Podcasts about Maybellene

Maybellene's jingle taught us to wonder: Maybe she's born with it. In a makeup company's ad, it's beauty that's in question. But we wonder the same way when it comes to people we see as humble; as if their character is something that just happened. As followers of Jesus though, we know it's not luck – it's a decision that's made. Humility doesn't just happen.

Collating and organising some of Chuck Berry's most iconic previously released singles into one legendary release, ‘Berry Is On Top' stands as a milestone in rock ‘n' roll history. Released in 1959, this third studio album by Chuck Berry essentially functions as a mini greatest hits compilation, showcasing the raw energy, revolutionary guitar riffs, and lyrical genius that defined his career. Packed with timeless classics like ‘Johnny B. Goode', ‘Roll Over Beethoven', ‘Maybellene', and ‘Carol', this album cemented Berry's legacy as one of the true pioneers of rock ‘n' roll music. Whether you're a die-hard Chuck Berry fan or exploring the roots of rock for the first time, ‘Berry Is On Top' remains an essential listen, brimming with the rhythm, blues, and youthful rebellion that shaped a generation!Episode Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4mum0f0N5LT8VDLYRqOHWN?si=7c2d4e9bfc784fe9#ChuckBerry #BerryIsOnTop #RockNRoll* Follow Long Live Rock 'N' Roll online: https://linktr.ee/longlivernrpod* Get in touch and/or leave us a review: longliverocknrollpodcast@gmail.com* Watch us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@longlivernrpod* Listen & Review us on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/long-live-rock-n-roll/id1581139831* Listen & Review us on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wZW1BYAw9wJ6Z5blo2uGj

Join Harley Luscombe and Tristan Heath and their special guests Melbourne indie rock band, FIASCO! Tristan and Harley dissect the creative process behind Fiasco's stunning debut single "Maybellene", and the recently-released follow-up "Clinging". They are something very special!! Tune in!!

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate  | Skyline (bonus track)  | Feeling Great  |   | Matthew Fox  | Southern Moon  | That Crooked Stage  |   | John Hammond  | Southbound Blues  | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover - 1993  | Big Creek Slim  | Hyperborean Blues  | Migration Blues  |   | Errol Linton  | City Blues  | Break The Seal  |   | Willie 'Long Time' Smith  | My Buddy Dr Clayton  | Down Home Blues: Chicago 5CD Set CD1  | Wienerworld  | Mean Mary  | Sparrow Alone  | Alone [   | Jan James  | Always the Blues  | Time Bomb  |   | Amos MIlburn  | After Midnite  | Blues. Barrelhouse and Boogie Woogie: The Best Of Amos Milburn   | Robert Hokum  | 30 Days In Jail  | Trippin' Backwards  |   | Wily Bo Walker and Danny Flam  | Long Way To Heaven  | Ain't No Man A Good Man  | Chuck Berry  | Maybellene  | Chuck Berry  |   | Chris Barber featuring Muddy Waters  | Kansas City  | Memories Of My Trip  | Alabama Lovesnakes (Sweden)  | St. James Infirmary Blues  | Nasty Weather  |   | Robert Randolph & The Family Band  | Simple Man  | Brighter Days  |   | Deb Ryder  | Lord Knows I Do  | Grit Grease & Tears  | 

Aujourd'hui gros dossier :  "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" de James Brown, et sur la façon dont Brown est passé du statut d'artiste doo-wop mineur à celui de pionnier du funk. INTRO APPOLO James Brown, "Night Train" (version Live at the Apollo). The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long" The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember ?" Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes". James Brown, "Hold It" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think !" Les "5" Royales, "Think" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think" Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress" James Brown et Bea Ford, "You Got the Power" Joe Tex, "You Keep Her" Yvonne Fair, "I Found You" James Brown, "Night Flying" The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love" Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try" Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta" Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me" James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (version Live at the Apollo) James Brown & his orchestra, "Out of Sight" James Brown et son orchestre, "Caldonia" James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)" The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl ?" Jan & Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World" Chuck Berry & Gerry and the Pacemakers : "Maybellene" James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show) The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around" Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley" Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening" Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours" Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive" Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell" Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive" Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe" James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)" James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"

Singles Going Around- KicksThe Kinks- "Most Exclusive Residence For Sale"Mel Brown- "Chicken Fat"Elvis Presley- "Maybellene"Van Morrison- "Wild Night"Frank Sinatra- "I Get A Kick Out of You"The Velvet Underground- "White Light/White Heat"The Beatles- "Everybody's Got Something To Hide, Except For Me and My Monkey"Band Of Gypsys- "Machine Gun"Beastie Boys- "Groove Holmes"The Everly Brothers- "All I Have To Do Is Dream"The Byrds- "This Wheel's On Fire"The Rolling Stones- "Little By Little"Captain Beefheart- "China Pig"Howlin' Wolf- "I Asked Her For Water, She Gave Me Gasoline"Led Zepplin- "Poor Tom"Beach Boys- "Our Prayer/Cabinessence"

In the annals of music history, the connection between the gritty, soulful blues and the raw, insurgent punk music might not seem obvious. Yet, beneath the surface of these seemingly disparate genres lies a deep, intertwining lineage. I'm Liam J. Holland, and in this exploration, we unearth how the foundational elements of blues music not only influenced but also helped shape the rebellious spirit and dynamic energy of punk music. This episode is an essential listening for enthusiasts of music history, offering a nuanced understanding of these influential genres. At the dawn of the 20th century, within the African American communities of the Southern United States, blues music was born. Emerging from a confluence of African musical traditions, work songs, and spirituals, blues was more than just a genre; it was the voice of an oppressed community. Its blue notes – notes played at a slightly lower pitch than standard – and distinctive call-and-response patterns were not mere musical techniques; they were expressions of deep emotional and cultural resonance. As the 20th century progressed, the raw emotionality and simple structures of blues gave rise to rock and roll. Artists like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, drawing from their blues influences, created a new sound that was lively and approachable. Berry's “Maybellene,” for example, was not just a song; it was a bridge between the old and the new, intertwining blues rhythms with the upbeat tempo of rock and roll. In the 1960s and '70s, rock music diversified into subgenres like hard rock and psychedelic rock. Bands such as Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones continued to draw from the deep well of blues. “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin wasn't just a hard rock anthem; it was a testament to the enduring influence of blues, echoing its rhythmic and thematic depth. In the mid-1970s, punk music emerged as a counter-narrative to the perceived excesses of mainstream rock. This genre, characterized by its simplicity, raw energy, and DIY ethos, might have seemed like a stark departure from the blues. However, a closer look reveals a different story. The Ramones' “Blitzkrieg Bop,” for example, encapsulated the I, IV, V chord progression fundamental to blues, repackaged into the frenetic energy of punk. Punk wasn't just a musical style; it was blues reimagined for a new generation, echoing the themes of rebellion and social commentary. The journey from blues to punk is a remarkable tale of musical evolution, mirroring societal changes and cultural shifts. This transition underlines how music adapts and transforms, carrying forward the legacy of its predecessors. As punk music continues to evolve, its roots in blues remain evident, offering a rich area of study for students of music history. The story of punk is incomplete without acknowledging its debt to the blues – a genre that has proven to be not just a style of music but the backbone of musical evolution. As we wrap up this exploration, I invite you to delve deeper into the stories behind these genres. For students and enthusiasts of music history, understanding the connection between blues and punk provides a richer perspective on the evolution of modern music. I encourage you to subscribe to "The Blues Legacy" for more insights into the fascinating world of music history. Your support on Patreon or Ko-fi helps sustain this journey through the annals of musical innovation. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theblueslegacy/message

Tough Chuck was a keen observer and song writer for young white America.

 | Artist  | Title  |   | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Eric Johanson  | Just Like New  | The Deep And The Dirty | Kenny Wayne Shepherd  | ad Intentions  | Dirt On My Diamonds Vol 1 | Johnny Mars + The Cold Heart Revue  | Rose  |   | Reunion  |   |  | Avey Grouws Band  | Rise Up  |   | The Devil May Care  |  | Kyla Brox  | When We're Alone  | Live at Konitz Castle  |  | Larkin Poe  | I'll Keep It with Mine  | Killing Time (& Blair Dunlop) (EP) | Jerimiah Marques  | Sitting On Top Of The World  | Down By The River  |  | Lipstick & Spurs  | One Hundred To One (Giddy Up)  | One Hundred To One (Giddy Up) SINGLE | Professor Longhair  | Tell Me Pretty Baby  |   |   |  | Andres Roots  | Sherwood  | Afternoon EP  |  | The Staples Singers  | Downward Road  | Gospel Music Anthology_ The Staples Singers (Digitally Remastered | Fats Domino  | The Fat Man  |The Fat Man   |   |  | Chuck Berry  | Maybellene  | The Blues Collection (Chuc | John P Taylor Band  | To Feel Alive  | To Feel Alive  |  | Bruce Cockburn  | O Sun by Day O Moon by Night  | O Sun O Moon  | 

We're about to rock and roll through the timeless sounds of Chuck Berry and his iconic album, "Chuck Berry Is on Top." Released in 1959, "Chuck Berry Is on Top" is not just an album; it's a cornerstone of rock 'n' roll history. This album is a testament to the enduring influence of Chuck Berry, the true pioneer of the genre. With his distinctive guitar licks and charismatic lyrics, Chuck Berry paved the way for countless rock legends. The album boasts a collection of classic tracks, including "Johnny B. Goode," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Maybellene," and "Carol." These songs are more than just rock 'n' roll; they're anthems of youthful rebellion and the soundtrack of a generation. Chuck Berry's songwriting and guitar virtuosity set him apart. His storytelling and playful lyrics captured the essence of teenage life in post-World War II America, making his music instantly relatable. "Chuck Berry Is on Top" is a journey through the birth of rock 'n' roll, a testament to Berry's incredible talent. At the time of its release, the album was groundbreaking. It solidified Chuck Berry's status as a rock 'n' roll icon and became a blueprint for countless musicians who followed. His influence extended to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and virtually every rock artist who emerged in the decades that followed. Chuck Berry's impact goes beyond music; his charismatic stage presence and his famous "duck walk" became defining elements of his performances. He's celebrated not only for his pioneering music but also for breaking down racial barriers in the music industry. As we gently place the needle on this vinyl gem, we invite you to join us on a musical journey through the roots of rock 'n' roll with "Chuck Berry Is on Top." We'll explore Chuck Berry's profound impact on the genre, the album's enduring relevance, and the timeless charm of the man who defined rock 'n' roll. So, get ready to rock and roll to the tunes of Chuck Berry on this episode of Dem Vinyl Boyz.

Singles Going Around- Back To Mono Volume OneI've been wanting to do this episode for a while. Mono records, recorded and transferred in mono. Play this one LOUD.Dave Clark Five- "Any Way You Want It"The Crystlals- "Da Doo Ron Run"The Beach Boys- "I Get Around"The Beatles- "Money"Chuck Berry- "Maybellene"Wilson Pickett- "Land of 1000 Dances"The Rolling Stones- "Satisfaction"The Everly Brothers- "Claudette"The Yardbirds- "I'm A Man"Booker T & The MG's- "Hip Hug-Her"Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels- "Shakin With Linda"Sam The Sham & The Pharoahs- "Little Red Riding Hood"The Doors- "Love Me Two Times"The Vettes- "Devil Driver's Theme"The Beatles- "Baby's In Black"Johnny Cash- "Orange Blossom Special"The Beach Boys- "Good Vibrations"The Rolling Stones- "Let's Spend The Night Together"The Kinks- "This Is Where I Belong"The Yardbirds- "Jeff's Boogie"The Byrds- "Mr. Tamborine Man"The Readymen- "Surfer Blues"The Beach Boys- "Little Pad"*All selections from mono Lp's and 45's.

At long last, we tackle Chuck Berry! In this episode we focus on his life story and on his lyrics. You also get to experience my new segue music. That alone is worth the listen...

Helen and Gavin chat about The Amazing Maurice, Silo, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and it's Week 80 from the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Best Songs Ever, numbers 105 to 101; Life on Mars? by David Bowie, I Want You Back by The Jackson 5, You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette, Maybellene by Chuck Berry, and Maps by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Buddy Whittington and Jim Suhler  | Texas Trio  | Texas Scratch  | Quarto Valley Records | Mike Guldin And Rollin' & Tumblin'  | Two Hearts  | The Franklin Sessions | Johnny Dickinson & Paul Lamb  | Ya Ya Blues  | Playin' With The Blues | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Walkin' Blues  | All That Blues  |  | Tom Harpo Walker feat Dani Wild  | Ride on  | Bruised Heart Blues  |  | Buddy Whittington and Jim Suhler  | Louisiana Cock Fight  | Texas Scratch  | Quarto Valley Records | Blind Blake  | Detroit Bound Blues  | All The Recorded Sides | JT.Lauritsen  | I Need My Babe  | Play  By The Rules  |  | Paul Dougherty  | I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome  | Spankin' Hankin'  |  | Piano Kid Edwards  | Give Us Another Jug  | The Paramount Masters - CD 4/4 | Alex Lopez  | Chase My Blues Away  | Yours Truely, Me  |  | Voodoo Ramble  | Out Of This World  feat. Ivana Galic  | Can't Write a Pop Song (When You've Got The Blues) | Chuck Berry  | Maybellene  | The Blues Collection (Chuc | The Fabulous Thunderbirds  | Rock This Place  | The Jimmy Vaughan Story | Malcolm Holcombe  | I've Been There  | Bits & Pieces (mp3)  |  | Kyle Culkin  | Path of Least Resistance  | Shotgun Ridge  |  | Mick Pini & Audio 54  | New Blues.mp3  | Way Ahead  | 

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot welcome author RJ Smith back to the show to discuss his new book on Chuck Berry. The hosts also pay tribute to Tina Turner, who died May 24 at 83. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode," Johnny B. Goode (Single), Chess, 1958Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It ," Private Dancer, Capitol, 1984Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary," Workin' Together, Liberty, 1970Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep Mountain High," River Deep - Mountain High, A&M, 1969Tina Turner, "Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)," B.E.F. Presents Tina Turner, Virgin, 1982Tina Turner, "Better Be Good to Me," Private Dancer, Capitol, 1984Chuck Berry, "Blues #1," Have Mercy: His Complete Chess Recordings 1969-1974, Geffen, 2010Chuck Berry, "Maybellene," (Single), Chess, 1955Chuck Berry, "You Never Can Tell," (Single), Chess, 1964Chuck Berry, "Promised Land," (Single), Chess, 1964Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, "Cast Iron Skillet," Weathervanes, Southeastern, 2023Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EL 21 de mayo de 1955 se grabó la que se considera pionera del rock and roll: Maybellene. Fue escrita por Chuck Berry, inspirado por un tema del cantante de western swing Bob Wills.

Maybellene by Chuck Barry

#40-36Intro/Outro: Oh What a Nite by The Dells40. Come Go With Me by The Del-Vikings39. At the Hop by Danny & the Juniors38. Tequila by The Champs37. Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps36. Maybellene by Chuck BerryVote on your favorite song from today's episodeVote on your favorite song from Week 2

On va faire un tour dans un disque Live culte : Paul Simon et Art Garfunkel, à Central Park, en 1981. Ils n'avaient pas rechanté ensemble depuis 11 ans. Plus d'un demi-million de personnes étaient venues les applaudir, lors de ce concert gratuit. Le disque (un des Live les plus vendus au monde) est sorti le 16 février 1982, il y a donc 40 ans. Tout est parfait dans ce disque, de la première à la dernière note, le groove est dingue. On retrouve les titres incontournables, une reprise du Maybellene de Chuck Berry, et un hommage à leur modèle : le duo des frères Everly, les Everly Brothers. Simon & Garfunkel reprenaient sur scène leur standard "Wake Up Little Susie". Ecoutez La pépite musicale avec Anthony Martin du 16 février 2022

Today is the birthday of Chuck Berry (1926). The singer-songwriter broke into the charts in 1955 with “Maybellene,” and in 1958 “Johnny B. Goode.”

We decided to revisit an older format called the Schizophrenic Shuffle; where we literally hit shuffle on our collection and provide you with approx 30 mins of music.  You never know what you're going to get each time, but you can always count on things being delightfully schizophrenic!Today's mix comes from Kevin's collection. Kinks – “All Day and All of the Night” from The Kinks (1964)Stevie Wonder – “Do Like You” from Hotter Than July (1980)Marty Robbins – “Maybellene” from The Essential Marty Robbins 1951-1982 (1991)Krokus – “Yellow Mary” from Dirty Dynamite (2013)Toto – “Hold the Line” from Africa: The Best of Toto (2009)JPT Scare Band – “Acid Acetate Excursion” from Acid Acetate Excursion/Rape of the Titan's Sirens (2010)Jackson Browne – “Jamaica Say You Will” from The Very Best of Jackson Browne (2004)St. Paul & The Broken Bones – “Hurricanes” from Young Sick Camellia (2018)Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/SchizoMusic)

THE RETURN OF PITCH IT! To celebrate 175 EPISODES of the podcast, we're bringing back a fan-favorite segment featuring host Aeric Azana's favorite Rogue: Captain Boomerang! Join us for "Boomer's Big Score: A Rogues Tale"! Plus this weeks Comics Countdown and more! Time Stamps: 00:00:45 Intro 00:02:05 News of the Week 00:19:49 Boomer's Big Score 00:26:21 Act I 00:54:33 Act II 01:17:24 Act III 01:45:15 Comics Countdown 01:57:02 Wrap-Up Follow us! Twitter: twitter.com/geeksplainedpod?lang=en Instagram: www.instagram.com/geeksplainedpod/?hl=en Send us your questions for the Geeksplained Mailbag! Email: Geeksplained@gmail.com Music Sampled: "Sayonara" by SAKEROCK "That's Life" by Frank Sinatra "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry "The Wanderer" by Dion "Rockin' Robin" by Bobby Day "Jump in the Line" by Harry Belafonte "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" by Dean Martin "La Vie En Rose" by Edith Piaf "December, 1963" by The Four Seasons "That Old Black Magic" by Louis Prima & Keely Smith "Miserlou" by Dick Dale "Beggin" by The Four Seasons

Robert Llewellyn is a British actor, comedian, presenter and writer. He plays the mechanoid Kryten in the TV sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf and formerly presented the TV engineering gameshow Scrapheap Challenge. He also presents a YouTube series, Fully Charged. Llewellyn was born in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England. Llewellyn's first foray into the world of show business started out as a hobby, organising a few amateur cabaret evenings in a riverside warehouse overlooking Tower Bridge in London. The shows were a great success and he eventually helped form an alternative comedy theatre group called the Joeys. Within six months he had stopped working as a shoemaker and started performing professionally with the group alongside Bernie Evans, Nigel Ordish and Graham Allum. The group toured Britain and France in the early 1980s with an initial idea of exploring sexual politics between men. Llewellyn wrote much of the material, and also began writing novels. The group split in 1985, having toured for years and done thousands of shows. ELECTRIC MAYBELLENE As I was motivatin' over the hill I saw Maybellene in a Coupé de Ville A Cadillac a-rollin on the open stretch Nothin' will outrun my Tesla S The Cadillac doin' 'bout 95 She bumper to bumper, rollin' side by side Oh Maybellene well you won't get far Nothing outruns an electric car The Cadillac pulled up at 104 The Tesla hot and wouldn't do no more It done got cloudy and started to rain I tooted my horn for the passin' lane The rain water blowin' all under my hood I knew that wasn't doin' my battery good Maybellene well you won't get far Nothing outruns an electric car Breaker breaker You got your ears on caddy? What's your 20? Seen a county mounty in a plain white wrapper 10-4 The motor cooled down, the heat went down And that's when I heard that highway sound Cadillac sittin' like toad on a lake A 110, a half mile ahead The Cadillac lookin' like it's sittin' still And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill Maybellene well you won't get far Nothing outruns an electric car Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true? You done started back doin' the things you used to do Maybellene, why can't you see? You're draining my batteries Maybellene, why can't you be true? Why do you do? The things you do? Maybellene, please see How you're draining my batteries ELECTRIC CARS (ft. Helen Austin) Electric cars, electric cars Why's it taking so long? If you want your air clean, forget dirty gasoline Switch to an electric car Electric cars, electric cars Funkier by far Never have I seen a sexier machine I want to get in an electric car I want to give joy to all whom I meet Don't want to leave behind smelly streets Electric cars, electric cars Come on now it's common sense With so much air pollution, can you think of a solution? Dumbo, get in an electric car Electric cars, electric cars The time has come time to change If you want your air clean, forget dirty gasoline Switch to an electric car I want to give joy to all I meet Don't want to leave behind smelly streets I want to soar I want to surge A revolution We're on the verge I want fresh air That's pure a clean Like the future Of my dreams Electric cars, electric cars Where were you all of my life? Only when you've met one will you know you're gonna get one There's no way back from electric cars Electric cars, electric cars Why's it taking so long? If you want your air clean, forget dirty gasoline Switch to an electric car I want to give joy to all whom I meet Don't want to leave behind smelly streets

#350-346Intro/Outro: If You Could Only See by Tonic350. Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches349. The Space Between by Dave Matthews Band348. Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles347. Maybellene by Chuck Berry346. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) by Bob Dylan

Scott and Daniel talk about expensive apartments, edibles, and the cause of CRS syndrome.  Email: contact@thatdarnelvis.com Voice: http://voicemail.thatdarnelvis.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/ThatDarnElvis

En este especial literario, Patricia del Río y Luis Rodríguez Pastor continúan analizando los libros y autores seleccionados por la revista cultural española "Babelia". En esta oportunidad, la directora de la librería Sur, Malena Sanseviero ("Expiación", Ian McEwan); la escritora y crítica literaria, Gaby Cevasco ("Verano", J. M. Coetzee); el periodista y editor, Alberto Rincón ("El año del pensamiento mágico", Joan Didion); el escritor y crítico literario, José Carlos Yrigoyen ("Mi lucha", Karl Ove Knausgård); el editor y crítico literario, Dante Trujillo ("Dientes blancos", Zadie Smith); el historiador y periodista, Fernando Carvallo ("El fin del Homo sovieticus", Svetlana Aleksiévich); y el librero de la librería Escena libre, Julio Zavala ("La liebre con ojos de ámbar", Edmund de Waal) nos cuentan por qué son imprescindibles leerlos. Las canciones que acompañan este programa son "Maybellene", por Gerry and The Pacemakers; "Mandala day", de Simple Minds; "My life, de Billy Joel; y "The Nutcracker - Russian dance", de Piotr Tchaikovsky.

En este especial literario, Patricia del Río y Luis Rodríguez Pastor continúan analizando los libros y autores seleccionados por la revista cultural española "Babelia". En esta oportunidad, la directora de la librería Sur, Malena Sanseviero ("Expiación", Ian McEwan); la escritora y crítica literaria, Gaby Cevasco ("Verano", J. M. Coetzee); el periodista y editor, Alberto Rincón ("El año del pensamiento mágico", Joan Didion); el escritor y crítico literario, José Carlos Yrigoyen ("Mi lucha", Karl Ove Knausgård); el editor y crítico literario, Dante Trujillo ("Dientes blancos", Zadie Smith); el historiador y periodista, Fernando Carvallo ("El fin del Homo sovieticus", Svetlana Aleksiévich); y el librero de la librería Escena libre, Julio Zavala ("La liebre con ojos de ámbar", Edmund de Waal) nos cuentan por qué son imprescindibles leerlos. Las canciones que acompañan este programa son "Maybellene", por Gerry and The Pacemakers; "Mandala day", de Simple Minds; "My life, de Billy Joel; y "The Nutcracker - Russian dance", de Piotr Tchaikovsky.

Dans cet épisode, Gérald et Serge cherchent à définir les divers modes de relations qui s'établissent entre la musique et notre identité, qu'elle soit individuelle ou collective.Liste de lectureClaude Champagne (1891-1965), Danse villageoise (1930)  [11:29]The Orioles, «Crying in the Chapel» (1953) [16:47]Chuck Berry (1926-2017), «Maybellene» [20:35]Tanya Tagaq (née en 1975), «Uja», Animism (2014) [25:50]Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), «Blue Yodel #11» (1929) [32:34]Genesis, «Firth of Fifth», Selling England by the Pound (1973) [39:58]Moody Blues, «Nights in White Satin», Days of Future Passed (1967) [42:00]Sénoufo - Parle-répond  (2016) [47:56]Remixer le Québec (2017) [51:42]Imawan Balawan, «Bangkyan Ngegol» (29 décembre 2015) [55:46]

Liner Notes:Chuck Berry has been hailed as the Father of Rock N Roll. The pied piper who ushered millions of teenagers into a new generation. But when Chuck left his stage presence behind, he was an entirely different person. On this track of Text, Prose & Rock N Roll, Kris speaks with Jon Brewer, whose new documentary uncovers - for the first time ever - the mysteries of Chuck Berry, and who this unique talent really was. In some way, Director Jon Brewer is the perfect person to document the life of Chuck Berry. He's no stranger to the music business, having spent decades working with David Bowie, Yes, and more before making music documentaries - the latest of which takes on the Father of Rock N Roll in a way no one else ever has. "Chuck Berry" is now available on Amazon, Apple and other platforms, as well as on DVD. Watch the official movie trailer here. --About the Podcast: ‘TEXT PROSE AND ROCK N ROLL'- is the only podcast dedicated to the written account of musicians. From artist memoirs to band bios, and anything in between. You'll hear first accounts from those who lived the lifestyle; a Book Club that rocks - literally. It was Created, Hosted & Executive Produced by Kris Kosach. It was Produced & Edited by Charlene Goto of Go-To Productions. For more on the show, visit the website. Or follow us on Instagram and Facebook @TextproserocknrollFollow Kris on Social Media: @KrisKosachFollow Producer Char on Social Media: @ProducerChar

Tough Chuck was a keen observer and song writer for young white America...

O Programa Homenagem é produzido pela equipe da Web Rádio Nós Na Fita com a intenção de homenagear personalidades, que de forma positiva, deixaram seu nome na história da arte, cultura, esporte, ciências e outras áreas afins. Nesta semana, Felipe Braga falou sobre Chuck Berry, cantor e compositor estadunidense que foi um dos pioneiros do rock and roll. Com canções como "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) e "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Berry refinou e desenvolveu o rhythm and blues nos principais elementos que tornaram o rock and roll distinto. Escrevendo letras focadas na vida adolescente e no consumismo, e desenvolvendo um estilo musical que incluía solos de guitarra e espetáculo, Berry tornou-se uma grande influência na música rock subsequente. Confira o Programa Homenagem sobre o Pai do Rock and Roll!

No RUÍDOS de hoje o papo é sobre… ruídos! Flávio e Tody discutem o barulho na música enquanto tenta chegar à resposta da pergunta de um milhão de dólares: afinal de contas, qual o limite do que é música e o que não é música? Entre nessa discussão com a gente! E-MAIL: ruidospodcast@gmail.com TWITTER: @ruidospodcast FACEBOOK: /ruidospodcast Recomendações: Tody: Ode ao Barulho #2 https://youtu.be/s9QZwtUvJa0 Flávio: The Beatles, Revolution 9 https://youtu.be/SNdcFPjGsm8 Links: Exemplos musicais: Intonarumori (exemplo): https://youtu.be/Lqej96ZVoo8 Varèse, Ionisation (1931): https://youtu.be/wClwaBuFOJA John Cage, 4'33'' (1952): https://youtu.be/HypmW4Yd7SY Stockhausen, Gesang Der Junglinge (1955-6): https://youtu.be/RpSO3UHKy_g Merzbow, Woodpecker No. 1 (1996): https://youtu.be/nj6YamxIv4o Chuck Berry, Maybellene (1955): https://youtu.be/75RiHJGfyUE Link Wray, Rumble (1958): https://youtu.be/ucTg6rZJCu4 The Kinks, You Really Got Me (1964): https://youtu.be/fTTsY-oz6Go Black Sabbath, Iron Man (1970): https://youtu.be/5s7_WbiR79E A Brief History of Metal: https://tinyurl.com/y6twrjlr Yoko and John… Cage: https://tinyurl.com/yapdvzvw John Cage's reach extended well beyond experimental music: https://tinyurl.com/y8w9zbf3 A Origem e a Evolução da Distorção: https://tinyurl.com/yd7b6lmg Referências Bibliográficas: Luigi Russolo, “L'Arte dei Rumori,” 1913 (Tradução de Daniel Bequer e José Henrique Padovani). Seb Roberts, “Make a Joyous Noise: The Pentecostal Nature of American Noise Music,” em Resonances, Noise and Contemporary Music, editado por Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan e Nicola Spelman. Bloomsbury: New York, NY, 2013. Jacques Attali, Noise, The Political Economy of Music, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2009. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2008. Anthony Seeger, “Etnografia da Música,” em Cadernos de Campo (São Paulo 1991) 17, 2008.

Writing songs such as Maybellene and Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry would go on to be known as the Father of Rock and Roll, but career did have it's ups and downs including jail time and being plagiarised by the very bands his music inspired.This week's episode is brought to you by Express VPN, visit: ExpressVPN.com/dogoonSupport the show and get rewards like bonus episodes: patreon.com/DoGoOnPodCheck out our webseries: https://www.youtube.com/user/stupidoldchannel Submit a topic idea directly to the hat: dogoonpod.com/Submit-a-TopicWatch the 100th episode of Prime Mates: https://sospresents.com/programs/prime-mates-live-re-editmp4-785b8d?categoryId=40976 Twitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: dogoonpod@gmail.comCheck out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Our awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader ThomasREFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chuck-Berryhttps://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/chuck-berry-father-rock-n-roll-dies-90-missouri-police-n699311https://www.biography.com/musician/chuck-berry#birth-of-rock-n-rollhttps://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-151127/chuck-berry-maybellene-59638/https://web.archive.org/web/20081217114104/http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-12-15-berry-house_N.htm

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was an American singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. Nicknamed the "Father of Rock and Roll", Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive with songs such as "Maybellene", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B. Goode". Writing lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, and developing a music style that included guitar solos and showmanship, Berry was a major influence on subsequent rock music.

Today in history: Chuck Berry records 'Maybellene.' Thurston High School shooting. Rajiv Gandhi assasinated. Amelia Earhart completes her flight. The Spirit of St. Louis lands.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell's research. The information on the precursors to the "Johnny B. Goode" intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week's, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that's likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you'll be OK, or come back next week. Today we're going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there'd been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That's what an important record "Johnny B. Goode" is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he'd just released "School Day", which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry's career didn't go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, "Oh Baby Doll", was a comparative flop -- it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll's premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about "these rhythm and blues", this time he was going to use the music's new name, and he was singing "just let me hear some of that rock and roll music": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Rock and Roll Music"] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn't have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, "Reelin' and Rockin'", was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, "Round the Clock Blues". Harris' song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis' band, was an inspiration for "Rock Around the Clock" among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Round the Clock Blues"] Berry's version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content -- though that would later come back in live performances of the song -- and played up the song's similarity to "Rock Around the Clock", but it's still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry's name -- for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry's songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry's earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I've seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I'm going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry's regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he's playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry's last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called "ripping" when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis' records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry's new records. Johnson didn't like the sound, which he considered "all flash and no technique", but Chess insisted -- to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he "'bout tore my thumbnail off" getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though -- simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session -- this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] "Sweet Little Sixteen" was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course -- things like "Drugstore Rock & Roll" or "Rip it Up" -- but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It's not completely about that, sadly -- it's the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it's also about how "everybody wants to dance with" this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her "tight dresses and lipstick" -- but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it's one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby -- not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about "Sweet Little Sixteen" is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they'll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to "on Bandstand" and "in Philadelphia PA", which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It's a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry's mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen", came another session for what would become Berry's most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It's instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to "Johnny B. Goode" is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] But that guitar part has a long history -- it's original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it's based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan's guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song "Bluin' the Blues", you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, "Bluin' the Blues"] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Got the Blues", in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] In Blind Blake's "Too Tight", also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Too Tight"] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan's playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he's playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, "Shufflin' the Blues"] Berry took Walker's playing style, and combined it with Hogan's note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician's toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to "Fun, Fun, Fun": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] Absolutely no-one listening thought "Oh, he's riffing off 'Texas Shout' by Cow Cow Davenport" -- everyone instantly thought "Oh, that's the intro to 'Johnny B. Goode'". Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician's toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying "Johnnie, be good", stop drinking so much -- a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him -- something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing "a country boy", he sang "a coloured boy". But there's another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that's in the very title itself. Goode is spelled "G-o-o-d-e", with an "e" on the end -- and Berry's childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There's another possible origin as well -- the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called "Berry", about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in "Berry" rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of "Johnny B. Goode" and say "well, this came from there, and this came from there", but still you're no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it's the combination of all these elements in a way that they'd never been put together before that is Berry's genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. "Johnny B. Goode" was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed's final film -- a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed's co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I've mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn't mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed's career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career -- rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn't have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed's downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They'd forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen -- the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said "It looks like the Boston police don't want you to have a good time." The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed -- so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they'd been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn't end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he'd been hired, the station was losing money, and he'd been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn't need to take risks, and they'd been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed's contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we've talked about before -- record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like "Maybellene" and "Sincerely" – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much -- Dick Clark certainly did -- and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what -- this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn't like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it's just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It's an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis' own underage sex scandal -- well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He'd promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry's case than in Lewis', because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men -- indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it's not like this was an isolated incident -- he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race -- and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks -- it's still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I'm not going to spend much more time on this with Berry -- not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week -- and that's because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there's a myth that Berry's career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn't true. It's true that "Johnny B. Goode" was Berry's last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He'd released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like "Thirty Days", "Too Much Monkey Business", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "You Can't Catch Me" had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn't end up going to jail until 1961. "Johnny B. Goode" came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there's a simple reason why Berry didn't chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists -- and all artists in the fifties were singles artists -- who can survive a major change in the public's taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after "Johnny B. Goode" wasn't his best. There were some good songs -- things like "Carol", "Little Queenie", and "I've Got to Find My Baby" -- but even those weren't Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like "Anthony Boy" and "Too Pooped to Pop", which very few of even Berry's most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception -- during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, "Memphis, Tennessee": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Memphis, Tennessee"] While it's a travesty that that record didn't chart, in retrospect it's easy to see why it didn't. Berry's audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, "Memphis Tennessee" was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he's split up with her mother. That's something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry's own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry's eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he'd had since summer 1958 -- "Nadine" made number 23, "You Never Can Tell" made number fourteen, and "No Particular Place to Go", a rewrite of "School Day", with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go"] Those songs were better than anything he'd released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry's studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, "My Ding-a-Ling", which if you've not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be -- he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called "Chuck", which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn't released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry", and for both better and worse, that's probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr.. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, "Roll Over Beethoven", the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we're going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as "Beethoven". Specifically, we're going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single -- "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" -- are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That's because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry's hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn't really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that -- one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren't dealing with those things. But one mistake that's always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians -- one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as "hip" or "hep" humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a "hepster's dictionary" which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: "Jive: Page One of the Hepster's Dictionary", Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan's work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like "Open the Door Richard": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Open the Door Richard"] Or "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again?)": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again)?"] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan's work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones -- and we'll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks' time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry's career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry's take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan's style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we're looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced "Roll Over Beethoven", "Drifting Heart", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. "Very few signs" does not, of course, mean that there were no signs -- Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances -- but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even "Roll Over Beethoven", which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to "these rhythm and blues" rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry's music was very much not that, and both "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" address very, very, adult concerns. "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"] Now, it's worth looking at that opening verse in some detail -- "arrested on charges of unemployment" is, first of all, a funny line, but it's *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge's wife getting the man freed because he's so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in "Back Door Man", written by Willie Dixon for Howlin' Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we're talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] This is a hugely common theme in the blues -- you hear it in various versions of "Stagger Lee", for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too -- you get the same thing in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa's "The Illinois Enema Bandit", but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there's this verse: [Excerpt: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?"] It's almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was -- at least in his public statements -- far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn't mentioned by name in Berry's lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson's image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just "brown-eyed" -- though there are often claims, which I've never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was "brown-skinned handsome man". That does, though, fit with Berry's repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – "Johnny B Goode" originally featured a "coloured boy" rather than a "country boy", and in "Nadine" he was originally "campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat" rather than a "Southern diplomat". But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" is also interesting. "Too Much Monkey Business" is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters' "Money Honey" or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn't hit the pop top forty -- and "Roll Over Beethoven" had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of "Maybellene", he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn't make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn't the only change he made. The "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" single was the last one to be released under the name "the Chuck Berry Combo". There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry's recordings -- though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry's first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain -- you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I'll link in the show notes. It's not, though, a film I'd actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an "evil" rival for Weld's boyfriend's attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: "Rock Rock Rock", Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film's producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we'll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they're watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he's singing in the film is his next single, "You Can't Catch Me", which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song's release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: "You Can't Catch Me"] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn't normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed's idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it -- people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers -- were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were "business associates" of Freed -- Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed's manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists' songs, but by one of Levy's companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic -- he was called into Chess' office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he'd signed away the rights to "You Can't Catch Me", and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "You Can't Catch Me"] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song "Come Together": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Come Together"] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement -- Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including "You Can't Catch Me". As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon's cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can't Catch Me”. "You Can't Catch Me" was a flop, and didn't even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, "Havana Moon", would in a roundabout way end up being Berry's most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] We'll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, "Rock and Roll Music", which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as "Roll Over Beethoven", but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about "rhythm and blues" as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn't a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on "Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Meade "Lux" Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] Johnson's own take on the song had kept Lewis' intro, and had been renamed "Johnnie's Boogie": [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, "Johnnie's Boogie"] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell -- a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in "Too Much Monkey Business", but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking "All Shook Up" by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess' lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. "School Day" was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. "After School Session" was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including "School Day", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Havana Moon", but not including "You Can't Catch Me" or the other songs on the "Rock Rock Rock" compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name "After School Session" obviously refers to "School Day", and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to "School Day" in much the same way that Meade "Lux" Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)"] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. "School Day" was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry's year, and we'll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar...

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Bo Diddley" by Bo Diddley. 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.I accidentally used a later rerecording of "I Wish You Would" by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven't already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley's own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley's first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you're likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we're going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law -- and something that we'll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series -- is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture -- particularly *rich* white musical culture -- has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement -- think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin -- it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else -- you'll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we've talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That's not, of course, to say that black musicians can't be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically -- I'm not here saying "black people have a great sense of rhythm" or any of that racist nonsense. I'm just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it's not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can't steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo... or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel's distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn't gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can't cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He'd then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion -- at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend's neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on "Maybellene", but he's someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and you'll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley's classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry's, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows... yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome's job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome's maracas weren't the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel's music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called "Uncle John", which had lyrics that went "Uncle John's got corn ain't never been shucked/Uncle John's got daughters ain't never been... to school"; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song "Hambone", which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: "Hambone", Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I'm talking about something that's from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, "Hambone" seems to be a unified thing that's part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don't want to pretend to knowledge I don't have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. "Hambone", like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the "ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague" kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there's a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that's the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song "Bo Diddley". There's a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying "the Bo Diddley beat is just the 'Hambone' beat", and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist -- to the point that when I first heard "Hambone" I was shocked, because I'd assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There's no similarity at all. And that's not the only song where I've seen claims that there's a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here's the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley's, mostly by people we've discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here's a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: "Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here's "That's Your Last Boogie", by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, "That's Your Last Boogie"] As you can hear, they both have something that's *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It's most notable at the very start of "That's Your Last Boogie" [Intro: "That's Your Last Boogie"] That's what's called a clave beat -- it's sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That's not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it's generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it's not them, and nor is it the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters' version of Lord Invader's great calypso song, "Rum and Coca Cola", has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: "Rum and Coca Cola", the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that's about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for "the Yankee dollar". But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley's beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We've talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn't expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle". [excerpt, Gene Autry, "I've Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle"] No, I don't see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called "Have Guitar Will Travel" (named after the Western TV show "Have Gun Will Travel") and "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger". Diddley's work is rooted in black folklore -- things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey -- but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It's also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again -- and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat -- but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in "I'm A Man" he took on another artist's style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. "I'm A Man" was a response to Waters' earlier "Hoochie Coochie Man": [Excerpt: "Hoochie Coochie Man", Muddy Waters] "Hoochie Coochie Man" had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. "Hoochie Coochie Man" had managed to sum up everything about Waters' persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore -- the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to "make pretty women jump and shout". He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you've got a great riff, you don't *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon's song, and called it "I'm a Man". In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn't felt that Diddley's own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio -- as Diddley put it later: "They wanted me to spell 'man', but they weren't explaining it right. They couldn't get me to spell 'man'. I didn't understand what they were talking about!" But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of "I'm a Man", didn't. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] And then there was Etta James' answer record, "W.O.M.A.N.", which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "W.O.M.A.N."] And that… "inspired" Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I'm A Woman"] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters', gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn't credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley's harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. "I'm Sweet on you Baby" wasn't released at the time, but it's a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess' normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we'll see that that didn't turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I'm Sweet on you Baby"] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song -- enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Sixteen Tons"] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing "Dr Jive", with all the confusion about what words he's using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying "Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons", assumed it meant the song "Bo Diddley" followed by the song "Sixteen Tons", and so he launched into "Bo Diddley". After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else's record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it's the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan's show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley's second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn't even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn't have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn't getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley's first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of "Diddley Daddy" dates back to one of the white cover versions of "Bo Diddley". Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets' first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, "Bo Diddley"] And, as with Georgia Gibbs' version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn't get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley's drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn't the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in "Live and Let Die" and "Superman II", though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn't like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn't happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he'd written, "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum", to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I Wish You Would"] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley's second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley's session -- where Diddley started playing "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum". Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said "I can't -- I just recorded that for VeeJay", and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn't want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he'd just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters' harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled "Diddley Daddy", became another of Diddley's signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] but the B-side, "She's Fine, She's Mine", was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "She's Fine, She's Mine"] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, "You Don't Love Me"] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties -- the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper... the list goes on. But Cobbs' song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs' song, based on Bo Diddley's song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)"] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that's how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years' worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn't credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive -- his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we're going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people -- a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley. 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.I accidentally used a later rerecording of “I Wish You Would” by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven’t already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley’s own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley’s first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you’re likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we’re going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law — and something that we’ll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series — is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture — particularly *rich* white musical culture — has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement — think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin — it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else — you’ll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we’ve talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That’s not, of course, to say that black musicians can’t be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically — I’m not here saying “black people have a great sense of rhythm” or any of that racist nonsense. I’m just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it’s not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can’t steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo… or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel’s distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn’t gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can’t cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He’d then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion — at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend’s neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on “Maybellene”, but he’s someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and you’ll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley’s classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry’s, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows… yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome’s job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome’s maracas weren’t the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel’s music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called “Uncle John”, which had lyrics that went “Uncle John’s got corn ain’t never been shucked/Uncle John’s got daughters ain’t never been… to school”; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song “Hambone”, which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: “Hambone”, Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I’m talking about something that’s from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, “Hambone” seems to be a unified thing that’s part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don’t want to pretend to knowledge I don’t have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. “Hambone”, like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the “ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague” kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there’s a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that’s the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song “Bo Diddley”. There’s a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying “the Bo Diddley beat is just the ‘Hambone’ beat”, and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist — to the point that when I first heard “Hambone” I was shocked, because I’d assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There’s no similarity at all. And that’s not the only song where I’ve seen claims that there’s a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here’s the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley’s, mostly by people we’ve discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here’s a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: “Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here’s “That’s Your Last Boogie”, by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, “That’s Your Last Boogie”] As you can hear, they both have something that’s *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It’s most notable at the very start of “That’s Your Last Boogie” [Intro: “That’s Your Last Boogie”] That’s what’s called a clave beat — it’s sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That’s not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it’s generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it’s not them, and nor is it the “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters’ version of Lord Invader’s great calypso song, “Rum and Coca Cola”, has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: “Rum and Coca Cola”, the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that’s about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for “the Yankee dollar”. But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley’s beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We’ve talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn’t expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry’s “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”. [excerpt, Gene Autry, “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle”] No, I don’t see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called “Have Guitar Will Travel” (named after the Western TV show “Have Gun Will Travel”) and “Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger”. Diddley’s work is rooted in black folklore — things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey — but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It’s also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again — and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat — but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in “I’m A Man” he took on another artist’s style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. “I’m A Man” was a response to Waters’ earlier “Hoochie Coochie Man”: [Excerpt: “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Muddy Waters] “Hoochie Coochie Man” had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. “Hoochie Coochie Man” had managed to sum up everything about Waters’ persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore — the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to “make pretty women jump and shout”. He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you’ve got a great riff, you don’t *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon’s song, and called it “I’m a Man”. In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “I’m a Man”] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn’t felt that Diddley’s own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio — as Diddley put it later: “They wanted me to spell ‘man’, but they weren’t explaining it right. They couldn’t get me to spell ‘man’. I didn’t understand what they were talking about!” But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of “I’m a Man”, didn’t. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] And then there was Etta James’ answer record, “W.O.M.A.N.”, which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, “W.O.M.A.N.”] And that… “inspired” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, “I’m A Woman”] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters’, gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn’t credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley’s harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. “I’m Sweet on you Baby” wasn’t released at the time, but it’s a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess’ normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we’ll see that that didn’t turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I’m Sweet on you Baby”] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song — enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Sixteen Tons”] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing “Dr Jive”, with all the confusion about what words he’s using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying “Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons”, assumed it meant the song “Bo Diddley” followed by the song “Sixteen Tons”, and so he launched into “Bo Diddley”. After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else’s record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it’s the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan’s show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley’s second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn’t even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn’t have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn’t getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley’s first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of “Diddley Daddy” dates back to one of the white cover versions of “Bo Diddley”. Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets’ first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, “Bo Diddley”] And, as with Georgia Gibbs’ version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn’t get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley’s drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn’t the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in “Live and Let Die” and “Superman II”, though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn’t like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn’t happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he’d written, “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”, to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it “I Wish You Would”: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I Wish You Would”] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley’s second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley’s session — where Diddley started playing “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”. Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said “I can’t — I just recorded that for VeeJay”, and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn’t want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he’d just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters’ harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled “Diddley Daddy”, became another of Diddley’s signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] but the B-side, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”, was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, “You Don’t Love Me”] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties — the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper… the list goes on. But Cobbs’ song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs’ song, based on Bo Diddley’s song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)”] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that’s how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years’ worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn’t credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive — his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we’re going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people — a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley. 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.I accidentally used a later rerecording of “I Wish You Would” by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows, and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven’t already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley’s own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley’s first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you’re likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we’re going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law — and something that we’ll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series — is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture — particularly *rich* white musical culture — has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement — think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin — it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else — you’ll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we’ve talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That’s not, of course, to say that black musicians can’t be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically — I’m not here saying “black people have a great sense of rhythm” or any of that racist nonsense. I’m just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it’s not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can’t steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo… or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel’s distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn’t gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can’t cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He’d then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion — at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend’s neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on “Maybellene”, but he’s someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and you’ll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley’s classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry’s, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows… yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome’s job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome’s maracas weren’t the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel’s music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called “Uncle John”, which had lyrics that went “Uncle John’s got corn ain’t never been shucked/Uncle John’s got daughters ain’t never been… to school”; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song “Hambone”, which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: “Hambone”, Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I’m talking about something that’s from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, “Hambone” seems to be a unified thing that’s part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don’t want to pretend to knowledge I don’t have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. “Hambone”, like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the “ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague” kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there’s a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that’s the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song “Bo Diddley”. There’s a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying “the Bo Diddley beat is just the ‘Hambone’ beat”, and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist — to the point that when I first heard “Hambone” I was shocked, because I’d assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There’s no similarity at all. And that’s not the only song where I’ve seen claims that there’s a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here’s the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley’s, mostly by people we’ve discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here’s a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: “Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here’s “That’s Your Last Boogie”, by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, “That’s Your Last Boogie”] As you can hear, they both have something that’s *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It’s most notable at the very start of “That’s Your Last Boogie” [Intro: “That’s Your Last Boogie”] That’s what’s called a clave beat — it’s sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That’s not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it’s generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it’s not them, and nor is it the “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters’ version of Lord Invader’s great calypso song, “Rum and Coca Cola”, has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: “Rum and Coca Cola”, the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that’s about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for “the Yankee dollar”. But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley’s beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We’ve talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn’t expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry’s “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”. [excerpt, Gene Autry, “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle”] No, I don’t see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called “Have Guitar Will Travel” (named after the Western TV show “Have Gun Will Travel”) and “Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger”. Diddley’s work is rooted in black folklore — things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey — but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It’s also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again — and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat — but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in “I’m A Man” he took on another artist’s style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. “I’m A Man” was a response to Waters’ earlier “Hoochie Coochie Man”: [Excerpt: “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Muddy Waters] “Hoochie Coochie Man” had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. “Hoochie Coochie Man” had managed to sum up everything about Waters’ persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore — the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to “make pretty women jump and shout”. He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you’ve got a great riff, you don’t *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon’s song, and called it “I’m a Man”. In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “I’m a Man”] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn’t felt that Diddley’s own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio — as Diddley put it later: “They wanted me to spell ‘man’, but they weren’t explaining it right. They couldn’t get me to spell ‘man’. I didn’t understand what they were talking about!” But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of “I’m a Man”, didn’t. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”] And then there was Etta James’ answer record, “W.O.M.A.N.”, which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, “W.O.M.A.N.”] And that… “inspired” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, “I’m A Woman”] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters’, gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn’t credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley’s harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. “I’m Sweet on you Baby” wasn’t released at the time, but it’s a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess’ normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we’ll see that that didn’t turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I’m Sweet on you Baby”] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song — enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Sixteen Tons”] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing “Dr Jive”, with all the confusion about what words he’s using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying “Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons”, assumed it meant the song “Bo Diddley” followed by the song “Sixteen Tons”, and so he launched into “Bo Diddley”. After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else’s record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it’s the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan’s show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley’s second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn’t even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn’t have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn’t getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley’s first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of “Diddley Daddy” dates back to one of the white cover versions of “Bo Diddley”. Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets’ first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, “Bo Diddley”] And, as with Georgia Gibbs’ version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn’t get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley’s drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn’t the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in “Live and Let Die” and “Superman II”, though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn’t like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn’t happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he’d written, “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”, to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it “I Wish You Would”: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, “I Wish You Would”] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley’s second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley’s session — where Diddley started playing “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum”. Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said “I can’t — I just recorded that for VeeJay”, and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn’t want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he’d just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters’ harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled “Diddley Daddy”, became another of Diddley’s signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] but the B-side, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”, was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “She’s Fine, She’s Mine”] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, “You Don’t Love Me”] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties — the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper… the list goes on. But Cobbs’ song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs’ song, based on Bo Diddley’s song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)”] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that’s how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years’ worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn’t credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive — his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we’re going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people — a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.  

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry. 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. I reference three previous episodes here -- last week's, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn't recommend that book, however -- while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon's material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It's the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we're going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we're going to talk about something a lot more recent. We're going to talk about "Old Town Road," by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don't follow the charts and the music news in general, "Old Town Road" is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it's a country song: [Excerpt: "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X] That's a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It's clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint -- if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you're doing isn't racist, it's probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the "race music" charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, "rock and roll" became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there's one they haven't yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that -- nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that's the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we'll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don't want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he'd played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of "Route 66" among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he'd moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums -- until New Year's Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn't play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year's Eve -- every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: "Oh Maria", Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren't interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We've talked about Waters before, but only in passing -- but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin' Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn't, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he'd written called "The Wee Wee Hours": [excerpt: Chuck Berry, "The Wee Wee Hours"] That was too generic for Chess -- and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could -- he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat "King" Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he'd also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song "Ida Red" in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on "Ida Red", which I'll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it's an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot -- he eventually changed the title to "Ida May", for a start -- and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem -- he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on "Maybellene", after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. "Ida Red" wasn't the only influence on "Maybellene" though, there was another song called "Oh Red", a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: "Oh Red", the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in "Before Elvis", suggests that this was the *only* influence on "Maybellene", and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have "Red" in the titles. I disagree -- I think it's fairly clear that "Maybellene" is inspired both by "Ida Red"s structure and patter-lyric verse and by "Oh Red"s chorus melody. And it wasn't just Bob Wills' version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There's a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn't a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bumble Bee Slim] And there's another influence as well. Berry's lyrics were about a car chase -- to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend -- and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They -- and the car-horn sound of the guitar -- seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called "Hot Rod Racer" by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: "Hot Rod Racer", Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Maybellene"] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases -- this is closer to the style of Elvis' Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out -- and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio -- Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums -- augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we'll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer -- he'd been Joe Louis' sparring partner -- before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, "The Five Breezes": [Excerpt: "Sweet Louise", the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon's music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner -- right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess' flaws was one fatal one -- he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people's judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn't licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James... to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s -- white boys with guitars from England -- it was Willie Dixon's songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include "Little Red Rooster" for Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] "Bring it on Home" for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Bring it on Home"] "You Need Love" for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] You get the idea. In any other session he played on -- in any other room he ever entered -- Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as "Maybellene" would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn't the only credited songwriter -- and, separately, he may not have been the song's only writer. But these two things aren't linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say "Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office". Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn't work on Berry, who didn't drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to "Maybellene" over to people who had nothing to do with writing it -- Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met -- Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records' offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It's been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry's royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it's at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We'll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry's melody lines would be based on Johnson's piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here's a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny's Boogie”] It's impossible to say with certainty who did what -- Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don't have any clear guides as to what Berry's music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry's money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people's work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry's guitar licks -- Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you're a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you'd probably choose to write in E or A if you're playing the blues, D if you're doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you're doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist's fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you're playing the blues. And they're keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player -- alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you're a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you're most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson's band. Once you know that it seems obvious what's happened -- Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry's songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson's contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”'s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians' material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they'd expected the performer of "Maybellene" to be a white man and he wasn't allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit -- he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that "Maybellene" would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins' version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Maybellene"] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry's recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success -- in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest -- but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. "Maybellene" did so well that even "Wee Wee Hours", released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry's next single was a "Maybellene" soundalike -- "Thirty Days" [Excerpt: "Thirty Days", Chuck Berry] It's a great track, but it didn't do quite so well on the charts -- it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn't hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, "No Money Down", did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry] You don't need anything more, do you? That's the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don't even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, "Roll Over Beethoven". It's worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: "Roll Over Beethoven", Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre's history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it's talking about *recorded* music specifically -- Berry isn't wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he's explicitly making a link between his music -- "these rhythm and blues" -- and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis -- "don't step on my blue suede shoes". And Berry's music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there's a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with "Roll Over Beethoven". And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. "Roll Over Beethoven" was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We'll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks' time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. 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. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. 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. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network…”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we’re talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we’re going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we’re also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we’re going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren’t close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him — there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn’t want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he’d been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called “vocalese”, and it’s a really odd style of jazz singing that’s… the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] — that’s the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It’s what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that’s already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins’ great sax solo on “Body and Soul”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul”] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance — every other time he played the song he’d play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins’ solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, “Body and Soul”] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al “Fats” Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we’re talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al “Fats” Thomas, “Baby Please No No”] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase “rock and roll” into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music — particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he’d played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn’t know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn’t matter. Mintz would pick the records — they’d be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy — and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker — who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time — but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk — apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they’d heard weren’t on the record at all. Freed took the stage name “Moondog”, after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed’s theme song for his radio show was “Moondog Symphony”, by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to “Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals.” [Excerpt: “Moondog Symphony” by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows’ first single, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”: [Excerpt, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”, the Moonglows] According to Freed’s biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don’t hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance — which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie” heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows’ career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat — people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin’ Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”. By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, “Nadine”, on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: “Nadine”, the Coronets] The Coronets’ follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert — the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed’s first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming — twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on “the Big Rhythm and Blues Show”. This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn’t own this label of course, but by this time he’d got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance’s distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed’s brother was the distributor’s vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows’ first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. “Secret Love” was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film “Calamity Jane”: [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Secret Love”] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn’t stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We’ve talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day’s pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman’s country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, “Secret Love”] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, “Secret Love” did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band — they weren’t going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games — indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees’ sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him — and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed’s immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] “Sincerely” featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here’s the bridge for “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] And here’s the bridge for “That’s What You’re Doing to Me” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”] So while I’m critical of Freed for taking credit where it’s not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn’t completely clean when it came to this song either. “Sincerely” rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed’s promotion. It knocked “Earth Angel” off the top, and was in turn knocked off by “Pledging My Love”, and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Sincerely”] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, “My Loving Baby”, on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, “My Loving Baby”] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on “Diddley Daddy” by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren’t the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to “The Rock and Roll Party”. The term “rock and roll” had been used in various contexts before, of course — the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn’t want to get into the same trouble with the phrase “rock and roll” as he had with the name “Moondog”, and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I’m sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We’ll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase “rock and roll” (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that’s a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer’s part) and started using it for Freed’s now-branded “Rock and Roll Shows”, both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed’s incessant use of the phrase on his show — there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as “Sincerely”, but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is “Ten Commandments of Love”, from 1958: [excerpt: “Ten Commandments of Love”, Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn’t released as by “the Moonglows”, but by “Harvey and the Moonglows”. There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group’s two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did — and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself — there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it’s so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, “Spoonful”] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey’s Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who’d had one single out, “Wyatt Earp”. That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they’d been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, when he married Gwen’s sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loocie”] That record didn’t do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family’s labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we’re going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week’s time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed’s final signoff]

Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at The Moonglows and "Sincerely". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we'll be joining the Moondog Network...”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we're talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we're going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we're also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we're going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren't close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him -- there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn't want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he'd been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called "vocalese", and it's a really odd style of jazz singing that's... the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] -- that's the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It's what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that's already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins' great sax solo on "Body and Soul": [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul"] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance -- every other time he played the song he'd play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins' solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, "Body and Soul"] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al "Fats" Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we're talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al "Fats" Thomas, "Baby Please No No"] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase "rock and roll" into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music -- particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he'd played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn't know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn't matter. Mintz would pick the records -- they'd be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy -- and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker -- who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time -- but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk -- apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they'd heard weren't on the record at all. Freed took the stage name "Moondog", after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed's theme song for his radio show was "Moondog Symphony", by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to "Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals." [Excerpt: "Moondog Symphony" by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows' first single, "I Just Can't Tell No Lie": [Excerpt, "I Just Can't Tell No Lie", the Moonglows] According to Freed's biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don't hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance -- which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted "I Just Can't Tell No Lie" heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows' career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat -- people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin' Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88". By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, "Nadine", on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: "Nadine", the Coronets] The Coronets' follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert -- the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed's first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming -- twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on "the Big Rhythm and Blues Show". This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn't own this label of course, but by this time he'd got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance's distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed's brother was the distributor's vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows' first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. "Secret Love" was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film "Calamity Jane": [Excerpt: Doris Day, "Secret Love"] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn't stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We've talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day's pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman's country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, "Secret Love"] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, "Secret Love" did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band -- they weren't going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games -- indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees' sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him -- and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed's immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out "Sincerely": [Excerpt: The Moonglows, "Sincerely"] "Sincerely" featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here's the bridge for "Sincerely": [Excerpt: The Moonglows, "Sincerely"] And here's the bridge for "That's What You're Doing to Me" by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, "That's What You're Doing to Me"] So while I'm critical of Freed for taking credit where it's not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn't completely clean when it came to this song either. "Sincerely" rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed's promotion. It knocked "Earth Angel" off the top, and was in turn knocked off by "Pledging My Love", and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, "Sincerely"] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, "My Loving Baby", on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, "My Loving Baby"] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on "Diddley Daddy" by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren't the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to "The Rock and Roll Party". The term "rock and roll" had been used in various contexts before, of course -- the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn't want to get into the same trouble with the phrase "rock and roll" as he had with the name "Moondog", and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I'm sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We'll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase "rock and roll" (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that's a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer's part) and started using it for Freed's now-branded "Rock and Roll Shows", both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed's incessant use of the phrase on his show -- there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as "Sincerely", but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is "Ten Commandments of Love", from 1958: [excerpt: "Ten Commandments of Love", Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn't released as by "the Moonglows", but by "Harvey and the Moonglows". There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group's two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did -- and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself -- there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it's so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, "Spoonful"] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey's Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who'd had one single out, "Wyatt Earp". That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they'd been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua's brother-in-law, when he married Gwen's sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loocie"] That record didn't do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family's labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we're going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week's time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed's final signoff]

Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network…”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we’re talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we’re going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we’re also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we’re going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren’t close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him — there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn’t want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he’d been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called “vocalese”, and it’s a really odd style of jazz singing that’s… the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] — that’s the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It’s what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that’s already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins’ great sax solo on “Body and Soul”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul”] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance — every other time he played the song he’d play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins’ solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, “Body and Soul”] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al “Fats” Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we’re talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al “Fats” Thomas, “Baby Please No No”] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase “rock and roll” into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music — particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he’d played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn’t know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn’t matter. Mintz would pick the records — they’d be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy — and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker — who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time — but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk — apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they’d heard weren’t on the record at all. Freed took the stage name “Moondog”, after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed’s theme song for his radio show was “Moondog Symphony”, by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to “Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals.” [Excerpt: “Moondog Symphony” by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows’ first single, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”: [Excerpt, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”, the Moonglows] According to Freed’s biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don’t hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance — which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie” heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows’ career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat — people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin’ Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”. By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, “Nadine”, on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: “Nadine”, the Coronets] The Coronets’ follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert — the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed’s first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming — twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on “the Big Rhythm and Blues Show”. This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn’t own this label of course, but by this time he’d got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance’s distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed’s brother was the distributor’s vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows’ first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. “Secret Love” was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film “Calamity Jane”: [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Secret Love”] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn’t stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We’ve talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day’s pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman’s country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, “Secret Love”] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, “Secret Love” did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band — they weren’t going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games — indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees’ sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him — and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed’s immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] “Sincerely” featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here’s the bridge for “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] And here’s the bridge for “That’s What You’re Doing to Me” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”] So while I’m critical of Freed for taking credit where it’s not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn’t completely clean when it came to this song either. “Sincerely” rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed’s promotion. It knocked “Earth Angel” off the top, and was in turn knocked off by “Pledging My Love”, and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Sincerely”] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, “My Loving Baby”, on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, “My Loving Baby”] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on “Diddley Daddy” by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren’t the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to “The Rock and Roll Party”. The term “rock and roll” had been used in various contexts before, of course — the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn’t want to get into the same trouble with the phrase “rock and roll” as he had with the name “Moondog”, and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I’m sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We’ll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase “rock and roll” (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that’s a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer’s part) and started using it for Freed’s now-branded “Rock and Roll Shows”, both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed’s incessant use of the phrase on his show — there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as “Sincerely”, but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is “Ten Commandments of Love”, from 1958: [excerpt: “Ten Commandments of Love”, Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn’t released as by “the Moonglows”, but by “Harvey and the Moonglows”. There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group’s two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did — and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself — there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it’s so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, “Spoonful”] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey’s Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who’d had one single out, “Wyatt Earp”. That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they’d been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, when he married Gwen’s sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loocie”] That record didn’t do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family’s labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we’re going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week’s time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed’s final signoff]

Thomas Einarsson är tio när han ser Chuck Berry på TV första gången. 40 år senare håller han tal vid hans begravning. En berättelse om vägen till en oväntad vänskap, mellan en rocklegend och ett fan. När kompisarna i tributebandet Chuck´s Beat fick veta att deras gitarrist Thomas Einarsson skulle tala vid Chuck Berrys begravning trodde de inte sina öron. Thomas har bott och arbetat hela sitt liv i småländska Ljungby. Men samtidigt har han också i 40 år följt och spelat Chuck Berrys musik och kommit artisten själv närmre och närmre. Han gick genom åren från att vara ett fan och musiker till att bli vän med rocklegenden som format hans liv.  En resa som till slut förde honom upp i talarstolen på Chuck Berrys privata begravning, som enda medverkande från Sverige. Hur gick det till? Chuck Berry dog den 18 mars 2017 i sin hemstad St. Louis, USA, och ses som den som på 50-talet skapade själva begreppet rock´n roll med hits som "Maybellene", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Johnny B. Goode" och "Rock and Roll Music".  En P4-dokumentär av Ola Hemström. ola.hemstrom@sr.se Fler dokumentärer av Ola Hemström hittar du nedan:

Three Dog Night [00:46] a side: "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)" b side: "Rock & Roll Widow" Dunhill ABC Records 45-D-4239 1970 A legendary Randy Newman song, first recorded by Eric Burdon but made famous by these three dogs. Burning Curtains a side: "Mannequin Lullaby" [06:39] Happiness b side: "Knowm" [10:08] Partisan Records PTSN1016-7 2015 Catchy grooves on the a-side from San Francisco's Burning Curtains and the b-side from Rhode Island's own Happiness. Deerhoof [14:13] a side: "Matchbook Seeks Maniac (Dedication Mix)" b side: "Makko Shobu" Kill Rock Stars KRS 491 2007 Fantastic picture disc single from their 2007 album Friend Opportunity, featuring artwork by David Shrigley. This was from the post-Chris Cohen pre-Ed Rodriguez era when they played as a trio. Chuck Berry [19:43] a side: "Maybellene" b side: "Wee Wee Hours Chess Records 1604 1955 The rock and roll classic. Evidently the flipside "Wee Wee Hours" was on the audition tape that Chuck Berry sent to Leonard Chess that got him his contract. Mick Jagger [26:20] a side: "Memo from Turner" b side: "Natural Magic" Decca Records F 13067 1970 Single from Mr. Jagger recorded for "Performance" featuring some hot hot slide guitar from Ry Cooder. It also features Gene Parsons (of all people) on drums and oh hey... Randy Newman on piano. The Dynamics [32:11] a side: "Misery" b side: "I'm the Man" Big Top Records 45-3161 1963 Super fine r&b number for Detroit's The Dynamics. This would re-interpreted by The Who (or High Numbers if you prefer) as "Zoot Suit". Stereolab [38:16] a side: "Miss Modular" b side: "Allures" Duophonic Records D-UHF-D016s A moog-y masterpiece from Stereolab's 1997 album Dots and Loops. John Phillips [45:59] a side: "Mississippi" b side: "April Anne" Dunhill Records 45-D-4236 1970 The single from John, the Wolf King of LA, a fine stomper and steel-y country rock ballad. Music Behind the DJ: "Breezin'" by George Benson.

November 7-13, 1981 Today Ken welcomes actor, writer, director, artist, musician and all around dynamo Cady McClain to the show. Ken and Cady discuss how a Guinness Book Record for dancing can lead to a showbiz career, growing up in L.A., commercials, meeting the Kool-Aid man, Ann-Margaret, My Favorite Year, Pennies from Heaven, MGM's Musicals, having a grounding in reality, the business of make believe, being an object, not getting a job based on your looks, sacrificing for your art, the Boston Trinity plus, Spenser for Hire, St. Elsewhere, Cheers, Robert Kennedy Mini-Series, the family atmosphere of an isolated set, the gritty made-for-TV movies of the 80s and 90s, moving to New York to do plays, a second life in Soap Operas, Michael McKean, when pilots turn into TV movies, Simple Justice, Caesar Romero, PBS, loving English Shows, Nicholas Nickleby, confusing "The Two of Us" for the Avengers, Who Will Love My Children, giving away ten children one at a time, loving the Twilight Zone, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury, fruit Salad and the Love Boat/Fantasy Island block, white girl quesadillas, Florence Henderson, re-run royalties, actors turned directors, soap fans, Women who direct, working "real" jobs, making movies on a low budget out of sincerity, Joanna Kerns, Betty Thomas, Bethany Rooney, "Seeing Is Beliving: Women Direct", mentors, shared experience, trying to live a life of giving, Happy Days, Three's Company, Too Close for Comfort, "10", an American Obsession with Bo Derek, comedies that seem creepy in retrospect, Dolly Parton, variety shows, after school specials, tacking AIDS on TV, WKRP, Loni Anderson, All Creatures Great and Small, being the Maybellene girl one Summer, having an interest in something, and trying to show people the up side of hard work.

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