Podcasts about Merle Kilgore

Comedians Darren Carter and Mike Black talk Ice Cream, Donuts, High School Reunions, Merle Kilgore, Elvis, Las Vegas, Country Bumpkin Activities,  and much much more!Start That Party in your Earholes!Darren Carter, also known as "The Party Starter," is an American stand-up comedian and actor born in Fresno, California. He has been entertaining audiences for over 20 years with his unique style of comedy, which blends observational humor and physical comedy. Carter's comedy career began in the 1990s when he performed at open-mic nights in Los Angeles. He quickly gained recognition for his energetic stage presence and relatable humor, which led to appearances on popular TV shows such as "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," "Comedy Central Presents," and "Premium Blend." Over the years, Carter has released several comedy albums, including "Shady Side" and "That Ginger's Crazy." He has also performed live all over the country, including at The Comedy Store, The Laugh Factory, and The Improv. The film “Born Again” and also his Dry Bar Comedy Special will be released this year. In addition to his comedy work, Carter has also acted in a number of films and TV shows, including "Be Cool," "Who Made The Potatoe Salad," and "Love Chronicles." He also hosts his own podcast, "Pocket Party," where he interviews fellow comedians and shares stories from his own life. Carter is known for his high-energy performances, infectious laughter, and ability to connect with audiences of all ages and backgrounds. He continues to tour and perform regularly, bringing laughter and joy to fans across the country. When Carter is home in Los Angeles, he can be found going to Guitar Center with his teenage son and watching him play every instrument in the building until they get kicked out.PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, Rate and Review to this podcast. THANK YOU!Have a great day and keep shining!

Avec Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, Fall Out Boy et Jimi Hendrix. "Ring of Fire" écrit par June Carter et Merle Kilgore est un incontournable de Johnny Cash mettant en avant le thème du feu, sorti en 1963. "We Didn't Start the Fire" de Billy Joel en 1989 est une réflexion sur le 20e siècle né d'une discussion mémorable entre Billy Joel et Sean Lennon. En 2023, le groupe américain Fall Out Boy propose un 'update' de "We Didn't Start the Fire", succession d'événements qui ont eu un impact majeur sur leur existence entre 1989 et 2023 : la disparition de Kurt Cobain, les deep fakes, le 11 septembre 2001 ou l'avènement de l'intelligence artificielle… Jimi Hendrix jouait avec le feu, il lui arrivait de brûler sa guitare avec son groupe The Jimi Hendrix Experience et le titre "Fire" en 1967. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Днешната музикална история е посветена на един голям хит. А зад него стои един голям музикант. Става дума за „Ring Of Fire“ на Johnny Cash от 1963 година. Кой е Johnny Cash (Джони Кеш)? Не е възможно да се опише с няколко думи. Определят го като кънтри певец, но не е само това. Определят го и като актьор, но и това е малко за него. Това е една изключително колоритна личност за своето време. Показателно за успеха му е, че съумява да продаде над деветдесет милиона свои записи в кариерата си. Даже през 1969 година, сред пика на „Бийтълс“, неговите албуми надхвърлят по продажби техните, което си е цяло чудо. „Ring Of Fire“ е написана през 1962 година от тогавашната приятелка и бъдеща, втора поред, съпруга на Джони – June Carter (Джун Картър), и от китариста и автор на песни Merle Kilgore (Мърл Килгор). Не се знае как се ражда идеята за текста, но на някои места се твърди, че Джун Картър е вдъхновена от фразата „Любовта е като горящ огнен пръстен“, която видяла подчертана в книга с поезия от елизабетинската епоха, подарена от неин чичо, който също се е занимавал с писане на песни. В кънтри музиката в много случаи има такива предшественици роднини, допринесли за насоката на музикантите. Според списание „Rolling Stone“ Джун пише песента, докато шофира в една късна нощ, мислейки за трудните си отношения с Джони, който по това време има проблеми с алкохола и наркотиците. Тя е силно обезпокоена от дивашките му маниери и че въпреки това не може да му устои. Заради същите тези проблеми само две години по-късно той причинява голям пожар, който унищожава стотици акри горски масиви в Калифорния. Тогава той едва успява да се спаси, а избягва и тежка присъда. Няколко пъти след това е арестуван и затварян за по една нощ за притежание на леки наркотици. Джони живее известно време и с друг човек, който има проблеми с дрогата - кънтри музикантът Waylon Jennings (Уейлън Дженингс). В предишен епизод разказахме за него и как той предрича катастрофата на самолета, причинила смъртта на Buddy Holly (Бъди Холи) и други музиканти. Джун казва на Джони, че ще се ожени за него, ако той се изчисти от всякакви наркотици. Джони временно ги спира и те се венчават, след като той й предлага брак на свой концерт в Онтарио. Но после пак се връща към тях. Джони многократно опитва да откаже наркотиците, но все не се получава. Джун е до него и му помага, придружавайки го в няколко клиники за наркозависими. От нея той има единствения си син, Джон Картър Кеш, който обаче също става клиент на тези лечебни заведения. За пръв път „Ring Of Fire“ е изпълнена през 1962 година от Anita Carter (Анита Картър), която е сестра на Джун. Първото й заглавие е „Love's Ring Of Fire“ и тя е включена в нейния албум „Folk Songs Old And New“, издаден от „Mercury Records“. Джони, който по онова време е гадже на Джун, чува песента. Дни след това той сънува, че в нея има звук от характерните за мариачи стила мексикански тромпети. Така в главата му се ражда идеята за неговата версия. Само година по-рано мексиканската музика и конкретния инструмент, който Джони си е представял, се чува в доста често пусканата по радиостанциите „The Lonely Bull“ на Herb Alpert (Хърб Алпърт). Кеш си казва, че ще изчака шест месеца, за да види дали „Love's Ring Of Fire“ ще стане хит, и ако не стане, той ще я направи за себе си. Тя наистина няма успех и Джони се захваща с нея. За пръв път в своята музика Кеш ще добави тромпети. Това толкова му се харесва, че той го повтаря и в един от следващите си хитове „It Ain't Me, Babe“ от 1964 година. Беквокали на Джони в „Ring Of Fire“ са сестрите Джун и Анита, а също и тяхната майка и популярна кънтри певица Maybelle Carter (Мейбъл Картър). Кеш не запазва съвсем текста на Анита, а поразмества строфите в него.

Hot on the heels of Halloween, John Carpenter lovingly crafted this tribute to The King and established his long-term friendship with Kurt Russell. Let's talk about Scotty Moore, Robert Goulet, Merle Kilgore, Lester Bangs, Public Enemy, Living Colour, Sam Phillips, Dick Clark and oh yes, ELVIS AARON PRESLEY. To me, yes he is The King. But so are LIttle Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lemmy Kilmister and Chuck Berry. So these Elvis episodes will neither be a deconstruction nor a glorification.  Choose your way of supporting the show for no money or for maybe some money: https://linktr.ee/justtheworstever References: https://www.peterguralnick.com/ https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/08/21/emergency-mythmaking-john-carpenters-elvis https://archive.org/details/MusicWorldNo.6Oct.151957/page/n3/mode/2up National Sexual Assault Hotline 1-800-656-4673 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 800-273-8255

Den Song «Ring of Fire», mit dem Country-Legende Johnny Cash weltweite Bekanntheit erlangte, hat seine spätere Frau, June Carter, gemeinsam mit Cashs Freund, Merle Kilgore, komponiert. Geschrieben wurde der Welthit nicht für Johnny Cash, sondern für das Album von Junes Schwester Anita Carter.

Faron Young - "I've Got Five Dollars And It's Saturday Night" [0:00:00] Music behind DJ: Jimmy Bryant, Speedy West - "Pushin' The Blues" [0:08:45] Jimmy Work - "Just Like Downtown" [0:11:03] Doc Williams & Chickie Williams - "Echo Of The North" [0:13:34] Music behind DJ: Jørgen Ingmann & His Guitar - "Echo Boogie" [0:16:27] Wilburn Brothers - "I'm Gonna Tie One On Tonight" [0:20:34] Carolyn Bradshaw - "Baby, Then You're Catchin' On" [0:21:48] Charline Arthur - "Flash Your Diamonds (And Show Your Gold)" [0:24:37] Merle Kilgore - "42 In Chicago" [0:27:00] Kitty Wells - "Your Wild Life's Gonna Get You Down" [0:29:37] Music behind DJ: Jørgen Ingmann & His Guitar - "Echo Boogie" [0:32:13] Porter Wagoner - "Let's Squiggle" [0:35:00] The Johnny Burnette Trio - "Oh Baby Babe" [0:37:07] Jimmy Walker - "Detour" [0:39:23] Hylo Brown - "Outlaw Girl" [0:41:25] Jerry Boggs - "Love Came Back" [0:43:18] Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys - "Hound Dog" [0:45:27] Music behind DJ: Jørgen Ingmann & His Guitar - "Echo Boogie" [0:48:08] Wiley Barkdull - "I'll Give My Heart To You" [0:50:17] Tommy Wilson - "Cram It Up Your Heart" [0:53:00] 5 Williamson Bros. - "I've Got A Bead On You Baby" [0:54:39] Music behind DJ: Jimmy Bryant, Speedy West - "Pushin' The Blues" [0:56:59] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/106059

Southern feel, soul, rhythm and blues, country, rock & roll, greasy honky tonks; these things come to mind when thinking about Grammy-award winning keyboardist, Billy Earheart. He grew up in Tullahoma, Tennessee (an hour south of Nashville), and from there went to Muscle Shoals, Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville and currently in North Mississippi, playing with an impressive list of artists along the way.Billy is also an original member  with the Amazing Rhythm Aces, (46 years),and also has played with; Bocephus Hank Williams Jr(21 years), Al Green, B.B. King, Memphis Slim, Waylon Jennings, Eddie Hinton, Billy F.Gibbons, Reggie Young, Phineas Newborn, Earl Gaines, Roscoe Shelton, Little Larry LaDon, Jimmy Church, Fred Sanders, Kid Rock, Dickie Betts, Ace Cannon, Gatemouth Brown, Willie Cobbs, Kris Kristofferson, Sammy Hagar, Jimmy Buffet, Glen Frey, Rufus Thomas, Leslie West ,Otis Clay, Homesick James , Delbert McClinton, Bobby Rush, Eric Gales, Mark “Muleman” Massey, Kingfish(Christone Ingram), Sunnyland Slim, Watermelon Slim ,Johnny Woods, Tommy Talton, David Hood, Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson (Muscle Shoals Swampers),Rev.John Wilkins, Big Jack Johnson , Rodney Crowell, Jamey Johnson, Warren Haynes, Robert Bilbo Walker, Vassar Clements, Teenie Hodges, James Burton, Alan Jackson, Fred Ford, Garry Burnside , DuWayne Burnside, Cedric Burnside,  Dave and Robert Kimbrough, Johnny Jones, Charles Wigg Walker, The Decoys, Travis Wammack, Spooner Oldham, Roland Janes, Jimmy Hall & Wet Willie, Merle Kilgore, Jumpin Gene Simmons, Fingers Taylor, Ray Benson  and more…                                                                                                                                                                           Billy is plays a Roland 88 key digital PF-50 model piano and a; Hammond XK-3c organ Proud to be a Hammond endorsee.Billy started with a Farfisa Compact in 1966. He moved to a Hammond M-2 and the big Hammond C-3 (1959 model). When he played with the Amazing Rhythm Aces in the '70s he played the Hammond C-3 as well as a six-foot Yamaha grand piano, and Wurlitzer electric piano. Billy also has a 50's Wurlitzer electric piano 120, and 2 vintage accordions, and three Leslies, along with two old upright pianos and a pump organ.Musical Highpoints and AwardsBilly won several award with the Amazing Rhythm Aces. The group was nominated for a Grammy for "Best New Artist" in 1975. They won the Grammy for Country Group in 1976 for their recording of "The End Is Not In Sight." That same year, they won the Cash Box Award for "Best Progressive Group." Other honors with the Aces include several ASCAP awards, as well as receiving the "Key to the City of Memphis" in 1976. The Aces also won a gold record for "Goin South," a double CD compilation of Southern music.One of Billy's special honors was the proclamation by Shelby County Mayor William Morris of June 28, 1985 as "Billy Earheart Day" in Memphis, Tennessee!The awards continued with Billy's association with Bocephus. The CMA presented Hank Williams, Jr. and The Bama Band with two video awards: for "My Name is Bocephus" in 1986, and for "Young Country" in 1987. 1989 brought an Emmy for the Rowdy Friends Theme from "Monday Night Football." And in 1989, the documentary and live video featuring Hank Jr. and the band, "Full Access" was certified platinum. Billy also played on the gold records Hank Live, Wild Streak, Greatest hits 3,and America the way I see it. 

Sintonía: "Amen Brother" - The Winstons Para esta "Music Non-Stop Sessions", arrasamos con una recopilación en vinilo (Star Light Entertainment, 2016) de 16 trallazos que escuchamos en su totalidad; Oh, Yeah !!! Buen provecho, amigos !!! "The Real Thing" - Troy Dodds; "Gloria" - Dee Clark; "Lover´s Hell" - Merle Kilgore; "No Love" - McKinley Mitchell; "I´m Never Gonna Cry Again" - Roberta Daye; "Hey Eula" - Barry Cryer; "Workin´ For My Baby" - Gary U.S. Bonds; "Fever Twist" - Henry Wright; "Laughing Over My Grave" - Ray Stevens; "Baby Please Don´t Go" - Jo Ann Henderson; "Sixteen Tons" - Lou Neefs; "Delilah Jones" - McGuire Sisters; "Bury Me Deep" - Chance Halladay; "Il n´a rien retrouvé" - Sylvie Vartan; "Trance" - Billy Dixon & The Topics; "I Idolize You" - Gail Harris And The Wailers Escuchar audio

Season 5 kicks off with a true American icon: the Man in Black, Johnny Cash, and his signature song. We'll walk you through Johnny's story, including the writing of the song by June Carter Cash (well, probably) and Merle Kilgore. Also in this episode: - Country & Western vs Bro Country - Supergroups - Rob laughs so hard he almost dies on air - Johnny's fight to expose unfair treatment of Native Americans Connect with us! facebook.com/groups/greatsongpod, @greatsongpod on Twitter and Instagram, and you can check the archives and support the show by buying a shirt at greatsongpodcast.com. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/greatsongpod/support

Rare Earth [00:32] "Get Ready" Rare Earth R 5012 1969 Rare Earth were one of the artists name checked by Gil Scott Heron as not being the sound of the revolution. The Rolling Stones [03:20] "Paint It Black" London Records 45 LON 901 1966 Proto-Goth. Gary Lewis & the Playboys [06:46] "Jill" Liberty 55985 1967 An opening timpani bounce?! Could this be of the Popcorn genre from Jerry Lewis' kid? Sly & the Family Stone [09:04] "Family Affiar" Epic Records 5-10805 1971 The last number one single from Sly & the Family Stone. And actually it's just Sly on all the instruments, except the keys which are played by Billy Preson, and backing vox by his sister Rose. Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts [13:15] "Angel of the Morning" Bell Records 705 1968 This version made it all the way to number 7, recorded by Chips Moman in Memphis. Sandy Posey [16:26] "I Take It Back" MGM Records K 13744 1967 Another Chips Moman produced single, which reached number 12. Shorty Long [18:44] "Here Comes the Judge" Soul S-35044 1968 This Laugh-In inspired single made it all the way up to number 8. Release exactly two weeks before my birthday. How's your shing-a-ling? Paul Mauriat and his Orchestra [21:19] "Love Is Blue" Philips 40475 1967 Aw yeah... pop harpsichord, it doesn't get much better than that. Orginally performed with lyrics by Vicky as a Eurovision entry from Luxembourg. Jimmy Jules [25:22] "Talk About You" Atlantic Records 45-2120 1961 Some mighty fine New Orleans soul, with excellent arrangement by Harold Batiste. Jules would later go on to start a record label called Jim Gem Records. Sly & the Family Stone [28:03] "If You Want Me to Stay" Epic 5-11017 1973 And this one was Sly's last appearance in the Top 20, reaching number 12 on the pop charts. It does feature a fine bass groove by Larry Graham's hand-picked replacement Rustee Allen. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen [31:04] "Hot Rod Lincoln" Paramount Records PAA-0146 1972 The souped up classic featuring the deft clutching of Bill Kirchen. Bobbie Gentry [33:48] "Ode to Billie Joe" Capitol Records 5950 1967 And what an ode it is. If you'd like to know more about the now mysterious and amazing Bobbie Gentry, I strongly recommend the 33 1/3 series book on her first album, titled Ode to Billie Joe of course (https://amzn.to/38iqGUr). Merle Kilgore with The Merry Melody Singers [39:22] "A Girl Named Liz" Mercury Records 71978 1962 This is a new one by me. Kilgore was better known as a songwriter and would later become Hank Williams Jr's manager. Gallery [41:38] "Nice to Be with You" Sussex SUX-232 1972 Oh yeah... that one! Some might nice jaunty country pop from Detroit. Made it all the way to number 4 on the hot 100. Otis Redding [44:17] "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" Volt Records VLT-13684 Sure this copy is well used, but it's in waaay better shape than the one we heard not too long ago in the last season of Vinyl-O-Matic. Jr. Walker and the All Stars [46:56] "Do the Boomerang" Soul S-35012 1965 I am definitely going to do the boomerang next time I'm out on the dance floor. This skronkity tune made it to number 36 on the hot 100 and number 10 on the r&b charts. Music behind the DJ: "Theme from the Thomas Crown Affair" by Michel Legrand.

Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. (more…)

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

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

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

More than a year after Audrey and Hank Williams's divorce is finalized, a judge reverses the decision, 11 weeks after Hank Williams Jr. is born. Johnny Horton records his final song, Freddy Fender's signature tops the chart, Tammy Wynette sues the tabloids, we remember the birthday of singer-songwriter-manager Merle Kilgore, and it's always five o'clock somewhere! Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google, and Spotify!

In this episode of Bone and Sickle, we’re looking at the folklore and history of witches associated with caves.  We begin with the Bell Witch, of Adams Tennessee and a quick audio montage saluting the creature, one based around the eccentric country-western song “The Bell Witch” by Merle Kilgore.  Also included are snippets of The … Read More Read More The post Episode 9: Cave Witches appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Justin sits down with author Mark Rickert and discusses his new book, These Are My People. Rickert is the grandson of country music legend Merle Kilgore and this book chronicles his life!

Today Matt welcomes the Grandson of country music royalty! Mark Rickert an author with a unique tie to the country music community! Rickert is the grandson of true Nashville Royalty: Merle Kilgore. Kilgore, who passed away in 2005, was responsible for several hits, include Johnny Cash's “Ring of Fire”, which he co-wrote with June Carter. […] The post Mark Rickert, Grandson of Merle Kilgore-Episode 165 appeared first on Talk For Two.

Today Matt welcomes the Grandson of country music royalty! Mark Rickert an author with a unique tie to the country music community! Rickert is the grandson of true Nashville Royalty: Merle Kilgore. Kilgore, who passed away in 2005, was responsible for several hits, include Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”, which he co-wrote with June Carter. […] The post Mark Rickert, Grandson of Merle Kilgore-Episode 165 appeared first on Talk For Two.

This week on StoryWeb: June Carter and Johnny Cash’s song “Ring of Fire.” For the bride and groom “Ring of Fire” – written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and recorded by Johnny Cash – is no ordinary love song. For it tells not only of the sweetness of new love but even more so the all-consuming, burning nature of a deeply passionate love. According to the most widely accepted account of the song’s composition, June Carter came across a phrase in a book of Elizabethan poetry that had belonged to her uncle, the famed A.P. Carter. He had underlined the words “Love is like a burning ring of fire.” June suggested to songwriter Merle Kilgore that they write a song based on those words. June said, “There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns.” Apparently, June Carter knew what she was talking about. In 1962, when she wrote the song with Kilgore, she was touring with Johnny Cash for the first time, and theirs was a burning new love indeed. Kilgore was also on that tour, and Rolling Stone reports that whenever they were on tour together, June Carter and Merle Kilgore would often write songs together. The first person to record the song was June’s sister Anita Carter, but it failed to hit big on the charts. Johnny Cash claimed that, after hearing Anita’s version, he had a dream with the mariachi-style horns added to the song. Recorded in March 1963 and released the following month, Cash’s version features Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters singing harmony. The song remains the most recognizable and most enduring of Johnny Cash’s many hits. Perhaps Cash's daughter Rosanne put it best when she said, "The song is about the transformative power of love and that's what it has always meant to me and that's what it will always mean to the Cash children.” Learn more about Johnny Cash in his books Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography. The fine film, Walk the Line, is also well worth your time. John Carter Cash’s book, Anchored in Love: An Intimate Portrait of June Carter Cash, is a wonderful tribute to his mother. Beth Harrington’s book, The Winding Stream: An Oral History of the Carter and Cash Family, provides key insights into this influential musical family. To my friends who are celebrating their wedding today, may the transformative power of love be with you in the years to come. Visit thestoryweb.com/cartercash for links to all these resources and to watch Johnny Cash perform “Ring of Fire.”

Nashville resident and son of legendary song writer Merle Kilgore, Steve Kilgore joins Matt in one of VW's most diverse conversations yet. From Steve's passion for figure making to growing up on the Grand Ole Opry stage, it's all here! [ayssocial_buttons id=”1″] The post Episode 70-Steve Kilgore appeared first on Talk For Two.

Nashville resident and son of legendary song writer Merle Kilgore, Steve Kilgore joins Matt in one of VW’s most diverse conversations yet. From Steve’s passion for figure making to growing up on the Grand Ole Opry stage, it’s all here! [ayssocial_buttons id=”1″] The post Episode 70-Steve Kilgore appeared first on Talk For Two.

In honor of Turtle Wax launching their new campaign- “Protect The Body. Free The Soul.”- we’ve curated this podcast to serve as the perfect driving companion, guaranteed to enhance even the most mundane of driving occasions. Comencemos (Let’s Start) – Jungle Fire Latin funk that integrates horns, a driving bass-line and a constant ambush of bongos. Comencemos! The Skies Above – The Equals Eddy “Electric Avenue” Grant was the leader of this group, and this is one of his more arresting, freaked out songs. B-Side of the 1968 single, “I Get So Excited.” Ghetto Love – Spinnerette Spinnerette is headed by Brody Dalle, a pillar of punk rock in the 90’s who then slipped into synth-pop for a while. This track came from the sole record the group produced. Gasoline Alley – Dave Grusin Heard in the 1969 racing movie “Winning”, this song was one of the groovy staples on the soundtrack. Nothin’ in the World Can Stop Me Worryin’ Bout That Girl – The Kinks One of the more undiscovered Kinks classics, the song didn’t get played a lot when it came out, but resurged when Wes Anderson used it for the pool scene in “Rushmore”. All Night Long – The Mavericks This is the first song off the Mavericks new 2015 album “Mono”, and is a sexy salsa tune that has influences of Latin pop, rock and the unique sound that this band brings. Down In Mexico – The Coasters As this unmistakable 1957 tune proves, nobody ever combined doo-wop, R&B and a sense of humor quite like The Coasters did. Shrinking Violet – Kinny Off the 2009 album, “Can’t Kill A Dame With Soul”, a soulful, dirty groove anthem. Viol – Gesaffelstein After listening to over three-hundred tracks, we finally selected this driving beat from French DJ, Gesaffelstein as the theme for the new Turtle Wax campaign. Free your soul, baby! Wolverton Mountain – Claude King Coming from the collaborative efforts of King and Merle Kilgore, this 1962 hit is pure country corn. Potential suitors of Clifton Clowers’ daughter, beware!

Nashville resident and son of legendary song writer Merle Kilgore, Steve Kilgore joins Matt in one of VW's most diverse conversations yet. From Steve's passion for figure making to growing up on the Grand Ole Opry stage, it's all here!

Artistic Director and acclaimed comedian, Viv Groskop joins Aasmah Mir and Suzy Klein to talk about the 'caw' of stand-up comedy and what it's like making tea for famous authors at the Bath Literature Festival. Ten years ago Paul Sinton-Hewitt was fired and then had a bad fall when training for a half marathon which ruptured his stomach. Not knowing what to do with himself and determined not to give up running, he set up a club with the aim of running 5k at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning. 13 people joined him on his first run. Today, more than 1 million people across the world are part of the phenomenon Paul created that day - it's called Parkrun and it's happening as we speak, in more than 500 parks across the world. Seventy seven year-old Jill Stidever has been teaching children with disabilities to swim for over 50 years. Three of her swimmers have gone on to be paralympians - including her daughter Jane who won five gold medals. In December Jill won the 2014 BBC Get Inspired Unsung Hero award at the Sports Personality of the Year for her work in changing the perception of disabled sport. Interaction designer & aspiring astronaut Nelly Ben Hayoun works to bring the wonder of outer space into the comfort of the living room & creates chaos out of order. JP Devlin meets a group of pensioners in Gateshead who find that keeping hens helps stave off loneliness. Novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter Nick Hornby picks his Inheritance Tracks Producer: Maire Devine Editor: Karen Dalziel I Laughed, I Cried: How One Woman Took on Stand-Up and (Almost) Ruined Her Life Paperback - Jun 2013 by Viv Groskop. Published by Orion Inheritance Tracks: Ring of Fire written by June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore sung by Johnny Cash, 1963 album, Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash. (Do the) Mashed Potatoes recorded by James Brown with his band in 1959.