth Brown and Arlen Roth and Detroit Junior.Photograph by Laura Carbone.Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net

The latest episode of Blues is the Truth is here, and normal service resumes with two hours of phenomenal blues that will keep your soul singing and your feet tapping. Hosted by the ever-passionate and knowledgeable Ian McHugh, this week's show is packed with incredible music, the usual fan-favorite features, and a lineup of artists that truly defines the spirit of the blues. This episode shines a spotlight on the brilliant Tomislav Goluban and the powerhouse sounds of Crooked Eye Tommy, both delivering unforgettable performances that will leave you hitting replay. Alongside them, you'll hear classics and contemporary gems from legends like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy, and the deep grooves of Little Walter, Peter Green, and Otis Spann. Etta James brings her unparalleled vocal power, while Mud Morganfield, Tim Aves and Wolfpack, and the soulful Colin James remind us why blues endures. The raw energy of Tail Dragger, Cesar Crespo and the Pinball's Blues Party, and Wailin' Walker will keep you on the edge of your seat, while Bob Margolin and Bob Coritore showcase their collaborative genius. With contributions from Zoe Schwarz Blue Commotion, Larry Griffith, Jeff Pitchell, Kai Strauss, and even blues royalty BB King and Lowell Fulson, this week's lineup spans decades of brilliance. And, of course, there's a special place for Eric Clapton, whose timeless artistry remains an inspiration. Make sure you don't miss this blues-packed episode! Listen now and join Ian McHugh on this musical journey. And if you love what you hear, don't forget to like, share, subscribe, and review on your podcast platform of choice. Spread the word and help keep the blues alive!

Walter has been a drummer for  40 years with some of the most influential artists ever! Including: The Dynatones, Linn County, Big Joe Turner,Lowell Fulson,Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, Mary Wells,Luther Tucker, Tim Hardin, Sir Mack Rice of The Falcons, Lightning Hopkins, Mark Naftlin, Big Jack Reynolds, Bobo Jenkins, Featured drummer on over 25 LP's and numerous singles. Warner Bros., RCA, Rhino, Rounder, Blue Suit, Red Lighting, Solid Smoke, Westside, Bad Daddy,...

In the latest edition of Blues is the Truth, hosted by the always engaging Ian McHugh, we bring you another electrifying mix of blues that's sure to keep your toes tapping and your heart singing. As always, the show features beloved segments like Blues Driver, Title Track Tango, and The Song Remains the Same, offering unique takes on the genre we love. This week's lineup includes incredible music from Freddie King, The Terraplanes Blues Band, ZZ Top, Jimi Barbiani, Jerron Paxton, Corey Harris, Lowell Fulson, Leavin' Trunk, Joanne Shaw Taylor, Ian Siegal meets Johnny Mastro, Ori Naftali Band, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Ruthless Blues, Robert Hokum and Devil Drives, Breezy Rodio, The Hitman Blues Band, Hat Fitz and Cara Robinson, Larkin Poe, Albert Castiglia, Eva Carboni, Bjorn Peter Thissel, Mandolin Jack, and Buddy Guy. Don't miss a beat – listen now and immerse yourself in the sounds of legends and rising stars alike. Subscribe, share, rate, and review to help us keep spreading the blues love and growing the community!

Welcome to another electrifying episode of "Blues is the Truth," the podcast that brings you the very best in blues music from legends and rising stars alike. Hosted by the ever-passionate blues aficionado, Ian McHugh, this episode promises a rich tapestry of soulful tunes, insightful commentary, and regular features that fans have come to love. In this episode, we are dedicating a special segment to Paul Robigo, a beloved figure in the blues community whose influence and love for the genre continue to inspire us all. This week's lineup is a spectacular mix of artists who embody the spirit of the blues. Get ready to enjoy tracks from the iconic Alman Brothers Band and the legendary Duke Robillard. We're turning up the heat with Elles Bailey and experiencing the classic rock blend of T-Rex. Delve into the soulful sounds of Dove and Boweevil and vibe to the unique style of John Mayer. The Milk Men will bring their energetic beats, while Robert Hokum and Blues is Truth will keep the traditional blues alive. The Caddilac Kings and Gary Moore will captivate you with their powerful performances. We'll feature the dynamic Paul Michael Band, the eclectic David Sinclair 4, and the distinct fusion of Alabama 3. Don't miss the raw energy of The Fabulous Thunderbirds and the innovative sounds of Christopher Wyze and the Tellers. The Fran McGillivray Band and Mike Brookfield add their exceptional talents to the mix. Expect a stirring performance from the Trevor B Power Band, the timeless artistry of Lowell Fulson, and the masterful tunes of Andres Roots. Doug Duffey and BADD will get you grooving, and Popa Chubby will deliver his trademark grit. Finally, Thorbjørn Risager and Black Tornado will blow you away with their powerful sound, and we'll wrap up with the legendary Eric Clapton. Join Ian McHugh as he guides you through this rich blues journey, sharing interesting stories, exclusive insights, and much more. Tune in and let the blues take over!

Get ready for an unforgettable episode of "Blues is the Truth," hosted by the passionate and knowledgeable Ian McHugh. This latest edition not only brings you the finest in blues music but also includes a special dedication to Paul Robigo. In this episode, you'll enjoy all your favorite regular features that have become staples of the show: "Blues Driver," where Paul Michael introduces a timeless blues track; "The Song Remains the Same," which explores different versions of classic blues songs; and "Title Track Tango," highlighting standout title tracks from various albums. The musical lineup is truly stellar, featuring legendary artists and contemporary talents alike. You'll hear from the iconic Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, the dynamic duo of BB King and Eric Clapton, and the powerful Robin Bibi Big Band. Elles Bailey's soulful voice and Al Green's timeless sound will captivate you, while Beaux Gris Gris and The Guv'nors bring their unique styles to the mix. Rory Block's mastery and The Rigmarollers' energetic performances promise to keep you hooked. Additional highlights include tracks from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Blind Faith, as well as performances by Lowell Fulson, Jerry Portnoy and the Streamliners, and The Cinelli Brothers. Experience the profound blues of The Milk Men, Eddie Cotton, Elvin Bishop, Dave Weld and the Imperial Flames, and Colin James. The episode also pays homage to blues legends like Leadbelly and showcases the dynamic sounds of Delaney and Bonnie, Junior and the Igniters, Charles Wilson, and the Michael Messer Band. Tune in to this edition of "Blues is the Truth" for an enriching journey through the heart of blues music, celebrating both the legends and the rising stars of the genre.

Air Week: May 13-19, 2024 Lowell Fulson This week, the “Juke In The Back” spotlights Lowell Fulson, one of the blues' most versatile and vastly underrated talents. In the late 1940s, Fulson stormed the charts with his first hit “Three O'Clock Blues,” a song that B.B. King would take to the top of the charts […]

Grammy Nominee, Blues Award Winner, Author, Harp Man Mark Hummel had a banner year in 2014. Grammy Nominated for his Remembering Little Walter CD he produced and performed on, Mark also won Best Blues CD and Best Traditional Blues CD at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis, TN. Mark's The Hustle Is Really On climbed to #2 and stayed in the top five for four months on the Living Blues Radio Charts. Hummel's book "BIG ROAD BLUES:12 Bars on I-80" garnered rave reviews and was nominated for best Independent Book release. Mark Hummel started playing harmonica in 1970 and is considered one of the premier blues harmonica players of his generation. Thanks to over thirty recordings since 1985, including the Grammy nominated 2013 release Blind Pig recording Remembering Little Walter (part of the Blues Harmonica Blowout CD series). Mark Hummel's Blues Harmonica Blowout™ started in 1991 and have featured every major legend (Mayall, Musselwhite, Cotton, etc.) on blues harp as well as almost every player of note on the instrument - a who's who of players. Hummel is a road warrior - a true Blues Survivor. Along the way, he has crafted his own trademark harmonica sound - a subtle combination of tone, phrasing and attack combined with a strong sense of swing. Mark has been with Electro Fi Records since 2000, releasing five CDs. Thanks to Mark's earlier albums, constant touring and appearances at the major blues festivals, he's firmly established his solid reputation around the US and Europe. Born in New Haven, CT but raised in Los Angeles. Mark moved to Berkeley at age 18 to pursue a career in blues music, where he felt the music was taken more seriously. Mark started the Blues Survivors in 1977 with Mississippi Johnny Waters. By 1984 Hummel began a life of non- stop touring of the US, Canada and overseas, which he still continues at least 130-150 days out of each year. Hummel has toured or recorded with blues legends Charles Brown, Charlie Musselwhite, Lowell Fulson, Billy Boy Arnold, Carey Bell, Lazy Lester, Brownie McGhee, Eddie Taylor, Luther Tucker and Jimmy Rogers. www.markhummel.com

Sintonía: "I Sayed That" - Slim Willis Band"Ride Daddy Ride" - Fats Noel; "I Want A Bowlegged Woman" - Bull Moose Jackson; "It Ain´t The Meat, It´s The Motion" - The Swallows; "Poon Tang" - The Treniers; "(It Mus Be Jelly ´Cos You Know) Jam Don´t Shake" - Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon; "I Had To Give Up Gym" - The Hokum Boys; "Mule Get Up In The Alley" - Cannon´s Jug Stompers; "Let Me Ride In Your Little Automobile" - Lowell Fulson; "Move Your Hand Baby" - Crown Prince Waterford; "Sit Right On It" - Johnny Temple; "She Kept On Sittin´ On It All The Time" - Wynonie Harris; "Hucklebuck Baby" - Jimmy Preston; "You Put It In, I´ll Take It Out" - Papa Charlie Jackson; "Sweet Honey Hole" - Blind Boy Fuller; "Doodle Hole" - Charley Lincoln; "Let Me Roll Your Lemon" - Bo CarterTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "Ride Daddy Ride: Vintage Songs About Sex 1927-1953" (Buzzola, 2005)Escuchar audio

Estrin was born in San Francisco, California in 1949, and fell in love with blues after his sister presented him with Ray Charles' The Genius Sings The Blues when he was 12. He began playing harmonica at age 15, and by age 18 was beginning to work professionally. Early in his career he played with Lowell Fulson, Z.Z. Hill, Travis Phillips, and Fillmore Slim. Estrin names Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter Jacobs and Baby Boy Warren as key inspirations.  He played with and was mentored by Rodger Collins (whose 45rpm recordings include "She's Looking Good" and "Foxy Girls" In Oakland). Estrin moved to Chicago when he was 19 and worked with bluesmen Sam Lay, Johnny Littlejohn, Eddie Taylor and Johnny Young.  He met and sat in with Muddy Waters at the Sutherland Hotel in Chicago. He told the Sacramento Bee, "Muddy started shaking his finger in my face and said, ‘You outta sight, boy! You play like a man! I know that sound. That's my sound.'" Muddy tried to hire Estrin as a sideman but Estrin did not receive the phone call, and moved back to the Bay Area. He met guitarist Charlie Baty in 1973 and they created Little Charlie & the Nightcats based in Sacramento, California. Estrin fronted Little Charlie & the Nightcats for 30 years and performed around the world. They were nominated four times for the Blues Music Award for Band of the Year. In 2008, Baty retired from touring. Guitarist Kid Andersen joined Estrin with previous band members Hansen and Farrell and they formed Rick Estrin & The Nightcats that same year.   wwwmarkhummel.com www.patreon.com/markhummel

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Frank L. GoldwasserFormerly known in blues circles as “Paris Slim”, Franck L. Goldwasser was born and raised in Paris, France in the 1960's and studied fine arts before moving to Oakland, California in 1983. A self-taught guitarist and vocalist, Goldwasser began studying the recordings of Elmore James, B.B. King and T- Bone Walker at age 16. In 1978, Goldwasser's first public appearance finds him jamming with the renowned harmonica player Sugar Blue (of Rolling Stones' "Miss You" fame), then a Paris resident. Gaining experience while sitting-in with with visiting American bluesmen such as Luther Allison, George Smith, Jimmy Dawkins and Phillip Walker, Goldwasser lands his first professional gigs as backup guitarist for his idol Texas-bred California bluesman Sonny Rhodes in Paris and Reims. Following Rhodes' invitation to come to California, the Frenchman spends three months in Oakland and Los Angeles in 1981, meeting and jamming with Big Mama Thornton, Smokey Wilson, Lowell Fulson, Frankie Lee, Mark Naftalin, Buddy Ace, Troyce Key and J.J. Malone, Cool Papa and Mark Hummel, while documenting the West Coast blues scene for the French music magazine Soul Bag. Having moved permanently to the San Francisco Bay Area in June 1983 , Franck Goldwasser immerses himself in the then-vibrant East Bay blues scene, quickly landing a job in singer-guitarist Troyce Key's band. While gigging every weekend at the famed Eli Mile High club, he hones his skills working alongside West Coast blues titans Percy Mayfield, Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin, as well as Bay Area blues luminaries Omar “The Magnificient” Shariff (formerly Dave Alexander), Johnny Heartsman, Ron Thompson and Elvin Bishop.

Get ready for another electrifying episode of Blues is the Truth with your host, the legendary Ian McHugh! In this latest installment, we've lined up an incredible array of blues legends, rising stars, and timeless classics to keep you grooving from start to finish. Prepare to be blown away by the mesmerizing blues journey curated by Paul Michael in the much-awaited Blues Driver segment. Paul Michael's impeccable taste and keen ear for the blues will introduce you to the finest selection of soul-stirring tunes that will leave you wanting more. But that's not all! The spotlight shines brightly on a stellar lineup of blues icons, including the incomparable Paul Weller, the soulful Elles Bailey, and the powerful Willy Mae Thornton. And we've got even more blues greatness in store for you with Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Wily Bo Walker, Duke Robillard All Star Band, and Free, each delivering their distinctive sounds and gripping performances. Join us on a captivating musical journey as we also showcase the exceptional talents of Pistol Pete Wearn, Greig Taylor Band, Guitar Jr, and Bee Bee Queen, who will captivate your senses with their remarkable artistry. Not to be missed are the unforgettable contributions from Monster Mike Welch, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Mick Pini, and Audio 54, Voodoo Ramble, Eric Johanson, Dom Martin, Al Lerman, and Guy King, each adding their unique flair to the blues landscape. And if that's not enough to enthrall you, we've got timeless classics from Lowell Fulson, Kirris Riviere and the Delta du Bruit, Nick Moss Band feat Dennis Gruenling, Micke Bjorklof and Blue Strip, Jimmy Regal and the Royals, and Rosies Smokehouse Deluxe, along with the captivating sounds of Colin James. So mark your calendars, clear your schedules, and get ready to immerse yourself in the captivating world of blues music with Ian McHugh on Blues is the Truth. Whether you're a devoted blues aficionado or a newcomer to the genre, this episode promises to be a soul-stirring experience that will leave you craving for more. Tune in and let the blues take you on an unforgettable ride!

Today's show features music performed by Louis Jordan and Lowell Fulson

It's Christmas Eve, babe... so it's time for the 2022 Christmas special of Blues is the Truth... packed form start to finish with amazing Christmas tunes from some of the greatest artists in the blues. This week's show features Jimmie Bratcher, Bessie Smith, BB King, Fran McGilivray Band, Lawrence Lebo, Albert King, Eric Clapton, Victor Wainwright, Anson Fundeburgh, Buddy Guy, Michelle D'Amour, Earl King, Duke Robillard, Mabel Scott, Charles Brown, Eddie C Campbell, Laura Cheadle, Bobby Gentilo, Peter Vekestra and Blues Train, Floyd Dixon, Roy Milton, Lowell Fulson, Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials, Carla Thomas, John Verity Band, Louis Jordan, Deb Rider, Tomislav Goluban, Jim Koeppel and Ray Charles. Hit play for two hours of amazing blues! Merry Christmas to all the listeners and please don't forget to like share and subscribe... and if you like leave a little review too. It really helps grow the show and bring more folks to this amazing music. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/bluesisthetruth

Another packed edition of Blues is the Truth is now ready to stream, featuring new music, classics and more it's packed from start to finish with the very best of the blues. This week's show features songs from Lowell Fulson, Big Joe Shelton, William Bell, Lil' Red and the Rooster, Catfish, Sunjay, Georgia Van Etten, Chris Duarte, James Oliver, Bruce Katz Joe Louis Walker and Giles Robson, Guy King, Billy Flynn, BB King Blues Band, Anna Davis and the Sinnermen, Aynsley Lister, Reese Wynans, Sonny Landreth, Guy Verlinde and the Artisans of Solace, Shout Sister Shout, Samantha Fish, Mark Harrison, Joyann Parker, John Primer, Harry Hmura, Oliver Darling and Johnny Winter. You can get in touch with the show by joining our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/bluesisthetruth or via email using bluesisthetruthATgmail.com. Don't forget to like review and share the show on your podcast platform of choice!

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Jason Lee McKinney Band  | Promises  | One Last Thing  |  | Stacy Jones  | Ballad of George Stinney  | World On Fire  |  | Delbert McClinton  | Move It On Over  | Outdated Emotion  |  | Jose Ramirez  | After All This Time  | Major League Blues  |  | Mudlow  | Three Crows In A Row  | Bad Turn  |   |  | Wildmen Bluesband  | Got To Move  | Wildmen Blues Band | The Reverend Shawn Amos  | Mean As You  | Songs And Stories From The Family Tree (1997-2022) | Lowell Fulson with Jeff Dale  | Stoop Down Baby  | Lowell Fulson Live  |  | Anthony Geraci  | The Blues Called My Name  | Blues Called My Name | Kat Riggins  | Sinkin' Low  |   Progeny  |   |  | Big DooWopper  | Didn't It Rain  | Feel The Spirit, Tribute to Mahalia  | Howlin' Wolf  | Houserockin' Boogie  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 7 1951 | Mike Zito & Friends  | Let It Rock  | Rock 'N' Roll; A Tribute To Chuck Berry | Mike Brookfield  | Dunkirk Spirit  | Built To Last  |  | Mickey Jupp  | Mickey Jupp- Bad News Can Travel Slow  | Album sampler  | 

Pacific St Blues & AmericanaPlaylist: January 2, 2022This month we'll rebroadcast interviews with Kris Lager, Hector Anchondo, Matt Cox, and Matt Whipkey. (These segments are available on previously posted podcast shows and thus are not included on this Podcast.) We'll also explore some of the early independent RnB and Blues labels that gave rise to early rock and roll. This week we listen to music from the Los Angeles-based Swing Time Records. Uniquely, this label was owned and operated by African-American impresario Jack Lauderdale.Also, Omaha Magazine did an article to commemorate the 31st Anniversary of  Pacific St Blues and Americana: Omaha Magazine. 1. Keb Mo (feat: Old Crow Medicine Show) / Medicine Man2. Matt Whipkey / Quarantine Age Dream 3. BB King / Jump With Your Baby4. Louis Jordan / Ain't That Just Like a Woman 5. Joann Shaw Taylor (feat Joe Bonamassa) / Don't Go Away Mad6. Samantha Fish / All Ice, No Whiskey7. Tommy Castro / I Caught a Break 8. Carolyn Wonderland / On My Feet Again 9. Aretha Franklin / Angel10. Laura Nyro / Poverty Train 11. Bettye Lavette / Real, Real Gone12. Nina Simone / Wild is the Wind13. Floyd Dixon / Mississippi Blues14. Jimmy Witherspoon / In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down 15. The Maxim Trio w/ Ray Charles / You'll Never Miss the Water16. Pete Johnson Orchestra / Rocket Boogie 88 17. Percy Mayfield / Baby You're a Square18. Joe Swift with Johnny Otis / Alligator Meat 19. Ray Charles / Lonely Boy 20. Lowell Fulson feat Lloyd Glen 88 / Everyday I Have the Blues 21/22/23/24 Kris Lager, Blues Lover Interview (please see previously posted podcast) 25. Bonnie Raitt / Luck of the Draw26. Los Lonely Boys / Evil Ways 27. Neil Young / Cortex the Killer 28. Julie Peel / I Believe in You29. Joe Bonamassa /Mountain Time 30. Joe Bonamassa / A Conversation with Alice 31. Joe Bonamassa / The Heart that Never Waits

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |  | Johnny Ray Jones  | Way Down South  | Way Down South  |   |  | Dave Specter  | Specters Walk  | Six String Soul~30 Years On Delmark DISK 1 | Walter Parks and the Unlawful Assembly  | Follow the Drinking Gourd | Unlawful Assembly  |   |  | Dave Hunt  | Swamp Snake Moan  | Behind The Moon  |   |  | Bernard Allison  | Highs And Lows  | Highs and Lows  |   |  | Memphissippi Sounds  | Groove with Me  | Memphissippi  |   |  | John Mayall  | I'm As Good As Gone  | Singles November 2020  |  | Tommy Gunn  | Richard  | Singles November 2020  |  | Elly Wininger  | January 6th (Radio Edit)  |   |  | Clare Free  | I'll Never Love Again  | Single: I'll Never Love Again  |  | Julian Piper  | Write Me A Few Lines  | Singles (September 2021)  |  | Elles Bailey  | Cheats And Liars  | Singles (September 2021)  |  | Little G Weevil  | Casey Jones  | Live Acoustic Session  |  | Elly Wininger  | Let That Liar Alone  | The Blues Never End  |  | Donna Herula  | Bang At The Door  | Bang At The Door  |   |  | Veronica Lewis  | Put Your Wig On Mama  | You Ain't Unlucky  |   |  | Starlite Campbell Band  | Ride On Cowboy -  | Language of Curiosity  |  | Mississippi McDonald  | Keep Your Hands Out Of My Pocket  | Do Right, Say Right  |   |  | Mark Harrison  | Foxchase  | The Road to Liberty Pt2  |  | Bernie Marsden  | Back in the USA  | CHESS  |   |   |  | Lowell Fulson with Jeff Dale  | Going To Chicago Blues  | Lowell Fulson Live  |   |  | Dion  | I Got My Eyes On You Baby feat. Marcia Ball & Jimmy Vivino  | Stomping Ground  |   |  | Moonshine Society  | Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition)  |  | Jimmie Vaughan  | Texas Flood  | The Jimmy Vaughan Story  |  | The Two Charlies  | Happy New Year Blues  | Charley Jordan Vol 3 (1935-1937)

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.

 | Jessie Lee & The Alchemists  | Let It Shine  | Let it Shine  |  | Cathy Ponton King  | Tattoo On My Heart  | The Crux  | Codimac Music | Elias Bernet Band  | Monkey Juice  | Better Off With The Blues | Doyle Bramhall with Jimmie Vaughan  | Take Your Time Son  | The Jimmy Vaughan Story | Eric Gales  | Put That Back  | Crown  |   |  | Micke Bjorklof  | It's Been So Long  | Whole Nutha Thang  |  | Memphis Slim  | How Long Blues (Carr) [from Chicago Bluesmasters Vol 1]  | Memphis Slim and the Honky-Tonk Sound  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | You Treat Po Lightnin' Wrong  | Get Off My Toe  |  | Diane Durrett & Soul Suga  | Put A Lid On It  | Put A Lid On It  |  | Lady A  | Miss Beula Mae  | Satisfyin'   |  | The Pilgrim Harmonizers  | Witness There Too  | Bea & Baby Records Definitive Collection CD4  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Take Me to the Water  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Lowell Fulson with Jeff Dale  | Do You Feel It (Instrumental)  | Lowell Fulson Live  |  | ElectroBluesSociety feat Boo Boo Davis  | Lowdown Dirty Blues  | Low Down Dirty Blues | Tony Holiday  | Recipe For Love Featuring Bobby Rush  | Porch Sessions Vol2  |  | Memphissippi Sounds  | Saturday Morning  | Memphissippi  |  | Jackie Brenston  | Rocket 88  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 7 1951 | Mike Zito & Friends  | Reelin' And Rockin'  | Rock 'N' Roll; A Tribute To Chuck Berry | Joe Nolan  | Mountain  | Joe Nolan - Scrapper | Zac Harmon  | Ashes To The Wind  | Long As I Got My Guitar  | Catfood Records | Ilana Katz Katz  | Woman, Play the Blues  | In My Mind  |  | Wentus Blues Band  | My Home  | From The Barrell  |  | Samantha Fish  | Imaginary War  | Faster  |   |  | Clare Free  | I'll Never Love Again  | Single  |   |  | Dave Specter  | Got to Find A Way  | Six String Soul~30 Years on Delmark Disk2 | Memphissippi Sounds  | Crossroads  | Memphissippi  | 

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Jon Shain & FJ Ventre  | 2020 Blues  | Jon Shain & FJ Ventre | Elly Wininger  | January 6th (Radio Edit)  | single  |   |  | Teresa James & The Rhythm Tramps  | Rise Together  | Rose Colored Glasses | Jason Ricci & Joe Krown  | Badger The Wittness 6-16-21  | City Country City  |  | Dave Hunt  | Doctor  | Behind The Moon  |  | Joanna Cooke  | No Stranger To The Blues  | NO STRANGER TO THE BLUES [Single] | Willie Mabon  | Sad Feeling  | Cold Chilly Woman  |  | Dave Specter  | Riverside Ride  | Six String Soul~30 Years on Delmark | Lowell Fulson with Jeff Dale &  | Blues Pain  | Lowell Fulson  |  | JESSIE LEE & THE ALCHEMISTS  | The Same  | Let it Shine  |  | Joiners Five Trumpets  | Do You Think God Will Let You By  | This May Be My Last Time (CD1); Raw African-American Gospel on 45rpm | Washington Phillips  | You Can't Stop a Tattler, Pt. 2  | Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dr | Elias Bernet Band  | See What Lies Deeper  | Better Off With The Blues | Marcus Lazarus  | High Time  | Hell of A Ride  |  | Elles Bailey  | Sunshine City (Radio Edit)  | Singles  |   |  | Memphissippi Sounds  | Groove with Me  | Memphissippi  |  | Roy Brown  | Good Rockin' Man  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 7 1951 | Little Richard  | Rip It Up  | Les Pionniers Du Rock | Michot's Melody Makers  | Bluerunner La Lune Est Croche  | Tiny Island  |  | Paul Carrack  | I Miss You So  | All About  |   |  | Zac Harmon  | Long As I Got My Guitar  | Long As I Got My Guitar  | Catfood Records | Trev Turley  | Change Everything  | Cherish Ever  |  | Carlos Santana  | America For Sale feat. Kirk Hammett & Marc Osegueda  | Blessings & Miracles  |  | Dave Hunt  | Swamp Snake Moan  | Behind The Moon  |  | J. B. Hutto  | Call It Stormy Monday  | Slow Blues 35  | 

65 years ago this year, Elvis made two appearances on Milton Berle's popular variety program, once on board the U.S.S. Hancock and another back in Los Angeles. As voted by the TCBCast patrons, Justin & Gurdip are looking at both, and offering perspectives on the fallout from the latter performance, which gave way to the first major wave of controversy and backlash against Elvis. The two Songs of the Week that won the monthly patron poll made it an extremely tough choice between the two for Gurdip, but ultimately he settled on "Love Me," the Leiber/Stoller country spoof that Elvis played completely straight, while Justin digs into Lowell Fulson's blues classic "Reconsider Baby," with both songs having been featured throughout Elvis's entire career. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. If you are unable to support us via Patreon, but want to support us another way, please make sure to leave a positive review or mention our show to another like-minded music history and movie enthusiast.

SELECCIÓN 1 JULIO 2021 BLUES SYNDICATE 1- RAMBLER – GINGER BAKER TRIO 2- BETTER NOT LOOK DOWN – B.B. KING 3- ONE MORE HEADACHE – THE PAUL BUTTERFIELD BAND 4- SAME OLD GAMES – CANNED HEAD 5- TBONE SHUFFLE – JESSE COLIN YOUNG 6- STORMY MONDAY – CREAM 7- IT´S A LONG WAY THERE – LITTLE RIVER BAND 8- STILL THE ONE – ORLEANS 9- FOREVER YOUNG – STORMY MONDAYS 10- BLIND WILLIE MCTELL – CHRISSIE HYNDE 11- SHARECROPPER´S SON – ROBERT FINLEY 12- SPIDER IN MY STEW – BOB CORRITORE & LURRIE BELL 13- WHY DON´T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD – LOWELL FULSON

Welcome back to Hard Labor and Money Splashes! Our examination of The Rolling Stones 1983 album Undercover continues with our review of the album's next two songs, "Tie You Up (The Pain of Love)", and "Wanna Hold You". A modern take on a Lowell Fulson-style blues, (and one of Jon's all-time favorite Stones songs) "Tie You Up" takes us on a journey into BDSM territory, with Mick as our guide and narrator, while "Wanna Hold You" (a Beatles-inspired tune that wouldn't have been out of place on "Talk is Cheap") features Keith showing off his maturing songwriting and singing chops. Give these songs a listen and let us know your thoughts! Also, listen closely to the lyrics, as one of these songs contains a phrase that may just have provided this podcast with its title! Check out our YouTube channel: Hard Labor and Money Splashes - YouTube Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoneySplashes Reach out to us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moneysplashes/ Drop us an email at: hardlabormoneysplashes@gmail.com

Lloyd Price "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"Ruth Brown "Lucky Lips"Spade Cooley & His Orchestra "Three Way Boogie"Two Cow Garage "My Concern"Waylon Jennings "Ain't No God In Mexico"The Wandering "Lovin' Him Was Easier Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again"Satan and Adam "Ode To Billy Joe"Andrew Bird;Jimbo Mathus "Poor Lost Souls"The Both "The Gambler"Pretenders "My City Was Gone (2007 Remastered LP Version)"Gladys Bentley Quintet "Boogie'n My Woogie"Fleetwood Mac "Sugar Mama"Lefty Frizzell "Mama!"Tiny Kennedy "Have You Heard About The Farmer's Daughter?"Lucero "Darken My Door"Leon Redbone "Sweet Mama Papa's Getting Mad"Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five "Caledonia"Johnny Cash "Strange Things Happening Every Day"Lou Reed "Dirty Blvd."Jessie Mae Hemphill "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy"Mazzy Star "Wasted"Blind Willie McTell "Mama, 'Tain't Long Fo' Day"Duane Allman "Statesboro Blues"Bob Dylan "Blind Willie McTell - Studio Outtake - 1983"The White Stripes "Your Southern Can Is Mine"Blind Willie McTell "Dying Crapshooter's Blues"Kenny Brown Featuring Alvin Youngblood Hart "How Many More Years"Lowell Fulson "Three O'Clock Blues"Lucille Bogan "Black Angel Blues"Otis Rush "Homework"James Brown "Fat Wood, Pts. 1 & 2"Valerie June "Call Me A Fool"Armchair Martian "The Credible Hulk (1995)"Otis Spann "Five Spot"Kid Ory "High Society (02-12-45)"The White Stripes "Ball And Biscuit"Preservation Hall Jazz Band "Ice Cream"Jolie Holland "Old Fashioned Morphine"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"Kiki Cavazos "Lonesome Hearted Man"Lloyd Price "Stagger Lee"Lucinda Williams "It's A Long Way To The Top"Tom Rush "Child's Song"

Today’s show features music performed by Louis Jordan and Lowell Fulson

Today’s show features music performed by Lowell Fulson and Putney Dandridge

It's time for the annual Blues is the Truth Christmas Special featuring a plethora of festive tunes from the likes of Charles Brown, Albert King, Lawrence Lebo, Ron Sayer and Charlotte Joyce, Mike Zito, Albert Castiglia, Floyd Dixon, Lowell Fulson and Ray Charles. We also feature an exclusive play of a new song from the wonderful Paul Michael, which isn't a Christmas tune but is a gift for the ears... Tune in, enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Show 109 – Recorded 12-19-20 This Christmas Season podcast features 17 outstanding blues artists and 17 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from the late 1929 – 1958. Our featured artists are: Ralph Willis, Jimmy Butler, Bumble Bee Slim, Tampa Red, Harmon Ray, Bo Carter, Sonny Boy Williamson 1, LeRoy Carr, Sons of Heaven, Sonny Boy Williamson 2, Willie McNeal, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lowell Fulson, The Nic Nacs and Mickey Champion, Chuck Berry, Guitar Slim and Jelly Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Show 109 – Recorded 12-19-20 This Christmas Season podcast features 17 outstanding blues artists and 17 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from the late 1929 – 1958. Our featured artists are: Ralph Willis, Jimmy Butler, Bumble Bee Slim, Tampa Red, Harmon Ray, Bo Carter, Sonny Boy Williamson 1, LeRoy Carr, Sons of Heaven, Sonny Boy Williamson 2, Willie McNeal, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lowell Fulson, The Nic Nacs and Mickey Champion, Chuck Berry, Guitar Slim and Jelly Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Kings Of The Blues : Elmore James - "Dust My Broom" Billy Boy Arnold - "I Wish You Would" Freddy King - "Sa-Ho-Zay" George Butler - "Open Up Baby" Frank Frost - "My Back Scratcher" Lowell Fulson - "Thug" Guitar Junior - "The Crawl" John Lee Hooker - "I Love You Honey" Jerry McCain - "Honky Tonk" Little Joe Blue - "Loose Me" Albert King - "Born Under A Bad Sign" Shuggie Otis - "Hideaway" Jimmy Reed - "I Ain't Got You" Fenton Robinson - "Somebody Loan Me A Dime" little Johnny Taylor - "Part Time Love" Ted Taylor - "I Need Your Love So Bad" Revenge A Tribute To Jimi Hendrix : John Lee Hooker - "Red House" Triad - "Message To Love" Phenomenon - "Purple Haze" Escuchar audio

Another packed edition of Blues is the Truth this week that starts with Lowell Fulson and takes a dive through some amazing tunes. We once again feature the superb Songs of Isolation album, as well as sharing some of the very best new music and some true blues classics. Artists featured include Shemikia Copeland, Bruce Mississippi Johnson, Mrs Morganfield, Marcus Lazarus, Gareth Huggett, Catfish, Emma Wilson, Gregg Martinez, Arsen Shomakov, Samantha Fish, Elles Bailey, Paul Lamb, Adam Norsworthy, Elmore James and Buddy Guy. Tune in to enjoy some amazing Blues, Soul and everything in between!

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 "Muleskinner Blues" by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week -- I've been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don't worry, it's not anything serious...    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud's rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. It's not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it's still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis' sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis' continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It's well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. Before I start this week's episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We've already covered his work of course, in episodes on "Tutti Frutti" and "Keep A Knockin'", and I don't really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don't think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don't think you can argue that those three weren't the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we're covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we've looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let's have a few moments' noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we're going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we're entering the sixties, we're leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we're definitely leaving for now. Elvis' two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he'd been separated from everyone he knew, and he'd met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He'd recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years -- "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", "Hard-Headed Woman", "One Night", "I Need Your Love Tonight", and "A Big Hunk O' Love". Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel's from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted -- his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn't due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don't want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn't have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland -- the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father's new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show -- he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis' early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis' last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session -- Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He'll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He'll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland -- the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis' last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well -- as well as having sung on Elvis' pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles -- Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all -- Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going -- the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves -- and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled "Make Me Know It" took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Make Me Know It"] Elvis' voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army -- he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman's "A Mess of Blues": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "A Mess of Blues"] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single -- a mediocre track called "Stuck on You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Stuck on You"] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of "Stuck on You" backed with "Fame and Fortune" was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders -- they came out in sleeves that just read "Elvis' 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World", because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra -- The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he'd gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt's bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip -- that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he'd been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through "Fame and Fortune". He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, "Stuck on You", and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings "Love Me Tender" while Elvis sings Sinatra's "Witchcraft". Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock "Love Me Tender", but Elvis takes Sinatra's song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There's a passage in Umberto Eco's book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write "I love you madly". A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing "As Barbara Cartland might say, 'I love you madly'". This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco's view) can't. By this definition, Sinatra's performance is modernist -- he's just showing contempt for the material -- while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he's also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, "Love Me Tender/Witchcraft"] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of "Fever" that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Fever"] Then there was "Like a Baby", a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis' best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Like a Baby"] The next song was a huge departure from anything he'd done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin's 1950 hit "There's No Tomorrow": [Excerpt: Tony Martin, "There's No Tomorrow"] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he'd mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, "There's No Tomorrow" was based on the old song "O Sole Mio", which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became "It's Now or Never". Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he'd given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "It's Now Or Never"] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn't have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel's wife Marie's favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA's A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake -- because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn't see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis' repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that's almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from "King Creole", a cover version of "Such a Night", the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song "Reconsider Baby", the light Latin pop song "The Girl of My Best Friend", a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge -- in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks -- three singles and a twelve-track album -- and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it's very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called "GI Blues", intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn't going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were "business reasons" -- Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called "Wooden Heart", based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we'll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis' film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren't songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don't work as a poem. There's a habit even among Elvis' fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn't happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work -- he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it's clear that the time in the Army wasn't the problem -- it's just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did -- he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn't in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he'd been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis' role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There's quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis' acting in them, but there's no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis' own musical instincts yet -- he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he'd wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "His Hand in Mine"] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn't like, GI Blues, that was the big success -- and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies -- an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year -- a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like "Ito Eats": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Ito Eats"] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren't as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn't going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like "There's No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car". When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn't be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that "Elvis died when he went into the Army". We'll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. (more…)

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Susie Q" by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 "Shake a Hand" by Faye Adams.  ----more---- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song "Do it Again a Little Bit Slower" doesn't have the word "just" in the title. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud's terms of service, it's broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him -- Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins' early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already -- all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as "rockabilly", they don't tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don't sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as "swamp rock". [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that's the description that most people now use of him. We'll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It's not that he didn't like country music, of course -- as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers -- but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn't have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] While Hawkins Sr.'s name isn't in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn't, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it's unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn't reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn't the only family member to be a musician, either -- Dale's younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing Daddy Swing"] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we're going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams' widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins' first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn't as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them -- when the car park filled up, they'd just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn't tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan's Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they'd heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan's Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label -- if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer -- the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby", which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] Lewis took an interest in his young employee's music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis' instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like "Ring of Fire"), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins' most famous song, "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q", demo version] Listening to that, it's clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place -- the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn't fully worked out his guitar part, although it's close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist -- a song by Bobby Charles called "Later, Alligator", which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title "See You Later, Alligator": [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, "Later Alligator"] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles'. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed -- "See You Soon, Baboon": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins' demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins' first name -- Leonard Chess misheard "Del Hawkins" over the phone, and the record came out as by "Dale Hawkins", which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins' songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins' follow-up single, a new version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn't receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song -- notably James Burton -- didn't get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song -- I've seen various other putative co-authors listed -- but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians -- it's the kind of song that musicians come up with when they're jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound -- both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff -- is "Baby Please Don't Go" by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters' song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody -- "I've Got My Eyes on You": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "I've Got My Eyes On You"] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin' Wolf -- I've seen some people claim that the song was "ripped off" from Wolf. I don't believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like "Smokestack Lightnin'": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] And "Spoonful": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Spoonful"] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration -- that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about "Suzy". There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis' daughter Suzie -- and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song's lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, "Doin' the Suzie Q"] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one's feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it's likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so -- Jimmy McCracklin, in his song "The Walk", released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing "I know you've heard of the Susie Q": [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, "The Walk"] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, "Susie Q" was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan's opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn't notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins' vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] This new version of "Susie Q" was stripped right down -- it was just guitar, bass, and drums -- none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version -- that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis' fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he's closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo -- Tuminello couldn't make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we've put the song in context, there's an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to "Susie Q" as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to "Susie Q". And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week -- the electric bass. The demo version of "Susie Q" had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music -- though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn't play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass' tailpiece. But that points to something that "Susie Q" was doing that we've not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I've not looked very much at the music that we now think of as "the blues", though at the time it was only a small part of the blues -- the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that's because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false -- as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics -- primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B -- and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. There's never a first anything, and that's especially the case here where we're talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for "Susie Q" as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins' footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones' own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What's surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren't going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, "All Night Long"] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins' cover version of Little Walter's "My Babe": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "My Babe"] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Lo-Do-Dada"] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins' follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people's styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on "Susie Q". By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Do the Twist"] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break "Susie Q" on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I've seen claims, for example, that he produced "Hey Baby" by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, "Hey Baby"] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on "Judy In Disguise With Glasses" by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he's often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit "Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower" by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, "Do it Again A Little Bit Slower"] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Susie Q"] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, "LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: "LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas"] When that wasn't a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department -- a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit -- as well as finally getting his master's degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Wildcat Tamer"] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure -- he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people's records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record -- a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

In de laatste show van 2019 draait Tim muziek van Richard Thompson, Phosphorescent, Lowell Fulson, Townes van Zandt, Daniel Johnston, Steve Earle & Iris Dement en Dan Penn.

Bluesland Horn Band - Keep It in the Shadows (2019) Breezy Rodio – Led to a better life - If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It (2019) Griff Hamlin & The Single Barrel Blues Band -Where would I begin - I'll Drink To That (2019) Danny Bryant – as the years go passing by - Big (Live In Europe) - 2017 Thorbjorn Risager & the black Tornado – Lone gone - Change my Game – 2017 Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul -I visit the Blues - Summer Of Sorcery – GA-20 – You know I’m right - Lonely Soul (2019) Chris Rea – Lone star boogie - Blue Guitars - Album 05 (Texas Blues) - 2005 Lowell Fulson – Monday morning blues - The Ol' Blues Singer – 1995 J.R. Band – Turn the page - My Way Or The Highway - 2002 Wolf Mail –Coming to you - Live at Bluesmoose café- 7-4-2010

De dance track is deze week van Boney M. Verder hoor je muziek van Lowell Fulson, Liz Lawrence, Jeroen Kramer, Mattiel en ook Beatrice zelf komt voorbij.

Terug van vakantie dus om 14:00 uur Marc Stakenburg en Joost Verbunt met een nieuwe Music Trails op 40UP Radio. Je hoort muziek van Lowell Fulson, Paul Cauthen, Erma Franklin, Clara Smith, The South Austin Moonlighters en Jimi Hendrix. De week CD is The Teskey Brothers - Run Home Slow.

Terug van vakantie dus om 14:00 uur Marc Stakenburg en Joost Verbunt met een nieuwe Music Trails op 40UP Radio. Je hoort muziek van Lowell Fulson, Paul Cauthen, Erma Franklin, Clara Smith, The South Austin Moonlighters en Jimi Hendrix. De week CD is The Teskey Brothers - Run Home Slow.

Get into the smooth vibes of Charlie Puth singing “See You Again” (2015) and a very, very, very subtle Ray Charles sample used in this heart-melting song. What we geek out over in this episode: The legendary Ray Charles & American guitarist Lowell Fulson, BB King “Three O’Clock Blues” (1951), who sampled Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” (1954)?, “Georgia On My Mind” (1930) Hoagy Carmichael & Stuart Gorrell, Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road Jack” (1960), Charlie Puth and his perfect pitch

Show 38 – Recorded 6-22-19 This podcast provides 13 performances of blues songs performed by 14 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1959 up to the early 2018.  These blues artists are: Alabama Shakes, John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, Big Joe Williams, Lightnin Hopkins, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Mary Lane, BB King and Etta James, Lowell Fulson, Charlie Musselwhite, Muddy Waters, Reverend Gary Davis, Pinetop Perkins and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Lucinda Williams, Leon Russell, Little Milton  

Show 38 – Recorded 6-22-19 This podcast provides 13 performances of blues songs performed by 14 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1959 up to the early 2018.  These blues artists are: Alabama Shakes, John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, Big Joe Williams, Lightnin Hopkins, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Mary Lane, BB King and Etta James, Lowell Fulson, Charlie Musselwhite, Muddy Waters, Reverend Gary Davis, Pinetop Perkins and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Lucinda Williams, Leon Russell, Little Milton  

A lifetime side man, John’s played or recorded with John Lee Hooker, Charlie Musselwhite, Jimmy Witherspoon, Lowell Fulson, Curtis Salgado, Bonnie Raitt, Wayne Newton, Cindy Blackman-Santana, Starship, David Foster, and is currently out on tour with Bill Medley & The Righteous Brothers John opens up about the incredible motivation, discipline, and love he has for the guitar, and the early work he put in, to get good on the instrument. Growing up in a family where alcohol was a problem and how he turned that around… experiences playing with John Lee Hooker, Phil Lesh, Vince Welnick & David Foster… his cool guitars and much more. GREAT convo with a first-class guy: Subscribe https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ELovesGuitar

Show 36 – Recorded 5-25-19 This podcast provides 14 performances of blues songs performed by 14 blues artists who’s tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from the 1940’s up to the early 2018.  These blues artists are: Junior Wells, Etta James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Lowell Fulson, Shaun Murphy, Mike Hill’s Blues Mob, Sleepy John Estes, Little Walter, Mary Lane, Smiley Lewis, Mike Zito, Bonnie Raitt, Little Milton, Boz Scaggs  

Show 36 – Recorded 5-25-19 This podcast provides 14 performances of blues songs performed by 14 blues artists who’s tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from the 1940’s up to the early 2018.  These blues artists are: Junior Wells, Etta James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Lowell Fulson, Shaun Murphy, Mike Hill’s Blues Mob, Sleepy John Estes, Little Walter, Mary Lane, Smiley Lewis, Mike Zito, Bonnie Raitt, Little Milton, Boz Scaggs  

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "I Got A Woman" by Ray Charles. 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. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles' autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles' work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let's talk about melisma. One of the major things that you'll notice about the singers we've covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who's been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There's a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties -- not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing -- melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning -- it's when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing -- for example, at the start of "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Oh say...", there are two notes on the syllable "oh". That's melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn't, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to "Pocketful of Miracles" -- "Practicality doesn't interest me" -- but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he'd written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Pocketful of Miracles", with Sinatra singing "pee-racticality dee-oesn't interest me"] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century -- Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett -- they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers -- Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound -- but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren't stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you'd mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn't talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel -- and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we're talking about -- the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you'd sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I'm not going to unpick here -- we've got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all -- but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it's their command of melisma they're trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today's standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it's worth talking about the musical boundaries we're going to be using in this series, because while it's called "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs", I am not planning on using a narrow definition of "rock music", because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there's footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke "the greatest rock and roll singer in the world", and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called "rock and roll", but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call "soul" was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it's completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we're going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don't be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don't be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we're going to talk about a record that's been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we're going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We're going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing -- though perhaps one that's not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called "Mama", and by his father's wife, who he called "Mother". Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles' -- he didn't want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though -- and perhaps because -- he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn't going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn't want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I'm not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles' own attitude to his disability. I'm disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I'm just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase". [Excerpt; Art Tatum, "I Wish I Were Twins"] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum's musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style -- his first record, "Wondering and Wondering", was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Wondering and Wondering"] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder's band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn't how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We've heard Nat "King" Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it's still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like "Unforgettable", Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole's version of "Route Sixty-Six": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole Trio, "Route Sixty Six"] You'll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular -- Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat "King" Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the "Son" came from the Robinson in his own name, the "Mc" from the guitarist's name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio "Don't Put All Your Dreams In One Basket"] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn't perform on many of Fulson's sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson's biggest record, "Reconsider Baby", which came out shortly after Charles' time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but "The Things That I Used To Do", his most famous record, is as much Charles' record as it is Guitar Slim's -- Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim's other work, though it still has Slim's recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with "Mess Around", which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. "Mess Around" is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting -- rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing "Cow Cow Blues", a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, "Cow Cow Blues"] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled "Mess Around": [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, "Mess Around"] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers -- the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn't sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "It Should Have Been Me"] "Mess Around" and "It Should Have Been Me" were Charles' two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, "the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place." Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton's, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "One O'Clock Jump"] Charles' own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone's. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles' trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he'd been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They'd be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, "It Must Be Jesus"] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled "rock and roll", this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, "I Got a Woman", Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn't just that they were performing secular music -- it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. "I Got a Woman" went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, "I Got a Woman"] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, "I Got A Woman" became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees... Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn't stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song "This Little Light of Mine": [Excerpt: Etta James, "This Little Light of Mine"] And reworked it into "This Little Girl of Mine": [Excerpt: Ray Charles: "This Little Girl of Mine"] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn't a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 -- classic songs like "Hallelujah, I Love Her So", "Drown in My Own Tears", and "Lonely Avenue" -- he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as "My Bonnie" and "Swanee River Rock". But you can't keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we'll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. 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. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. 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. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. 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. Both "Rocket 88" and the Howlin' Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 - Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips' studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though -- the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I'm not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner's autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of "Rocket 88" is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don't want to give the impression I'm condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual "first rock and roll record", and if there is, it's not "Rocket 88". But nonetheless, "Rocket 88" has been officially anointed "the first rock and roll record ever made" by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven't already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I'll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don't want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I'm not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official "beginning of rock" according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case -- Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about "Rocket 88" we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called "The Honeydripper", which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It's a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from "Shortenin' Bread". It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation -- sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live -- but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded "The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2" for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: "The Honeydripper" by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn't sound that much now -- pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that's with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts -- which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself -- but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn't stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn't keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing... "The Honeydripper"   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford's version of "The Honeydripper"].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing... "The Honeydripper". Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers' version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts ("Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It's likely that nobody will ever beat that record. "The Honeydripper" was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of "The Honeydripper". It sank without trace -- but you'll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. "The Honeydripper" made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll -- he didn't turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that -- but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn't just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as "The Honeydripper", but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band's driver -- at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother's success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we'll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we'd be talking about. They weren't the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man" or "Night Life Boogie" -- all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, "Cadillac Boogie" was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow...   [Excerpt "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why "Cadillac Boogie" was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It's safe to say that he's one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music -- and it's also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we'd still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s -- he's as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional -- when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn't when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we're dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people's feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right -- if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn't fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn't get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro's brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips' intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism -- and also to improve the world in other ways -- was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they'd mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they'd put on an acetate disc -- apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn't have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person's artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn't been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen -- but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name "Blues Boy", or just "B.B." for short. To my mind they're actually some of King's best material -- much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn't released at the time, but has made compilations later -- "Pray For You":   [excerpt: B.B. King "Pray For You"]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it's the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we'll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner's house. The two hadn't stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands -- there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one "B.B. King". Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn't know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner's old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he'd like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. "Straight away", Ike replied, and they set off -- five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident -- they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that's one story as to what happened to the guitar amp -- like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that's definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified -- their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we've seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is -- I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell's scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering "Cadillac Boogie", as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that's being talked about -- the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there's the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner -- that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here's the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here's Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There's another difference as well -- the guitar sound. There's distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won't even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed -- if you're listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you'd probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax -- the line it's playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a "first rock and roll record", they latched on to this one -- because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified -- because he'd assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats". And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston's solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner's band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn't let Brenston sing his hit on stage -- he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But "Rocket 88" had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after "Rocket 88" was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with -- Howlin' Wolf.   [excerpt "How Many More Years" -- version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That's a recording that was made at Phillips' studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin' Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you're sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, "Ike and Tina Turner".   And finally, "Rocket 88" was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen -- a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller -- was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan's records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn't crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record "Rocket 88", which had been a big R&B hit but hadn't broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it'll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story...

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. 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. Both “Rocket 88” and the Howlin’ Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 – Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips’ studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though — the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I’m not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner’s autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of “Rocket 88” is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don’t want to give the impression I’m condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual “first rock and roll record”, and if there is, it’s not “Rocket 88”. But nonetheless, “Rocket 88” has been officially anointed “the first rock and roll record ever made” by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven’t already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I’ll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don’t want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I’m not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official “beginning of rock” according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case — Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about “Rocket 88” we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called “The Honeydripper”, which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It’s a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from “Shortenin’ Bread”. It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation — sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live — but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded “The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2” for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: “The Honeydripper” by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn’t sound that much now — pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that’s with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts — which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself — but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn’t stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn’t keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing… “The Honeydripper”   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford’s version of “The Honeydripper”].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing… “The Honeydripper”. Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers’ version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts (“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It’s likely that nobody will ever beat that record. “The Honeydripper” was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of “The Honeydripper”. It sank without trace — but you’ll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. “The Honeydripper” made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll — he didn’t turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that — but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn’t just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as “The Honeydripper”, but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band’s driver — at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother’s success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we’ll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we’d be talking about. They weren’t the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like “Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man” or “Night Life Boogie” — all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, “Cadillac Boogie” was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow…   [Excerpt “Cadillac Boogie” by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why “Cadillac Boogie” was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It’s safe to say that he’s one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music — and it’s also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we’d still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s — he’s as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional — when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn’t when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we’re dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people’s feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right — if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn’t fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn’t get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro’s brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips’ intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism — and also to improve the world in other ways — was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they’d mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they’d put on an acetate disc — apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn’t have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person’s artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn’t been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen — but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name “Blues Boy”, or just “B.B.” for short. To my mind they’re actually some of King’s best material — much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn’t released at the time, but has made compilations later — “Pray For You”:   [excerpt: B.B. King “Pray For You”]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it’s the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we’ll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner’s house. The two hadn’t stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands — there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one “B.B. King”. Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn’t know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner’s old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he’d like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. “Straight away”, Ike replied, and they set off — five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident — they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that’s one story as to what happened to the guitar amp — like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that’s definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified — their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we’ve seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is — I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell’s scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering “Cadillac Boogie”, as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that’s being talked about — the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there’s the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner — that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here’s the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here’s Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There’s another difference as well — the guitar sound. There’s distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won’t even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed — if you’re listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you’d probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax — the line it’s playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a “first rock and roll record”, they latched on to this one — because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified — because he’d assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats”. And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston’s solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner’s band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn’t let Brenston sing his hit on stage — he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But “Rocket 88” had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after “Rocket 88” was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with — Howlin’ Wolf.   [excerpt “How Many More Years” — version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That’s a recording that was made at Phillips’ studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin’ Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you’re sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, “Ike and Tina Turner”.   And finally, “Rocket 88” was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen — a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller — was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan’s records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn’t crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record “Rocket 88”, which had been a big R&B hit but hadn’t broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it’ll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story…

ESPECIAL CAREY BELL Carey Bell Harrington nació un 14 de noviembre de 1936 en Macon, Mississippi y falleció a los 70 años un 6 de mayo de 2007 en Chicago. Fue uno de los mejores armonicistas americanos al estilo musical del blues de Chicago. Bell toco la armonica y el contrabajo para otros iconos de blues desde hace décadas, incluyendo Earl Hooker, Robert Nighthawk, Lowell Fulson, Eddie Taylor y Jimmy Dawkins.

ESPECIAL CAREY BELL Carey Bell Harrington nació un 14 de noviembre de 1936 en Macon, Mississippi y falleció a los 70 años un 6 de mayo de 2007 en Chicago. Fue uno de los mejores armonicistas americanos al estilo musical del blues de Chicago. Bell toco la armonica y el contrabajo para otros iconos de blues desde hace décadas, incluyendo Earl Hooker, Robert Nighthawk, Lowell Fulson, Eddie Taylor y Jimmy Dawkins.

Vandaag fijne muziek van Lowell Fulson, Andrew Gold, Lavalu, Spijkers, This Is The Kit en Prince. De dance track is deze week van Marvin Gaye.

Una nueva descarga de Suave es la Noche, la número 36, desde la Torre decrépita de Radiopolis, en la 92.3 de la FM, desde Sevilla. Raúl Gallego y Gervi Navío retamos al destino con una selección imposible de Rock y Metal de todos los tiempos, arrancamos con los AC/DC, visitamos el blues esencial de Lowell Fulson, nos ataca el hacha de Flotsam and Jetsam, Dragonnforce nos pide la noche misma, Triana nos envuelve con su Frialdad….los Rammstein incendian el estudio y Sepultura certifica el entierro…..que grande es el Rock!!! Lista de temas 01-Rock and Roll Singer. AC/DC 02-She took an Axe. Flotsam and Jetsam 03-Reconsider Baby. Lowell Fulson 04-Ratitas Divinas. Pata Negra 05-Roadhouse Blues. The Doors 06-One of us.. Angelus Apatrida 07-Baby What's wrong. Lonnie Mack 08-Give me the night. Dragonforce 09-Asche zu Asche. Rammstein 10-The Starless Sleep. Avatarium 11-Tu Frialdad. Triana 12-All around the world. The Jam 13-Motörhead. Hawkwind 14-Morbid Visions. Sepultura Nos vamos gritando libertad y combatiendo el calor… litro a litro, menos mal que Dios es Suave y aparca coches en la calle Torneo.

Очередной подкаст «Дельты Миссисипи» из серии программ о блюзовых гитаристах, которых сегодня помнят лишь заядлые фанаты. Его Артур Ямпольский посвящает Лоуеллу Фулсону (Lowell Fulson). Музыкант начинал свою карьеру в далеком 1948-ом году и сразу попал на 6 строчку американских чартов со своим первым синглом. Хиты и блюзовые стандарты авторства Лоуелла – звучат на Ofr.fm/Jazz-Blues.

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.

Ryan McGarvey – My heart to you - Live At Swinghouse – 2018 Pat McManus Band – bad case - Tattooed In Blue - 2018 Joanna Conner – Walking Blues - Nothing But the Blues - 2001 DeWolff – Once in a blue moon - Thrust (2018) Lowell Fulson – Blood , sweat and tears - The Crazy Cajun Recordings - 1998 Marcia Ball – They don’t make m like that anymore - Shine Bright - 2018 Levi Parham & Them Tulsa Boys And Girls – Boxmeer Blues - It's All Good (2018) Paquito Blues Band - Maybe Someday Baby - 2018 Hoax, The – Don’t shake my hand - A Blues Odessey (Live) (2010)

John plays big Soul & Funk classics from Eddie Floyd, Lowell Fulson and Kool & The Gang, plus rareties from The Metros & Earl Grant. Listen up!

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº 4 (01:01:16) 1- Sintonia. Mr. Hurricane Band 2- A woman- Lazy Lester (05.30) 3- I went to the Mardi Grass – Snooks Eaglin (04.51) 4- Running on back – Red House (04.33) 5- Just a lucky so and so – Charles Brown (03.43) 6- Ain´t nobody businnes – Jimmy Witherspoon (02.53) 7- Lonely guitar mar – Jimmy Dawkins (05.15) 8- Baby please don´t go – Big Joe Williams (02.45) 9- Hard time killing – Skip James (03.23) 10- Amor en paro – Wladi Olmos & David García (04.23) 11- Everyday I have the blues – Lowell Fulson (02.26)

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº 4 (01:01:16) 1- Sintonia. Mr. Hurricane Band 2- A woman- Lazy Lester (05.30) 3- I went to the Mardi Grass – Snooks Eaglin (04.51) 4- Running on back – Red House (04.33) 5- Just a lucky so and so – Charles Brown (03.43) 6- Ain´t nobody businnes – Jimmy Witherspoon (02.53) 7- Lonely guitar mar – Jimmy Dawkins (05.15) 8- Baby please don´t go – Big Joe Williams (02.45) 9- Hard time killing – Skip James (03.23) 10- Amor en paro – Wladi Olmos & David García (04.23) 11- Everyday I have the blues – Lowell Fulson (02.26)

ESPECIAL PEE WEE CRAYTON Connie Curtís 'Pee Wee' Crayton nació un 11 de diciembre de 1914 en Rockdale, Texas y fue un elegante guitarrista del blues de la Costa Oeste de los cincuenta, el puente perfecto entre el patriarca tejano e inventor de la guitarra eléctrica blusera T-Bone Walker, y sus inmediatos discípulos: Lowell Fulson, Gatemouth Brown, B.B. King ... Pero, aun así, los historiadores le tienen arrinconado como a un talento de tercer rango, un mero machaca a las órdenes de orquestas revivalistas (Johnny Otis, Big Joe Turner), un instrumentista de un solo hit.

ESPECIAL PEE WEE CRAYTON Connie Curtís 'Pee Wee' Crayton nació un 11 de diciembre de 1914 en Rockdale, Texas y fue un elegante guitarrista del blues de la Costa Oeste de los cincuenta, el puente perfecto entre el patriarca tejano e inventor de la guitarra eléctrica blusera T-Bone Walker, y sus inmediatos discípulos: Lowell Fulson, Gatemouth Brown, B.B. King ... Pero, aun así, los historiadores le tienen arrinconado como a un talento de tercer rango, un mero machaca a las órdenes de orquestas revivalistas (Johnny Otis, Big Joe Turner), un instrumentista de un solo hit.

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº1. (59.55) Programa dedicado al blues. Playlist: 1- Sintonia. MR. HURRICANE BAND. www.mrhurricaneband.com 2- Come on with it. Syl Johnson. 3.44 3- Easy is my style. Eddie Clearwater. 3.50 4- Harmonica Lewinsky. Txus Blues and Jose Bluesfingers. 2.57 5- I never found a man. Miss Lavelle White. 3.45 6- Tramp. Lowell Fulson. 3.06 7- Hello little baby. Lazy Lester. 4.12 8- Lord I wonder. Katie Webster. 4.03 9- Preachin´blues. Son House. 5.46 10- Miss you. Sugar Blue. 6.09 11- Mi piel en tu corazón. SinElefante. 3.53 12- What a wonderful world. Keb Mo. 2.36

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº1. (59.55) Programa dedicado al blues. Playlist: 1- Sintonia. MR. HURRICANE BAND. www.mrhurricaneband.com 2- Come on with it. Syl Johnson. 3.44 3- Easy is my style. Eddie Clearwater. 3.50 4- Harmonica Lewinsky. Txus Blues and Jose Bluesfingers. 2.57 5- I never found a man. Miss Lavelle White. 3.45 6- Tramp. Lowell Fulson. 3.06 7- Hello little baby. Lazy Lester. 4.12 8- Lord I wonder. Katie Webster. 4.03 9- Preachin´blues. Son House. 5.46 10- Miss you. Sugar Blue. 6.09 11- Mi piel en tu corazón. SinElefante. 3.53 12- What a wonderful world. Keb Mo. 2.36