Podcasts about Meade Lux Lewis

SIDNEY BECHET New York, June 8, 1939SummertimeSidney Bechet (sop) Meade Lux Lewis (p) Teddy Bunn (g) Johnny Williams (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, June 8, 1939Blues for Tommy Ladnier, Pounding heart bluesFrankie Newton (tp) J.C. Higginbotham (tb) Sidney Bechet (sop-1,cl-2) Meade Lux Lewis (p) Teddy Bunn (g) Johnny Williams (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, March 27, 1940Lonesome blues, Dear old southland, Bechet's steady rider, Saturday night blues Sidney Bechet (cl,sop) Teddy Bunn (g) Pops Foster (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, December 20, 1944St. Continue reading Puro Jazz 19 de noviembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

SIDNEY BECHET New York, June 8, 1939SummertimeSidney Bechet (sop) Meade Lux Lewis (p) Teddy Bunn (g) Johnny Williams (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, June 8, 1939Blues for Tommy Ladnier, Pounding heart bluesFrankie Newton (tp) J.C. Higginbotham (tb) Sidney Bechet (sop-1,cl-2) Meade Lux Lewis (p) Teddy Bunn (g) Johnny Williams (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, March 27, 1940Lonesome blues, Dear old southland, Bechet's steady rider, Saturday night blues Sidney Bechet (cl,sop) Teddy Bunn (g) Pops Foster (b) Sidney Catlett (d) SIDNEY BECHET New York, December 20, 1944St. Continue reading Puro Jazz 19 de noviembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

Sintonía: "Home James" - Harry James & The Boogie Woogie Trio"Honky Tonk Train Blues" - Meade Lux Lewis; "Boogie Woogie" - Pete Johnson; "Woo-Woo" y "Jesse" - Harry James & The Boogie Woogie Trio; "Boogie Woogie Man" - Pete Johnson; "Walkin´ The Boogie", "Sixth Avenue Express" y "Movin´ The Boogie" - Pete Johnson & Albert Ammons; "Cafe Society Rag" - Albert, Pete & Meade; "Low Down Dirty Shame" - Joe Sullivan & His Cafe Society Orchestra; "Basin Street Boogie" - Will Bradley´s Six Texas Hot Dogs; "The Munson Street Breakdown", "Central Avenue Breakdown" y "Bouncing At The Beacon" - Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra; "K. K. Boogie" - Henry "Red" Allen & His OrchestraTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (3xCD) "Boogie Woogie & Blues Piano 1935-1942" (Mosaic Records, 2008)Todas las músicas seleccionadas (compiladas) por Klaus Faber.Escuchar audio

Today's show features music performed by Chuck Berry and Meade Lux Lewis

Soundies were music videos produced from 1940  to 1947, and played on portable video jukeboxes. Today, we sample the audio from soundies featuring African-American performers. These include: Count Basie, Dorothy Dandridge, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Meade Lux Lewis and Fats Waller.

Sidney Bechet unfettered, with just rhythm sections recording for Blue Note and Victor 1939-41 . .great sides including "Summertime," "Strange Fruit," and "Blues in Thirds" --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

El piano, pilar armónico y melódico de los grupos de jazz es un tema casi inabarcable, tantos son los grandes maestros. Traemos en 7 episodios, los mas destacados a nuestro juicio. Desde el rag de Scott Joplin pasamos a Jelly Roll, luego los maestros de stride de Harlem, Duke, Fats, Basie, el boogie woogie de Sam Price, Meade Lux Lewis y nos vamos con Earl Hines. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We open with Maurice Rocco- Rocco's Booogie Woogie and Tonky blues. An Australian Pressing on Decca, 1940. Never released in Britain. Rocco played piano standing up. Way before Jerry lee Lewis. Succesful during the 40s his star began to wane in the 1950s. A great shame, as what a performer and composer he was. He was murdered in Thailand in 1976. Big Joe Turner(vocals) and Pete Johnson(piano)- Roll 'em Pete and Going away blues. Roll 'em Pete is regarded as one of the most important precursor songs to Rock and Roll.  Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis,  Pete Johnson and Joe Turner-  Cafe Society Rag. Meade Lux lewis- Whistling Blues. Wingie Carpenter, Trumpter, singer and bandleader- Put me back in the alley. Vocals by Mae Hopkins. Who was mae Hopkins? Nothing about her on the internet, other than cutting four sides for Decca with Mozelle France in 1940. Sam Price and his Texan Bluesicians- How 'bout that mess. Pianist who performed  in numerous bands right up until the 1980s. Throughout the 1960s and 70s he was a civil rights campaigner and activist. An amazing man. Vic Filmer and his Murray Club Band- If you can't sing whistle(1931). Excellent advice in my case. Nice quality track on the Piccadilly label. Been waiting for a Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson and his West Indian Dance Band record to turn up for a while. Here we have Seventeen Candles and Last time I will fall in love. Johnson was an important figure in the history of black British music. Originally from British Guyana his West Indian band brought a real flavour of US style band music to Britain. Johnson was sadly killed in a bombing raid in 1941, he was playing at The Cafe Paris in London. Members of the band joined other British groups and influenced British jazz for years to come. Yorke Desouza, Dave Wilkins and Joe Deniz worked extensively with F.S favourite Harry Parry. We have a wee flavour of George Formby Senior from 1920. This is on an Ariel Grand Records disc. He died the year after this recording, aged 46. He was a huge music hall and recording star at the begining of the 20th century. Elements of his act may well have inspired Chaplin's tramp. His upbringing was incredibly harsh and impoverished. A strong contrast to the height of his career when he was earning £350 a week(£40k in 2022). He was reluctant to allow his son into show business and sent him away for jockey training. Didn't stop young George though. He went on to become an even greater star. We finish with Buddy's Blues from Buddy Featherstonehaugh and his Radio Rhythm Club and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Yeah I know he's hardly forgotten but when do you hear him played directly from a 78 record?       

Today's show features music performed by Chuck Berry and Meade Lux Lewis

Shellac Stack No. 242 knows that you know! We hear from banjo virtuoso Bill Haid, singer Donald Peers, the voices of Dorothy Collins, and pianists Frankie Carle and Meade “Lux” Lewis. Good dance selections too from Jack Chapman, Ted Weems, Benny Goodman, Johnny Johnson, and much more. As always, your support of The Shellac Stack … Continue reading »

Today's show features music performed by Chuck Berry and Meade Lux Lewis

Performers include: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Barbecue Bob, Meade Lux Lewis, Henry Thomas, Victoria Spivey and the Memphis Jug Band. Songs include: Backwater Blues, Old County Stomp, Barbecue Blues, Blues Oh Blues, Kansas City Blues and Southern Rag.

Seventy-four years ago today, the film New Orleans premiered. It is an American musical romance film featuring Billie Holiday as a singing maid and Louis Armstrong as a bandleader; supporting players Holiday and Armstrong perform together and portray a couple becoming romantically involved. During one song, Armstrong's character introduces the members of his band, a virtual Who's Who of classic jazz greats, including trombonist Kid Ory, drummer Zutty Singleton, clarinetist Barney Bigard, guitar player Bud Scott, bassist George “Red” Callender, pianist Charlie Beal, and pianist Meade Lux Lewis. Also performing in the film is cornetist Mutt Carey and bandleader Woody Herman. The music, however, takes a back seat to a rather conventional plot. The movie stars Arturo de Córdova and Dorothy Patrick, features Marjorie Lord, and was directed by Arthur Lubin. This episode is also available as a blog post. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/waldina/message

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. 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 "G.T.O." by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that has often been called "the first heavy metal record", one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We're going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We're going to look at the Kinks, and at "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older -- their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray's thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she'd had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it's possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing "Apache", Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins' version of "Malaguena": [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, "Malaguena"] Ray's newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them -- and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things.  And it wasn't just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy's tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Did You Leave Heaven?"] Like Broonzy's earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians -- you'll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton -- but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation's taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy's performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him -- even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet -- though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing "No Trespassing" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "No Trespassing"] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin' Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start's mother thought the young lad's raspy voice was so awful she wouldn't let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn't like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children's parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn't see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave's songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling -- he was kicked out for "Teddy Boy behaviour", but his main problem was that he didn't feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people.  Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society's showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones' early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band's repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece "Honky Tonk Train Blues", which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby's Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] But while the group were extremely good musicians -- their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies -- Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special", which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as "Big Bill Broonzy with drums": [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special"] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make.  But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods -- who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils -- John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn't like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and "manager" Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett's friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils.  Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal -- he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn't exactly a success -- Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn't want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn't singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d'Abo's band A Band of Angels -- d'Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren't. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren't already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal -- Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group's earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song "I'm A Hog For You Baby": [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, "I'm A Hog For You Baby"] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, "I Believed You": [Excerpt: The Ravens, "I Believed You"] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names -- at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn't to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group's self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name "Larry Page, the Teenage Rage" -- a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer's insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, "That'll be the Day"] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He'd teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for "Rock Around the Clock" for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York.  Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page's management income, Kassner would give Page's acts songs, and any song Page's acts wrote would be published by Kassner.  Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements -- independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he'd produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and one of "Music in the Air" by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe's office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like "Charmaine" by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Charmaine"] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and "kinky" had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as "kinky boots". Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, "Kinky Boots", in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, "Kinky Boots"] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group "the Kinks", as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks' bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles' gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles' reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school -- though he still didn't think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal,  and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally", and that they hadn't yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Long Tall Sally"] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him "Congratulations, you just made a flop", and they were correct -- the Kinks' version had none of the power of Little Richard's original or of the Beatles' version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as "Bits and Pieces": [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Bits and Pieces"] It's also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies' rhythm parts for him on most of the group's early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What's definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn't available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn't want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in.  Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available.  Avory wouldn't play on the next few records -- Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity -- but he was available for the group's first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks' stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn't get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were "OK as they are". Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave's "One Fine Day", a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, "One Fine Day"] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray's "I've Got That Feeling": [Excerpt: The Orchids, "I've Got That Feeling"] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting -- at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write -- he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words "I", "Me", and "You" in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible.  This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group's next single, "You Still Want Me", a Merseybeat pastiche that didn't even do as well as the group's first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Still Want Me"] The group were now in trouble. They'd had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for "You Really Got Me" many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan's performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer's Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, "As Catch Can"] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained  the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song's final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the "you" and "me" based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn't a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he'd pointed Ray to "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Ray was instantly inspired by "Louie Louie", which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line "Yeah, you really got me going," Page suggested that instead he sing "Girl, you really got me going", partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group's sexuality was already coming in for some question -- Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word "girl" might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We've heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course -- on "Rocket '88", and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich's demo of "Do-Wah-Diddy", but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies' reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox -- but it's very rarely been done as well as it was on "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of "You Really Got Me" has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that's not the case -- that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song.  Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn't want it released. Pye were insistent -- they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group's management had faith in their singer's vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn't come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled "Oh no!" with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he'd distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] "You Really Got Me" was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option -- so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, "Stop Your Sobbing", showed a giant leap forward in Ray's songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Stop Your Sobbing"] There may be a reason for that. "Stop Your Sobbing" features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks' circle, Ray's new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group's records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we'll see some of the influence she had on the group.

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. 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 “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a record that has often been called “the first heavy metal record”, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We’re going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We’re going to look at the Kinks, and at “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older — their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray’s thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she’d had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it’s possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing “Apache”, Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins’ version of “Malaguena”: [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Malaguena”] Ray’s newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them — and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn’t just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy’s tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Did You Leave Heaven?”] Like Broonzy’s earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians — you’ll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton — but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation’s taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy’s performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him — even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet — though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing “No Trespassing” by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, “No Trespassing”] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin’ Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start’s mother thought the young lad’s raspy voice was so awful she wouldn’t let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn’t like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children’s parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn’t see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave’s songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling — he was kicked out for “Teddy Boy behaviour”, but his main problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society’s showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones’ early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band’s repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece “Honky Tonk Train Blues”, which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] But while the group were extremely good musicians — their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies — Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Ramrod”] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as “Big Bill Broonzy with drums”: [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods — who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils — John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn’t like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and “manager” Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett’s friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal — he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn’t exactly a success — Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn’t want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn’t singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d’Abo’s band A Band of Angels — d’Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren’t. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren’t already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal — Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group’s earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song “I’m A Hog For You Baby”: [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, “I’m A Hog For You Baby”] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, “I Believed You”: [Excerpt: The Ravens, “I Believed You”] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names — at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn’t to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group’s self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage” — a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer’s insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, “That’ll be the Day”] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He’d teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for “Rock Around the Clock” for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page’s management income, Kassner would give Page’s acts songs, and any song Page’s acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements — independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he’d produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and one of “Music in the Air” by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe’s office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like “Charmaine” by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Charmaine”] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and “kinky” had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as “kinky boots”. Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, “Kinky Boots”, in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, “Kinky Boots”] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group “the Kinks”, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks’ bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles’ gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles’ reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school — though he still didn’t think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, and that they hadn’t yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Long Tall Sally”] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him “Congratulations, you just made a flop”, and they were correct — the Kinks’ version had none of the power of Little Richard’s original or of the Beatles’ version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as “Bits and Pieces”: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Bits and Pieces”] It’s also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies’ rhythm parts for him on most of the group’s early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What’s definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn’t available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn’t want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn’t play on the next few records — Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity — but he was available for the group’s first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks’ stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn’t get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were “OK as they are”. Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave’s “One Fine Day”, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, “One Fine Day”] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”: [Excerpt: The Orchids, “I’ve Got That Feeling”] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting — at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write — he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words “I”, “Me”, and “You” in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group’s next single, “You Still Want Me”, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn’t even do as well as the group’s first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Still Want Me”] The group were now in trouble. They’d had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for “You Really Got Me” many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, “As Catch Can”] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like “Parchman Farm”: [Excerpt: Mose Allison, “Parchman Farm”] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song’s final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the “you” and “me” based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn’t a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he’d pointed Ray to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] Ray was instantly inspired by “Louie Louie”, which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line “Yeah, you really got me going,” Page suggested that instead he sing “Girl, you really got me going”, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group’s sexuality was already coming in for some question — Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word “girl” might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We’ve heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course — on “Rocket ’88”, and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich’s demo of “Do-Wah-Diddy”, but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies’ reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox — but it’s very rarely been done as well as it was on “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of “You Really Got Me” has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that’s not the case — that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn’t want it released. Pye were insistent — they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group’s management had faith in their singer’s vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn’t come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled “Oh no!” with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he’d distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] “You Really Got Me” was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option — so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, “Stop Your Sobbing”, showed a giant leap forward in Ray’s songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Stop Your Sobbing”] There may be a reason for that. “Stop Your Sobbing” features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks’ circle, Ray’s new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group’s records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we’ll see some of the influence she had on the group.

A particularly upbeat selection of music this time round. Two from Bob Crosby and two Shakespeare sonnets, fabulous vocals from Marion Mann. Two from Bob Skyles and the Skyrockets- Lets play love and My darling Texas cow girl. Elias and his zig zag jive flutes with Tom Hark, the original and a massive world wide hit. Its in the Kwela style, South African penny whistle with a skiffle type beat. Two from Red Nichols. Nat Gonella and Lionel Hampton. Fab 1920s music from The High Hatter, vocals by Frank Luther and Maestro Paul Laval and his Woodmindy Ten. Pioneering jazz guitar and violin from Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Fletcher Henderson masquerading as Duke of Harlam and his Flunkies. Talking of maestros- we have the three boogie woogie pianos of Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. If that wasn't enough we have the man who produced the first commercial record with the term Boogie Woogie on it, Pine Top Smith. Flipping the side of this Brunswick reissue of a 1928 recording we have Pine Top Smith's Blues. Smith was a real pioneer but sadly died of gunshot wounds at the age of 25 in 1929. Harry Parry sees us out with the superb Softly as in a morning sunrise. Joyous stuff.

Guitar in High - Teddy Bunn . . great guitarist whose career stretched from the 1920's to the 1960's. Here we will listen to sides from 1938-40 including those he made with the Mezzrow-Ladnier Quintet (Mezz Mezzrow, Tommy Ladnier, Pops Foster and Manzie Johnson), Rosetta Crawford (Mezzrow, Ladnier and James P. Johnson), the Frankie Newton Quintet/Port of Harlem Jazz Men (Frankie Newton, J.C. Higginbotham, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pops Foster, Sid Catlett), Sidney Bechet Quartet (Bechet, Foster, Catlett) and by himself in a virtually unique solo guitar session from 1940 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Songs include: Five Foot Two, Five O' Clock Whistle, Deep Fives, Five Minutes More, Mr. Five By Five and Swinging At the Circle Five. Musicians include: Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters, the Swift Jewel Cowboys, Meade Lux Lewis, the Mills Brothers and Stan Getz.

Black Swan Records va ser un segell americà de Jazz i Blues fundat l’any 1921 a Harlem pel Sr. Harry Pace. Operaven i comercialitzaven principalment amb afroamericans. Per aquest segell va gravar gent com Ma Rainey, Meade Lux Lewis, Jelly Roll Morton, Cow Cow Davenpourt i molts més. The post Blues Barrelhouse 01/02/2021 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.

Jueves 1 Octubre: con Fletcher Henderson & his Orchestra, Miguel Fernández, Mario Delgado, Alex Yanssen, Ivan Paduart, Charles Mingus, Meade "Lux" Lewis" y Ernesto Aurignac entre otros. Edición inaugural y de inicio de nuestra 15ª temporada en antena en la que presentamos a modo de sumario algunos de los contenidos, músicos y músicas que fundamentan nuestro programa así como la forma en la que nos organizamos y programamos a lo largo de la semana y mes. "Sugar Foot Stomp" de King Oliver es el "Estándar de la semana" y "El giro del cíngulo" de Ernesto Aurignac, nuestro "Favorito". Ahora Jazz, Ed.1995.

Edmund Hall was one of the most distinctive and accomplished clarinetists in the Trad Jazz style from 1940 until he passed away in 1967. This podcast focuses on the recordings he made for Blue Note in the 1940's under his own name and with James P. Johnson, Art Hodes and Sidney DeParis. The Hall sessions feature more swing-oriented groups with Charlie Christian (playing acoustic guitar!), Meade Lux Lewis (on celeste!), Red Norvo and Teddy Wilson while the others utilize the talents of Sidney DeParis, Max Kaminsky, Vic Dickenson, James P. Johnson, Art Hodes, Carl Kress, Jimmy Shirley, Everett Barksdale, John Simmons and Sid Catlett, among others. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra - "Trumbology" Strayhorn Trio - "In a Blue Summer Garden" The Old Codger Show Proud Sponsor - "Kellogg's Pep" Teddy Wilson - "Breaking In a Pair of Shoes" Lil Johnson - "Was I?" Josephine Baker - "Vous faites partie de moi (I've Got You Under My Skin)" Cole Porter - "Me and Marie" George Hannah with Meade "Lux" Lewis (piano) - "The Boy in the Boat" Dizzy Gillespie - "Dizzy Atmosphere" Don Redman Orchestra - "Shakin' That Afri-Can" The Boswell Sisters - "I'm in Training for You" Owl Jolson - "Starring In I Love to Singa" Lil Johnson & Black Bob - "Get 'Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)" The Brox Sisters - "Bring on the Pepper" Jimmie Rodgers - "Down the Old Road to Home" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/94671

Empezamos con una comparación entre el Harlem stride y el boogie woogie. El boogie woogie centrado en Chicago, con orígenes en Texas, Kansas, Memphis. Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Otis Spann sus principales exponentes. El gordo Waller, Fats: compositor extraordinario (Handful of keys, Ain't misbehavin' Honeysuckle Rose y más de 400 temas en solo 39 años de vida, sin contar los que le robaron o mal vendió). Pianista vibrante, exquisito, organista, cantante y showman. Primer vals jazzístico, el Jitterbug Waltz. Chismes: toca en el  cumpleaños de Capone.  Las “primas” del gordo. Y saben en qué coinciden Sir Edward Elgar, Fats Waller, The Beatles y Pink Floyd?

Radio Jazz studievært Kay Seitzmayer spiller musik med blues-folk, der alle er født i september måned. Det er musikere som Floyd Council, Pink Anderson, Memphis Slim, Freddie King, Meade »Lux« Lewis, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles og B B King. Sendt i Radio Jazz i 2017 Der er mere jazz på www. radiojazz.dk

1 - Honky Tonk Train - Bob Crosby and his Orchestra;Meade "Lux" Lewis - 19382 - Gravy Train - Tiny Bradshaw;Henry Bernard - 19493 - SUBWAY - Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra - 19374 - Grand Central Station - 5 Red Caps;Irene Higginbotham - 19445 - Love on a Greyhound Bus - Kay Kyser and his Orchestra;Lucyann Polk and the Campus Kids - 19466 - Greyhound Bus - Brownie McGhee - 1940's7 - Gasoline Gus and his Jitney Bus - Billy Murray - 19158 - Tuscaloosa Bus - Johnny Mercer;Wingy Manone and The Pied Pipers;Paul Weston And His Orchestra - 19489 - Birmingham Bus - Romo Vincent - 194410 - Us on a Bus - Fats Waller and his Rhythm - 193611 - Rolleo Rolling Along - The Merry Macs - 194212 - Two on a Bike - Six Hits and a Miss with Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra - 194213 - Ann and Her Little Sedan - Phil Baker and His Accordion (A Bad Boy From A Good Family) - 192514 - Rollin' on Our Roller Skate - George Olsen and His Music - 193315 - Haida, Troika! - The A. & P. Gypsies with Harry Horlick - 192616 - Mule Train - Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith And His Cracker-Jacks - 194917 - Covered Wagon Days - Ted Weems and His Orchestra - 192318 - Square Wheeled Wagon - Bob Van Antwerp with Rusty's Riders - 1950's19 - Elephant Swing - Franz Jackson And His Jacksonians - 194020 - Burrita, La - from Mexico - 1950's21 - Honeymoon on a Rocket Ship - Big Jim de Noone - 195322 - Rocket to the Moon - Moon Mullican - 195323 - Mail Plane Blues - Georgia White - 194124 - Laivyne (Rowboat) - Anthony Sodeika, composer Gounod - 192025 - Ride On, Ride On - June Richmond with Andy Kirk And His Clouds Of Joy - 194226 - Ride Daddy Ride - Fats Noel - 195127 - Elevator Boogie - Bill Johnson and his Musical Notes - 194828 - Elaine Tanner Case - Richard Diamond, Private Detective - 1950

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-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Birmingham Bounce" by Hardrock Gunter. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. The biographical information here comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll.  The information about the "Yancey Special" bassline and its history comes from "Before Elvis", by Larry Birnbaum. There have been three previous episodes in which Domino and Bartholomew have featured, including two on Domino songs. See the "Fats Domino" tag for those episodes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This is the third episode we're going to do on Fats Domino, and the last one, though he will be turning up in other episodes in various ways. He was the one star from the pre-rock days of R&B to last and thrive, and even become bigger, in the rock and roll era, and he was, other than Elvis Presley, by far the most successful of the first wave of rock and roll stars.   And this points to something interesting -- something which we haven't really pointed out as much as you might expect.   Because of that first wave of rock and rollers, by late 1956 there were only Elvis and the black R&B stars left as rock and roll stars on the US charts. The wave of white rockabilly acts that had hits throughout 1955 and 56 had all fizzled -- Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley would between them never have another major hit in the US, though all of them would have success in other countries, and make important music over the next few years. Johnny Cash would have more hits, but he would increasingly be marketed as a country music star. If we're talking about actual rock and roll hits rising to decent positions in the charts, by late 1956 you're looking at acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, with only Elvis left of the rockabillies.   Of course, very shortly afterwards, there would come a second wave of white rock and rollers, who would permanently change the music, and by the time we get to mid-1957 we'll be in a period where white man with guitar is the default image for rock and roll star, but in late 1956, that default image was a black man with a piano, and the black man with a piano who was selling the most records, by far, was Fats Domino.   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   When we left Domino, he had just had his breakout rock and roll hit, with "Ain't That A Shame". He was so successful that Imperial Records actually put out an album by him, rather than just singles, for the first time in the six years he'd been recording for them. This was a bigger deal than it sounds -- rhythm and blues artists hardly ever put out albums in the fifties. The sales of their records weren't even normally directly to their audiences -- they were to jukebox manufacturers.   So when Imperial put out an album, that was a sign that something had changed with Domino's audience -- he was selling to white people with money. The black audience, for the most part, were still buying 78s, not even 45s -- they were generally relatively poor, and not the type of people to upgrade their record players while the old ones still worked.   (This is obviously a huge generalisation, but it's true in so far as any generalisations are true.)   Meanwhile, the young white rock and roll audience that had developed all of a sudden between 1954 and 1956 was mostly buying the new 45rpm singles, but at least some of them were also buying LPs -- enough of them that artists like Elvis were selling on the format.   Domino's first album, Rock and Rollin' With Fats Domino, was made up almost entirely of previously released material -- mostly hit singles he'd had in the few years before the rock and roll boom took off, and including the songs we've looked at before. It was followed only three months later by a follow-up, imaginatively titled Fats Domino Rock and Rollin'. That one was largely made up of outtakes and unreleased tracks from 1953, but when it came out in April 1956 it sold twenty thousand copies in its first week on release.   That doesn't sound a lot now, but for an album aimed at a teenage audience, by a black artist, in 1956, and featuring only one hit single, that was quite an extraordinary achievement.   But Domino's commercial success in 1956 was very much overshadowed by other events, which had everything to do with the racial attitudes of the time. Because believe it or not, Fats Domino's shows were often disrupted by riots.   We've been talking about 1956 for a while, and dealing with black artists, without having really mentioned just what a crucial time this was in the history of the civil rights struggle. The murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman, had been in August 1955. Rosa Parks had refused to get to the back of the bus in December 1955, and in early 1956 a campaign of white supremacist terrorism against black people stepped up, with the firebombing of several churches and of the houses of civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King.   This, as much as anything musical, is the context you need to understand why rock and roll was seen as so revolutionary in 1956 in particular. White teenagers were listening to music by black musicians, and even imitating that music themselves, right at the point where people were having to start taking sides for or against racial justice and human decency. A large chunk of white America was more concerned about the "inappropriate" behaviour of people like Rosa Parks than about the legitimate concerns of the firebombers. And this attitude was also showing up in the reaction to music. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was injured on stage when a mob of white supremacists attacked him. Cole was one of the least politically vocal black entertainers, and he was appearing before an all-white audience, but he was a black man playing with a white backing band, and that was enough for him to be a target for attempted murder.   And this is the background against which you have to look at the reports of violence at Fats Domino shows. The riots which broke out at his shows throughout that year were blamed in contemporary news reports on his "pulsating jungle rhythms" -- and there's not even an attempt made to hide the racism in statements like that -- but there was little shocking about Domino's actual music at the time.   In fact, in 1956, Domino seemed to be trying to cross over to the country and older pop audience, by performing old standards from decades earlier. His first attempt at doing so became a top twenty pop hit. "My Blue Heaven" had originally been a hit in 1927 for the crooner Gene Austin:   [Excerpt: Gene Austin, "My Blue Heaven"]   Domino's version gave it a mild R&B flavour, and it became a double-sided hit with "I'm In Love Again" on the other side:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "My Blue Heaven"]   And for the rest of the year, Domino would repeat this formula -- one side of each of his singles would be written by Domino or his producer Dave Bartholomew, while the other side would be a song from twenty to forty years earlier. His single releases for the next eighteen months or so would include on them such standards as "I'm in the Mood for Love", "As Time Goes By", and "When My Dreamboat Comes Home".   And so, this is the music that was supposedly to blame for riots. And riots *did* follow Domino around everywhere he went. In Roanoake, Virginia, for example, in May, Domino was playing to a segregated crowd -- whites in the balcony, black people on the floor. The way segregation worked when it came to rock and roll or R&B concerts was simple -- whichever race the promoter thought would be more likely to come got the floor, the race which would have fewer audience members got the balcony.   But in this case, the promoters underestimated how many white people were now listening to this new music. The balcony filled up, and a lot of white teenagers went down and joined the black people on the ground floor. Towards the end of the show, someone in the balcony, incensed at the idea of black and white people dancing together, threw a whisky bottle at the crowd below. Soon whisky bottles were flying through the air, and the riot in the audience spread to the streets around.   The New York Times blamed the black audience members, even though it had been a white person who'd thrown the first bottle. The American Legion, which owned the concert venue, decided that the simplest solution was just to ban mixed audiences altogether -- they'd either have all-white or all-black audiences.   Another riot broke out in San Jose in July, when someone threw a string of lit firecrackers into the audience. In the ensuing riot, a thousand beer bottles were broken, twelve people were arrested, and another twelve needed medical treatment.   In Houston, Domino played another show where white people were in the balcony and black people were on the dancefloor below. Some of the white people decided to join the black dancers, at which point a black policeman -- trying to avoid another riot because of "race mixing" -- said that everyone had to sit down and no-one could dance. But then a white cop overruled him and said that only white people could dance. Domino refused to carry on playing if black people weren't allowed to dance, too, and while that show didn't turn violent, a dozen people were arrested for threatening the police.   This is the context in which Domino was performing, and this is the context in which he had his biggest hit. The song that was meant to be the hit was "Honey Chile", a new original which Domino got to feature in an exploitation film called "Shake, Rattle, and Rock":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Honey Chile"]   At the same session where he recorded that, he tried to record another old standard, with disappointing results. "Blueberry Hill" was originally written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis. As with many songs of the time, it was recorded simultaneously by dozens of artists, but it was the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had the biggest hit with it:   [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Glenn Miller, Gene Autry had also had a hit with the song. We've talked before about Autry, and how he was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and influenced everyone from Les Paul to Bo Diddley. Given Domino's taste for country and western music, it's possible that Autry's version was the first version of the song he came to love:   [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Blueberry Hill"]   But Domino was inspired to cover the song by Louis Armstrong's recording. Armstrong was, of course, another legend of New Orleans music, and his version, from 1949, had come out after Domino had already started his own career:   [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong: "Blueberry Hill"]   Domino loved Armstrong's version, and had wanted to record it for a long time, but when they got into the studio the band couldn't get through a whole take of the song. Dave Bartholomew, who hadn't been keen on recording the song anyway, said at the end of the session, "We got nuthin'".   But Bunny Robyn, the engineer at the session, thought it was salvageable. He edited together a version from bits of half-finished takes, and thanks to the absolutely metronomic time sense of Earl Palmer, he managed to do it so well that after more than thirty years of listening to the record, I'm still not certain exactly where the join is. I *think* it's just before he starts the second middle eight -- there's a *slight* change of sonic ambience there -- but I wouldn't swear to it. Listen for yourself. The part where I think the join comes is just before he sings "the wind in the willow":   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   After Robyn edited that version together, Dave Bartholomew tried to stop it from being released, telling Lew Chudd, the owner of the record label, that releasing it would ruin Domino's career forever.   He couldn't have been more wrong. The song became Domino's biggest hit, rising to number two in the pop charts, and Bartholomew later admitted it had been a huge mistake for him to try to block it, saying that his horn arrangement for the song would be the thing he would be remembered for, and telling Domino's biographer Rick Coleman, "When I'm dead and gone a million times, they'll still be playing 'da-da-da-da-dee-dah'".   Not only was Domino's version a hit, but it was big enough that Louis Armstrong's version of the song was reissued and became a hit as well, and Elvis recorded a soundalike cover, including the piano intro that Domino had come up with, for his film "Loving You":   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blueberry Hill"]   The song was so big that it even revived the career of its co-lyricist, Al Lewis, whose career had been in the doldrums since a run of hits for people like Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. Lewis made a comeback as an R&B songwriter, co-writing songs for Domino himself:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "I'm Ready"]   And for Little Anthony and the Imperials:   [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Tears on My Pillow"]   As always with a Fats Domino record, we're going to talk about its points of rhythmic interest. The bass-line here is not one that was used on any of the previous versions, but it was common on New Orleans R&B records -- indeed it's very similar to the one Domino used on "Ain't That a Shame", which we looked at a few months ago.   This kind of bassline has some of that Jelly Roll Morton Spanish tinge we've talked about before, when we talked about the tresilo rhythms that Dave Bartholomew brought to the arrangements. But when it's used as a piano bassline, as it is here, it comes indirectly from the boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey:   [Excerpt: Jimmy Yancey, "How Long Blues"]   Yancey made a speciality of this kind of bassline, but the man who made every New Orleans piano player start playing like that was the great boogie player Meade "Lux" Lewis, with his song "Yancey Special":   [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Yancey Special"]   Lewis named that song after Yancey, which caused a problem for him when Sonny Thompson, an R&B bandleader from Chicago, recorded an instrumental with a similar bassline, "Long Gone":   [Excerpt: Sonny Thompson, "Long Gone"]   That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and Lewis sued Thompson for copyright infringement, claiming it was too similar to "Yancey Special", because it shared the same bassline. The defendants brought out Jimmy Yancey, who said that he'd come up with that bassline long before Lewis had. Lewis didn't help himself in his testimony -- he claimed, at first, that he hadn't named the song after Jimmy Yancey, but later admitted on the stand that the song called "Yancey Special" which featured a bassline in the style of Jimmy Yancey had indeed been named after Jimmy Yancey.   The plagiarism case was thrown out for that reason, but also for two others. One was that the bassline was such a simple idea that it couldn't by itself be copyrightable -- which is something I would question, but I have spoken in great detail about the problems with copyright law as it comes to black American musical creation in the past, and I won't repeat myself here. The other was that by allowing the record of "Yancey Special" to come out before he'd registered the copyright, Lewis had dedicated the whole composition to the public domain, and so Thompson could do what he liked with the bassline.   That bassline became a staple of R&B music, and particularly of New Orleans R&B music. You can hear it, for example, on "I Hear You Knockin'", a 1955 hit for Smiley Lewis, arranged by Dave Bartholomew, featuring Huey "Piano" Smith playing a very Fats Domino style piano part:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"]   Domino had used the bassline in "Ain't That A Shame", as well, and it seems to have been taken up by Bartholomew as a signature motif -- he also used it in "Blue Monday", another song which he'd written for Smiley Lewis:   [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "Blue Monday"]   Domino's remake of that song would become his next hit after "Blueberry Hill", and almost as big a success. Worldwide, "Blueberry Hill" was the biggest rock and roll hit of 1956, outdoing even Elvis' "Hound Dog" and "Heartbreak Hotel" in worldwide chart positions, though none of those songs could beat "Que Sera Sera" by Doris Day -- however much our popular image of the 1950s is based on ponytailed bobbysoxers, the fact remains that a sizeable proportion of the record-buying public were older and less inclined to rock than to gently sway, and for all that Domino's shows were inspiring riots wherever he went in 1956, his records were still also appealing to that older crowd.   But segregation applied here too. "Blueberry Hill" made Billboard's top thirty records of the year for country sales in its annual roundup, but it never appeared even on the top one hundred country charts during 1956 itself. We've talked before about how the recent "Old Town Road" debacle shows how musical genres are the product of rigid segregation, but nothing shows that more than this. That appearance by Domino in the top thirty sellers for the year was the only appearance by a black artist on any Billboard country charts in the fifties, and it shows that country audiences were buying Domino's records, just as his *lack* of appearance on all the other country charts that year shows that this wasn't being recognised by any of the musical gatekeepers, despite the evident country sensibility in his performance:   [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Blueberry Hill"]   Meanwhile, of course, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins were appearing on the R&B charts as well as the country and pop ones.   1956 was the absolute peak of Domino's career in chart terms, and "Blueberry Hill" was his biggest hit of that year, but he would carry on having top twenty pop hits until 1962, by which point he had outlasted not only the first wave of rockabilly acts that came up in 1955 and 56, but almost all of the second wave that we're going to see coming up in 1957 as well. His is an immense body of work, and we've barely touched upon it in the three episodes this podcast has devoted to him. His top thirty R&B chart hits span from 1949 through to 1964, a career that covers multiple revolutions in music. When he started having hits, the biggest artists in pop music were Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters, and when he stopped, the Beatles were at the top of the charts. Domino was, other than Elvis, the biggest rock and roll star of the fifties by a massive margin. The whole of New Orleans music owes a debt to him, and "Blueberry Hill" in particular has been cited as an influence by everyone from Mick Jagger to Leonard Cohen.   Yet he is curiously unacknowledged in the popular consciousness, while much lesser stars loom larger. I suspect that part of the reason for that is racism, both in ignoring a black man because he was black, and in ignoring him because he didn't fit white prejudices about black people and the music they make.   Other than drinking a bit too much, and sleeping around a little in the fifties, Domino led a remarkably non-rock-and-roll life. He was married to the same woman for sixty-one years, he rarely left his home in New Orleans, and other than a little friction between songwriting partners you'll struggle to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him. You build a legend as a rock star by shooting your bass player on stage or choking to death on your own vomit, not by not liking to travel because you don't like the food anywhere else, or by being shy but polite, and smiling a lot.   That's not how you build a reputation for rock and roll excess. But it *is* how you build a body of work that stands up to any artist from the mid-twentieth-century, and how you live a long and happy life. It's how you get the Medal of Arts awarded to you by two Presidents -- George W. Bush awarded Domino with a replacement after he lost his first medal, from Bill Clinton, during Hurricane Katrina. And it's how you become so universally beloved and admired that when your home is destroyed in a hurricane, everyone from Elton John to Doctor John, from Paul McCartney to Robert Plant, will come together to record a tribute album to help raise funds to rebuild it.   Fats Domino died in 2017, sixty-eight years after the start of his career, at the age of eighty-nine. His collaborator Dave Bartholomew died in June this year, aged one hundred. They both left behind one of the finest legacies in the histories of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and New Orleans music.

Hoy os ofrecemos el primer monográfico dedicado al 80 aniversario del sello Blue Note. Fue el pasado 6 de enero y le vamos a dedicar una serie de capítulos donde escucharemos y hablaremos de las leyendas que vivieron bajo los auspicios de aquella idea que convirtió en realidad Alfred Lion. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver o Lee Morgan entre otros sonarán en esta primera edición.

Hoy os ofrecemos el primer monográfico dedicado al 80 aniversario del sello Blue Note. Fue el pasado 6 de enero y le vamos a dedicar una serie de capítulos donde escucharemos y hablaremos de las leyendas que vivieron bajo los auspicios de aquella idea que convirtió en realidad Alfred Lion. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver o Lee Morgan entre otros sonarán en esta primera edición.

Boogie Woogie classics from 1939. Tunes include: Steady Rock Blues, Shout For Joy, Deep Fives, Woo Woo and Pinetop's Boogie Woogie. Performers include: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Harry James, Woody Herman and Clarence Lofton.

For over 50 years, John Mayall has served as a pioneer of blues music, rightly earning him the title, "The Godfather of British Blues". After decades of touring and recording, in 2013 John signed with producer Eric Corne's label, Forty Below Records, and has since been experiencing an artistic and career renaissance, including a Blues Hall of Fame induction in 2015.  This Friday Forty Below Records will release Nobody Told Me, Mayall’s  new studio album. Born in the UK in 1933, Mayall first became attracted to jazz and blues through  his father's 78s  record collection, listening to guitarists like Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Leadbelly. However once he heard the sounds of boogie woogie piano giants Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis, he was hooked.  As a young teen, he began learning the guitar and  later, the harmonica, inspired by Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter. The rest is history: mentoring future stars like Paul McCartney, Mick Fleetwood,  and Eric Clapton, moving to Los Angeles, more live and studio albums, and world touring his band The Bluesbreakers. Never stopping, he recently recorded albums in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and began playing live as a trio. His 2017  European tour resulted in the critically acclaimed live recording Three for the Road that showcased his skills on organ, piano and harmonica. In 2018, he recruited Texas blues guitarist Carolyn Wonderland -- the first female guitarist in his permanent lineup- for recording and touring in 2019.   Mayall also has a  new studio album in the works which features a full blown lineup with guest contributions from an impressive list of extraordinary, well-known guitarists.   

Edição de 17 de janeiro 2109

Hey All...….This weeks show:Out opening salvo:*The Shangri-las - Bulldog [Red Bird 1965] From the LP "Leader of the Pack"ALL BEDS: The Jimmy Gordon Orch. - Buzzzzzz [Challenge 1963] Drummer Jimmy Gordon with his 1st 45 rpm.Set 1: Savages & Hail Marys…* The Savage Resurrection - Thing in "E" [Mercury 1968] LP-S/T...killer only LP by San Francisco / Oakland w/ 16 year old Randy Hammon on guitar..they morphed out of a band called The Boys.* The V.I.P.s - I wanna be free [Island 1966] EP. Cover of Joe Tex killer grinder. Mike Harrison and Greg Ridley pre-ART, pre-Spooky Tooth.* Circus Maximus - The Wind [Vanguard 1967] LP - S/T. Jerry Jeff Walker and Bob Bruno before they went folk / jazz...respectively.* The Bennito Sextet - Psychedelic Soul [Tico 1968] LP - The Bennito Sextet + 1 * Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Mary Mary [Elektra 1966] LP - East West. Great version of The Monkees / Mike Nesmith song.* BED: see aboveSet 2: Broken Sky Pilots* International Submarine Band - Sum up broke [ Columbia 1966] 45 rpm. Best record ever of this band that included Gram Parsons & Chris Etheridge pre- Flying Burrito Brothers.* Flying Burrito Brothers - Wheels [A&M 1969] LP - The Guilded Palace of Sin* The Onion Radio News - A coroner works from home* The Tremeloes - Suddenly winter [Epic 1967] 45 rpm. Great track! * Traffic Sound - Sky Pilot [MAG 1968] 45 rpm. Peru's favorite pop / psychsters! * BED: See aboveSet 3: Rockets & Rhumbas* Pete Johnson - Rocket 88 Boogie [Downbeat 1949] 78 rpm. one third of the Boogie Woogie Trio along with Albert Ammons & Meade Lux Lewis.* Lowell Fulson - Blues Rhumba [Checker 1957] 45 rpm. Too good! Next weeks show: Christmas in Jail

ESPECIAL JOHNNIE JOHNSON El pianista Johnnie Clyde Johnson nació un 8 de julio de 1924, en Fairmont, al oeste de Virginia. Su padre era un minero del carbón y cuando Johnson tuvo cuatro años, nos se sabe muy bien como ni porque sus padres compraron un piano. De esta manera, Johnson empezó relativamente pronto a tocar y a imitar a los músicos que escuchaba en el tocadiscos de casa, gente como Art Tatum, el maestro del boogie woogie Meade Lux Lewis. También sintonizaba un programa llamado Dawn Patrol de una emisora de Pittsburgh, total que a los nueve años ya hacia sus pinitos en la radio y podemos decir que Johnson fue un autodidacta total del piano.

ESPECIAL JOHNNIE JOHNSON El pianista Johnnie Clyde Johnson nació un 8 de julio de 1924, en Fairmont, al oeste de Virginia. Su padre era un minero del carbón y cuando Johnson tuvo cuatro años, nos se sabe muy bien como ni porque sus padres compraron un piano. De esta manera, Johnson empezó relativamente pronto a tocar y a imitar a los músicos que escuchaba en el tocadiscos de casa, gente como Art Tatum, el maestro del boogie woogie Meade Lux Lewis. También sintonizaba un programa llamado Dawn Patrol de una emisora de Pittsburgh, total que a los nueve años ya hacia sus pinitos en la radio y podemos decir que Johnson fue un autodidacta total del piano.

  Here's the second episode, on "Roll 'Em Pete" by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue -- in the episode, I say that "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That's not actually true for the original version -- it is true for Bill Haley's cover version, and Elvis' and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner's version the part we now know as the chorus didn't come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. ----more---- Resources As always, I've put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has "In the Mood" and "the Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller, "Roll 'Em Pete" and "It's All Right Baby" by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Joe Turner, "I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl" by Bessie Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, and "Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton's autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that's also out of print -- this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they'll get a rerelease at a reasonable price.   Transcript "It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" -- in Chuck Berry's classic song "Rock and Roll Music", that's the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it's something that had predecessors in rock's pre-history.   If you don't know what a backbeat is... well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you'd have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you'd expect from the name, it's a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you'd generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.   The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm -- so much so that often you'll see "shuffle rhythm" and "swing time" used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to "In the Mood" by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song].   That's a shuffle. That's swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It's a good, strong, sound -- there's a reason why it was popular -- but... it's a little bit polite. A little bit tame.   A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar -- boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It's a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That's the rhythm that made rock and roll.   Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says "I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn't even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming."   And that's what a backbeat does -- it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR.   But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn't even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called "Roll 'Em Pete".   Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that "generally credited". There are two problems with it -- the first is that "Roll 'Em Pete", at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn't have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that's the way of these things, as we'll see over and over again. The first anything is messy.   But "Roll 'Em Pete" is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let's have a look at it.   Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player -- yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline -- you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] -- while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and "eight to the bar" was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time.   But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you'll hear a rhythm which isn't so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. "Roll 'Em Pete" changed that.   Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his "Spirituals to Swing" concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts -- one in 1938 and one in 1939 -- were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That's not an exaggeration, by any means, it's just a fact.   At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event -- it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music.   For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from "primitive" folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA.   And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who's who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died -- Johnson's place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet.   For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And "shouter" was the word for what Turner did. If you don't know about blues shouters, that's unsurprising -- it's a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer -- usually a man -- who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could.   Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn't very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder -- blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie's.   But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever.   "Roll 'Em Pete" has the first recorded example -- as far as anyone has been able to discover -- of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson's piano part -- in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he's playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry's guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there.   Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself "I don't really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song -- are you sure it's got more of a backbeat?"   If you are, I don't blame you -- but there's a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that's the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier -- that performance is titled "It's Alright Baby" rather than "Roll 'Em Pete" on the official recordings, but it's the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly.   Now this isn't a clearcut differentiation -- you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that's a lot of what's going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a "first backbeat record" is almost as ridiculous as talking about a "first rock and roll record" or a "first soul record". And the more I've listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it's a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it's one you can clearly point to and say "that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that's massively different from its predecessors, but like "Flying Home", which we talked about last time, it's as good a place to start as any.   And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers.   Before we go into why, we'll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics -- or, more precisely, the way that they aren't really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we'll be seeing a lot of in the future -- a blues tradition called "floating lyrics". A song like "Roll 'Em Pete", you see, isn't really a song in the conventional sense. There's a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they'd tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. "Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman's tryin' to quit me, Lord, but I love her still" is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics -- though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don't believe she will, or doesn't love me but her sister will.   Most of Turner's songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we'll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We'll see several examples of people taking credit as "songwriters" for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result.   Turner and Johnson could stretch "Roll 'Em Pete" out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance -- and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all.   But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form -- it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music -- every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about "the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B" and wanted you to "beat me daddy, eight to the bar" (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to "scrub me mama to a boogie beat"). Tommy Dorsey recorded "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" (renamed as "TD's Boogie Woogie"), and you got... well, things like this.   [play excerpt of "The Booglie Wooglie Piggy" by Glenn Miller]   That's the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don't write them like that any more.   Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren't directly about being boogie-woogie -- like, say, Glenn Miller's "Chatanooga Choo Choo" -- you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like "when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far".   And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever.   Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry -- men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands.   But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott.   The American Society of Composers and Publishers was -- and still is -- an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs -- in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing.   And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute.   This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn't been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music -- the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn't think was important.   Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing "I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair".  And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles.   And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history -- the musicians' union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn't affect anyone playing on the radio -- so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years.   This had several effects, all of them profound.   Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current -- at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture.   Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That's right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them.   Third -- and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers -- there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth   And fourth -- the strike didn't affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey's band couldn't record anything, but Dorsey's old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers.   The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman -- or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra -- and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton's and Count Basie's, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars.   Seventeen years after "Roll 'Em Pete", Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone -- though he was using the name "Charles Calhoun", because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one -- but you can hear that there's a very, very clear line to "Roll 'Em Pete". The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is a rock and roll song.   We'll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs' time, but for now we'll just talk about this song. That's Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that "whap, whap" snare drum playing. It's safe to say that's not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential.   "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is definitely the *same kind of thing* as "Roll 'Em Pete", isn't it? The piano playing is similar, Turner's blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But "Shake Rattle and Roll" is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term "rock and roll".   So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there's a few other things as well -- influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll.   There's the obvious one, of the saxophone. That's from rhythm and blues, and it's something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet's solo on "Flying Home" from last episode? That's a very clear progenitor for this.   But there's also the influence of another type of song -- one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don't even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into "blues".   The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like "Fishing Pole Blues", which has lines like "want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you'd better have a great big pole", or songs called things like "Banana in my Fruit Basket", I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll", "It's Tight Like That" and "Warm My Weiner".   There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like "Bull Dyke Blues", but I won't look at those in any more detail here as I don't want this podcast to get put in an "adults only" section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material.   And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren't the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead.   And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It's the pattern of "Tutti Frutti", of "Maybelline", of "Rock Around the Clock", and of "Shake Rattle and Roll". And "Shake Rattle and Roll", while it's not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter.   (Hilariously, Bill Haley's cover version is famously "cleaned up" -- they took out lines like "the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through" and "I believe to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose" in case they were too dirty. But they left in "I'm like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store"...)   So that's what rock and roll was, in its early stages -- a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from "Roll 'Em Pete", and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the "Spirituals to Swing" concerts.   But wait... isn't the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where's all the country music in this?   Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn't have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we'll have to wait until next episode.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

  Here’s the second episode, on “Roll ‘Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue — in the episode, I say that “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That’s not actually true for the original version — it is true for Bill Haley’s cover version, and Elvis’ and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner’s version the part we now know as the chorus didn’t come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has “In the Mood” and “the Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller, “Roll ‘Em Pete” and “It’s All Right Baby” by Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner, “I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl” by Bessie Smith, “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Bill Haley For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can. Lionel Hampton’s autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap. The Spirituals to Swing concerts have been released on CD, but sadly that’s also out of print — this is the definitive version, but hopefully at some point they’ll get a rerelease at a reasonable price.   Transcript “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it” — in Chuck Berry’s classic song “Rock and Roll Music”, that’s the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it’s something that had predecessors in rock’s pre-history.   If you don’t know what a backbeat is… well, in the days of swing, and even on a lot of very early rock and roll records, the typical beat you’d have is one called a shuffle, which sounds like you’d expect from the name, it’s a sort of tit-tit-tit-tit [demonstrates] kind of sound, and you’d generally stress the first beat in the bar. [demonstrates] ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.   The shuffle rhythm was *the* swing rhythm — so much so that often you’ll see “shuffle rhythm” and “swing time” used interchangeably. Listen, for example, to the introduction to “In the Mood” by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest-selling swing record of all time [plays section of song].   That’s a shuffle. That’s swing music, and that rhythm was the basis of almost all pre-war popular music, one way or the other. It’s a good, strong, sound — there’s a reason why it was popular — but… it’s a little bit polite. A little bit tame.   A backbeat, on the other hand, gives you a straight, simple, pulse. You stress the second and fourth beats in a bar — boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP boom BAP. It’s a simpler rhythm, but a more exciting one. That’s the rhythm that made rock and roll.   Players in blues and jazz music had been using that rhythm, off and on, since the 1920s. Lionel Hampton, in his autobiography, talking about his earliest work as a drummer before switching to vibraphone, says “I had a different style on drums. I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn’t even get popular until the 1950s. I wanted people to dance, have a good time, clap their hands, and they would do it to my drumming.”   And that’s what a backbeat does — it gives people somewhere to clap their hands, a very clear signal, you clap on TWO and FOUR.   But while Hampton was playing like that, he was never recorded doing that, and nor were any other drummers at the time. In fact, the first recording in the prehistory of rock generally credited as having a backbeat doesn’t even have a drummer on it at all. Rather, it features just a vocalist, Big Joe Turner, and a piano player, Pete Johnson. The song, which was recorded in December 1938, is called “Roll ‘Em Pete”.   Now, before we go any further, I want to say something about that “generally credited”. There are two problems with it — the first is that “Roll ‘Em Pete”, at least in the version recorded under that name, doesn’t have a particularly pronounced backbeat at all, and the second is that there *were* other records being made, long before 1938, which do. But that’s the way of these things, as we’ll see over and over again. The first anything is messy.   But “Roll ‘Em Pete” is still a hugely important record, in ways that are more important than whether it has a backbeat on it. So let’s have a look at it.   Pete Johnson was a boogie-woogie player — yet another of the musical streams which fed into early rock and roll. Boogie woogie was a style of piano playing that became popular in the 1930s, where the left hand would play a strong bassline — you almost certainly know the generic boogie bassline style, which goes like this [demonstrates] — while the right hand would play decorative melodic stuff over it. That bassline and melody combination was the most popular style of playing for a time, and it became the cornerstone of rock piano playing, as well as of country music and much else. The bassline would have eight notes in a typical bar, and “eight to the bar” was another term some used for boogie woogie at the time.   But boogie woogie was, for the most part, based on that shuffle rhythm. Listen to “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, the first real boogie record, from 1928, and you’ll hear a rhythm which isn’t so different to that Glenn Miller record from a decade or so later. “Roll ‘Em Pete” changed that.   Pete Johnson was considered one of the greatest exponents of the boogie-woogie style, and in 1938 when John Hammond was putting together his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, it was natural that Hammond would choose Johnson to perform. These concerts — one in 1938 and one in 1939 — were probably the most important concerts in popular music history. That’s not an exaggeration, by any means, it’s just a fact.   At the beginning of 1938, Hammond had promoted a concert by the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie, and that concert itself had been an impressive event — it was the first time an integrated band had played Carnegie Hall, and the first time that popular music had been treated as seriously as classical music.   For a follow-up, at Christmas 1938, Hammond wanted to present only black musicians, but to an integrated audience. He wanted, in fact, to present a history of black music, from “primitive” folk forms to big band swing. This was, to say the least, a controversial choice, and in the end the event was sponsored by The New Masses, a magazine published by the Communist Party USA.   And the lineup for that show was pretty much a who’s who of black American music at the time. Hammond had wanted to get Robert Johnson, but he discovered that Johnson had recently died — Johnson’s place was taken by a then-obscure folk musician called Big Bill Broonzy, who became popular largely on the basis of that appearance. Sonny Terry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more all appeared, and the show was successful enough that the next year there was a follow-up, with many of the same musicians, which also featured the Benny Goodman Sextet.   For this show, as well as playing on his own, Pete Johnson was backing a blues shouter called Big Joe Turner. And “shouter” was the word for what Turner did. If you don’t know about blues shouters, that’s unsurprising — it’s a style of music that went out of fashion with the big bands. But a blues shouter was a singer — usually a man — who could sing loudly and powerfully enough that he could be heard over a band, without amplification. In the early twentieth century, microphones were unknown at first, and singers had to be able to be heard over the musicians simply by the force of their voices. Some singers used megaphones as a crude form of amplification, but many more simply had to belt out their vocals as loud as they could.   Even after microphones were introduced, they were unreliable and amplification wasn’t very powerful. And at the same time bands were getting bigger and louder — blues shouters like Big Joe Turner could compete with that power, and get a crowd excited by the sheer volume of their voice, even over bands like Count Basie’s.   But for the Carnegie Hall show, Turner and Pete Johnson were playing together, just the two of them. And while they were in New York, they had a recording session, and recorded a track that some say is the first rock and roll record ever.   “Roll ‘Em Pete” has the first recorded example — as far as anyone has been able to discover — of a boogie song which uses a backbeat rather than a shuffle beat. All the musical elements of early rock and roll are there in Pete Johnson’s piano part — in particular, listen to the phrasing in his right-hand part. Those melody lines he’s playing, if you transfer them to guitar, are basically the whole of Chuck Berry’s guitar style, but you can also hear Jerry Lee Lewis in there.   Now you might be listening to the track and saying to yourself “I don’t really hear that much of a difference with the earlier song — are you sure it’s got more of a backbeat?”   If you are, I don’t blame you — but there’s a version of this song with a much clearer backbeat, and that’s the live recording of Turner and Johnson performing the song at Carnegie Hall the week earlier — that performance is titled “It’s Alright Baby” rather than “Roll ‘Em Pete” on the official recordings, but it’s the same song. There, Turner is clapping along on the backbeat, and you can hear the claps clearly.   Now this isn’t a clearcut differentiation — you can play music in such a way that you can have a shuffle beat going up against a backbeat, and that’s a lot of what’s going on in boogie music of this period, and the two rhythms rubbing up against each other is a lot of what drives early rock and roll. Talking about a “first backbeat record” is almost as ridiculous as talking about a “first rock and roll record” or a “first soul record”. And the more I’ve listened to this song and the other music of its time, the less convinced I am that this specific song has something altogether new. But still, it’s a great example of boogie, of blues, and of the music that would become rock and roll, and it’s one you can clearly point to and say “that has all the elements that will later go into rock and roll music. Perhaps not in exactly the same proportions, perhaps not in a way that’s massively different from its predecessors, but like “Flying Home”, which we talked about last time, it’s as good a place to start as any.   And this is, have no doubt about it, a record of important performers.   Before we go into why, we’ll talk briefly about the song, and particularly about the lyrics — or, more precisely, the way that they aren’t really coherent lyrics at all. This is something we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future — a blues tradition called “floating lyrics”. A song like “Roll ‘Em Pete”, you see, isn’t really a song in the conventional sense. There’s a melodic structure there, and over that melodic structure the singer would improvise. And when blues singers improvised, they’d tend to pull out lyrics from a set of pre-existing phrases that they knew worked. “Well, I got a gal, she lives up on the hill/Well, this woman’s tryin’ to quit me, Lord, but I love her still” is the opening line, and that is one of those floating lyrics — though sometimes, depending on the singer, the women says she loves me but I don’t believe she will, or doesn’t love me but her sister will.   Most of Turner’s songs were made up of these floating lyrics, and this is something we’ll see happening more in the early years of rock and roll, as we look at those. The whole idea of floating lyrics, sadly, makes authorship claims for songs somewhat difficult, and rock and roll, like blues and country before it, was essentially a folk artform to start with. We’ll see several examples of people taking credit as “songwriters” for things that are put together from a bunch of pre-existing elements, striking it lucky, and becoming millionaires as a result.   Turner and Johnson could stretch “Roll ‘Em Pete” out to an hour sometimes, with Turner just singing new lyrics as needed, and no recording can really capture what they were doing in live performance — and this is the problem with much of the prehistory of rock and roll, as so much of it was created by musicians who were live performers first and recording artists a distant second, if at all.   But those live performances mattered. In 1938, when Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons made their appearances in the Spirituals to Swing shows, boogie woogie was something of a minority form — it was something that had had a brief popularity a decade earlier and which was largely forgotten. That show changed that, and suddenly boogie woogie was the biggest thing in music — every big band started playing boogie woogie music, adapted to the big band style. The Andrews Sisters sang about “the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B” and wanted you to “beat me daddy, eight to the bar” (and then, presumably feeling dirty after that, wanted you to “scrub me mama to a boogie beat”). Tommy Dorsey recorded “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” (renamed as “TD’s Boogie Woogie”), and you got… well, things like this.   [play excerpt of “The Booglie Wooglie Piggy” by Glenn Miller]   That’s the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the biggest band of the forties, with Tex Beneke singing about a booglie wooglie piggy. They don’t write them like that any more.   Most of this music, as you can hear, was still using that swing beat, but it was clearly boogie woogie music, and that became the biggest style of music in late-period big band music, the music that was popular in the early 1940s. Even in songs that aren’t directly about being boogie-woogie — like, say, Glenn Miller’s “Chatanooga Choo Choo” — you still get that boogie rhythm, and nods to the generic boogie bassline and you get lines like “when you hear that whistle blowing eight to the bar, then you know that Tennessee is not very far”.   And that influence had a bigger impact than it might otherwise have done, and became something bigger than just a fad, because between 1941 and 1943 a whole host of events conspired to change the music industry forever.   Most importantly, of course, the Second World War reached America, and that caused a lot of problems for the big band industry — men who would otherwise have been playing in those bands were being drafted, as were men who would otherwise have been going out dancing to those bands.   But there were two smaller events that, if anything, made even more impact. The first of these was the ASCAP boycott.   The American Society of Composers and Publishers was — and still is — an organisation that represented most of the most important songwriters and music publishers in the USA, the people who had been writing the most successful songs. They collected royalties for live performances and radio plays, and distributed them to the composers and publishers who made up their membership. And they only dealt with the respectable Tin Pan Alley composers, but that covered enough songs — in the early forties they had a repertoire of one and a quarter million songs, including all the most popular songs that the big bands were playing.   And then for ten months in 1941, they banned all the radio stations in the USA from playing any of their songs, over a royalty dispute.   This should have been catastrophic for the radio stations, and would have been if there hadn’t been another organisation, BMI, set up as a rival to ASCAP a couple of years earlier. BMI dealt with only the low-class music — the blues, and country songs, and gospel songs, and hillbilly music, and boogie. The stuff ASCAP didn’t think was important.   Except that now all that music became *very* important, because that was all you could play on the radio. Well, that and public domain songs, but pretty soon everyone was bored of hearing “I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair”.  And so there was suddenly a much bigger audience for all the hillbilly and blues performers, all of whom had incorporated the boogie style into their own styles.   And then, just as the music industry was getting back on its feet after that, there was what is still the biggest entertainment strike in US history — the musicians’ union strike of 1942-44. This time, the strike didn’t affect anyone playing on the radio — so long as it was a live performance. But because of a dispute over royalties, no instrumentalist was allowed to record for the major record labels for two years.   This had several effects, all of them profound.   Firstly, the big bands all recorded a *lot* of music to stockpile in the last weeks before the strike, and this meant that the styles that were current in July 1942 effectively stayed current — at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned. For two years, the only big band music that could be released was from that stockpile, so the music recorded during the boogie fad stayed around longer than it otherwise might have, and remained a major part of the culture.   Secondly, the ban only affected the major labels. Guess who was on the minor labels, the ones that could keep making music and putting it out? That’s right, those blues and hillbilly musicians, and those boogie piano players. The same ones whose songs had just spent a year being the only ones the famous bands could play, and now after being given that free publicity by the famous bands, they had no competition from them.   Third — and this is a real negative effect of the strike, one which is an immense historical tragedy for music lovers — there was a new form of jazz being invented in New York between 1942 and 1944 by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, people who played in the big bands but were also doing something new in their side gigs. That form later became known as be-bop, or just bop, and is some of the most important music of the twentieth century, but we have no recordings of its birth   And fourth — the strike didn’t affect singers. So Tommy Dorsey’s band couldn’t record anything, but Dorsey’s old vocalist, Frank Sinatra, could, backed by a vocal group instead of instrumentalists. And so could lots of other singers.   The end result of all this was that, at the end of 1944, swing was effectively dead, as was the tradition of instrumentalists being the stars in American music. From that time on, the stars would stop being trombone players like Glenn Miller or clarinetists like Benny Goodman — or piano players like Pete Johnson. Instead they were singers, like Frank Sinatra — and like Joe Turner. The swing musicians either went into bebop, and thus more or less vanish from this story (though their own story is always worth following up), or they went into playing the new forms of music that had sprung up, in particular one form which was inspired by swing bands like Lionel Hampton’s and Count Basie’s, but also by the boogie music that had influenced them, and by the blues. That form was called rhythm and blues, and Joe Turner became one of its biggest stars.   Seventeen years after “Roll ‘Em Pete”, Joe Turner recorded another song, which became his most well-known contribution to popular music. That song was written by the songwriter Jesse Stone — though he was using the name “Charles Calhoun”, because he was a member of ASCAP under his real name, and this was a BMI song if ever there was one — but you can hear that there’s a very, very clear line to “Roll ‘Em Pete”. The main difference here is that the backbeat is now stressed, almost to the point of parody, because “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is a rock and roll song.   We’ll be hearing more about Jesse Stone in a few songs’ time, but for now we’ll just talk about this song. That’s Connie Kay, the drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, you can hear there doing that “whap, whap” snare drum playing. It’s safe to say that’s not the subtlest piece of drumming he ever did, but it may well be the most influential.   “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” is definitely the *same kind of thing* as “Roll ‘Em Pete”, isn’t it? The piano playing is similar, Turner’s blues shouting is the same kind of thing, the vocal melody is similar, both are structured around twelve-bar blueses, and both songs are made up largely of floating lyrics. But “Shake Rattle and Roll” is rock and roll, and it was covered by both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the two biggest white rock and roll singers of the time, and Turner would perform it on shows promoted by Alan Freed, the man who claimed to have coined the term “rock and roll”.   So what makes the difference? Well, firstly that backbeat from Connie Kay, that gives it a much bigger forward momentum. But there’s a few other things as well — influences from other genres that fed into rock and roll.   There’s the obvious one, of the saxophone. That’s from rhythm and blues, and it’s something that rhythm and blues got from swing. Remember Ilinois Jacquet’s solo on “Flying Home” from last episode? That’s a very clear progenitor for this.   But there’s also the influence of another type of song — one most people who talk about the origins of rock and roll don’t even think of as being a separate type of music, as it just gets rolled up into “blues”.   The hokum song is a type of music with a long history, which can trace its origins through vaudeville back to minstrel songs. It was originally for comedy performances more than anything else, but later a whole subgenre of them started being just songs about sex. Some of the more euphemistic of them are songs like “Fishing Pole Blues”, which has lines like “want to go fishing in my fishing hole/If you want to fish with me you’d better have a great big pole”, or songs called things like “Banana in my Fruit Basket”, I Want a Hot-Dog in my Roll”, “It’s Tight Like That” and “Warm My Weiner”.   There were less euphemistic songs, too, called things like “Bull Dyke Blues”, but I won’t look at those in any more detail here as I don’t want this podcast to get put in an “adults only” section. Suffice to say, there was plenty of very, very obscene music as well as the comedy songs and the more euphemistic material.   And the other thing about hokum songs is that they stuck to a fairly straightforward formula. There weren’t the complicated structures of the Tin Pan Alley songs of the time, there was a simple pattern of a verse which had different lyrics every time and a chorus which was always the same, and the two would alternate. The chorus would usually be a twelve-bar blues, and more often than not so would the verse, though sometimes it would be an eight-bar blues instead.   And this is the pattern that you would get in rock and roll songs throughout the fifties. It’s the pattern of “Tutti Frutti”, of “Maybelline”, of “Rock Around the Clock”, and of “Shake Rattle and Roll”. And “Shake Rattle and Roll”, while it’s not the dirtiest song in history or anything, is certainly fairly blatant about its subject matter.   (Hilariously, Bill Haley’s cover version is famously “cleaned up” — they took out lines like “the way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through” and “I believe to my soul you’re the devil in nylon hose” in case they were too dirty. But they left in “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea-food store”…)   So that’s what rock and roll was, in its early stages — a blues shouter, singing over a boogie-inspired piano part, with a backbeat on the snare drum, a structure and lyrics patterned after the hokum song, and horns coming out of swing music. And there is a very, very clear line to that from “Roll ‘Em Pete”, and the boogie-woogie revival of 1938, and the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts.   But wait… isn’t the cliche that rock and roll comes from R&B mixed with country music? Where’s all the country music in this?   Well, that cliche is slightly wrong. Rock doesn’t have much influence from the country music, but it has a lot of influence from Western music. And for that, we’ll have to wait until next episode.   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Shellac Stack No. 104 recalls New Year's Eves past with recordings made on either December 30 or December 31 between 1908 and 1947. We hear from Frank Crumit, Johnny Marvin, Gene Austin, Roy Fox, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Bob Wilber, and many more. From ragtime songs to salon orchestras to dance bands to hot trad jazz, … Continue reading »

Hur påverkar själva livet musikens uttryck? Hur påverkar musiken det liv som utövaren lever? Och hur påverkas sångdiktare och musiker av sina medmänniskors liv? I detta fjärde program medverkar pianisten, kompositören och entertainern Robert Wells, med svensk mamma och nordamerikansk pappa. Robert Wells kallar sig både hovnarr och gathörns-trubadur och har måttot Less is Less More is Best. Wells har nämligen skrivit och spelat in ouvertyrer till gigantiska evenemang som VM i ishockey och konståkning, och till OS I friidrott. Under nio år såg och hörde vi Robert Wells som ackompanjatör i SVT-programmet Så ska det låta. Rhapsody in Rock, som 2011 firade 25-årsjubileum, har Wells som dynamisk kapellmästare och kreativt nav. Konserterna har hållits på jättelika arenor som Ulllevi, Dalhalla och Råsunda och turnéerna har gått över hela världen. Wells är pianoprofessor i Kina, har pianoskolan King of Piano  på nätet och arbetar med stiftelsen Tummeliten till stöd för för tidigt födda barn. Hans pianistiska förebilder är de tre afroamerikanska boogie woogie-legenderna Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons och Meade Lux Lewis. Men även europeiska pianister älskar han, inte minst de två Vladimir, nämligen Horowitz och Ashkenazy. Och Arthur Rubinstein. 2010 gav Robert Wells ut sin första soloplatta Close up Classics med egna tolkningar av pianistiska pärlor av Chopin, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Debussy, Beethoven, Stenhammar och Grieg. Robert Wells var den yngste eleven någonsin vid solistlinjen på Musikhögskolan i Stockholm. Myten att han hoppade av studierna är falsk, men det var när Robert Wells hörde den svenske pianisten Charlie Normans boogie woogie-tappning av Griegs Anitras Dans, som han bestämde sig för att mixa musikstilar. Det berättar Robert Wells för Birgitta Tollan när de möts i hans studio i Stockholm där han tar plats vid sin digitala flygel och säger: - I min värld är ingen musik finare än den andra. Jag älskar att spela och jag älskar musik. Så enkelt är det!   Spellista:   Spellista Musik & Liv 4:   Yemandja Angelique Kidjo, sång, m fl Aye Island Records Mango 74321 16646 2     Minute Waltz Frédéric Chopin Robert Wells, piano Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107           Bumble-Bee Boogie Rimskij-Korsakov. Robert Wells Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Rhapsody In Rock no VIII Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Nut Rocker Robert Wells, piano. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Sing Me Another Song Robert Wells. Jakob Samuel. Plusquam Records     Anitras Dans Edvard Grieg Robert Wells, Charlie Norman, pianon Norman & Wells Carlton Home Entertainment 751589     honky tonk train blues Meade Lux Lewis Meade Lux Lewis, piano     Hungarian Rhapsody No II Franz Liszt Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6                                                                                      Fantaisie-Impromptu Frédéric Chopin Robert Wells, piano. Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107           Clair De Lune Claude Debussy Robert Wells, piano. Close Up Classics Carpe Diem CD107     Honeysuckle Rose Fats Waller. Andy Razaf. Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6                                          River Deep Mountain High Ike & Tina Turner Robert Wells, piano. Sanne Salomonsen, sång. M fl. The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Sommarnatt Robert Wells Robert Wells, piano och sång. SCRANTA SACD                 The Typewriter Leroy Anderson Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     Belleville Rendez-Vous Benoît Charest, music. Sylvain Chomet, text. Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6     1812 Overture Tjajkovskij Robert Wells, piano. M fl The Best of Rhapsody in Rock Warner Music WEA 5051442-8614-2-6

1967, Fort Riley, Kansas. Henry Threadgill is 23 years old. Knowing he’s going to be drafted into the military, he joins the Army Concert Band, hoping to focus on his passion: writing music. As he surrounds himself with new ideas, he works his influences into the music that he's arranging. Then one day, the band plays one of his arrangements of a patriotic song for an inauguration of big-wigs, and from the calm of a quietly confused crowd comes a cry from a cardinal in attendance: “Blasphemy!” One day later, he’s told to gather his things. Thirty days later, he’s on his way to Vietnam. Fifty years later, he wins the Pulitzer Prize for music composition. This is only the beginning of the story of how the energy, hunger and curiosity of Henry Threadgill have influenced and changed the people around him. In spite of the failure and rejection he’s faced, Threadgill is perpetually driven toward new ideas, new challenges and new opportunities to pursue and grow stronger in his improvisational creative vision. His music is the product of the community he builds in the moment. This is the story of Henry Threadgill, told by the people whose lives he has touched. Heard a piece of music that you loved? Discover it here! 1:32—Samuel Ward: America the Beautiful | Listen 1:47—Cecil Taylor: Air Above Mountains | Listen 1:51—Igor Stravinsky: Rite of Spring | Listen 1:57—Thelonious Monk: Solo Monk | Listen 2:58—The Star-Spangled Banner, re-imagined by Meet the Composer3:29—Henry Threadgill: Someplace | Buy 3:47—Henry Threadgill: Higher Places | Buy 5:24—Henry Threadgill: Little Pocket-Sized Demons | Buy 6:00—Nico Muhly: Mothertongue: I. Archive | Listen 6:20—Henry Threadgill: The Devil is on the Loose and Dancing with a Monkey | Listen 6:58—Henry Threadgill: Try Some Ammonia | Listen 9:00—Edward Ciuksza: Basia | Listen 9:07—Demiran Cerimovic: Laca's Proud Cocek | Listen 9:17—Sallie Martin Singers: Jesus | Listen 9:28—Howlin' Wolf: Back Door Man | Listen 10:20—Ernest Tubb & Red Foley: Hillbilly Fever | Listen 10:33—Dmitri Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, op. 107 | Listen 10:39—Big Maybelle: Do Lord | Listen 10:52—Meade Lux Lewis: Honky Tonk Train Blues | Listen 12:17—Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life | Listen 13:11—Bishop Samuel Kelsey & Others: Tell Me How Long Has The Train Been Gone | Listen 14:19—Henry Threadgill: Where's Your Cup | Listen 16:10—Muhal Richard Abrams: Wise in Time | Listen 18:02—Muhal Richard Abrams: Marching With Honor | Listen 18:09—George Lewis: Voyager Duo 4 | Listen 18:16—Amina Claudine Myers: African Blues | Listen 18:24—Roscoe Mitchell: A Game of Catch | Listen 18:30—Wadada Leo Smith: Lake Michigan | Listen 18:31—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen 28:03—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen 29:15—Henry Threadgill: Subject to Change: This | Buy 34:08—Henry Threadgill: In for a Penny, Out for a Pound | Listen 37:27—Henry Threadgill: Old Locks & Irregular Verbs | Listen 

Songs about bears, including: The Teddy Bear's Picnic, Jack the Bear, The Preacher and the Bear, Bear Creek Blues and Teddy Bear Blues. Performers include: Phil Harris, Duke Ellington, the Carter Family, Henry Hall, Erskine Hawkins, Meade Lux Lewis and the Hillbilly Boys.

Celebrating nine years of Music From 100 Years Ago with some of the host's favorite records. Performers include: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, the Tune Wranglers, Ella Fitzgerald, Meade Lux Lewis, Vladimir Horowitz, Leadbelly and Robert Johnson. Music includes: If I Had Possesion Over Judgment Day, Put Em Down Blues, Nocturne #15, Manhattan Masquarade, Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Rock Island Line and Basin Street Blues.

Songs that are fun. Tunes include: And The Green Grass Grew All Around, Honky Tonk Train Blues, Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby, Take An Old Cold Tater, The Joint Is Jumpin and Don't Take Everybody To Be Your Friend. Performers include: The Six Jumping Jacks, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, Louis Jordan, Meade Lux Lewis and Fred Astaire.

The 286th Roadhouse runs like a blues train from The Little Blue House On The Wetlands to All Points Blue. Albert Castiglia, Angela Strehli, Dr. John, Meade Lux Lewis, and John Primer lead the way in an hour with a big variety of blues and plenty of blues harp. It's another hour of the finest blues you've never heard – the 286th Roadhouse.

The 286th Roadhouse runs like a blues train from The Little Blue House On The Wetlands to All Points Blue. Albert Castiglia, Angela Strehli, Dr. John, Meade Lux Lewis, and John Primer lead the way in an hour with a big variety of blues and plenty of blues harp. It’s another hour of the finest blues you’ve never heard – the 286th Roadhouse.

This is an energetic and rhythmic style of piano playing that originated in the Southern States of America in the early 20th century. The rumbling left-hand rhythm was often used to evoke trains and railroad travel, and the buoyant energy of the music was popular to dance to in the juke joints and barrelhouses. Famous early exponents included Jelly Roll Morton, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. Featuring Jools Holland and Peter Silvester.

Highlights from 6 years of Music From 100 Years Ago.  Performers include: Doris Day, Meade Lux Lewis, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Eugene Ormandy.

The 286th Roadhouse runs like a blues train from The Little Blue House On The Wetlands to All Points Blue. Albert Castiglia, Angela Strehli, Dr. John, Meade Lux Lewis, and John Primer lead the way in an hour with a big variety of blues and plenty of blues harp. It's another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 286th Roadhouse.

The 286th Roadhouse runs like a blues train from The Little Blue House On The Wetlands to All Points Blue. Albert Castiglia, Angela Strehli, Dr. John, Meade Lux Lewis, and John Primer lead the way in an hour with a big variety of blues and plenty of blues harp. It's another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 286th Roadhouse.

Pete Johnson was one of the three great boogie-woogie pianists (along with Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis) whose sudden prominence in the late '30s helped make the style very popular. Originally a drummer, Johnson switched to piano in 1922.Listen to our NEW Radio Station, Oldies Big Band Jazz and More   HempUSA Store       

The musicians who brought boogie woogie into mainstream popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.  Pianists include: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Hazel Scott and Jimmy Yancey. Tunes include: Boogie Woogie Prayer, Bass Goin Crazy, Hazel's Boogie and Movin the Boogie.