Podcasts about marie knight

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2023 59:00

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Blues And Grooves - Jaf Jervis // 04-06-23

The Face Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2023 59:45

Reggae, Soul and Rock ‘n' Roll all feature this week with newies from HF International, Underground System, Mr Confuse, Floyd James, Sparks and Hollow Hand. Oldies from Desmond Dekker, Ronnie Lane, Marie Knight and lots more!Tune into new broadcasts of Blues & Grooves, Sunday from 4 - 5 PM EST / 9 - 10 PM GMT.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/blues-and-grooves///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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5.6 - Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Death By Music Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2023 71:00

This groudbreaking guitarist combined electric guitar with spiritual music, becoming a pioneer of the rock and roll scene to come. deathbypodcastteam@gmail.com . Listen to the playlist for this episode at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/22ZIrcAoLY9zqJtHJZTy7G?si=db2887722e5b46fc .Support the show

Episode 428: WEDNESDAY'S EVEN WORSE #568 AUGUST 24, 2022

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 58:58

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Fuego En La Pista de Baile #54 Música Negra Variada 23Marzo2022 (SEGUNDA TEMPORADA)

Podcast de iPop Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2022 61:43

Fuego en la Pista de Baile, los éxitos y las novedades más underground en www.ipopfm.com, cada miércoles de 20 a 21 horas. Hoy música negra variada: jazz, soul y ska. Déjate seducir por el programa más underground de iPOPfm. Déjate seducir por Fuego En La Pista de Baile! Han sonado: 1. Howlin’ Wolf – Smokestack Lightening 2. T-Bone Walker – Teenage Baby 3. Little Milton – That’s Love Will Make You Do 4. Preston Epps – Sing Gonna Do 5. Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm– Rocket 88 6. Professor Longhair – Mardi Gras In New Orleans 7. Jewell King – 3x7=21 8. Richard Berry – Baby Please Come Home 9. Mongo Santamaria – Louie Louie 10. Baba Brooks and His Band – Watermelon Man 11. Derrick and Patsy – Let The Good Times Roll 12. Laurel Aitken & The Blue Beats – Bartender 13. Sir Charles Thompson – Streat Beat 14. Ray Baretto – New York Soul 15. Getz, Gilberto, Jobim – Doralice 16. Mose Alison – The Seventh Son 17. The Hi-Tones – Let’s Have a Good Time 18. Marie Knight – You Lie So Well 19. Bettie Swan – I’ll Be Alone 20. The Marvelettes – Way Over There 21. The Richard Kent Style – Just a Little Misunderstanding

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE

Bon Temps Rouler

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2021 50:04

J'ai le vague souvenir d'une vieille blague décrivant un mythique super groupe : un crocodile à la batterie, une girafe à la basse, un éléphant aux claviers … mais pourquoi une femme à la guitare ? Pendant presque 100 ans, quasiment, seule la place de chanteuse était disponible pour les filles. Mais il y'a eu de spectaculaires exceptions. Sister Rosetta Tharpe en est une et non des moindres. Une sacrée bonne femme, une bonne femme sacrée, cette semaine dans Bon Temps Rouler… Playlist : Up Above My Head - Rhiannon Giddens - Tomorrow Is My Turn Two Little Fishes Five Loaves Of Bread - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Gospel TrainUp Above My Head I Hear Music In The Air - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, Sam Price Trio - Gospel Train (Expanded Edition) Nobody's Fault But Mine - Joan Osborne, The Holmes Brothers - Shout, Sister, Shout: A Tribute To Sister Rosetta TharpeDidn't It Rain - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Never Alone Strange Things Happening Every Day - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Sister Rosetta Tharpe Vol. 2 1942-1944Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us - Robert Plant, Alison Krauss - Raising Sand Milky White Way - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, Sam Price Trio - The Decca Singles, Vol. 4Milky White Way - Elvis Presley - His Hand in Mine My Journey To The Sky - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, Sam Price Trio - Gospel Train (Expanded Edition)My Journey to the Sky - Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt - Shout, Sister, Shout: A Tribute To Sister Rosetta Tharpe End Of My Journey - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - The Decca Singles, Vol. 1He'll Understand and Say Well Done - Johnny Cash - Hymns From The Heart I Want a Tall Skinny Papa - Marcia Ball, Tracy Nelson, Maria Muldaur, Angela Strehli - Shout, Sister, Shout: A Tribute To Sister Rosetta TharpePrecious Lord Take My Hand - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Precious Memories Titres pour les abonnés Premium : Beams of Heaven - Phoebe Snow, The Holmes Brothers - Shout, Sister, Shout: A Tribute To Sister Rosetta TharpeAmazing Grace - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - The Golden Star CollectionGospel Train - Live - The Sunset Harmonizers of Washington - The Wedding Ceremony of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Live, Mono Version)Rock Daniel (VD129) - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Sister Rosetta Tharpe Vol. 2 1942-1944Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Episode 56: Gospel Memories - November 27, 2021

Gospel Memories

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2021 59:37

This episode includes selections from "Gospel Train," a Marie Knight reissue collection from Jasmine Records; a set of Christmas songs by gospel artists; Grammy nominees, and more.

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Episode 460: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #460, NOVEMBER 10, 2021

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2021 58:59

Episode 26: Gospel Memories - April 24, 2021

Gospel Memories

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2021 60:15

This episode includes music from the Angelic Gospel Singers, Sounds of Soul, Brook Benton, Washington Temple Camp Meeting Choir, Blind Boys of Alabama, Marie Knight (pictured), and others.

Episode 498: WEDNESDAY'S EVEN WORSE #498, APRIL 14, 2021.

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Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 117:56

Artist Title Album Name Album Copyright Val Starr & the Blues Rocket So Easy Isolating With You mas Val Starr Isolating Winter of 2020 Brigitte DeMeyer All the Blue Seeker Ritchie Dave Porter And Debra Susan Youve Got The Blues Misc February 2021 Joe Edwards Capital Blues Keep On Running (Release Date - May 22 2020) Kat Danser Please, Don't Cry 'One Eye Open' (Release Date - February 19 2021) Ana Popovic Like It On Top Live for Live (2020) Carl "Sonny" Leyland Trio Meets Nathan James And Ben Hernandez City Blues Carl Sonny Leyland Trio Meets Nathan James and Ben Hernandez KB Bayley Night Dogs 'Little Thunderstorms' (Release Date - February 5 2021) Chris Cain I Believe I Got Off Cheap 2020 Blues - New Music From Alligator Records Peach & Quiet For My Love 'Just Beyond The Shine' (Release Date - January 15 2021) Marie Knight 12 Gates To The City The Gospel Truth Live Rev Gary Davis Samson And Delilah Live at Newport: July 1965 Trevor B. Power Woman What Is Real Ben de la Cour Basin Lounge 'Shadow Land' (Release Date - April 9 2021) Anna Elizabeth Laube Oh My! (Oh Me Oh Me Oh My) 'Annamania' (Release Date - January 22 2021) Scott McKeon 6. Third Eye Witness New Morning Bill Haley A.B.C. Boogie Les Pionniers Du Rock Chuck Berry Almost Grown The Blues Collection (Chuc Ben Bedford Guinevere is Sleeping 'Portraits' (Release Date - September 4 2020) Bad Bob Bates How Y' Feelin' Deadbeat Jamie Lynn Vessels Blues And Roots 2 Station IDs June 2018 Michael McDermott 10 Until I Found You 'What In The World...' (Release Date - June 12 2020) Bob Margolin March 2020 in Stop Time Star of Stage and Screens Clare Free Call Trade Descriptions Clare Free Call Trade Descriptions Kat Danser One Eye Closed 'One Eye Open' (Release Date - February 19 2021) Carey & Lurrie Bell with Junkyard Angels 06 I Need Your Love So Bad 'Straight Shoot' Carey & Lurrie Bell with Junkyard Angels Harry Hornsey 05. M&O Blues Harry Hornsey -Revue (2020) Joe Edwards 02 Capital Blues Keep On Running (Release Date - May 22 2020) The Terraplanes Blues Band Catfish Misc February 2021 Robert Connely Farr Cadillac Problems Country Supper (2020) mp3 radio Doc MacLean Africa Blues Singles 2021

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7. Sister Rosetta Tharpe (w/Julianne Colwell from Aria Podcast)

Classical Queeros

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2021 71:31

Shahid and Alice are joined by the host of Aria Podcast, Julianne Colwell, who teaches them about the legendary, iconic, and truly remarkable Sister Rosetta Tharpe. You can find Julianne and her podcast on Instagram @ariapodcast. On her show, Julianne interviews musicians from all over the ~scene~. She also donates all her Patreon proceeds to LGBTQ+ and BIPOC organizations. What a cool gal!! Go support her!! Background Music: Didn't It Rain? by Sister Rosetta Tharpe Lonesome Road by Sister Rosetta Tharpe with the Lucky Millinder Jazz Band I Want A Tall Skinny Papa by Sister Rosetta Tharpe with the Lucky Millinder Jazz Band The Blues by Jonah Whales and Sammy Price Up Above My Head by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight Strange Things Happen Every Day by Sister Rosetta Tharpe Recommended Listenings: I Want A Tall Skinny Papa Rock Me any thing with Marie Knight! Beams of Heaven Didn't It Rain? Up Above My Head ------------------------------------ Classical Queeros is a podcast that aims to spotlight queer composers and make classical music more accessible. Follow us on Instagram @classicalqueeros and Twitter at @classicalqueero, and check out our website at classicalqueeros.com! ------------------------------------ Our episode was sponsored by: Honeybee Writing Coach! Write to learn, write to succeed, write to lead. honeybeewritingcoach.com PrettyLitter! You can visit prettylitter.sjv.io/classicalqueeros to both purchase quality litter and support your favorite podcast! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/classical-queeros/support

Episode 118: "Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy" by Manfred Mann

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021 49:27

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy" by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Walk on By" by Dionne Warwick. 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 No Mixcloud this week due to the number of tracks by Manfred Mann. Information on the group comes from Mannerisms: The Five Phases of Manfred Mann, by Greg Russo, and from the liner notes of this eleven-CD box set of the group's work. For a much cheaper collection of the group's hits -- but without the jazz, blues, and baroque pop elements that made them more interesting than the average sixties singles band -- this has all the hit singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript: So far, when we've looked at the British blues and R&B scene, we've concentrated on the bands who were influenced by Chicago blues, and who kept to a straightforward guitar/bass/drums lineup. But there was another, related, branch of the blues scene in Britain that was more musically sophisticated, and which while its practitioners certainly enjoyed playing songs by Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, was also rooted in the jazz of people like Mose Allison. Today we're going to look at one of those bands, and at the intersection of jazz and the British R&B scene, and how a jazz band with a flute player and a vibraphonist briefly became bubblegum pop idols. We're going to look at "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Do Wah Diddy Diddy"] Manfred Mann is, annoyingly when writing about the group, the name of both a band and of one of its members. Manfred Mann the human being, as opposed to Manfred Mann the group, was born Manfred Lubowitz in South Africa, and while he was from a wealthy family, he was very opposed to the vicious South African system of apartheid, and considered himself strongly anti-racist. He was also a lover of jazz music, especially some of the most progressive music being made at the time -- musicians like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane -- and he soon became a very competent jazz pianist, playing with musicians like Hugh Masakela at a time when that kind of fraternisation between people of different races was very much frowned upon in South Africa. Manfred desperately wanted to get out of South Africa, and he took his chance in June 1961, at the last point at which he was a Commonwealth citizen. The Commonwealth, for those who don't know, is a political association of countries that were originally parts of the British Empire, and basically replaced the British Empire when the former colonies gained their independence. These days, the Commonwealth is of mostly symbolic importance, but in the fifties and sixties, as the Empire was breaking up, it was considered a real power in its own right, and in particular, until some changes to immigration law in the mid sixties, Commonwealth citizens had the right to move to the UK. At that point, South Africa had just voted to become a republic, and there was a rule in the Commonwealth that countries with a head of state other than the Queen could only remain in the Commonwealth with the unanimous agreement of all the other members. And several of the other member states, unsurprisingly, objected to the continued membership of a country whose entire system of government was based on the most virulent racism imaginable. So, as soon as South Africa became a republic, it lost its Commonwealth membership, and that meant that its citizens lost their automatic right to emigrate to the UK. But they were given a year's grace period, and so Manfred took that chance and moved over to England, where he started playing jazz keyboards, giving piano lessons, and making some money on the side by writing record reviews. For those reviews, rather than credit himself as Manfred Lubowitz, he decided to use a pseudonym taken from the jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and he became Manfred Manne -- spelled with a silent e on the end, which he later dropped. Mann was rather desperate for gigs, and he ended up taking a job playing with a band at a Butlin's holiday camp. Graham Bond, who we've seen in several previous episodes as the leader of The Graham Bond Organisation, was at that time playing Hammond organ there, but only wanted to play a few days a week. Mann became the substitute keyboard player for that holiday camp band, and struck up a good musical rapport with the drummer and vibraphone player, Mike Hugg. When Bond went off to form his own band, Mann and Hugg decided to form their own band along the same lines, mixing the modern jazz that they liked with the more commercial R&B that Bond was playing. They named their group the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, and it initially consisted of Mann on keyboards, Hugg on drums and vibraphone, Mike Vickers on guitar, flute, and saxophone, Dave Richmond on bass, Tony Roberts and Don Fay on saxophone and Ian Fenby on trumpet. As their experiences were far more in the jazz field than in blues, they decided that they needed to get in a singer who was more familiar with the blues side of things. The person they chose was a singer who was originally named Paul Pond, and who had been friends for a long time with Brian Jones, before Jones had formed the Rolling Stones. While Jones had been performing under the name Elmo Lewis, his friend had taken on Jones' surname, as he thought "Paul Pond" didn't sound like a good name for a singer. He'd first kept his initials, and performed as P.P. Jones, but then he'd presumably realised that "pee-pee" is probably not the best stage name in the world, and so he'd become just Paul Jones, the name by which he's known to this day. Jones, like his friend Brian, was a fan particularly of Chicago blues, and he had occasionally appeared with Alexis Korner. After auditioning for the group at a ska club called The Roaring 20s, Jones became the group's lead singer and harmonica player, and the group soon moved in Jones' musical direction, playing the kind of Chicago blues that was popular at the Marquee club, where they soon got a residency, rather than the soul style that was more popular at the nearby Flamingo club, and which would be more expected from a horn-centric lineup. Unsurprisingly, given this, the horn players soon left, and the group became a five-piece core of Jones, Mann, Hugg, Vickers, and Richmond. This group was signed to HMV records by John Burgess. Burgess was a producer who specialised in music of a very different style from what the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers played. We've already heard some of his production work -- he was the producer for Adam Faith from "What Do You Want?" on: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, "What Do You Want?"] And at the time he signed the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, he was just starting to work with a new group, Freddie and the Dreamers, for whom he would produce several hits: [Excerpt: Freddie and the Dreamers, "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody"] Burgess liked the group, but he insisted that they had to change their name -- and in fact, he insisted that the group change their name to Manfred Mann. None of the group members liked the idea -- even Mann himself thought that this seemed a little unreasonable, and Paul Jones in particular disagreed strongly with the idea, but they were all eventually mollified by the idea that all the publicity would emphasise that all five of them were equal members of the group, and that while the group might be named after their keyboard player, there were five members. The group members themselves always referred to themselves as "the Manfreds" rather than as Manfred Mann. The group's first single showed that despite having become a blues band and then getting produced by a pop producer, they were still at heart a jazz group. "Why Should We Not?" is an instrumental led by Vickers' saxophone, Mann's organ, and Jones' harmonica: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Why Should We Not?"] Unsurprisingly, neither that nor the B-side, a jazz instrumental version of "Frere Jacques", charted -- Britain in 1963 wanted Gerry and the Pacemakers and Freddie and the Dreamers, not jazz instrumentals. The next single, an R&B song called "Cock-A-Hoop" written by Jones, did little better. The group's big breakthrough came from Ready, Steady, Go!, which at this point was using "Wipe Out!" by the Surfaris as its theme song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Wipe Out"] We've mentioned Ready, Steady, Go! in passing in previous episodes, but it was the most important pop music show of the early and mid sixties, just as Oh Boy! had been for the late fifties. Ready, Steady, Go! was, in principle at least, a general pop music programme, but in practice it catered primarily for the emerging mod subculture. "Mod" stood for "modernist", and the mods emerged from the group of people who liked modern jazz rather than trad, but by this point their primary musical interests were in soul and R&B. Mod was a working-class subculture, based in the South-East of England, especially London, and spurred on by the newfound comparative affluence of the early sixties, when for the first time young working-class people, while still living in poverty, had a small amount of disposable income to spend on clothes, music, and drugs. The Mods had a very particular sense of style, based around sharp Italian suits, pop art and op art, and Black American music or white British imitations of it. For them, music was functional, and primarily existed for the purposes of dancing, and many of them would take large amounts of amphetamines so they could spend the entire weekend at clubs dancing to soul and R&B music. And that entire weekend would kick off on Friday with Ready, Steady, Go!, whose catchphrase was "the weekend starts here!" Ready, Steady, Go! featured almost every important pop act of the early sixties, but while groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers or the Beatles would appear on it, it became known for its promotion of Black artists, and it was the first major British TV exposure for Motown artists like the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Marvelettes, for Stax artists like Otis Redding, and for blues artists like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Ready Steady Go! was also the primary TV exposure for British groups who were inspired by those artists, and it's through Ready Steady Go! that the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Them, and the Who, among others reached national popularity -- all of them acts that were popular among the Mods in particular. But "Wipe Out" didn't really fit with this kind of music, and so the producers of Ready Steady Go were looking for something more suitable for their theme music. They'd already tried commissioning the Animals to record something, as we saw a couple of weeks back, but that hadn't worked out, and instead they turned to Manfred Mann, who came up with a song that not only perfectly fit the style of the show, but also handily promoted the group themselves: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "5-4-3-2-1"] That was taken on as Ready, Steady, Go!s theme song, and made the top five in the UK. But by the time it charted, the group had already changed lineup. Dave Richmond was seen by the other members of the group as a problem at this point. Richmond was a great bass player, but he was a great *jazz* bass player -- he wanted to be Charles Mingus, and play strange cross-rhythms, and what the group needed at this point was someone who would just play straightforward blues basslines without complaint -- they needed someone closer to Willie Dixon than to Mingus. Tom McGuinness, who replaced him, had already had a rather unusual career trajectory. He'd started out as a satirist, writing for the magazine Private Eye and the TV series That Was The Week That Was, one of the most important British comedy shows of the sixties, but he had really wanted to be a blues musician instead. He'd formed a blues band, The Roosters, with a guitarist who went to art school with his girlfriend, and they'd played a few gigs around London before the duo had been poached by the minor Merseybeat band Casey Jones and his Engineers, a group which had been formed by Brian Casser, formerly of Cass & The Cassanovas, the group that had become The Big Three. Casey Jones and his Engineers had just released the single "One Way Ticket": [Excerpt: Casey Jones and His Engineers, "One-Way Ticket"] However, the two guitarists soon realised, after just a handful of gigs, that they weren't right for that group, and quit. McGuinness' friend, Eric Clapton, went on to join the Yardbirds, and we'll be hearing more about him in a few weeks' time, but McGuinness was at a loose end, until he discovered that Manfred Mann were looking for a bass player. McGuinness was a guitarist, but bluffed to Paul Jones that he'd switched to bass, and got the job. He said later that the only question he'd been asked when interviewed by the group was "are you willing to play simple parts?" -- as he'd never played bass in his life until the day of his first gig with the group, he was more than happy to say yes to that. McGuinness joined only days after the recording of "5-4-3-2-1", and Richmond was out -- though he would have a successful career as a session bass player, playing on, among others, "Je t'Aime" by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, "Your Song" by Elton John, Labi Siffre's "It Must Be Love", and the music for the long-running sitcoms Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine. As soon as McGuinness joined, the group set out on tour, to promote their new hit, but also to act as the backing group for the Crystals, on a tour which also featured Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Joe Brown and his Bruvvers. The group's next single, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble" was another original, and made number eleven on the charts, but the group saw it as a failure anyway, to the extent that they tried their best to forget it ever existed. In researching this episode I got an eleven-CD box set of the group's work, which contains every studio album or compilation they released in the sixties, a collection of their EPs, and a collection of their BBC sessions. In all eleven CDs, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble" doesn't appear at all. Which is quite odd, as it's a perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, piece of pop R&B: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble"] But it's not just the group that were unimpressed with the record. John Burgess thought that the record only getting to number eleven was proof of his hypothesis that groups should not put out their own songs as singles. From this point on, with one exception in 1968, everything they released as an A-side would be a cover version or a song brought to them by a professional songwriter. This worried Jones, who didn't want to be forced to start singing songs he disliked, which he saw as a very likely outcome of this edict. So he made it his role in the group to seek out records that the group could cover, which would be commercial enough that they could get hit singles from them, but which would be something he could sing while keeping his self-respect. His very first selection certainly met the first criterion. The song which would become their biggest hit had very little to do with the R&B or jazz which had inspired the group. Instead, it was a perfect piece of Brill Building pop. The Exciters, who originally recorded it, were one of the great girl groups of the early sixties (though they also had one male member), and had already had quite an influence on pop music. They had been discovered by Leiber and Stoller, who had signed them to Red Bird Records, a label we'll be looking at in much more detail in an upcoming episode, and they'd had a hit in 1962 with a Bert Berns song, "Tell Him", which made the top five: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] That record had so excited a young British folk singer who was in the US at the time to record an album with her group The Springfields that she completely reworked her entire style, went solo, and kickstarted a solo career singing pop-soul songs under the name Dusty Springfield. The Exciters never had another top forty hit, but they became popular enough among British music lovers that the Beatles asked them to open for them on their American tour in summer 1964. Most of the Exciters' records were of songs written by the more R&B end of the Brill Building songwriters -- they would record several more Bert Berns songs, and some by Ritchie Barrett, but the song that would become their most well-known legacy was actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Like many of Barry and Greenwich's songs, it was based around a nonsense phrase, but in this case the phrase they used had something of a longer history, though it's not apparent whether they fully realised that. In African-American folklore of the early twentieth century, the imaginary town of Diddy Wah Diddy was something like a synonym for heaven, or for the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the folk song -- a place where people didn't have to work, and where food was free everywhere. This place had been sung about in many songs, like Blind Blake's "Diddie Wah Diddie": [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Diddie Wah Diddie"] And a song written by Willie Dixon for Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddy Wah Diddy"] And "Diddy" and "Wah" had often been used by other Black artists, in various contexts, like Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew's "Diddy-Y-Diddy-O": [Excerpt: Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew, "Diddy-Y-Diddy-O"] And Junior and Marie's "Boom Diddy Wah Wah", a "Ko Ko Mo" knockoff produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Junior and Marie, "Boom Diddy Wah Wah"] So when Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich wrote "Do-Wah-Diddy", as the song was originally called, they were, wittingly or not, tapping into a rich history of rhythm and blues music. But the song as Greenwich demoed it was one of the first examples of what would become known as "bubblegum pop", and is particularly notable in her demo for its very early use of the fuzz guitar that would be a stylistic hallmark of that subgenre: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich, "Do-Wah-Diddy (demo)"] The Exciters' version of the song took it into more conventional girl-group territory, with a strong soulful vocal, but with the group's backing vocal call-and-response chant showing up the song's resemblance to the kind of schoolyard chanting games which were, of course, the basis of the very first girl group records: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Do-Wah-Diddy"] Sadly, that record only reached number seventy-eight on the charts, and the Exciters would have no more hits in the US, though a later lineup of the group would make the UK top forty in 1975 with a song written and produced by the Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine. But in 1964 Jones had picked up on "Do-Wah-Diddy", and knew it was a potential hit. Most of the group weren't very keen on "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", as the song was renamed. There are relatively few interviews with any of them about it, but from what I can gather the only member of the band who thought anything much of the song was Paul Jones. However, the group did their best with the recording, and were particularly impressed with Manfred's Hammond organ solo -- which they later discovered was cut out of the finished recording by Burgess. The result was an organ-driven stomping pop song which had more in common with the Dave Clark Five than with anything else the group were doing: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Do Wah Diddy Diddy"] The record reached number one in both the UK and the US, and the group immediately went on an American tour, packaged with Peter & Gordon, a British duo who were having some success at the time because Peter Asher's sister was dating Paul McCartney, who'd given them a hit song, "World Without Love": [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The group found the experience of touring the US a thoroughly miserable one, and decided that they weren't going to bother going back again, so while they would continue to have big hits in Britain for the rest of the decade, they only had a few minor successes in the States. After the success of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", EMI rushed out an album by the group, The Five Faces of Manfred Mann, which must have caused some confusion for anyone buying it in the hope of more "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" style pop songs. Half the album's fourteen tracks were covers of blues and R&B, mostly by Chess artists -- there were covers of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Ike & Tina Turner, and more. There were also five originals, written or co-written by Jones, in the same style as those songs, plus a couple of instrumentals, one written by the group and one a cover of Cannonball Adderly's jazz classic "Sack O'Woe", arranged to show off the group's skills at harmonica, saxophone, piano and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Sack O'Woe"] However, the group realised that the formula they'd hit on with "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" was a useful one, and so for their next single they once again covered a girl-group track with a nonsense-word chorus and title -- their version of "Sha La La" by the Shirelles took them to number three on the UK charts, and number twelve in the US. They followed that with a ballad, "Come Tomorrow", one of the few secular songs ever recorded by Marie Knight, the gospel singer who we discussed briefly way back in episode five, who was Sister Rosetta Tharpe's duet partner, and quite possibly her partner in other senses. They released several more singles and were consistently charting, to the point that they actually managed to get a top ten hit with a self-written song despite their own material not being considered worth putting out as singles. Paul Jones had written "The One in the Middle" for his friends the Yardbirds, but when they turned it down, he rewrote the song to be about Manfred Mann, and especially about himself: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "The One in the Middle"] Like much of their material, that was released on an EP, and the EP was so successful that as well as making number one on the EP charts, it also made number ten on the regular charts, with "The One in the Middle" as the lead-off track. But "The One in the Middle" was a clue to something else as well -- Jones was getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the records the group was making were hits, and he was the frontman, the lead singer, the person picking the cover versions, and the writer of much of the original material, but all the records were getting credited to the group's keyboard player. But Jones wasn't the next member of the group to leave. That was Mike Vickers, who went off to work in arranging film music and session work, including some work for the Beatles, the music for the film Dracula AD 1972, and the opening and closing themes for This Week in Baseball. The last single the group released while Vickers was a member was the aptly-titled "If You Gotta Go, Go Now". Mann had heard Bob Dylan performing that song live, and had realised that the song had never been released. He'd contacted Dylan's publishers, got hold of a demo, and the group became the first to release a version of the song, making number two in the charts: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Before Vickers' departure, the group had recorded their second album, Mann Made, and that had been even more eclectic than the first album, combining versions of blues classics like "Stormy Monday Blues", Motown songs like "The Way You Do The Things You Do", country covers like "You Don't Know Me", and oddities like "Bare Hugg", an original jazz instrumental for flute and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Bare Hugg"] McGuinness took the opportunity of Vickers leaving the group to switch from bass back to playing guitar, which had always been his preferred instrument. To fill in the gap, on Graham Bond's recommendation they hired away Jack Bruce, who had just been playing in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with McGuinness' old friend Eric Clapton, and it's Bruce who played bass on the group's next big hit, "Pretty Flamingo", the only UK number one that Bruce ever played on: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] Bruce stayed with the band for several months, before going off to play in another band who we'll be covering in a future episode. He was replaced in turn by Klaus Voorman. Voorman was an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days, who had been taught the rudiments of bass by Stuart Sutcliffe, and had formed a trio, Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, with two Merseybeat musicians, Paddy Chambers of the Big Three and Gibson Kemp of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, "No Good Without You Baby"] Like Vickers, Voorman could play the flute, and his flute playing would become a regular part of the group's later singles. These lineup changes didn't affect the group as either a chart act or as an act who were playing a huge variety of different styles of music. While the singles were uniformly catchy pop, on album tracks, B-sides or EPs you'd be likely to find versions of folk songs collected by Alan Lomax, like "John Hardy", or things like "Driva Man", a blues song about slavery in 5/4 time, originally by the jazz greats Oscar Brown and Max Roach: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Driva Man"] But by the time that track was released, Paul Jones was out of the group. He actually announced his intention to quit the group at the same time that Mike Vickers left, but the group had persuaded him to stay on for almost a year while they looked for his replacement, auditioning singers like Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry with little success. They eventually decided on Mike d'Abo, who had previously been the lead singer of a group called A Band of Angels: [Excerpt: A Band of Angels, "(Accept My) Invitation"] By the point d'Abo joined, relations between the rest of the group and Jones were so poor that they didn't tell Jones that they were thinking of d'Abo -- Jones would later recollect that the group decided to stop at a pub on the way to a gig, ostensibly to watch themselves on TV, but actually to watch A Band of Angels on the same show, without explaining to Jones that that was what they were doing – Jones actually mentioned d'Abo to his bandmates as a possible replacement, not realising he was already in the group. Mann has talked about how on the group's last show with Jones, they drove to the gig in silence, and their first single with the new singer, a version of Dylan's "Just Like a Woman", came on the radio. There was a lot of discomfort in the band at this time, because their record label had decided to stick with Jones as a solo performer, and the rest of the group had had to find another label, and were worried that without Jones their career was over. Luckily for everyone involved, "Just Like a Woman" made the top ten, and the group's career was able to continue. Meanwhile, Jones' first single as a solo artist made the top five: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "High Time"] But after that and his follow-up, "I've Been a Bad, Bad, Boy", which made number five, the best he could do was to barely scrape the top forty. Manfred Mann, on the other hand, continued having hits, though there was a constant struggle to find new material. d'Abo was himself a songwriter, and it shows the limitations of the "no A-sides by group members" rule that while d'Abo was the lead singer of Manfred Mann, he wrote two hit singles which the group never recorded. The first, "Handbags and Gladrags", was a hit for Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Handbags and Gladrags"] That was only a minor hit, but was later recorded successfully by Rod Stewart, with d'Abo arranging, and the Stereophonics. d'Abo also co-wrote, and played piano on, "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations: [Excerpt: The Foundations, "Build Me Up Buttercup"] But the group continued releasing singles written by other people. Their second post-Jones single, from the perspective of a spurned lover insulting their ex's new fiancee, had to have its title changed from what the writers intended, as the group felt that a song insulting "semi-detached suburban Mr. Jones" might be taken the wrong way. Lightly retitled, "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" made number two, while the follow-up, "Ha Ha! Said the Clown", made number four. The two singles after that did significantly less well, though, and seemed to be quite bizarre choices -- an instrumental Hammond organ version of Tommy Roe's "Sweet Pea", which made number thirty-six, and a version of Randy Newman's bitterly cynical "So Long, Dad", which didn't make the charts at all. After this lack of success, the group decided to go back to what had worked for them before. They'd already had two hits with Dylan songs, and Mann had got hold of a copy of Dylan's Basement Tapes, a bootleg which we'll be talking about later. He picked up on one song from it, and got permission to release "The Mighty Quinn", which became the group's third number one: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "The Mighty Quinn"] The album from which that came, Mighty Garvey, is the closest thing the group came to an actual great album. While the group's earlier albums were mostly blues covers, this was mostly made up of original material by either Hugg or d'Abo, in a pastoral baroque pop style that invites comparisons to the Kinks or the Zombies' material of that period, but with a self-mocking comedy edge in several songs that was closer to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Probably the highlight of the album was the mellotron-driven "It's So Easy Falling": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "It's So Easy Falling"] But Mighty Garvey didn't chart, and it was the last gasp of the group as a creative entity. They had three more top-ten hits, all of them good examples of their type, but by January 1969, Tom McGuinness was interviewed saying "It's not a group any more. It's just five people who come together to make hit singles. That's the only aim of the group at the moment -- to make hit singles -- it's the only reason the group exists. Commercial success is very important to the group. It gives us financial freedom to do the things we want." The group split up in 1969, and went their separate ways. d'Abo appeared on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, and then went into writing advertising jingles, most famously writing "a finger of fudge is just enough" for Cadbury's. McGuinness formed McGuinness Flint, with the songwriters Gallagher and Lyle, and had a big hit with "When I'm Dead and Gone": [Excerpt: McGuinness Flint, "When I'm Dead and Gone"] He later teamed up again with Paul Jones, to form a blues band imaginatively named "the Blues Band", who continue performing to this day: [Excerpt: The Blues Band, "Mean Ol' Frisco"] Jones became a born-again Christian in the eighties, and also starred in a children's TV show, Uncle Jack, and presented the BBC Radio 2 Blues Programme for thirty-two years. Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg formed another group, Manfred Mann Chapter Three, who released two albums before splitting. Hugg went on from that to write for TV and films, most notably writing the theme music to "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?": [Excerpt: Highly Likely, "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?"] Mann went on to form Manfred Mann's Earth Band, who had a number of hits, the biggest of which was the Bruce Springsteen song "Blinded by the Light": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Blinded by the Light"] Almost uniquely for a band from the early sixties, all the members of the classic lineup of Manfred Mann are still alive. Manfred Mann continues to perform with various lineups of his Earth Band. Hugg, Jones, McGuinness, and d'Abo reunited as The Manfreds in the 1990s, with Vickers also in the band until 1999, and continue to tour together -- I still have a ticket to see them which was originally for a show in April 2020, but has just been rescheduled to 2022. McGuinness and Jones also still tour with the Blues Band. And Mike Vickers now spends his time creating experimental animations. Manfred Mann were a band with too many musical interests to have a coherent image, and their reliance on outside songwriters and their frequent lineup changes meant that they never had the consistent sound of many of their contemporaries. But partly because of this, they created a catalogue that rewards exploration in a way that several more well-regarded bands' work doesn't, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a major critical reassessment of them at some point. But whether that happens or not, almost sixty years on people around the world still respond instantly to the opening bars of their biggest hit, and "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" remains one of the most fondly remembered singles of the early sixties.

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Episode 118: “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick. 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 No Mixcloud this week due to the number of tracks by Manfred Mann. Information on the group comes from Mannerisms: The Five Phases of Manfred Mann, by Greg Russo, and from the liner notes of this eleven-CD box set of the group’s work. For a much cheaper collection of the group’s hits — but without the jazz, blues, and baroque pop elements that made them more interesting than the average sixties singles band — this has all the hit singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript: So far, when we’ve looked at the British blues and R&B scene, we’ve concentrated on the bands who were influenced by Chicago blues, and who kept to a straightforward guitar/bass/drums lineup. But there was another, related, branch of the blues scene in Britain that was more musically sophisticated, and which while its practitioners certainly enjoyed playing songs by Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, was also rooted in the jazz of people like Mose Allison. Today we’re going to look at one of those bands, and at the intersection of jazz and the British R&B scene, and how a jazz band with a flute player and a vibraphonist briefly became bubblegum pop idols. We’re going to look at “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”] Manfred Mann is, annoyingly when writing about the group, the name of both a band and of one of its members. Manfred Mann the human being, as opposed to Manfred Mann the group, was born Manfred Lubowitz in South Africa, and while he was from a wealthy family, he was very opposed to the vicious South African system of apartheid, and considered himself strongly anti-racist. He was also a lover of jazz music, especially some of the most progressive music being made at the time — musicians like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane — and he soon became a very competent jazz pianist, playing with musicians like Hugh Masakela at a time when that kind of fraternisation between people of different races was very much frowned upon in South Africa. Manfred desperately wanted to get out of South Africa, and he took his chance in June 1961, at the last point at which he was a Commonwealth citizen. The Commonwealth, for those who don’t know, is a political association of countries that were originally parts of the British Empire, and basically replaced the British Empire when the former colonies gained their independence. These days, the Commonwealth is of mostly symbolic importance, but in the fifties and sixties, as the Empire was breaking up, it was considered a real power in its own right, and in particular, until some changes to immigration law in the mid sixties, Commonwealth citizens had the right to move to the UK. At that point, South Africa had just voted to become a republic, and there was a rule in the Commonwealth that countries with a head of state other than the Queen could only remain in the Commonwealth with the unanimous agreement of all the other members. And several of the other member states, unsurprisingly, objected to the continued membership of a country whose entire system of government was based on the most virulent racism imaginable. So, as soon as South Africa became a republic, it lost its Commonwealth membership, and that meant that its citizens lost their automatic right to emigrate to the UK. But they were given a year’s grace period, and so Manfred took that chance and moved over to England, where he started playing jazz keyboards, giving piano lessons, and making some money on the side by writing record reviews. For those reviews, rather than credit himself as Manfred Lubowitz, he decided to use a pseudonym taken from the jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and he became Manfred Manne — spelled with a silent e on the end, which he later dropped. Mann was rather desperate for gigs, and he ended up taking a job playing with a band at a Butlin’s holiday camp. Graham Bond, who we’ve seen in several previous episodes as the leader of The Graham Bond Organisation, was at that time playing Hammond organ there, but only wanted to play a few days a week. Mann became the substitute keyboard player for that holiday camp band, and struck up a good musical rapport with the drummer and vibraphone player, Mike Hugg. When Bond went off to form his own band, Mann and Hugg decided to form their own band along the same lines, mixing the modern jazz that they liked with the more commercial R&B that Bond was playing. They named their group the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, and it initially consisted of Mann on keyboards, Hugg on drums and vibraphone, Mike Vickers on guitar, flute, and saxophone, Dave Richmond on bass, Tony Roberts and Don Fay on saxophone and Ian Fenby on trumpet. As their experiences were far more in the jazz field than in blues, they decided that they needed to get in a singer who was more familiar with the blues side of things. The person they chose was a singer who was originally named Paul Pond, and who had been friends for a long time with Brian Jones, before Jones had formed the Rolling Stones. While Jones had been performing under the name Elmo Lewis, his friend had taken on Jones’ surname, as he thought “Paul Pond” didn’t sound like a good name for a singer. He’d first kept his initials, and performed as P.P. Jones, but then he’d presumably realised that “pee-pee” is probably not the best stage name in the world, and so he’d become just Paul Jones, the name by which he’s known to this day. Jones, like his friend Brian, was a fan particularly of Chicago blues, and he had occasionally appeared with Alexis Korner. After auditioning for the group at a ska club called The Roaring 20s, Jones became the group’s lead singer and harmonica player, and the group soon moved in Jones’ musical direction, playing the kind of Chicago blues that was popular at the Marquee club, where they soon got a residency, rather than the soul style that was more popular at the nearby Flamingo club, and which would be more expected from a horn-centric lineup. Unsurprisingly, given this, the horn players soon left, and the group became a five-piece core of Jones, Mann, Hugg, Vickers, and Richmond. This group was signed to HMV records by John Burgess. Burgess was a producer who specialised in music of a very different style from what the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers played. We’ve already heard some of his production work — he was the producer for Adam Faith from “What Do You Want?” on: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “What Do You Want?”] And at the time he signed the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, he was just starting to work with a new group, Freddie and the Dreamers, for whom he would produce several hits: [Excerpt: Freddie and the Dreamers, “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody”] Burgess liked the group, but he insisted that they had to change their name — and in fact, he insisted that the group change their name to Manfred Mann. None of the group members liked the idea — even Mann himself thought that this seemed a little unreasonable, and Paul Jones in particular disagreed strongly with the idea, but they were all eventually mollified by the idea that all the publicity would emphasise that all five of them were equal members of the group, and that while the group might be named after their keyboard player, there were five members. The group members themselves always referred to themselves as “the Manfreds” rather than as Manfred Mann. The group’s first single showed that despite having become a blues band and then getting produced by a pop producer, they were still at heart a jazz group. “Why Should We Not?” is an instrumental led by Vickers’ saxophone, Mann’s organ, and Jones’ harmonica: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Why Should We Not?”] Unsurprisingly, neither that nor the B-side, a jazz instrumental version of “Frere Jacques”, charted — Britain in 1963 wanted Gerry and the Pacemakers and Freddie and the Dreamers, not jazz instrumentals. The next single, an R&B song called “Cock-A-Hoop” written by Jones, did little better. The group’s big breakthrough came from Ready, Steady, Go!, which at this point was using “Wipe Out!” by the Surfaris as its theme song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, “Wipe Out”] We’ve mentioned Ready, Steady, Go! in passing in previous episodes, but it was the most important pop music show of the early and mid sixties, just as Oh Boy! had been for the late fifties. Ready, Steady, Go! was, in principle at least, a general pop music programme, but in practice it catered primarily for the emerging mod subculture. “Mod” stood for “modernist”, and the mods emerged from the group of people who liked modern jazz rather than trad, but by this point their primary musical interests were in soul and R&B. Mod was a working-class subculture, based in the South-East of England, especially London, and spurred on by the newfound comparative affluence of the early sixties, when for the first time young working-class people, while still living in poverty, had a small amount of disposable income to spend on clothes, music, and drugs. The Mods had a very particular sense of style, based around sharp Italian suits, pop art and op art, and Black American music or white British imitations of it. For them, music was functional, and primarily existed for the purposes of dancing, and many of them would take large amounts of amphetamines so they could spend the entire weekend at clubs dancing to soul and R&B music. And that entire weekend would kick off on Friday with Ready, Steady, Go!, whose catchphrase was “the weekend starts here!” Ready, Steady, Go! featured almost every important pop act of the early sixties, but while groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers or the Beatles would appear on it, it became known for its promotion of Black artists, and it was the first major British TV exposure for Motown artists like the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Marvelettes, for Stax artists like Otis Redding, and for blues artists like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Ready Steady Go! was also the primary TV exposure for British groups who were inspired by those artists, and it’s through Ready Steady Go! that the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Them, and the Who, among others reached national popularity — all of them acts that were popular among the Mods in particular. But “Wipe Out” didn’t really fit with this kind of music, and so the producers of Ready Steady Go were looking for something more suitable for their theme music. They’d already tried commissioning the Animals to record something, as we saw a couple of weeks back, but that hadn’t worked out, and instead they turned to Manfred Mann, who came up with a song that not only perfectly fit the style of the show, but also handily promoted the group themselves: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “5-4-3-2-1”] That was taken on as Ready, Steady, Go!s theme song, and made the top five in the UK. But by the time it charted, the group had already changed lineup. Dave Richmond was seen by the other members of the group as a problem at this point. Richmond was a great bass player, but he was a great *jazz* bass player — he wanted to be Charles Mingus, and play strange cross-rhythms, and what the group needed at this point was someone who would just play straightforward blues basslines without complaint — they needed someone closer to Willie Dixon than to Mingus. Tom McGuinness, who replaced him, had already had a rather unusual career trajectory. He’d started out as a satirist, writing for the magazine Private Eye and the TV series That Was The Week That Was, one of the most important British comedy shows of the sixties, but he had really wanted to be a blues musician instead. He’d formed a blues band, The Roosters, with a guitarist who went to art school with his girlfriend, and they’d played a few gigs around London before the duo had been poached by the minor Merseybeat band Casey Jones and his Engineers, a group which had been formed by Brian Casser, formerly of Cass & The Cassanovas, the group that had become The Big Three. Casey Jones and his Engineers had just released the single “One Way Ticket”: [Excerpt: Casey Jones and His Engineers, “One-Way Ticket”] However, the two guitarists soon realised, after just a handful of gigs, that they weren’t right for that group, and quit. McGuinness’ friend, Eric Clapton, went on to join the Yardbirds, and we’ll be hearing more about him in a few weeks’ time, but McGuinness was at a loose end, until he discovered that Manfred Mann were looking for a bass player. McGuinness was a guitarist, but bluffed to Paul Jones that he’d switched to bass, and got the job. He said later that the only question he’d been asked when interviewed by the group was “are you willing to play simple parts?” — as he’d never played bass in his life until the day of his first gig with the group, he was more than happy to say yes to that. McGuinness joined only days after the recording of “5-4-3-2-1”, and Richmond was out — though he would have a successful career as a session bass player, playing on, among others, “Je t’Aime” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, “Your Song” by Elton John, Labi Siffre’s “It Must Be Love”, and the music for the long-running sitcoms Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine. As soon as McGuinness joined, the group set out on tour, to promote their new hit, but also to act as the backing group for the Crystals, on a tour which also featured Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Joe Brown and his Bruvvers. The group’s next single, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble” was another original, and made number eleven on the charts, but the group saw it as a failure anyway, to the extent that they tried their best to forget it ever existed. In researching this episode I got an eleven-CD box set of the group’s work, which contains every studio album or compilation they released in the sixties, a collection of their EPs, and a collection of their BBC sessions. In all eleven CDs, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble” doesn’t appear at all. Which is quite odd, as it’s a perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, piece of pop R&B: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble”] But it’s not just the group that were unimpressed with the record. John Burgess thought that the record only getting to number eleven was proof of his hypothesis that groups should not put out their own songs as singles. From this point on, with one exception in 1968, everything they released as an A-side would be a cover version or a song brought to them by a professional songwriter. This worried Jones, who didn’t want to be forced to start singing songs he disliked, which he saw as a very likely outcome of this edict. So he made it his role in the group to seek out records that the group could cover, which would be commercial enough that they could get hit singles from them, but which would be something he could sing while keeping his self-respect. His very first selection certainly met the first criterion. The song which would become their biggest hit had very little to do with the R&B or jazz which had inspired the group. Instead, it was a perfect piece of Brill Building pop. The Exciters, who originally recorded it, were one of the great girl groups of the early sixties (though they also had one male member), and had already had quite an influence on pop music. They had been discovered by Leiber and Stoller, who had signed them to Red Bird Records, a label we’ll be looking at in much more detail in an upcoming episode, and they’d had a hit in 1962 with a Bert Berns song, “Tell Him”, which made the top five: [Excerpt: The Exciters, “Tell Him”] That record had so excited a young British folk singer who was in the US at the time to record an album with her group The Springfields that she completely reworked her entire style, went solo, and kickstarted a solo career singing pop-soul songs under the name Dusty Springfield. The Exciters never had another top forty hit, but they became popular enough among British music lovers that the Beatles asked them to open for them on their American tour in summer 1964. Most of the Exciters’ records were of songs written by the more R&B end of the Brill Building songwriters — they would record several more Bert Berns songs, and some by Ritchie Barrett, but the song that would become their most well-known legacy was actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Like many of Barry and Greenwich’s songs, it was based around a nonsense phrase, but in this case the phrase they used had something of a longer history, though it’s not apparent whether they fully realised that. In African-American folklore of the early twentieth century, the imaginary town of Diddy Wah Diddy was something like a synonym for heaven, or for the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the folk song — a place where people didn’t have to work, and where food was free everywhere. This place had been sung about in many songs, like Blind Blake’s “Diddie Wah Diddie”: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Diddie Wah Diddie”] And a song written by Willie Dixon for Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddy Wah Diddy”] And “Diddy” and “Wah” had often been used by other Black artists, in various contexts, like Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew’s “Diddy-Y-Diddy-O”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew, “Diddy-Y-Diddy-O”] And Junior and Marie’s “Boom Diddy Wah Wah”, a “Ko Ko Mo” knockoff produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Junior and Marie, “Boom Diddy Wah Wah”] So when Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich wrote “Do-Wah-Diddy”, as the song was originally called, they were, wittingly or not, tapping into a rich history of rhythm and blues music. But the song as Greenwich demoed it was one of the first examples of what would become known as “bubblegum pop”, and is particularly notable in her demo for its very early use of the fuzz guitar that would be a stylistic hallmark of that subgenre: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich, “Do-Wah-Diddy (demo)”] The Exciters’ version of the song took it into more conventional girl-group territory, with a strong soulful vocal, but with the group’s backing vocal call-and-response chant showing up the song’s resemblance to the kind of schoolyard chanting games which were, of course, the basis of the very first girl group records: [Excerpt: The Exciters, “Do-Wah-Diddy”] Sadly, that record only reached number seventy-eight on the charts, and the Exciters would have no more hits in the US, though a later lineup of the group would make the UK top forty in 1975 with a song written and produced by the Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine. But in 1964 Jones had picked up on “Do-Wah-Diddy”, and knew it was a potential hit. Most of the group weren’t very keen on “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, as the song was renamed. There are relatively few interviews with any of them about it, but from what I can gather the only member of the band who thought anything much of the song was Paul Jones. However, the group did their best with the recording, and were particularly impressed with Manfred’s Hammond organ solo — which they later discovered was cut out of the finished recording by Burgess. The result was an organ-driven stomping pop song which had more in common with the Dave Clark Five than with anything else the group were doing: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”] The record reached number one in both the UK and the US, and the group immediately went on an American tour, packaged with Peter & Gordon, a British duo who were having some success at the time because Peter Asher’s sister was dating Paul McCartney, who’d given them a hit song, “World Without Love”: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, “World Without Love”] The group found the experience of touring the US a thoroughly miserable one, and decided that they weren’t going to bother going back again, so while they would continue to have big hits in Britain for the rest of the decade, they only had a few minor successes in the States. After the success of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, EMI rushed out an album by the group, The Five Faces of Manfred Mann, which must have caused some confusion for anyone buying it in the hope of more “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” style pop songs. Half the album’s fourteen tracks were covers of blues and R&B, mostly by Chess artists — there were covers of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Ike & Tina Turner, and more. There were also five originals, written or co-written by Jones, in the same style as those songs, plus a couple of instrumentals, one written by the group and one a cover of Cannonball Adderly’s jazz classic “Sack O’Woe”, arranged to show off the group’s skills at harmonica, saxophone, piano and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Sack O’Woe”] However, the group realised that the formula they’d hit on with “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” was a useful one, and so for their next single they once again covered a girl-group track with a nonsense-word chorus and title — their version of “Sha La La” by the Shirelles took them to number three on the UK charts, and number twelve in the US. They followed that with a ballad, “Come Tomorrow”, one of the few secular songs ever recorded by Marie Knight, the gospel singer who we discussed briefly way back in episode five, who was Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s duet partner, and quite possibly her partner in other senses. They released several more singles and were consistently charting, to the point that they actually managed to get a top ten hit with a self-written song despite their own material not being considered worth putting out as singles. Paul Jones had written “The One in the Middle” for his friends the Yardbirds, but when they turned it down, he rewrote the song to be about Manfred Mann, and especially about himself: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “The One in the Middle”] Like much of their material, that was released on an EP, and the EP was so successful that as well as making number one on the EP charts, it also made number ten on the regular charts, with “The One in the Middle” as the lead-off track. But “The One in the Middle” was a clue to something else as well — Jones was getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the records the group was making were hits, and he was the frontman, the lead singer, the person picking the cover versions, and the writer of much of the original material, but all the records were getting credited to the group’s keyboard player. But Jones wasn’t the next member of the group to leave. That was Mike Vickers, who went off to work in arranging film music and session work, including some work for the Beatles, the music for the film Dracula AD 1972, and the opening and closing themes for This Week in Baseball. The last single the group released while Vickers was a member was the aptly-titled “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”. Mann had heard Bob Dylan performing that song live, and had realised that the song had never been released. He’d contacted Dylan’s publishers, got hold of a demo, and the group became the first to release a version of the song, making number two in the charts: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”] Before Vickers’ departure, the group had recorded their second album, Mann Made, and that had been even more eclectic than the first album, combining versions of blues classics like “Stormy Monday Blues”, Motown songs like “The Way You Do The Things You Do”, country covers like “You Don’t Know Me”, and oddities like “Bare Hugg”, an original jazz instrumental for flute and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Bare Hugg”] McGuinness took the opportunity of Vickers leaving the group to switch from bass back to playing guitar, which had always been his preferred instrument. To fill in the gap, on Graham Bond’s recommendation they hired away Jack Bruce, who had just been playing in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with McGuinness’ old friend Eric Clapton, and it’s Bruce who played bass on the group’s next big hit, “Pretty Flamingo”, the only UK number one that Bruce ever played on: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Pretty Flamingo”] Bruce stayed with the band for several months, before going off to play in another band who we’ll be covering in a future episode. He was replaced in turn by Klaus Voorman. Voorman was an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days, who had been taught the rudiments of bass by Stuart Sutcliffe, and had formed a trio, Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, with two Merseybeat musicians, Paddy Chambers of the Big Three and Gibson Kemp of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, “No Good Without You Baby”] Like Vickers, Voorman could play the flute, and his flute playing would become a regular part of the group’s later singles. These lineup changes didn’t affect the group as either a chart act or as an act who were playing a huge variety of different styles of music. While the singles were uniformly catchy pop, on album tracks, B-sides or EPs you’d be likely to find versions of folk songs collected by Alan Lomax, like “John Hardy”, or things like “Driva Man”, a blues song about slavery in 5/4 time, originally by the jazz greats Oscar Brown and Max Roach: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Driva Man”] But by the time that track was released, Paul Jones was out of the group. He actually announced his intention to quit the group at the same time that Mike Vickers left, but the group had persuaded him to stay on for almost a year while they looked for his replacement, auditioning singers like Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry with little success. They eventually decided on Mike d’Abo, who had previously been the lead singer of a group called A Band of Angels: [Excerpt: A Band of Angels, “(Accept My) Invitation”] By the point d’Abo joined, relations between the rest of the group and Jones were so poor that they didn’t tell Jones that they were thinking of d’Abo — Jones would later recollect that the group decided to stop at a pub on the way to a gig, ostensibly to watch themselves on TV, but actually to watch A Band of Angels on the same show, without explaining to Jones that that was what they were doing – Jones actually mentioned d’Abo to his bandmates as a possible replacement, not realising he was already in the group. Mann has talked about how on the group’s last show with Jones, they drove to the gig in silence, and their first single with the new singer, a version of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”, came on the radio. There was a lot of discomfort in the band at this time, because their record label had decided to stick with Jones as a solo performer, and the rest of the group had had to find another label, and were worried that without Jones their career was over. Luckily for everyone involved, “Just Like a Woman” made the top ten, and the group’s career was able to continue. Meanwhile, Jones’ first single as a solo artist made the top five: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, “High Time”] But after that and his follow-up, “I’ve Been a Bad, Bad, Boy”, which made number five, the best he could do was to barely scrape the top forty. Manfred Mann, on the other hand, continued having hits, though there was a constant struggle to find new material. d’Abo was himself a songwriter, and it shows the limitations of the “no A-sides by group members” rule that while d’Abo was the lead singer of Manfred Mann, he wrote two hit singles which the group never recorded. The first, “Handbags and Gladrags”, was a hit for Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, “Handbags and Gladrags”] That was only a minor hit, but was later recorded successfully by Rod Stewart, with d’Abo arranging, and the Stereophonics. d’Abo also co-wrote, and played piano on, “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations: [Excerpt: The Foundations, “Build Me Up Buttercup”] But the group continued releasing singles written by other people. Their second post-Jones single, from the perspective of a spurned lover insulting their ex’s new fiancee, had to have its title changed from what the writers intended, as the group felt that a song insulting “semi-detached suburban Mr. Jones” might be taken the wrong way. Lightly retitled, “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James” made number two, while the follow-up, “Ha Ha! Said the Clown”, made number four. The two singles after that did significantly less well, though, and seemed to be quite bizarre choices — an instrumental Hammond organ version of Tommy Roe’s “Sweet Pea”, which made number thirty-six, and a version of Randy Newman’s bitterly cynical “So Long, Dad”, which didn’t make the charts at all. After this lack of success, the group decided to go back to what had worked for them before. They’d already had two hits with Dylan songs, and Mann had got hold of a copy of Dylan’s Basement Tapes, a bootleg which we’ll be talking about later. He picked up on one song from it, and got permission to release “The Mighty Quinn”, which became the group’s third number one: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “The Mighty Quinn”] The album from which that came, Mighty Garvey, is the closest thing the group came to an actual great album. While the group’s earlier albums were mostly blues covers, this was mostly made up of original material by either Hugg or d’Abo, in a pastoral baroque pop style that invites comparisons to the Kinks or the Zombies’ material of that period, but with a self-mocking comedy edge in several songs that was closer to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Probably the highlight of the album was the mellotron-driven “It’s So Easy Falling”: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “It’s So Easy Falling”] But Mighty Garvey didn’t chart, and it was the last gasp of the group as a creative entity. They had three more top-ten hits, all of them good examples of their type, but by January 1969, Tom McGuinness was interviewed saying “It’s not a group any more. It’s just five people who come together to make hit singles. That’s the only aim of the group at the moment — to make hit singles — it’s the only reason the group exists. Commercial success is very important to the group. It gives us financial freedom to do the things we want.” The group split up in 1969, and went their separate ways. d’Abo appeared on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, and then went into writing advertising jingles, most famously writing “a finger of fudge is just enough” for Cadbury’s. McGuinness formed McGuinness Flint, with the songwriters Gallagher and Lyle, and had a big hit with “When I’m Dead and Gone”: [Excerpt: McGuinness Flint, “When I’m Dead and Gone”] He later teamed up again with Paul Jones, to form a blues band imaginatively named “the Blues Band”, who continue performing to this day: [Excerpt: The Blues Band, “Mean Ol’ Frisco”] Jones became a born-again Christian in the eighties, and also starred in a children’s TV show, Uncle Jack, and presented the BBC Radio 2 Blues Programme for thirty-two years. Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg formed another group, Manfred Mann Chapter Three, who released two albums before splitting. Hugg went on from that to write for TV and films, most notably writing the theme music to “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”: [Excerpt: Highly Likely, “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”] Mann went on to form Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, who had a number of hits, the biggest of which was the Bruce Springsteen song “Blinded by the Light”: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Blinded by the Light”] Almost uniquely for a band from the early sixties, all the members of the classic lineup of Manfred Mann are still alive. Manfred Mann continues to perform with various lineups of his Earth Band. Hugg, Jones, McGuinness, and d’Abo reunited as The Manfreds in the 1990s, with Vickers also in the band until 1999, and continue to tour together — I still have a ticket to see them which was originally for a show in April 2020, but has just been rescheduled to 2022. McGuinness and Jones also still tour with the Blues Band. And Mike Vickers now spends his time creating experimental animations. Manfred Mann were a band with too many musical interests to have a coherent image, and their reliance on outside songwriters and their frequent lineup changes meant that they never had the consistent sound of many of their contemporaries. But partly because of this, they created a catalogue that rewards exploration in a way that several more well-regarded bands’ work doesn’t, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a major critical reassessment of them at some point. But whether that happens or not, almost sixty years on people around the world still respond instantly to the opening bars of their biggest hit, and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” remains one of the most fondly remembered singles of the early sixties.

tv american history black chicago uk england woman british walk italian dad angels south africa dead bbc band baseball horses zombies empire states wolf britain animals beatles bond cd boy rolling stones engineers pirates clowns richmond fool sean combs south africans hamburg trouble bob dylan elton john bruce springsteen cds paul mccartney commonwealth chess temptations southeast black americans steady klaus tina turner gallagher bbc radio crystals dreamers eps paddy motown hammond kinks eric clapton british empire big three woe burgess roaring mod rod stewart flamingos blinded tilt ike manfred emi whatever happened abo frisco mods greenwich rock music jesus christ superstar john coltrane supremes british tv muddy waters randy newman lightly cadbury otis redding roosters marquee dionne warwick handbags private eyes wipeout vickers brian jones wah serge gainsbourg pacemakers stax howlin mcguinness yardbirds dusty springfield john lee hooker jane birkin bo diddley casey jones charles mingus know me one way ticket paul jones what do you want stoller sister rosetta tharpe high time sweet peas manfred mann john mayall stereophonics ornette coleman hmv mingus jack bruce joe brown only fools alan lomax blues band leiber shirelles willie dixon your song uncle jack tony roberts summer wine go now earth band dave clark five brill building mose allison bluesbreakers peter asher sonny boy williamson marvelettes basement tapes mighty quinn hugg john hardy butlin glad rags merseybeat jeff barry labi siffre john burgess tommy roe surfaris long john baldry roy brown five faces bonzo dog doo dah band blind blake shelly manne big rock candy mountain greg russo ellie greenwich stuart sutcliffe springfields manfreds dracula ad build me up buttercup dave bartholomew it must be love bert berns exciters likely lads marie knight klaus voorman come tomorrow oscar brown that was the week that was mike vickers tilt araiza

Nit de Nadal, nit de g

DeliCatessen

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2020 60:02

La tradici

Nit de Nadal, nit de g

Música

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2020 60:02

La tradici

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Taking COVID-19 Testing to the People in Jacksonville, Florida. Featuring Ann-Marie Knight, MHA, FACHE.

The Health Disparities Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2020 45:35

With Florida emerging as the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, care providers in Jacksonville knew they had to intervene decisively with a testing plan for all populations, including the most vulnerable.

Taking COVID-19 Testing to the People in Jacksonville, Florida. Featuring Ann-Marie Knight, MHA, FACHE.

The Health Disparities Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2020 45:35

covid-19 testing jacksonville ann marie jacksonville florida fache with florida marie knight

Taking COVID-19 Testing to the People in Jacksonville, Florida. Featuring Ann-Marie Knight, MHA, FACHE.

The Health Disparities Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2020 45:35

Corona Chronicles with Anne - Marie Knight

Unlock your "Super" power with America's SuperMom!

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2020 22:38

A conversation on how we can give back to others during these difficult times. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/americassupermom/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americassupermom/support

anne marie corona chronicles marie knight

Ruta 61 - Adiós a Little Richard - 18/05/20

Ruta 61

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2020 64:02

Nos despedimos del gran Little Richard, uno de los padres del roc'n'rol, que falleció hace unos días a la edad de 87. Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It - Junior Wells; Ain't That Good News, Tutti Frutti - Little Richard; Singing In My Soul - Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Ain't Nothing Happening - Little Richard; How Far From God - Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Up Above My Head - Sister Rosetta Tharpe & Marie Knight; Lawdy Miss Mawdy - Lloyd Price; Lawdy Miss Mawdy, Tutti Frutti - Elvis Presley; Red House, Hear My Train A Comin', Easy Blues - Jimi Hendrix; Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Tin Pan Alley - Stevie Ray Vaughan. Escuchar audio

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Words Unite Bookstore Co-Founders and Authors, Qiana Cannon and Ashley Marie Knight

Master Your Story

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2020 17:13

Qiana Cannon and Ashley Marie Knight, authors and U.S. Army Veterans, discuss Words Unite Bookstore, and how they are using it to “change the narrative”, promoting family literacy and independent authors.

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Ann-Marie Knight - Testing in Under served Communities

Jacksonville's Morning News Interviews

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2020 5:40

4-9-2020 UF Health Jax

interview media news testing communities jacksonville served cox ann marie cmg marie knight

'My love for gardening — an odd hobby for someone my age'

Heywire

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2019 3:13

Heywire winner, Marie Knight, Grenfell, NSW.

youth calm hobbies stereotypes gardening nsw grenfell rural youth marie knight

Laura Palmer Screamin' Rebel Angels co-host/ Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 05-20-19

Rockabilly & Blues Radio Hour

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2019 57:03

Laura Palmer from Screamin' Rebel Angels is my co-host on this Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour. She hand-picked all the songs except for 2 tracks from their latest album, Heel Grinder, that I wanted to know more about. We spin tunes from Nikki Hill, Mickey Lee Lane, Gary U.S. Bonds, Stray Cats, Little Richard, The Go-Getters, Marie Knight, Bunker Hill, The Delta Bombers, Nick Curran, Boz Boorer, Roy Head and Big Maybelle! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues" Nikki Hill- "Get Down, Crawl" Gary U.S. Bonds- "New Orleans" Little Richard- "The Girl Can't Help It" Screamin' Rebel Angels- "Oh! My Soul" Bunker Hill- "The Girl Can't Dance" The Delta Bombers- "Good Disguise" Stray Cats- "How Long You Wanna Live, Anyway?" Nick Curran & The Lowlifes- "Kill My Baby" Roy Head- "Treat Her Right" The Go-Getters- "Slow Down" Boz Boorer- "Bad Hangover" Marie Knight- "I Thought I Told You Not To Tell Them" Screamin' Rebel Angels- "Sweet Petunia" Big Maybelle- "That's A Pretty Good Love" Mickey Lee Lane- "Hey-Sah-Lo-Ney" Outro Music Bed: Link Wray- "The Wild One"

bonds little richard rockabilly go getters stray cats laura palmer bunker hill nick curran big maybelle nikki hill roy head marie knight blues radio screamin' rebel angels

Part 3: Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul

Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2019 34:00

By the mid-20th century, gospel music was a force in America, compelling many sanctified artists to cross over to secular music. The temptations of fortune and fame became strong for many gospel artists. But crossing over could mean betraying the audience that built them up - or worse. This episode tells the stories of musicians such as Sam Cooke and Sister Rosetta Tharpe who had to navigate this complex relationship between sacred and secular music.

america rock soul gospel roots sam cooke al green gospel music electric guitars cece winans sister rosetta tharpe crossing over wxpn soul stirrers marie knight

"Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2019 35:44

Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets. 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. Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. It's what everyone wants, and it's what they've been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that? Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Imagine that it's a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next? For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called "Rock Around the Clock". It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song's two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley's producer, didn't want Haley to record it -- to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he'd brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song. According to John Swenson's biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn't get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as "Rock Around the Clock" being very derivative. In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris' "Around the Clock Blues". Indeed, even the title "Rock Around the Clock" had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer: [excerpt "Rock Around the Clock": Hal Singer and Orchestra] So, "Rock Around the Clock" was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller's reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn't like he was missing out on anything special, was it? After "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy Man Crazy", Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but... nothing happened. He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren't following up on the clear direction he'd set with those singles. Instead he seemed to be flailing around, recording cover versions of recent country hits, or remakes of older songs like "Chattanooga Choo Choo". None of his follow-ups to "Crazy Man Crazy" did anything at all in the charts, and it looked for a while that he was going to be a one-hit wonder, and getting to number fifteen in the charts was going to be his highest achievement. But then, something happened -- Bill Haley quit Essex Records, the label that had led him to become a rockabilly performer in the first place, and signed with Decca. And there his producer was Milt Gabler. Decca was in an interesting position in 1954, one which listeners to this podcast may not quite appreciate. You might remember that we've mentioned Decca quite a few times over the first few months of this podcast. That's because in the 1940s, Decca was the only major label to sign any of the proto-rock artists we've talked about. In the late forties, Decca had Lucky Millinder, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, and the Mills Brothers on its roster. It also had a number of country artists who contributed a lot to the hillbilly boogie sound -- people like Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, and more. But Decca was the *only* one of the major labels to sign up acts like this. The major labels were, as we've discussed, going mostly for a white middle-class market that wanted Doris Day and Tony Bennett -- not that there's anything wrong with Doris Day or Tony Bennett -- and indeed Decca had plenty of its own acts like that too, and *mostly* dealt in that sort of music. But any artist that was working in those styles that *wasn't* signed to Decca had to sign to tiny independent labels. And those independent labels set up their own distribution networks, which went to shops that specialised in the black or hillbilly markets. And so those speciality shops eventually just started buying from the indie distributors, and didn't buy from the major labels at all -- since Decca was the only one they'd been buying from anyway, before the indies came along. And this caused problems for a lot of Decca's artists. The reason that Louis Jordan, say, was so big was that he'd been selling both to the R&B market -- since he was, after all, an R&B artist, and one of the best -- and to the pop market, because he was on a major label. You sell to both those markets, and you'd sell to a *lot* of people -- the casual record buyer market was much larger than the market for speciality genres, while the speciality genre audience was loyal and would buy everything in the styles it liked. But if you were only selling to the Doris Day buyers, and not to the people who liked honking saxophones and went out of their way to buy them, then your honking-saxophone records were not going to do wonderfully in sales. This change in the distribution model of records is one of the two reasons that all the artists we talked about in the first few episodes had a catastrophic drop in their sales in the early fifties. We already talked about the other reason in the episode on "Crazy Man Crazy", but as a reminder, when the radio stations switched to playing forty-fives, they threw out their old seventy-eights. That meant that if you were one of those Decca artists, you simultaneously lost all the radio play for your old singles -- because the radio stations had chucked out their copies -- and stopped having new hits because the distribution model had changed under your feet. And so pretty much all Decca's roster of rhythm and blues or country hitmakers had lost their hit potential, all at the same time. But Decca still had Milt Gabler. We talked about Milt Gabler right back at the start of this series. He was the one who produced Lionel Hampton's version of "Flying Home", the one with the Ilinois Jacquet sax solo, and who produced "Strange Fruit" and most of Louis Jordan's records and the Ink Spots' hits. He'd been the one who put Sister Rosetta Tharpe together with pianist Sammy Price. He was largely -- almost solely -- responsible for the difference between Decca's roster and that of the other major labels, and he still wanted to carry on making records in the styles he loved. But to do that, he had to find a way to sell them to the pop audience. And Bill Haley seemed like someone who could appeal to that audience. Indeed, Haley already *had* appealed to that audience once, with "Crazy Man Crazy", and if he could do it once he could do it again. Bill Haley's style was not very like most of the music Milt Gabler had been making -- Gabler was, after all, a serious jazz fanatic -- but over recent months Haley's style had been drifting closer and closer to the sort of thing Gabler was doing. In fact, Gabler saw a way to make him even more successful, by pushing the similarity to Louis Jordan, which had already been apparent in some of Haley's earlier records. And so the group were in the studio to record what was intended to be Bill Haley and the Comets' latest hit, "Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town". [excerpt: Bill Haley "Thirteen Women"] We haven't talked enough about how much nuclear paranoia was fuelling the popular culture of the early 1950s. Remember, when this record was made, the first atomic bombs had only been dropped eight and a half years earlier, and it had been five years since the Russians had revealed that they, too, had an atom bomb. At the time, everyone was absolutely convinced that a nuclear war between America and Russia was not only likely but inevitable -- yet at the same time the development of nuclear weapons was also something to be proud of -- a great American technological innovation, something that was out of a science fiction film. Both of these things were true, more or less, as far as the American popular imagination went, and this led to a very odd sort of cognitive dissonance. And while it's not a good idea to put too much weight on the lyrics of "Thirteen Women", which is, after all, just an attempt at having a novelty hit with a Louis Jordan-style song about having thirteen women to oneself, it is notable that it does reflect that ambiguity. The dream the singer has is that the hydrogen bomb has been dropped and left only fourteen people alive in the whole town -- thirteen women plus himself. Now, one might normally think that that was a devastating, horrific, thought, and that it was a prelude to some sort of Threads-esque story of post-apocalyptic terror. In this case, however, it merely becomes an excuse for a bit of casual sexism, as the thirteen women become Haley's harem and servants, each with their own specified task. Obviously, I'm being a little facetious here. For what it is -- a comedy hillbilly boogie that plays on Haley's genial likeability, “Thirteen Women” is perfectly pleasant, if a little "of its time". It's very obviously influenced by Louis Jordan, but that makes sense given that Gabler was Jordan's producer. Indeed, Gabler was also the one who introduced the H-bomb theme -- the original version of the song, by the blues guitarist Dickie Thompson, makes no mention of the bomb or the dream, just treats it as something that happened to him. And, frankly, Thompson's version is much, much better than Haley's, and has some truly great guitar playing: [excerpt: Dickie Thompson "Thirteen Women"] But Thompson's record is absolutely a blues record, in the same style as people like Guitar Slim or Johnny Guitar Watson. Haley's record is very different, and while Thompson's sounds better to modern ears -- or at least to my ears -- Haley's was in a style that was massively popular for the time. But it would probably make an unlikely massive hit. And you certainly wouldn't expect its B-side to become that massive hit. For the B-side, Haley decided to cut that "Rock Around the Clock" song that he'd been offered a year earlier. It might have come back into his mind because, two weeks earlier, another group had released their version of it. Sonny Dae and his Knights were a band from Virginia who had never made a record before -- and who never would again -- but who had a regular radio spot. "Rock Around the Clock" was their only recorded legacy, and it might have had a chance at being a hit by them with some proper promotion -- or maybe not, given the... experimental... nature of the intro: [excerpt Sonny Dae and his Knights: "Rock Around the Clock"] So the single did very little, and now Sonny Dae and his Knights are a footnote. But their release may have reminded Haley of the song, and he recorded his new version in two takes. But the interesting thing is that Haley *didn't* record the song as it was written, or as the Knights recorded it. Listen again to the melody that Sonny Dae is singing: [short excerpt] Now, let's listen to Bill Haley singing the same bit [excerpt] That's a totally different melody. What Haley has done there is change the melody on the original to a melody that is essentially the standard boogie bassline. But I think there's a specific reason for that. Hank Williams' very first big hit, remember, was a comedy Western swing song called "Move it on Over". That song has almost exactly the same melody that Haley is singing for the verse of "Rock Around the Clock" [excerpt of Hank Williams: "Move it On Over"] We know that Haley knew the song, because he later cut his own version of it, so it's reasonable to assume that this was a very deliberate decision. What Haley and the Comets have done is take the *utterly generic* song "Rock Around the Clock", and they've used it as an excuse to hang every bit of every other song that they know could be a hit on -- to create an arrangement that could encapsulate everything about successful music. They kept the basic arrangement and structure they'd worked out for "Rock the Joint" right down to Danny Cedrone playing the same solo note-for-note. Compare "Rock the Joint"'s solo [excerpt] With "Rock Around the Clock"'s [excerpt] For the beginning, they came up with a stop-start intro that emphasised the word "rock": [excerpt] And then, at the end, they used a variant of the riff ending you'd often get in swing songs like "Flying Home", which one strongly suspects was Gabler's idea. The Knights did something similar, but only for a couple of bars, in their badly-thought-out solo section. With the Comets, it's a far more prominent feature of the arrangement. Again, compare "Flying Home": [riff from "Flying Home", Benny Goodman] and "Rock Around the Clock": [riff] This was *wildly* experimental. They were trying this stuff, not with any thought to listenability, but to see what worked. It didn't matter, no-one was going to hear it. It was something they knocked out in two takes – and the finished version had to be edited together from both of them, because they didn't have time in the studio to get a decent take down. This was not a record that was destined to have any great success. And, indeed, it didn't. "Rock Around the Clock" made almost no impact on its original release. It charted, but only in the lower reaches of the chart, and didn't really register on the public's consciousness. But Haley and his band continued making records in that style, and their next one, a cover of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", did rather better, and started rising up the charts quite well. Their version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" -- a song which we talked about a bit in episode two, if you want to go back and refresh your memory -- was nowhere near as powerful as Turner's had been. It cleaned up parts of the lyric -- though notably not the filthiest lines, presumably because the innuendo in them completely passed both Haley and Gabler by -- and imposed a much more conventional structure on it. But while it was a watered-down version of the original song, it was still potent enough that for those who hadn't heard the original, it was working some sort of magic: [excerpt: "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Bill Haley and his Comets] Haley was a real fan of Turner, and indeed the two men became close friends in later years, and the Comets were Turner's backing band on one sixties album. But he doesn't have the power or gravitas in his vocals that Turner did, and the result is rather lightweight. Haley's cover was recorded the same week that Turner's version reached number one on the R&B charts, and it's easy to think of this as another "Sh'Boom" situation, with a white man making a more radio-friendly version of a black musician's hit. But Haley's version is not just a straight copy -- and not just because of the changes to remove some of the more obviously filthy lines. It's structured differently, and has a whole different feel to it. This feels to me more like Haley recasting things into his own style than him trying to jump on someone else's bandwagon, though it's a more ambiguous case than some. "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" became Bill Haley's biggest hit so far, going top ten in the pop charts, and both Haley's version and Turner's sold a million copies. It looked like Haley was on his way to a reasonable career -- not, perhaps, a massive stardom, but selling a lot of records, and doing well in shows. But then everything changed, for Bill Haley and for the world. It was only when a film, "The Blackboard Jungle", was being made nearly a year after "Rock Around the Clock" was recorded, that the track became important. "Blackboard Jungle" was absolutely not a rock and roll film. It was a film about teenagers and rebellion and so on, yes, but in a pivotal scene when a teacher brings his old jazz records in, in order to bond with the kids, and they smash them and play their own, it's not rock and roll they're playing but modern jazz. Stan Kenton is the soundtrack to their rebellion, not anything more rock. But in order to make the film up-to-the-minute, the producers of the film borrowed some records from the record collection of Peter Ford, the teenage son of the film's star. They wanted to find out what kind of records teenagers were listening to, and he happened to have a copy of the Bill Haley single. They made the decision that this was to be the theme tune to the film, and all of a sudden, everything changed. Everything. Because "The Blackboard Jungle" was a sensation. Probably the best explanation of what it did, and of what "Rock Around the Clock" did as its theme song, is in this quote from Frank Zappa from 1971. "In my days of flaming youth I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up et cetera, was nowhere when I compared it to my high school negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin' Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton.” (Again, when Zappa said this, that word was the accepted polite term for black people. Language has evolved since. The quote continues.) “But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching 'One, Two, Three O'Clock, Four O'Clock Rock…' It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms, across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the 'dirty music' of their lifestyle. ("Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap…and turn the volume all the way down".) But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere…he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem, and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down." There were reports of riots in the cinemas, with people slicing up seats with knives in a frenzy as the music played. "Rock Around the Clock" went to number one on the pop charts, but it did more than that. It sold, in total, well over twenty-five million copies as a vinyl single, becoming the best-selling vinyl single in history. When counting compilation albums on which it has appeared, the number of copies of the song that have sold must total in the hundreds of millions. Bill Haley and the Comets had become the biggest act in the world, and for the next couple of years, they would tour constantly, playing to hysterical crowds, and appearing in two films -- "Rock Around the Clock" and "Don't Knock the Rock". They were worldwide superstars, famous at a level beyond anything imaginable before. But at the same time that everything was going right for "Rock Around the Clock"'s sales, things were going horribly wrong for everything else in Haley's life. Ten days after the session for "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", at the end of June 1954, Danny Cedrone, the session guitarist who had played on all Haley's records, and a close friend of Haley, fell down the stairs and broke his neck, dying instantly. At the end of July, Haley's baby daughter died suddenly, of cot death. And... there was no follow-up to "Rock Around the Clock". You *can't* follow up anything that big -- there's nothing to follow it up with. And Haley's normal attitude, of scientifically assessing what the kids liked, didn't work any more either. The kids were screaming at *everything*, because he was the biggest star in the world. The next few records all hit the pop charts, and all got in the top twenty or thirty -- they were big hits by most standards, but they weren't "Rock Around the Clock" big. And then in 1955, the band's bass player, saxophone player, and drummer quit the band, forming their own group, the Jodimars: [excerpt: the Jodimars: "Well Now Dig This"] Haley soldiered on, however, and the new lineup of the band had another top ten hit in December 1955 -- their first in over a year -- with "See You Later Alligator": [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets "See You Later, Alligator"] While that was no "Rock Around the Clock", it did sell a million copies. But it was a false dawn. The singles after that made the lower reaches of the top thirty, and then the lower reaches of the top one hundred, and then stopped charting altogether. They had one final top thirty hit in 1958, with the rather fabulous "Skinny Minnie": [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets "Skinny Minnie"] That's an obvious attempt to copy Larry Williams' "Bony Moronie", but also, it's a really good record. But the follow-up, "Lean Jean", only reached number sixty, and that was it for Bill Haley and the Comets on the US charts. And that's usually where people leave the story, assuming Haley was a total failure after this, but that shows the America-centric nature of most rock criticism. In fact, Bill Haley moved to Mexico in 1960. The IRS were after Haley's money, and he found that he could make money from a Mexican record label, and if it stayed in Mexico, he didn't have to give his new income to them. He was going through a divorce, and he'd met a Mexican woman who was to become his third wife, and so it just made sense for him to move. And in Mexico, Bill Haley became king of the Twist: [excerpt: Bill Haley y sus Cometas, "Florida Twist"] "Florida Twist" went to number one in Mexico, as did the album of the same name. Indeed, "Florida Twist", by Bill Haley y sus Cometas, became the biggest-selling single ever up to that point in Mexico. The Comets had their own TV show in Mexico, Orfeón a Go-Go, and made three Spanish-language films in the sixties. They had a string of hits there, and Mexico wasn't the only place they were having hits. Their "Chick Safari" went to number one in India. A warning before this bit... it's got a bit of the comedy racism that you would find at the time in too many records: [excerpt "Chick Safari", Bill Haley and the Comets] And even after his success as a recording artist finally dried up -- in the late sixties, not the late fifties like most articles on him assume, Haley and the Comets were still a huge live draw across the world. At a rock revival show in the late sixties at Madison Square Garden, Haley got an eight-and-a-half-minute standing ovation before playing a song. He played Wembley Stadium in 1972 and the Royal Variety Performance in 1979. Haley's last few years weren't happy ones -- he started behaving erratically shortly after Rudy Pompili, his best friend and saxophone player for over twenty years, died in 1976. He gave up performing for a couple of years -- he and Pompilli had always said that if one of them died the other one wouldn't carry on -- and when he came back, he seemed to be behaving oddly and people usually put this down to his alcoholism, and blame *that* on his resentment at his so-called lack of success -- forgetting that he had a brain tumour, and that just perhaps that might have led to some of the erraticness. But people let that cast a shadow back over his career, and let his appearance -- a bit fat, not in the first flush of youth -- convince them that because he didn't fit with later standards of cool, he was "forgotten" and "overlooked". Bill Haley died in 1981, just over a year after touring Britain and playing the Royal Variety Performance -- a televised event which would regularly get upwards of twenty million viewers. I haven't been able to find the figures for the 1979 show, but the Royal Variety Performance regularly hit the top of the ratings for the *year* in the seventies and eighties. Bill Haley was gone, yes, but he hadn't been forgotten. And as long as “Rock Around the Clock” is played, he won't be. [excerpt: "See You Later Alligator" -- "so long, that's all goodbye"]

america tv american history english rock mexico russia russian spanish western language mexican wolf britain thompson rock and roll knock irs shake threads clock twist knights joint myers madison square garden essex go go frank zappa mixcloud fuchs tony bennett ella fitzgerald rock music wembley stadium rattle western hemisphere zappa comets hank williams doris day howlin strange fruit benny goodman decca sister rosetta tharpe bill haley cometas lionel hampton larry williams dave miller gabler louis jordan rock around stan kenton ink spots blackboard jungle johnny guitar watson big joe turner ernest tubb flying home peter ford rock around the clock royal variety performance orfe mills brothers chattanooga choo choo johnny otis red foley marie knight jimmy myers john swenson

“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. 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. Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print — one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post — it’s very good on the facts — but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. It’s what everyone wants, and it’s what they’ve been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that? Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Imagine that it’s a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next? For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called “Rock Around the Clock”. It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song’s two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley’s producer, didn’t want Haley to record it — to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he’d brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song. According to John Swenson’s biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn’t get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as “Rock Around the Clock” being very derivative. In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris’ “Around the Clock Blues”. Indeed, even the title “Rock Around the Clock” had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer: [excerpt “Rock Around the Clock”: Hal Singer and Orchestra] So, “Rock Around the Clock” was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller’s reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn’t like he was missing out on anything special, was it? After “Rock the Joint” and “Crazy Man Crazy”, Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but… nothing happened. He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren’t following up on the clear direction he’d set with those singles. Instead he seemed to be flailing around, recording cover versions of recent country hits, or remakes of older songs like “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. None of his follow-ups to “Crazy Man Crazy” did anything at all in the charts, and it looked for a while that he was going to be a one-hit wonder, and getting to number fifteen in the charts was going to be his highest achievement. But then, something happened — Bill Haley quit Essex Records, the label that had led him to become a rockabilly performer in the first place, and signed with Decca. And there his producer was Milt Gabler. Decca was in an interesting position in 1954, one which listeners to this podcast may not quite appreciate. You might remember that we’ve mentioned Decca quite a few times over the first few months of this podcast. That’s because in the 1940s, Decca was the only major label to sign any of the proto-rock artists we’ve talked about. In the late forties, Decca had Lucky Millinder, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, and the Mills Brothers on its roster. It also had a number of country artists who contributed a lot to the hillbilly boogie sound — people like Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, and more. But Decca was the *only* one of the major labels to sign up acts like this. The major labels were, as we’ve discussed, going mostly for a white middle-class market that wanted Doris Day and Tony Bennett — not that there’s anything wrong with Doris Day or Tony Bennett — and indeed Decca had plenty of its own acts like that too, and *mostly* dealt in that sort of music. But any artist that was working in those styles that *wasn’t* signed to Decca had to sign to tiny independent labels. And those independent labels set up their own distribution networks, which went to shops that specialised in the black or hillbilly markets. And so those speciality shops eventually just started buying from the indie distributors, and didn’t buy from the major labels at all — since Decca was the only one they’d been buying from anyway, before the indies came along. And this caused problems for a lot of Decca’s artists. The reason that Louis Jordan, say, was so big was that he’d been selling both to the R&B market — since he was, after all, an R&B artist, and one of the best — and to the pop market, because he was on a major label. You sell to both those markets, and you’d sell to a *lot* of people — the casual record buyer market was much larger than the market for speciality genres, while the speciality genre audience was loyal and would buy everything in the styles it liked. But if you were only selling to the Doris Day buyers, and not to the people who liked honking saxophones and went out of their way to buy them, then your honking-saxophone records were not going to do wonderfully in sales. This change in the distribution model of records is one of the two reasons that all the artists we talked about in the first few episodes had a catastrophic drop in their sales in the early fifties. We already talked about the other reason in the episode on “Crazy Man Crazy”, but as a reminder, when the radio stations switched to playing forty-fives, they threw out their old seventy-eights. That meant that if you were one of those Decca artists, you simultaneously lost all the radio play for your old singles — because the radio stations had chucked out their copies — and stopped having new hits because the distribution model had changed under your feet. And so pretty much all Decca’s roster of rhythm and blues or country hitmakers had lost their hit potential, all at the same time. But Decca still had Milt Gabler. We talked about Milt Gabler right back at the start of this series. He was the one who produced Lionel Hampton’s version of “Flying Home”, the one with the Ilinois Jacquet sax solo, and who produced “Strange Fruit” and most of Louis Jordan’s records and the Ink Spots’ hits. He’d been the one who put Sister Rosetta Tharpe together with pianist Sammy Price. He was largely — almost solely — responsible for the difference between Decca’s roster and that of the other major labels, and he still wanted to carry on making records in the styles he loved. But to do that, he had to find a way to sell them to the pop audience. And Bill Haley seemed like someone who could appeal to that audience. Indeed, Haley already *had* appealed to that audience once, with “Crazy Man Crazy”, and if he could do it once he could do it again. Bill Haley’s style was not very like most of the music Milt Gabler had been making — Gabler was, after all, a serious jazz fanatic — but over recent months Haley’s style had been drifting closer and closer to the sort of thing Gabler was doing. In fact, Gabler saw a way to make him even more successful, by pushing the similarity to Louis Jordan, which had already been apparent in some of Haley’s earlier records. And so the group were in the studio to record what was intended to be Bill Haley and the Comets’ latest hit, “Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town”. [excerpt: Bill Haley “Thirteen Women”] We haven’t talked enough about how much nuclear paranoia was fuelling the popular culture of the early 1950s. Remember, when this record was made, the first atomic bombs had only been dropped eight and a half years earlier, and it had been five years since the Russians had revealed that they, too, had an atom bomb. At the time, everyone was absolutely convinced that a nuclear war between America and Russia was not only likely but inevitable — yet at the same time the development of nuclear weapons was also something to be proud of — a great American technological innovation, something that was out of a science fiction film. Both of these things were true, more or less, as far as the American popular imagination went, and this led to a very odd sort of cognitive dissonance. And while it’s not a good idea to put too much weight on the lyrics of “Thirteen Women”, which is, after all, just an attempt at having a novelty hit with a Louis Jordan-style song about having thirteen women to oneself, it is notable that it does reflect that ambiguity. The dream the singer has is that the hydrogen bomb has been dropped and left only fourteen people alive in the whole town — thirteen women plus himself. Now, one might normally think that that was a devastating, horrific, thought, and that it was a prelude to some sort of Threads-esque story of post-apocalyptic terror. In this case, however, it merely becomes an excuse for a bit of casual sexism, as the thirteen women become Haley’s harem and servants, each with their own specified task. Obviously, I’m being a little facetious here. For what it is — a comedy hillbilly boogie that plays on Haley’s genial likeability, “Thirteen Women” is perfectly pleasant, if a little “of its time”. It’s very obviously influenced by Louis Jordan, but that makes sense given that Gabler was Jordan’s producer. Indeed, Gabler was also the one who introduced the H-bomb theme — the original version of the song, by the blues guitarist Dickie Thompson, makes no mention of the bomb or the dream, just treats it as something that happened to him. And, frankly, Thompson’s version is much, much better than Haley’s, and has some truly great guitar playing: [excerpt: Dickie Thompson “Thirteen Women”] But Thompson’s record is absolutely a blues record, in the same style as people like Guitar Slim or Johnny Guitar Watson. Haley’s record is very different, and while Thompson’s sounds better to modern ears — or at least to my ears — Haley’s was in a style that was massively popular for the time. But it would probably make an unlikely massive hit. And you certainly wouldn’t expect its B-side to become that massive hit. For the B-side, Haley decided to cut that “Rock Around the Clock” song that he’d been offered a year earlier. It might have come back into his mind because, two weeks earlier, another group had released their version of it. Sonny Dae and his Knights were a band from Virginia who had never made a record before — and who never would again — but who had a regular radio spot. “Rock Around the Clock” was their only recorded legacy, and it might have had a chance at being a hit by them with some proper promotion — or maybe not, given the… experimental… nature of the intro: [excerpt Sonny Dae and his Knights: “Rock Around the Clock”] So the single did very little, and now Sonny Dae and his Knights are a footnote. But their release may have reminded Haley of the song, and he recorded his new version in two takes. But the interesting thing is that Haley *didn’t* record the song as it was written, or as the Knights recorded it. Listen again to the melody that Sonny Dae is singing: [short excerpt] Now, let’s listen to Bill Haley singing the same bit [excerpt] That’s a totally different melody. What Haley has done there is change the melody on the original to a melody that is essentially the standard boogie bassline. But I think there’s a specific reason for that. Hank Williams’ very first big hit, remember, was a comedy Western swing song called “Move it on Over”. That song has almost exactly the same melody that Haley is singing for the verse of “Rock Around the Clock” [excerpt of Hank Williams: “Move it On Over”] We know that Haley knew the song, because he later cut his own version of it, so it’s reasonable to assume that this was a very deliberate decision. What Haley and the Comets have done is take the *utterly generic* song “Rock Around the Clock”, and they’ve used it as an excuse to hang every bit of every other song that they know could be a hit on — to create an arrangement that could encapsulate everything about successful music. They kept the basic arrangement and structure they’d worked out for “Rock the Joint” right down to Danny Cedrone playing the same solo note-for-note. Compare “Rock the Joint”‘s solo [excerpt] With “Rock Around the Clock”‘s [excerpt] For the beginning, they came up with a stop-start intro that emphasised the word “rock”: [excerpt] And then, at the end, they used a variant of the riff ending you’d often get in swing songs like “Flying Home”, which one strongly suspects was Gabler’s idea. The Knights did something similar, but only for a couple of bars, in their badly-thought-out solo section. With the Comets, it’s a far more prominent feature of the arrangement. Again, compare “Flying Home”: [riff from “Flying Home”, Benny Goodman] and “Rock Around the Clock”: [riff] This was *wildly* experimental. They were trying this stuff, not with any thought to listenability, but to see what worked. It didn’t matter, no-one was going to hear it. It was something they knocked out in two takes – and the finished version had to be edited together from both of them, because they didn’t have time in the studio to get a decent take down. This was not a record that was destined to have any great success. And, indeed, it didn’t. “Rock Around the Clock” made almost no impact on its original release. It charted, but only in the lower reaches of the chart, and didn’t really register on the public’s consciousness. But Haley and his band continued making records in that style, and their next one, a cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, did rather better, and started rising up the charts quite well. Their version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” — a song which we talked about a bit in episode two, if you want to go back and refresh your memory — was nowhere near as powerful as Turner’s had been. It cleaned up parts of the lyric — though notably not the filthiest lines, presumably because the innuendo in them completely passed both Haley and Gabler by — and imposed a much more conventional structure on it. But while it was a watered-down version of the original song, it was still potent enough that for those who hadn’t heard the original, it was working some sort of magic: [excerpt: “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Bill Haley and his Comets] Haley was a real fan of Turner, and indeed the two men became close friends in later years, and the Comets were Turner’s backing band on one sixties album. But he doesn’t have the power or gravitas in his vocals that Turner did, and the result is rather lightweight. Haley’s cover was recorded the same week that Turner’s version reached number one on the R&B charts, and it’s easy to think of this as another “Sh’Boom” situation, with a white man making a more radio-friendly version of a black musician’s hit. But Haley’s version is not just a straight copy — and not just because of the changes to remove some of the more obviously filthy lines. It’s structured differently, and has a whole different feel to it. This feels to me more like Haley recasting things into his own style than him trying to jump on someone else’s bandwagon, though it’s a more ambiguous case than some. “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” became Bill Haley’s biggest hit so far, going top ten in the pop charts, and both Haley’s version and Turner’s sold a million copies. It looked like Haley was on his way to a reasonable career — not, perhaps, a massive stardom, but selling a lot of records, and doing well in shows. But then everything changed, for Bill Haley and for the world. It was only when a film, “The Blackboard Jungle”, was being made nearly a year after “Rock Around the Clock” was recorded, that the track became important. “Blackboard Jungle” was absolutely not a rock and roll film. It was a film about teenagers and rebellion and so on, yes, but in a pivotal scene when a teacher brings his old jazz records in, in order to bond with the kids, and they smash them and play their own, it’s not rock and roll they’re playing but modern jazz. Stan Kenton is the soundtrack to their rebellion, not anything more rock. But in order to make the film up-to-the-minute, the producers of the film borrowed some records from the record collection of Peter Ford, the teenage son of the film’s star. They wanted to find out what kind of records teenagers were listening to, and he happened to have a copy of the Bill Haley single. They made the decision that this was to be the theme tune to the film, and all of a sudden, everything changed. Everything. Because “The Blackboard Jungle” was a sensation. Probably the best explanation of what it did, and of what “Rock Around the Clock” did as its theme song, is in this quote from Frank Zappa from 1971. “In my days of flaming youth I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up et cetera, was nowhere when I compared it to my high school negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton.” (Again, when Zappa said this, that word was the accepted polite term for black people. Language has evolved since. The quote continues.) “But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching ‘One, Two, Three O’Clock, Four O’Clock Rock…’ It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms, across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the ‘dirty music’ of their lifestyle. (“Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap…and turn the volume all the way down”.) But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn’t tell you to turn it down. I didn’t care if Bill Haley was white or sincere…he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem, and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down.” There were reports of riots in the cinemas, with people slicing up seats with knives in a frenzy as the music played. “Rock Around the Clock” went to number one on the pop charts, but it did more than that. It sold, in total, well over twenty-five million copies as a vinyl single, becoming the best-selling vinyl single in history. When counting compilation albums on which it has appeared, the number of copies of the song that have sold must total in the hundreds of millions. Bill Haley and the Comets had become the biggest act in the world, and for the next couple of years, they would tour constantly, playing to hysterical crowds, and appearing in two films — “Rock Around the Clock” and “Don’t Knock the Rock”. They were worldwide superstars, famous at a level beyond anything imaginable before. But at the same time that everything was going right for “Rock Around the Clock”‘s sales, things were going horribly wrong for everything else in Haley’s life. Ten days after the session for “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, at the end of June 1954, Danny Cedrone, the session guitarist who had played on all Haley’s records, and a close friend of Haley, fell down the stairs and broke his neck, dying instantly. At the end of July, Haley’s baby daughter died suddenly, of cot death. And… there was no follow-up to “Rock Around the Clock”. You *can’t* follow up anything that big — there’s nothing to follow it up with. And Haley’s normal attitude, of scientifically assessing what the kids liked, didn’t work any more either. The kids were screaming at *everything*, because he was the biggest star in the world. The next few records all hit the pop charts, and all got in the top twenty or thirty — they were big hits by most standards, but they weren’t “Rock Around the Clock” big. And then in 1955, the band’s bass player, saxophone player, and drummer quit the band, forming their own group, the Jodimars: [excerpt: the Jodimars: “Well Now Dig This”] Haley soldiered on, however, and the new lineup of the band had another top ten hit in December 1955 — their first in over a year — with “See You Later Alligator”: [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets “See You Later, Alligator”] While that was no “Rock Around the Clock”, it did sell a million copies. But it was a false dawn. The singles after that made the lower reaches of the top thirty, and then the lower reaches of the top one hundred, and then stopped charting altogether. They had one final top thirty hit in 1958, with the rather fabulous “Skinny Minnie”: [excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets “Skinny Minnie”] That’s an obvious attempt to copy Larry Williams’ “Bony Moronie”, but also, it’s a really good record. But the follow-up, “Lean Jean”, only reached number sixty, and that was it for Bill Haley and the Comets on the US charts. And that’s usually where people leave the story, assuming Haley was a total failure after this, but that shows the America-centric nature of most rock criticism. In fact, Bill Haley moved to Mexico in 1960. The IRS were after Haley’s money, and he found that he could make money from a Mexican record label, and if it stayed in Mexico, he didn’t have to give his new income to them. He was going through a divorce, and he’d met a Mexican woman who was to become his third wife, and so it just made sense for him to move. And in Mexico, Bill Haley became king of the Twist: [excerpt: Bill Haley y sus Cometas, “Florida Twist”] “Florida Twist” went to number one in Mexico, as did the album of the same name. Indeed, “Florida Twist”, by Bill Haley y sus Cometas, became the biggest-selling single ever up to that point in Mexico. The Comets had their own TV show in Mexico, Orfeón a Go-Go, and made three Spanish-language films in the sixties. They had a string of hits there, and Mexico wasn’t the only place they were having hits. Their “Chick Safari” went to number one in India. A warning before this bit… it’s got a bit of the comedy racism that you would find at the time in too many records: [excerpt “Chick Safari”, Bill Haley and the Comets] And even after his success as a recording artist finally dried up — in the late sixties, not the late fifties like most articles on him assume, Haley and the Comets were still a huge live draw across the world. At a rock revival show in the late sixties at Madison Square Garden, Haley got an eight-and-a-half-minute standing ovation before playing a song. He played Wembley Stadium in 1972 and the Royal Variety Performance in 1979. Haley’s last few years weren’t happy ones — he started behaving erratically shortly after Rudy Pompili, his best friend and saxophone player for over twenty years, died in 1976. He gave up performing for a couple of years — he and Pompilli had always said that if one of them died the other one wouldn’t carry on — and when he came back, he seemed to be behaving oddly and people usually put this down to his alcoholism, and blame *that* on his resentment at his so-called lack of success — forgetting that he had a brain tumour, and that just perhaps that might have led to some of the erraticness. But people let that cast a shadow back over his career, and let his appearance — a bit fat, not in the first flush of youth — convince them that because he didn’t fit with later standards of cool, he was “forgotten” and “overlooked”. Bill Haley died in 1981, just over a year after touring Britain and playing the Royal Variety Performance — a televised event which would regularly get upwards of twenty million viewers. I haven’t been able to find the figures for the 1979 show, but the Royal Variety Performance regularly hit the top of the ratings for the *year* in the seventies and eighties. Bill Haley was gone, yes, but he hadn’t been forgotten. And as long as “Rock Around the Clock” is played, he won’t be. [excerpt: “See You Later Alligator” — “so long, that’s all goodbye”]

america tv american history english rock mexico russia russian spanish western language mexican wolf britain boom thompson rock and roll knock irs shake threads clock twist knights compare joint myers sh madison square garden essex alligators go go frank zappa mixcloud fuchs tony bennett ella fitzgerald rock music wembley stadium rattle western hemisphere zappa comets hank williams doris day howlin see you later strange fruit benny goodman decca sister rosetta tharpe bill haley cometas lionel hampton larry williams dave miller gabler louis jordan three o rock around stan kenton ink spots blackboard jungle johnny guitar watson big joe turner ernest tubb flying home peter ford rock around the clock royal variety performance orfe mills brothers chattanooga choo choo johnny otis red foley marie knight jimmy myers john swenson

Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train"

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2018 32:19

Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe's music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe's life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it's really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe's performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it's dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but don't say I didn't warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we're going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We've talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I'd talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that's a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally -- they had problems, but weren't all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. "From Spirituals to Swing". It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative -- one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It's like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about "primitive" music -- a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes -- is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn't because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn't afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man -- Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we've mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name "Georgia Tom" he'd collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song "It's Tight Like That", from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form -- and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of "It's Tight Like That"] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made -- you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who's ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he'd been playing. It's rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns -- at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like "Peace in the Valley" and "Take My Hand, Precious Lord". That's a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] That's not "primitive" music. That's not music that is unsophisticated. That's not some form of folk art. That's one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn't need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it's probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that's where it's based, and that's where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it's the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it's a Pentacostal church, because that's something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I'm going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you're a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I'll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe -- if they're "born again" to use a term that's a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism -- to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be "baptised in the Holy Ghost". This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call "water baptism" -- though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), "All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them". Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they're going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you're going to Heaven. You're going to Heaven once you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that's an end of it. At least, it's an end of it so long as you continue with what's called "outward holiness", and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit's entered into you, you're going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don't do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it's a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn't just about fear and living right, it's also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It's no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches -- at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there's a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we'll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we'll see a lot in the history of rock -- the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn't generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of -- because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage -- to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her -- broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen -- at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated -- only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a "jungle musician". The name itself -- the Cotton Club -- was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it's not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she'd been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course -- in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist -- but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be "Holy Rollers", mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement -- and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money -- and her role was simply to be one of many acts who'd come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled "Hide Me in Thy Bosom" but given the newer title "Rock Me" by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey's original, with one important exception -- where he had written "singing", Tharpe sang "swinging". [excerpt of "Rock Me"] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to "Rock Me", and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and "That's All", backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe's performance. [excerpt of "That's All" from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn't great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe's performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together -- Mo Gale, Millinder's manager, was also Chick Webb's manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he'd seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder's Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder's band, said that it was Millinder's idea, not Gale's, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she'd been performing earlier -- her gospel repertoire -- but with a big band backing her. She'd also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary -- where before she'd had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of "Rock Me" with Millinder's band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 "Rock Me"] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That's just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn't how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder's band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York -- regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after -- allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn't allow that -- although as Malcolm X said, it wasn't as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder's band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course -- she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like "Tall Skinny Papa", which wasn't particularly gospel-like [excerpt "Tall Skinny Papa"] And it's not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn't sing on that one. [excerpt "Big Fat Mama"] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians' union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day", with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn't playing in a normal jazz key. He didn't like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe's mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe -- and it's yet another song often credited as "the first rock and roll record". [Excerpt "Strange Things Happening Every Day"] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days -- and it's entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church -- but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe's friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi -- although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe's funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together -- and Tharpe toured later on her own -- in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, because they were with a white man -- if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn't even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe's most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she'd first recorded in 1938, "This Train", again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt "This Train"] That's a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you'll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums -- and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* -- her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid's arrow. Even Tharpe's half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe's popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There's fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time -- along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with "Didn't It Rain" [Didn't It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she'd always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she'd had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn't even realise. "This Train" was not written by Tharpe, exactly -- it dates back to the 1920s -- but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of "My Babe"] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe's UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who'd had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of "My Babe". Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you'd think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you've ever liked rock guitar, you've got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

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Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train”

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2018

Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”. That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”] That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”. Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it. At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”. [excerpt of “Rock Me”] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance. [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”] And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one. [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”. [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt “This Train”] That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain” [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of “My Babe”] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train”

lisa marie michigan state police marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2018

Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” (more…)

92 Lisa Marie Knight

Already Gone Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2018 19:41

On June 8, 2012 Lisa Marie Knight met up with her former husband, Lloyd Frey, they had plans to visit their youngest child. The visit never happened. Lisa made a 10:30p phone call to a friend, and then she vanished. Det/Sgt Harshberger of the Michigan State Police is in charge of Lisa's case and he's determined to locate Lisa and bring those responsible for her disappearance to justice. If you have any information on Lisa's disappearance you're asked to call Michigan State Police Alpena Post at 989-354-4101. #Missing #Michigan #Unsolved Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/AlreadyGone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

92 Lisa Marie Knight

Already Gone Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2018 19:41

On June 8, 2012 Lisa Marie Knight met up with her former husband, Lloyd Frey, they had plans to visit their youngest child. The visit never happened. Lisa made a 10:30p phone call to a friend, and then she vanished. Det/Sgt Harshberger of the Michigan State Police is in charge of Lisa’s case and he’s determined to locate Lisa and bring those responsible for her disappearance to justice. If you have any information on Lisa’s disappearance you’re asked to call Michigan State Police Alpena Post at 989-354-4101. #Missing #Michigan #Unsolved Support the show.

lisa marie already gone michigan state police marie knight

Episode 377 - Kevin Roy Live & New Releases

Folk Roots Radio... with Jan Hall

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2018 58:09

Winnipeg country roots troubadour singer-songwriter Kevin Roy joins us on Episode 377 of Folk Roots Radio for a chat about his music and three live songs. It's a great session and definitely worth checking out. We also include new music from Manitoba Hal, Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane, Ambre McLean, Vi Wickam And Justin Branum, Anne Janelle, Billy Strings, Norm Brunet, Samantha Martin & Delta Sugar and Marie Knight. Check out the full playlist: http://folkrootsradio.com/folk-roots-radio-episode-377-kevin-roy-live-new-releases/

winnipeg new releases billy strings samantha martin kevin roy marie knight delta sugar gordie tentrees jaxon haldane ambre mclean folk roots radio

Ep398 Brandi Carlile

Americana Music Show Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2018 80:56

Calvin plays a double shot of the new album from Brandi Carlile. Calvin also features Bettye LaVette’s new Bob Dylan cover album. Plus you’ll hear the new country rock album from Sam Morrow, the new Kacey Musgraves album, and the new blue-eyed soul album from Anderson East. There’s also some classic gospel from Marie Knight and the new country rock album from Sarah Shook and the Disarmers. "Ep398 Brandi Carlile" originated from Americana Music Show.

bob dylan kacey musgraves brandi carlile sarah shook anderson east disarmers marie knight sam morrow

You’ve Got To See Mamma Every Night (Lost in Paradise)

Angel Baby spins the platters that matter!

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2015 51:22

Angel Baby shoots out of the gate on her second Women's History Month tribute with a trio of hot rockin' femmes, segueing into two-timed r&b belters and, after a refreshing dunk in the briny, spinning boy crazy teen tunes before finishing up with sultry sassy mamas and ginchy gals diggin' their real gone guys. All girl and all good! Do This Do That – Barbara Joy – Tar-Get / Louisiana Twist – ‘June Bug’ Bailey – Jo-Records / Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes – Dawn Owens and the Rhythm Kings – Star / Shake-A-Fin – Baby Terry Hall – Philips / Up Above My Head (I Hear Music In The Air) - Sister Rosetta Tharpe & Marie Knight – Decca / Why Young Men Go Wild – Miss LaVell – Duke / I Can’t Believe What You Say (For Seeing What You Do) – Ike And Tina Turner – Kent / Breaking Point – Etta James – Argo / Whispering Sea – Loretta Lynn – Zero / Down By The Sea – Margo White with The Cup Cakes – Khoury’s / Ocean Of Tears – Big Maybelle – The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story 1949-1957 (Previously Unissued) / I’ve Just Discovered Boys – Sherry Crane – Trumpet / Go Away, Don’t Bother Me – The Collins Kids – Columbia / Buzzin’ – Kathy Zee – Laurie / Keep ‘Em For A Hobby – Carolyn Chipman and The Beachcombers backed by The Jordanaires – Bett-Coe / Get Your Enjoys – Eunice Davis – De Luxe / You’ve Got To See Mamma Every Night – Kari Lynn – Auburn / Real Gone Okie – Renie Hicks with The Aztecs – Aztec / Slip Away – Millie Rodgers – Ultima / I’m Just Drifting – Betty Amos – Mercury / Bye Bye Baby – Betty Renne – New Art

Roadhouse 435

road house mighty joe young randy scott mike zito marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2013 62:23

The river of blues in this edition of The Roadhouse forks from gospel to contemporary, old and new. Randy Scott, Mike Zito, Watermelon Slim & The Workers, Marie Knight, and Mighty Joe Young make the case for the joy of fragmentation. It's another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 435th Roadhouse.

Roadhouse 283

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2010 60:04

Summer vacation takes over The Roadhouse this week, with an archived show taking the stage. From late 2007, show 150 brings Kevin Mark, Billy Jones, Janiva Magness, Marie Knight, and Mavis Staples. They're all important threads in the tapestry of The Roadhouse, and they set the stage for another hour of the finest blues you've … heard.

road house mavis staples billy jones janiva magness marie knight kevin mark

Roadhouse 283

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2010 60:04

road house mavis staples billy jones janiva magness marie knight kevin mark

Roadhouse 208

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2009 63:08

208 shows, 2000 songs, 175 hours of music, 33 hours of talk, 1400 hours of show preparation, 1,463,000 downloads, 90 gigabytes of shows. It all adds up to the 4th anniversary edition of The Roadhouse. Candye Kane, Rod Piazza, Watermelon Slim, Siegel-Schwall, and Marie Knight are among the favorites in this special edition. Their music and your words comprise the 208th Roadhouse - 4 years of the finest blues you've never heard.

road house watermelon slim marie knight rod piazza candye kane

Roadhouse 208

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2009 63:08

road house watermelon slim marie knight rod piazza candye kane

Roadhouse 193

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2008 59:30

The 193rd Roadhouse Podcast is one solid groove; a show that came together as if struck by a muse. With Elvin Bishop, Byther Smith, Smokey Wilson, Cedric Burnside, and Marie Knight, the pieces all fit together seamelssly for another hour of the finest blues you've never heard.

road house cedric burnside marie knight byther smith

Roadhouse 193

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2008 59:30

road house cedric burnside marie knight byther smith

Roadhouse 150

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2007 60:04

It's the last show of 2007 and the 150th edition of The Roadhouse Podcast. We merge those two milestones in this edition: a party feel to close out the year comprised of some of my favorite artists from the first 149 shows. As an added gift, subscribers to the ad-supported version of The Roadhouse get the ad-free Premium edition to ring in the new year. Kevin Mark, Billy Jones, Janiva Magness, Marie Knight, Mavis Staples - they're all important threads in the tapestry of The Roadhouse, and they set the stage for another hour of the finest blues you've ... heard. Have a great New Year with the 150th Roadhouse Podcast.

new year road house mavis staples billy jones janiva magness marie knight kevin mark

Roadhouse 150

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2007 60:04

new year road house mavis staples billy jones janiva magness marie knight kevin mark

Roadhouse 139

road house albert king hound dog taylor james harman marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2007 60:16

This edition of The Roadhouse is served up as a series of seemingly unconnected threads. Step back, though, and it all starts to make sense. A little blues rock, some acoustic blues, some jump blues, a couple of cuts with a gospel tinge to them, maybe a little R&B. I can't really pick out a theme, but they do seem to fit together pretty well under the ramshackle roof of The Roadhouse. James Harman, Saturday Night Fish Fry, Marie Knight, Hound Dog Taylor, Albert King - all great artists the 139th hour of The Roadhouse.

Roadhouse 139

road house albert king hound dog taylor james harman marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2007 60:16

Roadhouse 136

road house burnside solomon burke kim wilson marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2007 60:14

With the final summer colds invading The Roadhouse Studios, it's time to call on the music to cure all ills – blues, blues, blues. Mason Casey, Kim Wilson, R.L. Burnside, Marie Knight, and Solomon Burke provide such a great motivation for chair-dancing that you might just anything that's ailing you. It's blues medicine in the 136th Roadhouse Podcast – the finest blues you've never heard.

Roadhouse 136

road house burnside solomon burke kim wilson marie knight

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2007 60:14

Roadhouse 133

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2007 60:13

This edition of The Roadhouse celebrates some big events in the past week. A new Roadhouse version (The Roadhouse Deluxe), the addition of M.C. Records to The Roadhouse Family, and a new terrestrial radio station pickup in KPVL, Postville, IA. To follow the big events, I've got big blues. Big Jack Johnson, Teresa James, Kim Wilson, Marie Knight, and The Bluesbusters will keep you rolling along for a full hour, completely immersed in yet another week of the finest blues you've never heard.

records ia road house kim wilson teresa james marie knight postville

Roadhouse 133