Podcasts about milton brown

Send us a textEnjoy this interview with Cary Ginell - a veteran radio broadcaster, folklorist, and author of ten books on American music. He is an award-winning writer and music historian who took a moment to sit down with host, Kelly Hurd, recently and discuss the beginnings of the western swing music genre.Through Cary's reminiscing about the days of Milton Brown, Bob Wills, and the Light Crust Doughboys, you'll feel as if you stepped back into the 1930s!Get to know Milton Brown and Bob Wills a little better through the insights of Cary Ginell.* And in the opinion of Kelly Hurd - Bob Wills is still the king, of Western Swing!May faith guide your compass and fear kiss your back bumper! Hope you'll join me next time on Calling to the Good. CallingToTheGood.com

Sintonía: "Dancin´At The Rancho" - Tex Williams & His String Band"On a Slow Boat To China" y "Williams Rag" compuestas e interpretadas por Tex Williams & His String Band"Wooly Boogie", "Cornstalk Hop", "Slip In And Slip Out", "Oklahoma Hayseed", "My Window Faces The South", "Remember This", "Just Because" y "Pork Chop Stomp" compuestas e interpretadas por Grady Martin & His Winging Strings"Moonlight Cocktail", "Curtain Call", "Snow Deer", "Tippin´ In", "The Bandera Shuffle", "Tuxedo Junction", "Tennessee Stomp" y "Johnson Rag" compuestas e interpretadas por Billy Gray & His Western Okies"Todas las músicas extraídas de la colección (7x10") "Country & Western - Dance-O-Rama - The Complete Works" (Sleazy Records, 2022), una reedición de la serie de 7 vinilos de 10 pulgadas que publicó el sello discográfico Decca en 1955Relación de los dos programas anteriores de este tríptico coleccionable sobre el Western Dance (o Western Swing) estadounidense de la década de los 50:1- Emitido el 17/03/2025 con Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys y Milton Brown & His Brownies2- Emitido el 20/03/2025 con Adolph Hofner, Spade Cooley y Tex WilliamsEscuchar audio

Sintonía: "Brownie Special" - Milton Brown & His Brownies"San Antonio Rose" - "Spanish Two-Step" - "Lone Star Rag" - "Four Our Five" - "Beaumont Rag" - "Don´t Let Your Deal Go Down" - "New Osage Stomp" - "Black and Blue Rag". Instrumentales y canciones interpretadas por Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys"St Louis Blues" - "Sweet Jenny Lee" - "Texas Hambone Blues" - "Right or Wrong" - "Washington and Lee Swing" - "Beautiful Texas" - "Little Betty Brown". Instrumentales y canciones interpretadas por Milton Brown & His BrowniesTodas las músicas extraídas de la colección (7x10") "Country & Western - Dance-O-Rama - The Complete Works" (Sleazy Records, 2022), una reedición de la serie de 7 vinilos de 10 pulgadas que publicó el sello discográfico Decca en 1955Escuchar audio

A sleepy time themed collection this week as we take a deep dive into classic sounds from the past and present, all with a blend of sentiments we hold close as midnight approaches. We'll have some old doo wop and early rock chestnuts from Jesse Belvin, The Fleetwoods, The Valentines and The Spaniels with just the right amount of rock, R&B and country. That means a little bit of Fats Domino, some rockabilly from Charline Arthur and Sonny Burgess, middling pop from Doris Day, Jimmy Durant and Dean Martin in store. Little Jimmy Dickens, Milton Brown and Swamp Dogg will also fill the air with country and blues. Friday mornings are the time to tune in for a fresh dose of America's music from the past 100 years hear on KOWS-LP, Occidental, streaming to all of Planet Earth on kowsfm.com/listen. Be sure to install the Radio Rethink app on your Apple device and look us up. We'd be glad to have you.

CLIMBers! Today we are talking with a legendary lyricist who had major cuts. You've heard his songs on TV, in movies, on radio, all that good stuff. He's been doing it for a long time. We get to talk to him today. One of the amazing things about him is he accomplished all this without ever moving out of his hometown in Mobile, Alabama. Y'all want to listen up to this one- it's going to be fun. The C.L.I.M.B. Show is dedicated to helping singers, songwriters, indie artists and industry pros "Create Leverage In The Music Business." We want you to win! About the hosts: Brent Baxter is an award-winning hit songwriter with cuts by Alan Jackson (“Monday Morning Church”), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Gord Bamford and more. He helps songwriters turn pro by helping them WRITE like a pro, DO BUSINESS like a pro and CONNECT to the pros. You can find Brent at SongwritingPro.com/Baxter and SongwritingPro.com. Johnny Dwinell owns Daredevil Production and helps artists increase their streams, blow up their video views, sell more live show tickets, and get discovered by new fans, TV and music industry pros. Daredevil has worked with artists including Collin Raye, Tracy Lawrence, Ty Herndon, Ronnie McDowell and others. You can find Johnny at TheCLIMBshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The word hokum originated in vaudeville to mean a risqué performance laced with wordplay, euphemisms and double entendre.When it appeared on the label of a 1928 hit for Vocalion Records by a new group called Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, the term rapidly entered the jazzy lexicon of The Roarin' Twenties.When the group moved on to Paramount Records as The Famous Hokum Boys, it quickly picked up imitators at other studios, often using variations on the same word in their own names. Eventually “hokum” came to describe an entire species of novelty tunes, all those sexy, silly blues of the 1920s and '30s.About Tampa RedHokum's first star, Tampa Red, was one of the most prolific blues artists of his era, recording some 335 songs, 75 percent between 1928 and 1942. Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, near Albany in the first decade of the 20th century. When their parents died, he and his older brother Eddie moved to Tampa, Florida, to be reared by their aunt and their grandmother. There he also adopted their surname, Whittaker.Emulating Eddie, Hudson Whittaker played guitar around the Tampa area, especially inspired by an old street musician called Piccolo Pete, who taught the youngster his first blues licks.After perfecting a slide guitar technique, he moved to Chicago in 1925 and began working as a street musician himself. He took the name "Tampa Red" to celebrate to his childhood home.Enter TomRed's big break came when he was hired to accompany established blues star Ma Rainey. There he also met pianist/composer Thomas A. Dorsey, who as working as “Georgia Tom.” Red and Tom became fast friends and music partners.Tom introduced Red to records exec J. Mayo Williams, who arranged a studio session in 1928. Their first effort was a dud, but their next song — the cheeky “It's Tight Like That” — became a national sensation, selling a million copies. Red later recalled seeing people standing outside of record stores just waiting to buy the disc. Since the song was composed by both Red and Tom, they shared $4,000 in royalties from that single song. (That would be about $75,000 today.)While his partnership with Dorsey ended in 1932, Red remained much in demand in recording studios throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was later "rediscovered" in the blues revival of the late 1950s, along with other early blues artists, like Son House and Skip James. Red made his last recordings in 1960.About the SongTampa Red recorded “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” in 1934, but unlike so many of the tunes he waxxed, he didn't write this one.Instead, the song was composed and recorded five years earlier by a curious genre-blending mandolinist named Al Miller.Starting in 1927, Miller played and sang in a style that combined elements of country, blues and jazz on sides for Black Patti records. His eclectic mix of sounds and material gave way to a heavy concentration on bawdry once he arrived at Brunswick for a series of recordings with his Market Street Boys. Miller recorded his “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” on March 8, 1929. It was his big seller. Five years later, after Tampa Red also scored with it, the song even started attracting the attention of artists in the fledgling country and western genre. In 1937, for instance, Milton Brown, called by some “the father of Western swing,” did a rendition for Decca. The following year, The Callahan Brothers (Walter and Homer) of Madison County, Ky., recorded it on the Conqueror label.Our Take on the TuneIf there's such a thing as a "standard" in jug band music, ”Somebody's Been Using That Thing” is certainly one of them. While The Flood's heroes recorded it 90 years ago, the band didn't get around to doing it until back in 2009 when Joe Dobbs recommended it. That was right after he received a recording of it by our old buddy, Ed Light, and his DC-area band with one great name: The All New Genetically Altered Jug Band. We've been Floodifying the tune ever since, as this track from a recent rehearsal demonstrates. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Join Dave Stroud for two hours of the very best of country swing music on Deeper Roots Radio: A Century of America's Music. He'll excavate the archives for a show from over eight years ago, reminding us that the west had been long-settled when a new sound exploded. It blasted its way out of the dance halls and barn-dance venues of the Midwest with an upbeat blend of jazz, hillbilly, and down-home blues. The arrangements blended strings, guitar, fiddle and bass, with the rhythmic sounds of urban jazz to reveal something catchy and danceable…and marketable. Before the beat was modernized into the mass market country blandness that paralleled mainstream pop, there were the pioneers including Milton Brown, Bob Wills, Adolph Hofner, Spade Cooley, Light Crust Doughboys, and a host of others. Drop in and celebrate this classic fusion of America's best.

Learn how to design luxury packaging and what luxury packaging can mean from Vincent Villeger is a seasoned luxury packaging designer (Burberry, Givenchy, By Far, Milton Brown, and more) with a rich background in the industry. Learn more about Vincent Villeger Known for his refined and innovative approach to design, Villeger has made a significant mark in the world of luxury branding, particularly during his tenure at Burberry, where he led the design of fragrance packaging and more. His expertise lies in translating brand ethos into tangible products that communicate quality and confidence. Villeger is not only adept at the creative aspects of design but also deeply involved in the product development process, ensuring his concepts are realized with integrity. Connect with our Sponsors: Luxury Packaging Manufacturer without middlemen Manage your packaging specifications for EPR laws and optimized sustainability Get the new dissolvable paper that leaves no trace In this candid episode, listeners are given a front-row seat to the creative mind of Vincent Villeger, a master of luxury packaging design. Villeger delves into the nuances of developing designs that resonate with high-end consumers, discussing the importance of confidence, quiet luxury, and the art of problem-solving in design. The conversation offers a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of packaging and brand identity, exploring how timeless and iconic pieces are created. The episode kicks off with Villeger opening up about his methods of maintaining creativity and staying connected to the practical side of production. He underscores the value of understanding brand uniqueness and how it factors into successful design execution. Moving from theory to practice, Villeger shares intriguing project stories, including the challenges of innovating for brands like By Far and Molton Brown. Listeners of this episode are treated to Villeger's deep dive into the role of a designer in championing both form and function. He articulates how he navigates client expectations, aligns the design with a brand's strategic goals, and strives for designs that will remain impactful over time—eschewing fleeting trends for enduring relevance. * Luxury design is not about shouting but about confidence and quietness that speaks to a brand's self-assured quality. * Villeger actively involves himself in the development process post-design to ensure the end product reflects his original vision. * The psychology of presenting design ideas is as crucial as the concepts themselves, with Villeger sharing his strategic approach to client presentations. * Villeger's design philosophy leans towards timelessness and rejects the transient allure of trends, focusing on what will last for years on the shelves. * Problem-solving is central to his design process, with a focus on stripping back to the essence of an idea to create something iconic and pure. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/packagingunboxd/message

Songs include: Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Montana Plains, There's No Hiding Place, Nobody's Darlin, Cattle Call and Beautiful Texas. Performers include: The Sons of the Pioneers, W. Lee O'Daniel, Red Foley, Patsy Montana, the Carter Family and Milton Brown. 

Dr. Milton Brown of the DBT Therapy Center of San Diego talks about the mission of the Center; how therapy for complex and challenging emotional disorders can work without meds; and how to find a qualified therapist for borderline personality disorder.

Fieles a su cita, todos los pizarristas y las pizarristas, a partir de las ocho de la mañana del sábado podrán comenzar el día, o acabar, con delicias hawaianas del tamaño de "Palolo" de Kane's Hawaiians; gemas del western swing como "Do The Hula Lou" de Milton Brown and His Brownies y tiros cubanos como “Parampampin" de la Orquesta Casino de La Playa. En la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio

Nada mejor en mitad de este largo puente que disfrutar en su remoto lugar de descanso de un repertorio añejo de lo más disfrutón. El sábado, bien tempranito, ustedes podrán recrearse con “Take It Slow And Easy” de Milton Brown and His Brownies,“Like a Monkey Likes Cocoanuts”de los Hoosier Hot Shots o “Caravan” de Luis Arcaraz and his Orchestra. A partir de las ocho de la mañana en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

Milton Brown, Jr was this week's guest on Success Profiles Radio. He is a financial professional who shows pre-retirees, retirees, and business owners combat high taxes and vanishing savings to help them pave the road to financial freedom. He realized in his 20's that he wanted to learn how money works, so he embarked on a career that taught him this. We discussed how he started his company, Terian Consulting, why some people are wealthy and others aren't, how the wealthy avoid taxes by doing things that the government rewards, developing a mindset for wealth, and the two biggest enemies of wealth. In addition, we talked about what wealthy people do that others don't, his three-step strategy to help clients save up to 70% on taxes, and the importance of forming a trust. Finally, we talked about how to avoid outliving our savings and how to live tax-free in retirement. You can listen and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, and you can hear the show at Success Profiles Radio | Live Internet Talk Radio | Best Shows Podcasts (toginet.com)

En sus Melodías Pizarras de siempre, además del súper número de Yas Yas Girl y el Yo Yo Blues de Barbecue Bob, también tendremos enormidades de Milton Brown and His Brownies, Don Barreto and His Cuban Orchestra, Alfredito, Wilmoth Houdini And His Humming Birds y Ray Kinney and his Hawaiian Musical Ambassadors. A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

Encore... The Light Crust Cowboys is an American western swing band from Texas that was organized in 1931 by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company in Saginaw,TX. Peak popularity was achieved up to World War II. Early members included Bob Wills, Milton Brown and later Tommy Duncan, Cecil Brower, John Parker, and Kenneth Pitts Original band disbanded in 1942. One member, Marvin Montgomery, led a new version organized in 1960. Another incarnation began in 1990...until 2001. Inducted into Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1989. There is a Light Crust Doughboys Hall of Fame and Museum at Hill College in Hillsboro, Texas. Songs on this track ca. 1939-40. Added to Country/Western Music Playlist.

The Light Crust Cowboys is an American western swing band from Texas that was organized in 1931 by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company in Saginaw,TX. Peak popularity was achieved up to World War II. Early members included Bob Wills, Milton Brown and later Tommy Duncan, Cecil Brower, John Parker, and Kenneth Pitts Original band disbanded in 1942. One member, Marvin Montgomery, led a new version organized in 1960. Another incarnation began in 1990...until 2001. Inducted into Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1989. There is a Light Crust Doughboys Hall of Fame and Museum at Hill College in Hillsboro, Texas. Songs on this track ca. 1939-40. Added to Country/Western Music Playlist.

Un Okeh de Mississippi John Hurt. un Decca de Milton Brown and His Brownies; un Columbia de Lillian Glinn; un Victor; Emilio Cáceres Trío; un Champion de los Mound City Blue Blowers; un de... ¿es necesario seguir?. A las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

En 1955 la casa Decca lanzó la caja Dance-O-Rama, Country & Western Dance-O-Rama, dedicada a 7 de las figuras más relevantes del género de los 20 años anteriores. El sello malagueño Sleazy Records reedita el box-set de siete vinilos en una lujosa y mimada edición que nos sumerge de lleno en aquel subgénero del country conocido como western swing. Playlist; MILTON BROWN and HIS BROWNIES “Texas hambone blues” MILTON BROWN and HIS BROWNIES “Right or wrong” MILTON BROWN and HIS BROWNIES “St Louis Blues” BOB WILLS and HIS TEXAS PLAYBOYS “Don’t let your deal go down” BOB WILLS and HIS TEXAS PLAYBOYS “San Antonio Rose” BOB WILLS and HIS TEXAS PLAYBOYS “Four or five times” SPADE COOLEY and HIS BUCKLE-BUSTERS “Sparkling silver bells” SPADE COOLEY and HIS BUCKLE-BUSTERS “Y ready” TEX WILLIAMS and HIS STRING BAND “Air mail special” TEX WILLIAMS and HIS STRING BAND “Rancho boogie” ADOLPH HOFNER and HIS SAN ANTONIANS “South Texas swing” ADOLPH HOFNER and HIS SAN ANTONIANS “Tickle toe song” GRADY MARTIN and HIS WINGING STRINGS “Slip in and slip out” GRADY MARTIN and HIS WINGING STRINGS “My window faces the South” GRADY MARTIN and HIS WINGING STRINGS “Pork chop stomp” BILLY GRAY and HIS WESTERN OKIES “Trippin’ in” BILLY GRAY and HIS WESTERN OKIES “Moonlight cocktail” Escuchar audio

As expected, R. Kelly was found guilty on all charges brought against him, including those of child porn and enticement. R. Kelly was charged with 13 separate charges, including conspiracy to manipulate evidence and bribe victims in a prior case. On Wednesday, a jury in Chicago found R. Kelly guilty on all charges. The "I Believe I Can Fly" singer was found guilty of three charges of child pornography and three counts of child enticement in 2021 and is presently serving a 30-year term in a New York prison for sexually assaulting underage fans. On top of manufacturing and receiving child pornography and coercing juveniles into engaging in criminal sexual behavior, Kelly, 55, was also charged with obstructing justice for allegedly paying off a minor victim and witnesses in a Chicago case filed in 2002. In her closing address on Tuesday, prosecutor Jeannice Appenteng stated, "[L]adies and gentlemen, what R. Kelly desired was to have sex with young girls." On Tuesday, after viewing a section of an explicit video in which one of Kelly's accusers, named Jane, claimed to be 14 at the time it was filmed, the jury began deliberations. Kelly was found not guilty on 21 charges of child pornography in 2008, despite allegations that he had worked with others to fabricate evidence and intimidate or bribe witnesses. Federal court filings claim that "Minor 1," the first victim referenced in the investigation, was under the age of 14 when Kelly filmed himself having sex with her. In the federal trial, "Minor 1" testified at the age of 30. According to the complaint, Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown, two of Kelly's friends, also conspired to clear the "Ignition" singer of the abuse claims. Teenage Daughter 1 allegedly told her parents that R. Kelly would be her godfather after seeing him in the 1990s when she was a junior in high school and her aunt visited Kelly at his recording studio. One of Minor 1's parents testified against Kelly in 2008, and Kelly was suspected of paying them off. He will have to wait until he is 80 years old before he can apply for release. If you like TRUE CRIME TODAY - Be sure to search and subscribe wherever you download podcasts! Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-today-a-true-crime-podcast/id1504280230?uo=4 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0GYshi6nJCf3O0aKEBTOPs Stitcher http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/real-ghost-stories-online-2/dark-side-of-wikipedia-true-crime-disturbing-stories iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/270-Dark-Side-of-Wikipedia-Tru-60800715 Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/565dc51b-d214-4fab-b38b-ae7c723cb79a/Dark-Side-of-Wikipedia-True-Crime-Dark-History Google Podcasts https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hdWRpb2Jvb20uY29tL2NoYW5uZWxzLzUwMDEyNjAucnNz Or Search "True Crime Today" for the best in True Crime ANYWHERE you get podcasts! Support the show at http://www.patreon.com/truecrimetoday

1 Lori Vallow's son has been charged with sexual assault. Lori Vallow's son, who is 26 years old, was recently detained on sexual assault charges. KUTV-TV reports that in Maricopa County, Arizona, Colby Ryan has been charged with sexual assault. It is reported by KSAZ-TV that on August 31st, Ryan went to the victim's house to watch television with her before engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior. According to reports, the woman repeatedly tried to stop Ryan, but he ignored her. KSAZ claims in court documents that Ryan apologized to the victim and began to cry after the incident. Ryan allegedly acknowledged to having raped the victim on a recording made by the alleged victim. During an interview with authorities, he allegedly admitted to having sexually assaulted the victim. According to court documents, Ryan was booked into the Maricopa County Jail on two charges of sex offenses. Lori Vallow, Ryan's mother, has been charged with the murders of her two sons and the first wife of Ryan's father. In May, prosecutors asked for the right to seek the death penalty in the event that Vallow is found guilty of any of the murders. Tylee, 17, and J.J., 7, were reported missing in December 2019 after they failed to show up to school for the first time since September 2019. Vallow's first wife, Tammy Daybell, was discovered dead in her house in October of 2019. Chad Daybell and Vallow got married in Hawaii around two weeks after Chad's ex-wife was discovered dead. On June 9, 2020, authorities conducted a search warrant at Daybell's residence and discovered "what looked to be two sets of unidentifiable human remains," later determined to be J.J.'s and Tylee's. J.J. had a plastic bag over his head, and duct tape around his hands and feet; Tylee had been burned and mutilated, according to reports. Tammy Daybell, Chad's first wife, died of asphyxiation. The trial against Vallow is set to begin on October 11. 2 Authorities in Las Vegas make an arrest in the murder of an investigative journalist. Authorities in Las Vegas have arrested a county official in connection with the murder of reporter Jeff German. A seasoned reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal named German was found stabbed to death at roughly 10:30 a.m. September 3rd, outside his Las Vegas home. Investigators executed search warrants on Wednesday in connection with the slaying, and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department confirmed the news to PEOPLE. The house of Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles was reportedly searched in accordance with the search warrant, as reported by the Review-Journal. When asked, police officials declined to validate the Review-account. Journal's Officer Lawrence Hadfield tells PEOPLE, "I can't confirm any suspect information at this time." "The probe is progressing at a breakneck pace." A number of media outlets are reporting that Telles was taken into custody on Wednesday. Sasha Loftis, a reporter for the Las Vegas CBS affiliate 8 News Now, was on the scene at Telles' home and Tweeted minute-by-minute updates. Loftis described how residents were urged to leave their homes "or not return back in the area" when police and SWAT troops arrived. She also showed footage of police and fire vehicles rushing to the scene. Loftis then tweeted that Telles had been brought to the hospital with "non-life threatening self-inflicted wounds." At the time, 8 News Now reporter Vanessa Murphy had confirmed the arrest of Telles from anonymous sources. The Review-Journal reports that German, 69, complained to HR that Telles had a hostile work environment and engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. After German's article came out in June, the democratic candidate Telles lost his re-election campaign. The Review-Journal claims that German was finishing up a follow-up report when he tragically passed away. Telles regularly complained about German on Twitter. A rustling in the trash prompted his wife to ask, "Honey, is there a wild animal in the trash?" He responded, "No, darling. Looks like it's @JGermanRJ digging through our trash for his 4th article on me." "Oh, Jeff... [laughing Emoji] @LVRJ#LasVegas." Telles joked that he had thrown away pizza and sushi, and then he described German as a "classic bully," adding, "Can't take a pound of critism [sic] after flinging 100 pounds of BS. Up to article #4 now. You'd think he'd have better things to do." The suspect and a red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali with chrome handles, a sunroof, and a baggage rack were released from security footage on Tuesday. Metropolitan Police Department Captain Dori Koren had previously stated that a "altercation took place outside of the home" in a press conference. It's impossible to picture Las Vegas without German's many years of casting a bright light on dark places, according to Glenn Cook, executive editor of the Review-Journal. Cook called German "the gold standard of the journalism business." After completing his Master's degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, German spent almost twenty years at the Las Vegas Sun, where he largely covered crime and politics. He was the first journalist to arrive at the scene of the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, where 58 people were murdered and 489 were injured. The county website states that 45-year-old Telles founded an estate planning and probate law practice. Telles was unreachable for further comment. However, we were unable to get a response from the district attorney's office in Clark County. 3 A co-defendant of R. Kelly's testifies about his skepticism of the sexual misconduct allegations against the musician. On Wednesday, R. Kelly's ex-business manager testified before a jury that he believed the singer's denials of sexual misconduct that emerged against his boss, and that he came to understand that defending against false charges was a cost of doing business for a superstar. Co-defendant Derrell McDavid testified in Kelly's trial for child pornography and trial manipulation in federal court in Chicago, and he said he observed no early signs Kelly targeted youngsters for sex, attributing the fabrication of the claims to Kelly's rivals and those trying to benefit off his popularity. Before the Labor Day holiday, the prosecution wrapped up their two-week presentation to the jury, which featured the testimony of four accusers who portrayed Kelly as a skilled manipulator. Conspiracy to obstruct justice charges have been filed against McDavid and Kelly, with the allegations centering on whether or not they attempted to influence the outcome of the trial in 2008, in which the R&B singer was found not guilty. Former Kelly colleague Milton Brown is the third defendant; he is charged with one count of conspiracy to receive child pornography. McDavid testified that he had witnessed the prosecution's star witness, known as "Jane" at the current trial, when she was a minor and a frequent visitor to Kelly's studio in the late 1990s. He claimed that Kelly vehemently disputed reports that he had abused his goddaughter Jane. On Wednesday, McDavid spent over four hours speaking in a dry, matter-of-fact tone from the witness stand. While the jury was out for lunch, McDavid approached the Kelly defense table and chatted cordially with his old employer. Jane, now 37 years old, testified earlier for prosecutors and alleged Kelly sexually abused her hundreds of times beginning when she was 14 years old. She also testified that she was the child pornographic movie star in a case from 2008 that was introduced as evidence in the current case. As far as she understood, Kelly was responsible for making it. McDavid is the only one of the three defendants speaking in his own behalf. Last Monday, attorneys for Kelly and Brown informed the trial court that neither of them would be testifying. This federal trial in Chicago follows another federal trial in New York, where 55-year-old Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in June. If you like TRUE CRIME TODAY - Be sure to search and subscribe wherever you download podcasts! Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-today-a-true-crime-podcast/id1504280230?uo=4 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0GYshi6nJCf3O0aKEBTOPs Stitcher http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/real-ghost-stories-online-2/dark-side-of-wikipedia-true-crime-disturbing-stories iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/270-Dark-Side-of-Wikipedia-Tru-60800715 Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/565dc51b-d214-4fab-b38b-ae7c723cb79a/Dark-Side-of-Wikipedia-True-Crime-Dark-History Google Podcasts https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hdWRpb2Jvb20uY29tL2NoYW5uZWxzLzUwMDEyNjAucnNz Or Search "True Crime Today" for the best in True Crime ANYWHERE you get podcasts! Support the show at http://www.patreon.com/truecrimetoday

Authentic cowboys, well sort of, start us off. Mac McClintock left home to join the circus. Between that, and becoming a singer, actor, composer and poet, he did a whole stream of incredible jobs. Railroading in Africa, Mule train in Philipines and news gatherer in China. He was a devoted union man and wrote Hallelujah I'm a bum and Big rock candy mountain. Here he gives us The old Chisholm trail. Jules Allen sings Zebra dun. He probably was a real life cowboy at one time, driving cattle from the Mexican border to Montana. The Cartwright Brothers sing Texas Ranger. The tune and sentiment are familar. It's yet another version of The unfortunate Rake. Into Western Swing. The right key but the wrong keyhole- Cliff Bruner Texas Wanderers, I can't dance(I've got ants in my pants)- Rob Newman and his boys, Wonder Stomp- Texas Wanderers and Devil with the devil- Rob Newman and his boys. Bob Wills with Bob Wills boogie from 1946. Very rock and roll in my opinion. Jazz on 78rpm break with Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra. I cried for you- vocals by Billie Holiday and, a new favourite of mine, Blues in G sharp minor. Composed by Wilson. He was rated as the best swing pianist of his time. Back to Western Swing and Milton Brown and his Brownies. St Louis Blues. Great, trippy version, with a real tempo shift toward the end. In El Rancho Grande- Milton and Durwood singing in Spanish. From 1937, a year after Milton's death, Durwood sings If you can't get five get two. We finish with the wonderfully upbeat  tune from Virginian fiddler John Ashby- The 8th of January.     

A good deal of Western Swing,  some early country and a wee bit of blues. Have to give I haven't got a pot to cook(1936)  another airing. Naughtiness from The Sweet Violet Boys. Jimmie Revard and his Oklahoma Playboys- Ride 'em Cowboy(1936). A Bob Wills song. My only Bob Skyles and his Skyrockets trabk on vinyl next- The Rhythm King. Milton Brown and his Brownies- Yes sir(1936). Chicken Reel Stomp(1937)-The Tune Wranglers. The also performed as Tono Hombres and sang in Spanish. Wonderful blues from Buddy Jones- Settle down blues(1939) Buddy recorded over 80 sides for Decca. On piano is Moon Mulligan. Not Max as I say 'on air.' Bob Dunn on Steel guitar. Amade' Ardoin- La Valse a Abe and Two Step Eunice. A pioneer of Cajun and Zydeco music on record. Much legend surrounds his death. It now appears he probably died of V.D in 1942.  A unique voice and great accordion. The Georgia Crackers-  Joe Diamond(1927). The duo also performed as the Coffer Brothers. Dupree's Rome Boys- 12th Street Blues(1929). A popular dance band number of the time, adapted perfectly for guitar and fiddle. Lil McClintock- Don't think I'm Santa Clause(1930). McClintock was a street musican in Clinton South Carolina and only recorded four sides for Columbia. Nothing is known of his origins or what happened to him. An obscure but talented artist that came and went. Frank Hutchinson- K.C Blues(1929.)  Hutchinson is considered the best musician and singer of white country blues music and recorded around 40 sides for the Okeh label between 1926 and 1929. He played the steel guitar using a pen knife as a slide.  He'd worked as a miner in Virginia. Died young at 48.  I love this laid back track and his wee shout toward the end. We finish with that man Milton Brown and Hesitation Blues.  

Jenn Tully is joined by filmmaker Mike Markwardt to talk about his new documentary 'The Birth and History of Western Swing'!  Mike tells some great stories and they talk about songs from Milton Brown, Bob Wills and George Strait!You can find out more about Mike's film at HistoryofWesternSwing.comCheck out the Spotify playlist here.

An old favourite to start us off- Frankie and Johnny. The best version, from Jimmie Rodgers. Then another variation of the Unfortunate Rake, an 18th century Anglo- Irish folk song. Here we have Bright Summer Morning from The Virgin Islands. Recorded in 1953, Viola Penn sings and plays guitar. He's back, Milton Brown and his Brownies- Fan it! and Goofus. Moondog with two tracks. An extraordinary artist and performer and composer. Genre defying. He performed on the streets of New York from the 1940s to the 1970s. Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman knew him. Charlie Parker was a fan and he influenced Philip Glass. He was blind, made his own instruments and dressed as a Viking. Brilliant. Back to a 78rpm and way back to 1918. The Six Brown Brothers, they were brothers, with When Aunt Dinah's daughter Hannah bangs on the piano. They were a Vaudeville act that all played saxophones. In fact they are credited with making the sax popular in the USA. Four in a row. Dallas String Band with Dallas Rag(1927), Jeeps Blues- Port Arthur Jubileers, Too tight Henry- Charlston contest part 2(1928) and Florene- Leon Selph and his Blue Ridge Playboys(1941). We had Georgia fiddle music a couple of episodes ago, now its Texas fiddle. Sally Johnson- The Lewis Brothers and the very scottish sounding Eck Robertson - Great big Taters. We go out with glorious 78s all the way. Josh white with I'm gonna move to the outskirts of town. A modern, more affluent take on the blues. White recorded quite a few tracks in London at this time, early 1950s. Bessie Smith with Muddy Water(1927). She's with her Blues boys. One of which was Fletcher Henderson. As if I'd planned it he's up next with PDQ Blues also 1927. We finish with more Western Swing. Adolp and Emil Hofner duetting on Swing with the music. I really hope you have been.   

Erick is with Turning Point USA bringing Biblical Citizenship with Rick Green. Larry is bringing Sheriff David Clarke and "No Time to Run" to The Hill Country. For tickets - NoTimeToRun.com

Muy buenas amigos, el duodécimo episodio de OLD COUNTRY MUSIC, en esta ocasión con MILTON BROWN. Una pequeña sección dedicada a los sonidos pioneros de la música country dentro del espacio "Blowin' In The Ameripolitan Winds" de mi compañera en La Aventura Americana Radio, Mariví Yubero. Una entrega semanal que no pasa de los 15 minutos de duración, aquí tenéis el capítulo en Ivoox, un saludo a todos y muchas gracias por seguir estos episodios. 1- Mama Don't Allow It 2- When I'm Gone Don't You Grieve 3- Get Along, Cindy

Milton Brown and his Brownies- Down by the Ohio(1935) What an extraordinary voice Brown had. A pioneer of Western swing his career was tragically cut short when he died of injuries sustained in a car crash in 1936. Bob Skyles and the skyrockets- Swing it Mr drummer man(1938). Clifford kendrick on drums. Hoosiers Hot shots- Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia. Seemlessly moving into two tracks from the fabulously named Hell broke out in Georgia LP.  First, more great names, Gid Tanner and his Skillet lickers- Don't you cry my honey(1930.) The Swamp rooters- Swamp cat rag(1936) They were led by fiddler Lowe Stokes, a member of the Skillet lickers. We stay with the fiddle but slow it down with The Leake County Revellers- Good night Waltz(1927.) East coast country blues is how the source LP describes the next two tracks. Lottie Kimsbrough and Winston Holmes- Lost Lover Blues(1928) A great track from lesser known artists. I've heard blues and yodelling before but never blues yodelling and birdsong. Fred McMullan and Ruth Mary Willis- Just can't stand it. Little known about these two. Both made a few recordings in the early 30s. McMullan died in the early 60s and was in prison at one point in his life. No further record of Willis's life. Just two examples of artists whose talents were recorded in the 1920s and 30s and then they just disappeared. Meade Lux Lewis- Honky Tonk Train Blues. Jimmy Yancy and Faber Smith- I received a letter. Pine Top Smith-  Pine Tops's Boogie Woogie. The first time boogie woogie appears on a record label and is mentioned in a song. Pine Top Smith was a real pioneer who sadly died at the age of 25. A wee excerpt from a rather 'faded' 78rpm featuring a meeting between The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The two pioneering acts of early country music. Then it's Jimmie solo, not yodelling, with I'm Lonesome too. Back to Britain. To listen to how the US influenced music here. Harry Torrani- Log Cabin Yodel (1932.) Slim Whitman rated Torrani as the best yodeller of all time. He certainly had a sweet spot voice. Incidentally yodelling was introduced in the US by a Swiss group who toured the whole country in the middle of the 19th century. Bob Mallin- Oh they're tough, mighty tough in the west. A very English delivered comic cowboy song from the late 30's. Lonnie Donegan is no stranger to Forgotten songs. Here he sings Don't let the sun go down on me. One of the many blues, folk and traditional songs from the US that he sang. He was a man who loved the very music we play here. We finish with Mugsy Spanier- Lonesome Road.  A superb laid back, instrumental version of this popular song that was written in the style of an African American folk song by Nat Skillret and Gene Austin.  

Up until now the Forgotten Songs ethos has been to show case forgotten songs and artists from all genres. It's been a real journey of discovery. I've been surprised by how much good music has been neglected. From this episode though I'm focusing on the choice of music. We will concentrate on Americana and American roots. Early folk, country, blues, jazz, boogie woogie, blue grass and, of course, western swing. This is our introduction. Jelly Roll Morton- Oh didn't he ramble. 1939. Sidney Bechet clarinet. Next a four song sequence that shows the development of one song- The unfortunate rake. From its likely Anglo Irish origins in the 18th century to its crossing the Atlantic with early settlers to the US.  We have The unfortunate rake- A.L Lloyd singer, Alf Edwards concertina. One day in May- Holly Wood from a version collected in 1941 in Salem Virginia. The Streets of Loredo- singer Harry Jackson ( Wycomig version of cowboy lament in 1938). St James Infirmary Blues. Saunders King and Orch. Saunders on guitar and vocals. Composer Joe Primrose.                                                                   Songs all the way- Powder river, let'er buck- Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee. Bucking Bronco( My lover is a rider)- Mildred and Dorothy Good. Amade Ardoin- La valse de mon vieux village. Pearl Dickson- Twelve pound daddy. Missippii Matilda- Hard working woman. Doc Watson- Am I born to die? McCravy brothers- Dip me in the golden sea.  Milton Brown and his brownies- Some body has been using that thang. Sons of the west- Sally's got a wooden leg. Cliff Bruners Texas Wanderers- Kangeroo blues. The sweet violet boys- I haven't got a pot to...cook in.     

Bing Crosby "Try A Little Tenderness"Ruth Brown "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"Hank Williams "Long Gone Lonesome Blues"Eilen Jewell "Hallelujah Band"John Hammond "Murder In The Red Barn"Langhorne Slim "Alligator Girl"Ted Hawkins "North to Alaska"Martha Carter "I'm Through Crying"THE BLACK CROWES "She Gave Good Sunflower"Steve Earle "Now She's Gone"James McMurtry "Song for a Deck Hand's Daughter"Geeshie Wiley "Last Kind Word Blues"Lucinda Williams "Can't Let Go"The Wandering "Old Joe Clark"Freddy King "Have You Ever Loved A Woman"Hank Penny And His California Cowhands "What She's Got Is Mine"Little Miss Jessie "My Baby Has Gone"Lyle Lovett "If I Had a Boat"Howlin' Wolf "Sugar Mama (Live 1963)"Buddie Emmons "Bluemmons"Joan Shelley "We'd Be Home"Lucero "The Only One"Little Willie John "Fever"George Jones "White Lightning"Benny Goodman & His Orchestra "Your Mother's Son-In-Law"Slim Harpo "Buzz Me Babe"Loretta Lynn "Heartaches Meet Mr. Blues"Neko Case "Deep Red Bells"Bo Diddley "Pretty Thing"Bonnie Raitt "Give It up or Let Me Go"Jimmy & Mama Yancey "Santa Fe Blues"Gillian Welch "I Had a Real Good Mother and Father"Jimmie Rodgers "Long Tall Mama Blues"Arthur Crudup "That's Alright Mama"Satan and Adam "Crawdad Hole""Sweet" Emma Barrett and Her Dixieland Boys "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of This Jelly Roll"Bob Dylan "Floater (Too Much to Ask)"Trixie Butler "You Got The Right Key"Pearl Reaves "Step It Up And Go"Pearl Reaves "You Can't Stay Here"Pearl Reeves And The Concords "You Can't Stay Here"Milton Brown "Easy Ridin' Papa"Albert King "I'll Play The Blues For You (Album Version - (Parts 1 & 2))"Andrew Bird "Fake Palindromes"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Steel Guitar Rag"Reverend Gary Davis "Motherless Children"Blue Lu Barker "Loan Me Your Husband (03-21-49)"Tom Waits "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)"Bessie Smith "I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama"Beastie Boys "Slow and Low"

Host Nate Wilcox gets Cary Ginnell to tell the tale of Milton Brown, founder of the Light Crust Doughboys and father of Western Swing. They discuss Brown's pioneering combination of traditional country string band with the new jazz sounds of the era.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox gets Cary Ginnell to tell the tale of Milton Brown, founder of the Light Crust Doughboys and father of Western Swing. They discuss Brown's pioneering combination of traditional country string band with the new jazz sounds of the era. Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox gets Cary Ginnell to tell the tale of Milton Brown, founder of the Light Crust Doughboys and father of Western Swing. They discuss Brown's pioneering combination of traditional country string band with the new jazz sounds of the era. Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox gets Cary Ginnell to tell the tale of Milton Brown, founder of the Light Crust Doughboys and father of Western Swing. They discuss Brown's pioneering combination of traditional country string band with the new jazz sounds of the era.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Fats Waller "Winter Weather"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Radio, Radio"Loretta Lynn "Van Lear Rose"Cedric Burnside "Keep On Pushing"Ruth Brown "It's Raining"Lightnin' Hopkins "Penitentiary Blues"Billie Holiday "That's All I Ask of You"Stack Waddy "Repossession Boogie"Bull Moose Jackson "Big 10 Inch Record (Remastered)"The Both "Honesty Is No Excuse"Tom Waits "I Never Talk to Strangers"Jolie Holland "Mad Tom Of Bedlam"The Foc'sle Singers "Haul on the Bowline"Shannon McNally "John Finch / Swing Me Easy"Dwight Yoakam Duet with Maria McKee "Bury Me (2006 Remaster)"Floyd Dixon "Hey Bartender"Ted Hawkins "I Got What I Wanted"Lucero "When You Found Me"R.L. Burnside "Poor Black Mattie"Joe Calicott "Fare Thee Well Blues"Various "Shout, Lula With The Red Dress On"Buddy Guy "Baby Please Don't Leave Me"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "May It Always Be"Duke Ellington "Creole Love Call"Hank Williams "Be Careful of Stones That You Throw"Chris Robinson "Over the Hill"Pee Wee King "Oh Monah"Victoria Spivey, Roosvelt Sykes, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams & Bob Dylan "All You Men"Jerry Lee Lewis "It Hurt Me So"Aretha Franklin "Never Grow Old"Shovels & Rope "I'm Comin' Out"Asie Payton "Back To The Bridge"Jimmy Lee Williams "Have You Ever Seen Peaches"Jessie Mae Hemphill "Run Get My Shotgun"Hank Ballard "Sunday Morning Coming Down"R.L. Boyce "R.l.'s Boogie"Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies "Easy Ridin' Papa"Jimmie Lunceford & His Orchestra "Margie"Josh White "Jelly Jelly"She & Him "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Pork and Beans"Marty Stuart "Hey Porter"Chubby "Hip Shakin'" Newsom "Hip Shakin' Mama"Eilen Jewell "Hallelujah Band"Johnny Horton "The Golden Rocket"Wright Holmes "Good Road Blues"The Wandering "In The Pines"Fred McDowell "You Gonna Meet King Jesus"

Josh and David open the show with a discussion of the fresh, welcome change in America that occurred with the inauguration of President Joe Biden; Dr. Milton Brown zooms to offer his controversial opinion on the COVID-19 vaccine, and also to argue with Josh; and they wrap with a discussion of a new ADP lawsuit and the Rightwing Nut of the Week.Vaccine resources:Debunking the myths about the COVID-19 vaccine • UABFacts about the COVID-19 vaccine • CDC8 Things to Know about the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccination Program • CDCGuests:Dr. Milton Brown, M.D., PhDAbout APW:APW is a weekly Alabama political podcast hosted by Josh Moon and David Person, two longtime Alabama political journalists. More information is available on our website. Listen anywhere you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

In which we compare midcentury Bakersfield to Paris in the 1920s, discuss how to build a music scene, and hear a song sung by a truck. See everyrecordeverrecorded.com for more Bakersfield Sound resources! + George Rich, "Drivin' Away My Blues" + Nathan Judd, "The Answer to the Greenback Dollar" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Get Along Home, Cindy" + Captain Sacto theme song + Cousin Herb Henson, "You'all Come" + Patsy Cline, "Crazy" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Act Naturally" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Love's Gonna Live Here" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "My Heart Skips a Beat" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Together Again" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I Don't Care (Just As Long As You Love Me)" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + "Before You Go" + "Only You (Can Break My Heart)" + "Buckaroo" + "Waitin' In Your Welfare Line" + "Think of Me" + "Open Up Your Heart" + "Where Does the Good Times Go" + "Sam's Place" + "Your Tender Loving Care" + "It Takes People Like You (To Make People Like Me)" + "How Long Will My Baby Be Gone" + "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail" + The Carter Family, "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" + William McEwan, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Silver Leaf Quartette, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" + The Carter Family, "Little Darlin' Pal of Mine" + The Carter Family, "Sad and Lonesome Day" + Lesley Riddle, "One Kind Favor" + Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, "Ain't It Amazing, Gracie" + The Ventures, "Walk, Don't Run" + The Lemon Pipers, "Green Tambourine" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "George's Playhouse" + "The Nightingale Song" + "I'll Make Sweet Love to You" + "Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown" + "New Step It Up and Go" + "Philadelphia Lawyer" + Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, "Sugar Moon" + Bud Hobbs, "Louisiana Swing" + Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, "Takin' Off" + Lefty Frizzell, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time" + Bill Woods and His Orange Blossom Playboys, "Have I Got a Chance With You?" + Jean Shepherd and Ferlin Husky, "A Dear John Letter" + Ferlin Husky, "Gone" + Merle Haggard, "Sing a Sad Song" + Merle Haggard, "Swinging Doors" + Bonnie Owens, "Lie a Little" + Merle Haggard, "Today I Started Loving You Again" + Mamie Smith "Crazy Blues" + Saul Ho'opi'i Trio, "Lehua" + Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #9" + DeFord Bailey, "John Henry" + Ruth Brown, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Rose Maddox, "Wild Wild Young Men" + Hank Penny, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes" + Patsy Cline, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Ray Charles, "Your Cheatin' Heart" + Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" + Antonio Aguilar, "El Ojo de Vidrio" + Woody Guthrie, "Billy the Kid" + Linda Ronstadt, "Palomita de Ojos Negros" + Ernest Tubb, "Thanks a Lot" + Jose Alfredo Jimenez, "El Rey" + The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Shimmy Shakin' Daddy" + Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, "Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age" + Luis Perez Meza, "Cuando Salgo a Los Campos" + Tommy Collins, "You Better Not Do That" + Wanda Jackson, "I Gotta Know" + Wanda Jackson, "Honey Bop" + Billy Mize, "Who Will Buy the Wine" + Red Simpson, "I'm a Truck" + The Derailers, "The Right Place" + Dale Watson, "I Lie When I Drink" + Dave Alvin, "Black Rose of Texas" + The Mavericks, "All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down" + The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Sin City" + JT Kanehira, "Country Music Makes Me So Happy" + Sturgill Simpson, "Life of Sin" + Albion Country Band, "Hanged I Shall Be" + A.L. Lloyd, "The Oxford Tragedy" + Shirley and Dolly Collins, "The Oxford Girl" + Phoebe Smith "Wexport Girl" + Harry Cox, "Ekefield Town" + Marybird McAllister, "The Bloody Miller" + Fields Ward, "The Lexington Murder" + Arthur and Gid Tanner, "The Knoxville Girl" + Fred Ross, "The Waco Girl" + The Outlaws, "Knoxville Girl" + Merle Haggard, "Kern River"

Brown currently serves as Professor of Practice and Director for the Center for Drug Discovery for Rare and Underserved Diseases at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and Fellow at the National Academy of Inventors (FNAI). His distinguished career has led to his international recognition as a leader in drug discovery and development research. “We are excited to have Dr. Brown join our Board, bringing his unique talents, expertise and perspectives to FARE and the 32 million Americans living with potentially life-threatening food allergies,” said David G. Bunning, chairman of the Board of Directors for FARE. “Dr. Brown's passion for medicine is clear, and we know this passion will aid us in our mission to find a cure for food allergies and improve the lives of all those affected.” Dr. Brown is a recipient of the 2015 Percy Julian Award by the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers for significant contributions in pure and/or applied research in science and has served as a scientific reviewer of grants and programs for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Center Support Grants, Department of Defense (DOD) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Brown previously served as Deputy Director for Drug Discovery & Development at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute and Director of the Inova Schar Cancer Center for Drug Discovery at Inova Center for Personalized Health in Fairfax, Virginia. In addition to his role on FARE's Board of Directors, Brown will also serve as a co-chair of FARE's Voice of the Patient Roundtable: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The Roundtable, which is set to be scheduled this fall, is co-chaired by Michael Frazier, FARE Board of National Ambassadors and Advocacy Advisory Committee member, and seeks to bring thought leaders together to find consensus on how patient advocacy organizations can advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the work that they do. Following the event, FARE will publish a blueprint outlining actionable steps to address DEI in food allergy education and research. “In identifying leaders who can play a key role in moving food allergy science and advocacy forward, Dr. Brown stood out as a seasoned professional who has a track record for developing trust in the community and with grateful patients and in maintaining multi-investigator collaborations in academia and industry, locally, nationally and internationally,” said Lisa Gable, chief executive officer for FARE. “We are thrilled to have him join our board and look forward to all we will be able to do together.”

This week we conclude our two-part feature “It Don't Mean a Thing ...” with a focus on western swing. Western swing was developed in the dancehalls of Texas and, in sharp contrast to old-time stringbands, western swing groups employed many more members, with horn sections and multiple fiddles. These were needed to fill these massive dance halls with music for dancing. We’ll hear classics from The Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. We'll also hear new classics from Deborah Silver, Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel. Boogie woogie fiddles … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Episode #20-42: “It Don't Mean a Thing ...”, Pt.2 Host: Tom Druckenmiller Artist/”Song”/CD/Label Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways David Grisman Quintet / “Minor Swing” / The David Grisman Quintet / Kaleidoscope Deborah Silver / “That Old Black Magic” / Glitter & Grits / NTL The Light Crust Doughboys / “Knocky, Knocky” / Okeh Western Swing / CBS Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies / “Sweet Jennie Lee” / Western Swing Kings / Pazzazz Bob Wills & his Texas layboys / “Right or Wrong” / Collection 1935-50 / Acrobat Merle Travis / “The Sheik of Araby” / The Merle Travis Guitar / Raven Lefty Frizzell / “If You Got the Money, I've Got the Time” / Columbia Country Classics Vol 2 / Columbia Texas Troubadours / “Steel Guitar Rag” / Almost to Tulsa / Bear Family Willie Nelson / “Cherokee Maiden” / You Don't Know Me / Lost Highway David Grisman Quintet / “Minor Swing” / The David Grisman Quintet / Kaleidoscope Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers / “Goin' Steady” / Shades of the Past / Sugar Hill Al Goll / “Farewell Blues” / New Reso Gathering / Pinecastle Susie Bogguss / “Straighten Up and Fly Right” / Swing / Compadre Vi Wickham & Paul Anastasio / “Weiser Stomp” / Swinging at the Savoy / Zero Carbon Footprint Asleep at the Wheel / “Take Me Back to Tulsa” / Comin' Right At Ya / United Artists Asleep at the Wheel / “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie” / Swing Time / Sony Merle Travis / “Cannonball Stomp” / The Merle Travis Guitar / Raven Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

At the tender age of 14, Milton realized the computer in his room was a tool for him to make money, so he started studying. Programming websites and banking some cash with AdSense came along, and even got banned from Google, back in the day.His passion for learning always drove him to keep on learning and developing his skillset, with stuff like SEO, Facebook Ads.Eventually, he ran into Justin Brooke and started following him... and he ended up going through the program.He went from managing $16k to about $100k in ad spend in under one year... and he keeps on growing his agency. He has worked with clients in many industries, such as universities, funeral homes, non-profits, school, and so on.Once, he brought in 987 qualified, USA leads for a magazine... for under $20. By creating a spot-on avatar and knowing their heaven/hell, he was able to run this winner campaign, which he explains how it went.One of the best tools he got from AdSkills is the templates of how to properly set up ad accounts and tracking... and he talks about a case study when this helped him dominate Google searches for one of his clients.His specialty is Google Ads, but he's also working with Display and YouTube ads.Reach out to Milton via his email miltonbrwn@gmail.com or his site www.workwithmilton.comWant to hire an AdSkills certified media buyer? Click here.

Para este último programa de la duodécima temporada pizarra, desde la mesa camilla del Torreón, les tenemos reservado un repertorio acorde con tan magno acontecimiento... The Four Aces, Milton Brown and His Brownies, Cab Calloway y Amos Milburn, serán algunos de los titanes de la noche. A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

. Milton Brown and His Brownies! Western Swing in the 1930's - great jazz by a string group and a superb vocalist! This group was more jazz than country and featured one of the first electric guitarists to be be recorded - Bob Dunn, as well as an excellent barrelhouse piano player named Fred "Papa" Calhoun. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Keep A Knockin'" by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer's faith and sexuality. 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 "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors.   ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group". Their name is actually "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band".   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with "Long Tall Sally", and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we've seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to "The Girl Can't Help It", and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we're going to look in more detail at Little Richard's career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, "Keep A Knockin'"] Richard's immediate follow-up to "Long Tall Sally" was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell -- "Rip it Up" backed with "Ready Teddy". These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn't have quite the same power as RIchard's first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn't sound like anything else out there, "Rip it Up" and "Ready Teddy" were both much closer to the typical songs of the time -- the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn't make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics -- we've discussed "The Girl Can't Help It" and "She's Got It" in the episode on "Twenty Flight Rock", but there was also "Jenny Jenny", "Send Me Some Lovin'", and possibly the greatest of them all, "Lucille": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Lucille"] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording -- or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. "Keep A Knockin'" had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called "A Bunch of Blues", written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy's band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues Band, "A Bunch of Blues"] That itself, though, may derive from another song, "My Bucket's Got A Hole in It", which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group" have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it", the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for "A Bunch of Blues" is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It"] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and "Georgia Tom", who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He's someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Peace in the Valley". But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like "Meat Balls" and "Banana in Your Fruit Basket". As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it's in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" turning into the song that would later be known as "Keep A Knockin'". Tampa Red's version was titled "You Can't Come In", and seems to have been the origin not only of "Keep A Knockin'" but also of the Lead Belly song "Midnight Special" -- you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, "You Can't Come In"] The version by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band wasn't the first recording to combine the "Keep a Knockin'" lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody -- the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James "Boodle It" Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody -- Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red's version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it's not surprising that "You Can't Come in" was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown -- who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: "Keep A Knockin'"] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan's version. Jordan was, of course, Richard's single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Keep A Knockin'"] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew's take on the idea. "I Hear You Knockin'" only bears a slight melodic resemblance to "Keep A Knockin'", but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard's favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record "Keep A Knockin'" in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that's uniquely Little Richard -- something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, "Keep A Knockin'"] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan's version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Keep A Knockin'", "drinking gin" verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped -- there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn't expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard's vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song -- the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the "whoo" after the first "keep a knockin' but you can't come in" after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, it remains one of Little Richard's greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, "Ooh! My Soul!": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] That session also produced a single for Richard's chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name "Pretty Boy": [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, "Bip Bop Bip"] "Pretty Boy" would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He's now probably best known for writing "Chain of Fools" for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard's last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about... well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as "the female Elvis Presley": [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, "He Will Come Back To Me"] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn't continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O'Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent's songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent's absence. O'Keefe isn't someone we're going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he's something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of -- his biggest hit, from 1958, "Wild One", which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Wild One"] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia -- low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn't believe him -- until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on -- I've seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn't solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard's real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard's contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying -- according to Marascalco -- to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like "Good Golly Miss Molly" were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release -- but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle -- he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren't sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard's sexuality and his religion continued to torment him -- he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet -- but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent's work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn't allowed to perform on stage -- so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour -- later on, he would sing "Be Bop A Lula" from offstage as well. Vincent wasn't the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn't make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he'd agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard's first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing "Peace in the Valley" and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn't start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour -- an audience that wanted "Rip it Up" and "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti Frutti" wasn't going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn't know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about -- he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn't stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of "Twistin' the Night Away" that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he'd not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he'd joined his old group to record Fats Domino's "I'm In Love Again", for a single that didn't get released until December 1962. The single was released as by "the World Famous Upsetters", but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, "I'm In Love Again"] So Richard's willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke's performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into "Long Tall Sally". The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he'd pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing "Tutti Frutti". The tour was successful enough, and Richard's performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard's own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn't interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn't record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, "Well Alright", but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, "Bama Lama Bama Loo": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Bama Lama Bama Loo"] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn't do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he'd done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn't, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair -- but because he's Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. 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 “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. 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 “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Essayer un autre voyage grâce à la musique d’un Jukebox... Pourquoi pas ? Comme si il y’avait un avion pour les années 20, mais en partant d’aujourd’hui... Crédits : Taking of | Milton Brown . Spring Cleaning | Fats Waller . Gonna Romp and Stomp | Slim Rhodes . I Wonder | Erik Janson et Bevan Manson . Busy Line | Rose Murphy . Adress Unknown + I don’t want to set the world on fire | The Ink Spots

Essayer un autre voyage grâce à la musique d’un Jukebox... Pourquoi pas ? Comme si il y’avait un avion pour les années 20, mais en partant d’aujourd’hui... Crédits : Taking of | Milton Brown . Spring Cleaning | Fats Waller . Gonna Romp and Stomp | Slim Rhodes . I Wonder | Erik Janson et Bevan Manson . Busy Line | Rose Murphy . Adress Unknown + I don’t want to set the world on fire | The Ink Spots

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

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

Set 1: Diggin' into the 45 vault for Tony Jackson & the Vibrations with "Fortune Teller" with stellar guitar work from Paul Pilnick...why isn't he in the R&R Hall of Shame?....Charlie Feathers [another candidate if you ask moi….maybe the requirement is a full set of teeth?] singin' his tale of a "Wild wild party" which was released on a 7" slab o wax in 1961 / Memphis Records. Mickey Most doesn't want to miss the 45 rpm party but even if he does "It's Alright" w/ Sir James Page on guitar...Fairport breaks the 45 spell with a cut from their first LP with "Time will show the wiser"...Ian McDonald aka Ian Mathews on lead vocals and none other than Judy Dyble on background vocals...great guitar work from Richard Thompson... Set 2: The Bloos Magoos on 45 rpm..."So I'm wrong and you are right"...after this [their 1st 45] they changed their name to The Blues Magoos. The Blue Things with a DRR staple "Orange rooftops of your mind" on a 45 from RCA...Killer! The Onion Radio News checks in with their weekly report on prison food....And speaking of food....Papa Link Davis on a small label out of Texas with "Rice and Gravy Boogie" takes us to The Nazz "Under the Ice" a 45 rpm on the SGC label 1968. Set 3: A bunch of Browns.... Roy Brown w/ the R&R Trio on a 45 / Imperial Records 1958...."Hip shakin' baby"...Roy never sounded better! He doesn't need more cowbell he needs more REVERB!....Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies check in with an instro-mental "Takin' Off" / Decca 1935. Brown is considered the architect of western swing predating Bob Wills by a few years. In fact Wills got his start in one of Milton's early bands...the world would know more about Milton Brown had he not died in a car crash in 1935 driving his "date" home. The Steel guitar is played by one of the greatest of all time Bob Dunn who is credited with the first amplified steel guitar ever recorded! Phil Brown keeps the ball "Rollin' and tumblin" off his first record called Cruel Inventions from 2002...I dig Phil a lot....James Brown with "It's a new day [Let a man come in" from 1970 finishing out the last proper set of music for the evening..... We finish out the festivities with one of the great German bands of the last 50 years...CAN. "She brings the rain" is the b-side of their 2nd single and a great one at that...Earl Jean [McCrea] with the original recording of "I'm into something good" which was a big hit for Herman's Hermits....and taking us to the finish line is a really good Canadian band called Mother Earth...their cover of Soul Sacrifice is essential! That's if for this week.....so if the good lord's willin' and the creek don't rise we'll be back at the Purple Grotto with another DRR Show next week....stay smooooth…...

Songs include: Tumbling Tumbleweeds, I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart, Are You Tired of Me My Darlin, Taking Off, I Ain't Got Nobody and I'm Rolling On.  Performers include: The Prairie Ramblers, The Girls of the Golden West, Gene Autry, the Delmore Brothers, Milton Brown, Bob Wills, Jimmie Davis and patsy Montana.

Pastor Gabe is joined by Milton Brown - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 12/06/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 54:04

Pastor Gabe is joined by Milton Brown - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 12/06/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 54:04

Milton Brown Joins Pastor Gabe to discuss Romans 6 - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 10/18/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 53:45

Milton Brown Joins Pastor Gabe to discuss Romans 6 - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 10/18/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 53:45

Pastor Gabe is joined by Pastor Milton Brown discussing Romans 5:17 - Gabriel Swaggart - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 05/24/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 53:47

Pastor Gabe is joined by Pastor Milton Brown discussing Romans 5:17 - Gabriel Swaggart - Sonlife Broadcasting Network - 05/24/14. Please visit www.crossfireyouthministry.com for more information. Episode Length: 53:47

The early history of western swing music.  Performers include: The Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown, Bob  Wills, Cliff Bruner,  Adolph Hofner, The Tune Wranglers and the Swift Jewel Cowboys.  Songs include: Pass the Biscuits Pappy, Beautiful Texas, Get A Long Home Cindy, Taking Off and My Untrue Cowgirl.

FTB podcast #103  is a mix of great new music from EMORY QUINN, SALLY SPRING, and 77 EL DEORA. The full playlist is posted below.  Check the artist's websites and order their CD's or downloads and tell 'em you heard the songs on the FTB podcast.  Please email me with any questions or suggestions for the podcasts. (frater@freighttrainboogie.com)Here's the iTunes link to subscribe to the FTB podcasts.  Here's the direct link to listen now!  And this is the RSS feed for non-iTunes listeners: http://ftbpodcasts.libsyn.com/rss Show #103 77 EL DEORA - (I Just Dodged a) Bullet - The Crown & The Crow's Confession  MARTIN ENGLAND - Do What The Man With The Gun Says - Razed And Reconstructed  KATHRYN CAINE - Settlin Down - Down Home Girl THE GREAT RECESSION ORCHESTRA - Sadie Green - Have You Even Heard of Milton Brown? (mic break) GLENNA BELL - Honky Tonk Man -Perfectly Legal: Songs of Sex, Love and Murder REVEREND FREAKCHILD - Sweet Sweet You - God Shaped Hole SALLY SPRING - Made of Stars -Made of Stars MIKE + RUTHY - Be the Boss - Million To One (mic break) DEREK PRITZL - His Words -Drifter THESE UNITED STATES - Just This - What Lasts EMORY QUINN - Hand In Hand -See You At The Next Light JIM BYRNES - No Mail Blues - Everywhere West MARTI BROM - Forbidden Fruit -Not For Nothin' (mic break) 77 EL DEORA - Fire on the Mountain (Revisited) -The Crown & The Crow's Confession (Jan. 21st, 2011) Bill Frater Freight Train Boogie

Early western swing bands.  Bands and performers include:  The Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown, Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, The Hillbilly Boys, Cliff Bruner and the Swift Jewel Cowboys. Songs include: Ida Red, Won't you Ride in My Little Red Wagon, Right or Wrong and Chuck Wagon Swing.