Podcasts about minnie the moocher

Today on another encore edition of the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are speaking with Josh Langsam, grandson of the great Cab Calloway. Our conversation with Josh was full of amazing family connections as well as a terrific lists of firsts from Cab Calloway that was fascinating to learn about. From fashion to language to composing and performing, Cab Calloway was both an entertainer as well as a cultural icon. While many of us knew him first from his appearance as Curtis in The Blues Brothers film, as the basis for both Jake and Elwood. While that film helped bring Cab back into popular culture, Cab's influence on popular culture in the first half of the 20th century. A song writer and performer whose song “Minnie The Moocher” sold one million copies – the first black entertainer to do so. He was also the first black entertainer to have a radio show and even was made into a cartoon in a Betty Boop short. And if that's not enough, none other than George Gershwin based the character Sportin' Life in the smash hit Porgy and Bess on Cab as well. We spoke to Josh about his grandfather's legacy and how he is working to enhance his legacy in 2025 and beyond. We spoke about Josh's plans for the estate and frankly, the what's and how's of running such an estate. We learned a lot from Josh on this episode as there was a lot to learn. So sit back and take a listen to the Rarified Heir Podcast. Everyone has a story.

Cab Calloway's immortal MINNIE THE MOOCHER was one of the first million selling black jazz records and spawned several sequels! Here we play homage to the tune and it's origins - from Cab to the Boswell Sisters, Roland Smith's Rascals and more!

NEW FOR APRIL 15, 2024 Nothing better than homemade . . . Home Spun - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 482 1. So What (live) - Ministry 2. The Last Of The Famous International Playboys - Morrissey 3. E'Festa (Celebration) - PFM 4. Eastern Intrigue / Initiation (live) - Todd Rundgren's Utopia 5. Two Pairs Of Hands - Mark Knopfler 6. John Barleycorn Must Die - Traffic 7. A Day In The Life (live) - Sting 8. Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite (live) - Paul McCartney 9. Minnie The Moocher (live) - Cab Calloway w/ The Blues Brother's Band 10. California (live) - Joni Mitchell w/ James Taylor 11. The Boy In The Bubble - Patti Smith 12. Downed (alt) - Cheap Trick 13. Fainting In Coils - Bill Bruford 14. Nimrodel / Procession / The White Rider - Camel 15. Heartland - The The 16. The Muffin Man (live) - Frank Zappa / Captain Beefheart 17. Native Stepson (live) - Sonny Landreth 18. The Boy From Beckenham - Andy Timmons feat. Peter Frampton 19. The Struggle Of The Turtle To The Sea (live) - Jean-Luc Pontly 20. Tank - Carl Palmer The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Where the big picture always exceeds it's parts. Accept No Substitute Click to leave comments on the Facebook page.

"Reefer Man" - Don Redman; "Knockin´ Myself Out" - Lil Green; "Wacky Dust" y "When I Get Low, I Get High" - Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb; "Kickin´ The Gong Around" y "Minnie The Moocher" - Cab Calloway; "Sweet Marijuana Brown" - Barney Bigard; "Onyx Hop" - Frankie Newton; "Texas Tea Party" - Jack Teagarden with Benny Goodman; "Take A Whiff On Me" - Leadbelly; "Lotus Blossom (Sweet Marijuana)" - Julia Lee; "I'm Feeling High & Happy" - Helen Ward with Gene Krupa; "Here Comes The Man With The Jive" - Stuff Smith; "Jack, I´m Mellow" - Trixie Smith Todas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "Reefer Madness - A Collection Of Vintage Drug Songs, 1927-1945" (Buzzola, 2004).Escuchar audio

We've got you covered!We ring in the new year by covering ten songs that Oingo Boingo covered over the years: Minnie The Moocher, Violent Love, California Girls, You Really Got Me, Monster Mash, Rawhide, Heard It Through The Grapevine, Sunshine of Your Love, I Am The Walrus, and Open Eyes.That should cover it!Song Clips:“Minnie The Moocher” - Cab Calloway, Minnie The Moocher (1931)“Violent Love” - Willie Dixon, Violent Love (1951)“Auld Lang Syne” - Guy Lombardo, Auld Lang Syne (1953)“The Monster Mash” - Bobby Pickett, Monsters' Holiday (1962)“You Really Got Me” - The Kinks, The Kinks (1964)“California Girls” - The Beach Boys, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)“I Am The Walrus” - The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour (1967)“Sunshine of Your Love” - Cream, Disraeli Gears (1967)“Heard It Through The Grapevine - Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cosmos's Factory (1970)“Minnie The Moocher” - Cab Calloway, The Blues Brothers Soundtrack (1980)“Rawhide” - The Blues Brothers Band, The Blues Brothers Soundtrack (1980)“Violent Love - Oingo Boingo, Oingo Boingo EP (1980)“You Really Got Me” - Oingo Boingo, Only A Lad (1981)“Squeezit the Moocher” - Danny Elfman, Forbidden Zone Soundtrack (1983)“Violent Love” - Oingo Boingo, Boingo Alive (1988)“I Am The Walrus” - Oingo Boingo, Boingo (1994)“Change” - Oingo Boingo, Boingo (1994)“I Am The Walrus” - Oingo Boingo, Farewell: Live from the Universal Amphitheater (1996)Film Clips:The Blues Brothers (1980)The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)Fan-Supplied Content:“Goodbye-Goodbye," "Minnie the Moocher," & "California Girls" - Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, bootleg demo“California Girls” & "Open Eyes" - Oingo Boingo, bootleg demo “You Really Got Me” - Oingo Boingo, bootleg alternate mix“Heard It Through The Grapevine” & " Sunshine of Your Love" - Oingo Boingo, bootleg rehearsals“Violent Love” - Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Alcazar Theatre, 1977“Minnie the Moocher” & “On Chedrania” - Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, The Aquarius, 1978“Chedrania Girls” & “Violent Love” - Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, The Roxy, 3-31-1979“Violent Love” - Oingo Boingo, bootleg live rehearsal, 1980“California Girls" - Oingo Boingo, The Whisky, 10-03-1980“Monster Mash” - Oingo Boingo, Atlanta, GA, 10-27-1982“Rawhide” - Oingo Boingo, Logan, UT, 11-12-1985“Minnie The Moocher” - Oingo Boingo, Irvine, CA, 10-27-1990“Monster Mash” & “Minnie The Moocher” - Oingo Boingo Former Members, Coach House 10-30-2022The Oingo Boingo Secret Appreciation Society Podcast is produced/hosted by Robynne Winchester & produced/edited by Matt Ellsworth. Patreon is operated by Adam Burr.Please note: The music and film clips included in this podcast (listed above) fall under the "Fair Use Doctrine" as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, parody, and education.WEBSITEOingo Boingo Secret Appreciation SocietySUPPORTBuy Us A Coffee!Patreon

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 914, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: state trees 1: Its state tree is the candlenut, but locals call it the Kukui. Hawaii. 2: Rhode Island picked the "red" type of this tree; Vermont got the "sugar" kind. maple. 3: Delaware chose a type of this tree that's paired with "the ivy" in a Christmas song. holly. 4: This state tree of Mississppi is famed for its fragrant flowers. magnolia. 5: The fan-shaped leaves of this South Carolina state tree are sometimes used to make baskets. the palmetto. Round 2. Category: african capitals 1: A water hole called Enkare Nairobi, or "cold water", eventually became the capital of this country. Kenya. 2: This Senegal capital is the westernmost city on the African mainland. Dakar. 3: The Indian Ocean seaport of Mogadishu is the capital of this nation. Somalia. 4: Upon the independence of this nation in 1962, Kampala replaced Entebbe as its capital. Uganda. 5: The American Colonization Society founded this city that now neighbors Bushrod Island. Monrovia. Round 3. Category: men in black 1: I know the men in black haunted Mulder on this TV show--I played one of them!. The X-Files. 2: Women in the "Men in Black" films include Lara Flynn Boyle and this "Last Seduction" star. Linda Fiorentino. 3: 19th century artist Hokusai is credited with the first image of these stealthy warriors wearing black. a ninja. 4: Josh Brolin played a younger version of this actor in "Men in Black 3". Tommy Lee Jones. 5: This Oscar-winning actor is all sorts of bad as the man in black in "The Dark Tower", based on the Stephen King novels. Matthew McConaughey. Round 4. Category: ordinary "world" 1: In 1851 new products on display at the first one of these included the Colt revolver and a reaper. world's fair. 2: This satirical Aldous Huxley novel is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Brave New World. 3: It's the "aged" nickname for prostitution. oldest profession in the world (world's oldest profession). 4: Numerical term referring collectively to more than 100 countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. third world. 5: The "U.S.A." in "U.S.A. for Africa" stood for "United Support of Artists" when they recorded this '85 No. 1 Hit. "We Are the World". Round 5. Category: "moo" 1: The song "That's Amore" is on the soundtrack to this 1987 Cher film. Moonstruck. 2: This adjective means "purely academic" or "irrelevant". Moot. 3: This stir-fried Chinese dish that contains shredded pork, scallions and egg is rolled in a thin pancake. Moo shu pork. 4: It's another name for a person born under the sign of Cancer. Moonchild/moonchildren. 5: This Cab Calloway song includes the lines "Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi!" and "Ho-De-Ho-De-Ho-De-Ho!". "Minnie The Moocher". Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

A quirky story sent in by Niamh Smith about her adventures in an unusual little car with an equally unusual name!

This week we dive into one of the most iconic soundtracks ever - The Blues Brothers. The movie and the soundtrack are very special to us for many reasons, and we wanted to share our thoughts. //// Fun FactsThe first draft of the movie was 324 pagesThe mall chase was filmed in a real mall in Harvey Il., next door to Phil's hometown. The mall was shut down in 1979 and torn down in 2013The movie has 2 connections to Star Wars - Carrie Fischer and Frank Oz, who is a puppeteer and voices the legendary character Yoda, who plays the corrections officer at the beginning of the movie.The movie raised $200K for Chicago orphanages. The movie set the record for the most cars crashed at the time - 104. Joe Walsh from the Eagles started the prison riot in the Jailhouse Finale.The restaurant, Chez Paul, in the movie is a real restaurant and is the same one featured in Ferris Beulers Day Off.- The Pope stopped by the set and blessed it. Also said it was on the recommended list of movies to watch by Catholics./// Songs In the Movie But Not On The Soundtrack1. Boom, Boom, Boom - John Lee Hooker2. Stand By Your Man Cover3. I Can't Turn You Loose/// Songs That Did Make The Soundtrack1. She Caught The Katy2. Peter Gunn Theme3. Gimme Some Lovin4. Shake Your Tail Feather (with Ray Charles)5. Everybody Needs Somebody To Love6. The Old Landmark (with James Brown)7. Think (with Aretha Franklin)8. Theme From Rawhide9. Minnie The Moocher (with Cab Calloway)10. Sweet Home Chicago/// CreditsHosted by Mike Svensson & Phil BowyerDirected by Phil BowyerProduced by BoozeHound EntertainmentIntro & Outro Voice-Over (Audio only) by Kate BowyerIntro & Outro Music by Dead Anarchy/// Sponsored by:Sounds On Vinyl Records, Malmo Sweden (http://soundsonvinyl.se)BoozeHound Music (https://boozehoundmusic.com)Thank you for listening! We love you! Keep Rockin'!Copyright BoozeHound Entertainment & BoozeHound Music. All Rights Reserved. Music courtesy Shot Glass Records, a BoozeHound Company. Some links may be affiliate links. We may get a small commission if you sign up or purchase using our link. This is just one way you can help support the show.

Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are talking to Josh Langsam, the grandson of the one and only Cab Calloway. Now aside from having a great name, Josh tells host Josh Mills about the legacy, the history and the future of one of America's greatest entertainers of all-time. Starting in the 1920's Cab Calloway was a band leader, performer, author, singer, actor, song writer and his  influence ranged from live performances, recorded music, film, animation, fashion – the guy did it all. He was the first black entertainer to sell one million copies with his signature song, “Minnie The Moocher” in 1931. He was also the first black entertainer to have his own radio show. None other than George Gershwin based the character Sportin' Life from Porgy and Bess after Cab. Pioneering animator Max Fleischer invented the Rotoscope and animates Cab as a Walrus in a Betty Boop cartoon based on “Minnie The Moocher”. Are you getting the picture, yet? We spoke to Josh about the Harlem Renaissance, the famed Cotton Club, the infamous Dizzy Gillespie spitball that wasn't, how our host Josh's family played a major part in Cab's career, Cab's iconic fashion sense and much more. Of course, we talk about Cab's “Minnie The Moocher” disco hit in the 80s, the movie Cotton Club and indeed, The Blues Brothers, which introduced Cab to a whole new, younger audience and revitalized his career. If you've ever wanted to know what someone does or wants to do with a legacy/estate as an heir to a famous person, this is the episode for you. It's very fun and frankly, an educational episode which hits upon both the entertainer and the man Cab Calloway. Take a listen to this episode of the Rarified Heir Podcast. Everyone has a story.

It's time for the Fleischer Brothers to out-weird everyone else from the time period with another Betty Boop-starring cartoon from before the series was named after her. This one involves Betty running away from home with her boyfriend Bimbo, where they come across a cave with jazz-singing ghosts. It's a spooky time, but more importantly, is it a fun time? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howsitholdup/support

"What's this?!" Kerry and Collin are joined by Christine Sellin to discuss the immortal Halloween/Christmas classic. Seemed pretty mortal when it was released, though. What made it endure? How is it different watching it as an adult? What does Minnie The Moocher have to do with any of this? We get to the bottom of all this and more as we take a perilous journey through Christmastown with our shrunken heads in tow.

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 159, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Prefixes 1: "Anti-" means "against; "ante-" means this. before. 2: This thoroughly modern prefix means "one thousandth". milli-. 3: A prefix meaning "after" is found in this word meaning an after-death examination. postmortem. 4: This prefix that means "first" or "primitive" is found before "plasm" and "zoa". proto-. 5: When this prefix precedes "active", it means "backwards"; by itself it refers to the style of an earlier time. retro-. Round 2. Category: Near Disasters 1: On Sept. 8, 2001 Erin became the Atlantic season's first of these, but stayed mostly out at sea. hurricane. 2: In 1919 the lonely keeper of one of these helped save all 21 crewmen from fire on the steamer Frank O'Connor. a lighthouse. 3: A possible nuclear war was averted (for the moment) in June 2002 talks between India and this country. Pakistan. 4: In July 2002 9 men were dramatically rescued from a flooded mine in this state. Pennsylvania. 5: In 1907 this financier kept the stock market afloat by locking bankers in his library until they raised $25 million. J.P. Morgan. Round 3. Category: "Moo" 1: The song "That's Amore" is on the soundtrack to this 1987 Cher film. Moonstruck. 2: This adjective means "purely academic" or "irrelevant". Moot. 3: This stir-fried Chinese dish that contains shredded pork, scallions and egg is rolled in a thin pancake. Moo shu pork. 4: It's another name for a person born under the sign of Cancer. Moonchild/moonchildren. 5: This Cab Calloway song includes the lines "Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi!" and "Ho-De-Ho-De-Ho-De-Ho!". "Minnie The Moocher". Round 4. Category: Español 1: The Spanish "calabozo" and the cowboy variation calaboose both mean thse. jail. 2: Any Spanish pier or wharf, or a certain waterfront area in San Francisco. embarcadero. 3: This day of the week is domingo. Sunday. 4: This pet is un perro. a dog. 5: You'll find these, los escritorios, in the classroom. a desk. Round 5. Category: Historic Occasions 1: Name shared by an American film made in 1903 and a British crime committed in 1963. The Great Train Robbery. 2: James Marshall found this Jan. 24, 1848, days before California was handed over to the U.S.. Gold. 3: The 1851 Lopez Expedition, a disasterous attempt to free this island, was an early version of the Bay of Pigs. Cuba. 4: In 1798, in this African country, Napoleon said, "Soldiers...forty centuries look down upon you". Egypt. 5: This man died April 5, 1975, after a quarter of a century leading Nationalist China on Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!

With the Blues Brothers nowhere in sight, Curtis and the band break into a reality-bending performance. If only Mike were here to see it. Support the show at www.patreon.com/DitchDiggers www.bluesbrosminute.com Facebook: @bluesbrosminute Twitter: @BluesBrosMin

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven’t talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I’ve used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown’s R&B work — this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I’ve often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as “the blues” as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you’d expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn’t have been more blues inspired. For the story of “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation — he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was “One Dime Blues”, which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt “One Dime Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they’re not. A substantial proportion of McTell’s recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that’s very different from the songs he normally played — while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn’t know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren’t in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it — and it’s something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There’s a reason why I call this podcast “A History of Rock Music…” rather than “THE History of Rock Music…” — the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like “The Boll Weevil” and “Amazing Grace”, because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience — imagine you’re a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You’ve been playing the clubs for several years, you’ve got a repertoire of songs you’ve written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You probably could perform those, but you’d be wondering why they wouldn’t let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It’s something we’ll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn’t want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos — they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that’s what he gave those audiences. But McTell’s version of “One Dime Blues”, retitled “Last Dime Blues”, wasn’t like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don’t treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen — she’d wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn’t last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder’s band, as so many early R&B stars we’ve discussed did, but that too didn’t last long. Millinder’s band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage… and Millinder said “I hired a singer, not a waitress — you’re fired. And besides, you don’t sing well anyway”. She was fired that day, and she had no money — Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she’d had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab’s sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab’s sister, and that’s probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother’s career, and she’d recorded songs like this: [excerpt “Just a Crazy Song”: Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother’s breakout hit “Minnie The Moocher”, which popularised the “Hi de hi, ho de ho” chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn’t the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she’s clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn’t her only achievement by any means — in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn’t room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band’s money and so she couldn’t afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn’t really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown’s plight — and impressed enough by her talent — that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she’d earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure — he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom — a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown’s performance — impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We’ve talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race — and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on — but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist’s proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic’s first few records — while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren’t especially successful, but then in 1949 they released “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] That record is another of those which people refer to as “the first rock and roll record”, and it was pure good luck for Atlantic — McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different — before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he’d sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing “mop mop” he’d sung “goddam”. Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee’s brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we’ve talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things — firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she’d have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more… spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn’t meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career — Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon’s band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson — who would produce most of Brown’s early records — listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan’s “So Long”. The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer — one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others — stopped the session and said “Wait a minute. Let’s go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!” And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by “Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon’s NBC Television Orchestra” “So Long” became a hit, and the followup “Teardrops From My Eyes” was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. “Teardrops From My Eyes” was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked — she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer — but it can’t be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn’t what she’d have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown “Teardrops From My Eyes”] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown’s recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated — to take black musicians who played or sang the more “sophisticated” (I don’t know if you can hear those air quotes, but they’re there…) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, this required a lot of work — Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song’s writer, and working out the arrangement — and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic’s ethos — making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren’t the best instrumentalists — the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. “Teardrops From My Eyes” became a million seller — Atlantic’s first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies — Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they’d want a million copies’ worth of royalties. But Brown’s biggest hit was her third number one, “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn’t do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask “the Ruth Brown who sings ‘Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’?” The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians’ union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn’t have to be union members. But “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn’t want to record the song originally — the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues — but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song’s influence, for example, in “Work With Me Annie” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: “Work With Me Annie”, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song’s greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine — or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists — in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children “she was our Aretha Franklin”, and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as “the house that Ruth Brown built”, but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate — at least for those who didn’t write their own material — got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again — not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records — like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself — it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn’t just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money — and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who’ve fallen on hard times — often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that’s not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything — it’s very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it’s still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off… Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven't talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I've used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown's R&B work -- this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I've often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as "the blues" as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you'd expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn't have been more blues inspired. For the story of "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation -- he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was "One Dime Blues", which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt "One Dime Blues" by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they're not. A substantial proportion of McTell's recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that's very different from the songs he normally played -- while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn't know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren't in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it -- and it's something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There's a reason why I call this podcast "A History of Rock Music..." rather than "THE History of Rock Music..." -- the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like "The Boll Weevil" and "Amazing Grace", because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience -- imagine you're a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You've been playing the clubs for several years, you've got a repertoire of songs you've written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like "All Things Bright and Beautiful". You probably could perform those, but you'd be wondering why they wouldn't let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It's something we'll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn't want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos -- they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that's what he gave those audiences. But McTell's version of "One Dime Blues", retitled "Last Dime Blues", wasn't like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don't treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen -- she'd wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn't last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder's band, as so many early R&B stars we've discussed did, but that too didn't last long. Millinder's band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage... and Millinder said "I hired a singer, not a waitress -- you're fired. And besides, you don't sing well anyway". She was fired that day, and she had no money -- Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she'd had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab's sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab's sister, and that's probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother's career, and she'd recorded songs like this: [excerpt "Just a Crazy Song": Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother's breakout hit "Minnie The Moocher", which popularised the "Hi de hi, ho de ho" chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn't the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she's clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn't her only achievement by any means -- in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn't room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band's money and so she couldn't afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn't really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown's plight -- and impressed enough by her talent -- that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she'd earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure -- he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom -- a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown's performance -- impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We've talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race -- and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on -- but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist's proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic's first few records -- while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren't especially successful, but then in 1949 they released "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] That record is another of those which people refer to as "the first rock and roll record", and it was pure good luck for Atlantic -- McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different -- before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he'd sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing "mop mop" he'd sung "goddam". Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee's brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we've talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things -- firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she'd have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more... spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn't meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career -- Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon's band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson -- who would produce most of Brown's early records -- listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan's "So Long". The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer -- one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others -- stopped the session and said "Wait a minute. Let's go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!" And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by "Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon's NBC Television Orchestra" "So Long" became a hit, and the followup "Teardrops From My Eyes" was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. "Teardrops From My Eyes" was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked -- she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer -- but it can't be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn't what she'd have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown "Teardrops From My Eyes"] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown's recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated -- to take black musicians who played or sang the more "sophisticated" (I don't know if you can hear those air quotes, but they're there...) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of "Teardrops From My Eyes", this required a lot of work -- Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song's writer, and working out the arrangement -- and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic's ethos -- making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren't the best instrumentalists -- the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. "Teardrops From My Eyes" became a million seller -- Atlantic's first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies -- Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they'd want a million copies' worth of royalties. But Brown's biggest hit was her third number one, "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn't do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask "the Ruth Brown who sings 'Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean'?" The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians' union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn't have to be union members. But "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn't want to record the song originally -- the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues -- but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of "Teardrops From My Eyes", turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song's influence, for example, in "Work With Me Annie" by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: "Work With Me Annie", Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song's greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine -- or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists -- in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children "she was our Aretha Franklin", and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as "the house that Ruth Brown built", but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate -- at least for those who didn't write their own material -- got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again -- not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records -- like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself -- it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn't just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money -- and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who've fallen on hard times -- often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that's not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything -- it's very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it's still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off... Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

April's show is again packed with new releases and exclusive previews of upcoming tunes. Includes the revival of the Blue Cover series 2.0 and a new EP from one half of The Gentlemen Callers of LA, Atom Smith. More from the Swingrowers new album, the return of Brazilian DJ collective Shaka, news of summer festivals and Island Records’ Vintage Remix imprint, not to mention a new electro swing EP from Jenova Collective.----------------Swingrowers - Healing Dance (Freshly Squeezed)Shaka - Ultrafunk (Freshly Squeezed)Atom Smith - Girl Looking Good (Freshly Squeezed)Swingrowers - Here to Stay (Freshly Squeezed)Timewarp Inc feat Tasos - Fotiou (Timewarp)Monetrik - Barbeque (White Label)Swingrowers - Selfie Face (Freshly Squeezed)Dean Frazier - Dick Tracey (Island)Kiko Bun - Sticky Situation (Island)Jazzotron - My Revolution (Pre Release Demo!) (Freshly Squeezed)PiSk - Minnie The Moocher (Freshly Squeezed)The Swing Bot - Coquette (Freshly Squeezed)Jenova Collective - Paradise Syndrome (Freshly Squeezed)Jenova Collective - Original Sensei (Freshly Squeezed)Head over to Freshly Squeezed Music for more news...

The last show of 2017 comes with a no-seasonal-music guarantee! Instead we bring you a more than usually eclectic range of sounds from downtempo psychedelic soul to vintage voodoo mambo.Includes brand new or forthcoming releases from our own Freshly Squeezed label, Island’s Vintage Remix imprint, Jazzman Records and many more. Fresh. Independent. Quality. No exceptions.----------------Tankus the Henge - You Can Do Anything (White Label)Grinny Grandad - Keep Your Hands To Yourself [ft Kymberley Kennedy] (Freshly Squeezed)12 Stone Toddler - Twang (Amazon)Klischée - Mais Non (1920 Version) (Deep Dive)Grinny Grandad - Blue Elephant (Freshly Squeezed)Flipron - The Flatpack Bride of Possibilities (Tiny Dog)The Cat Empire - Voodoo Cowboy (Two Shoes Record)incontroL - my mother is dead (Bandcamp)Chuz Alfred and His Combo - Caravan (Jazzman)Jem Stone vs Manouche - Bin Thinkin (Bandcamp)PiSk - Minnie The Moocher (Freshly Squeezed)Swing Republic - Long Legs (Freshly Squeezed)Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames - Yeh Yeh (Skeewiff Remix) (Vintage Remix)Head over to Freshly Squeezed Music for more news...

John Pyka Productions and BDC Entertainment presents The Dieselpunk Podcast - The Voice of Dieselpunk!   "Big Daddy Cool," Larry Daisy O'Dair, and Eric Fisk talk all things Dieselpunk! In this episode: Is Wonder Woman Dieselpunk? What IS Dieselpunk? Dieselpunk Appropriation Night Raid 1931 Wolfenstien II Like us on Face Book - www.facebook.com/dieselpoweredpodcast Follow us on Twitter - www.twitter.com/DieselPodcast   Theme song, "Minnie The Moocher" by Wolfgang Parker, used by permission. 

John Pyka Productions and BDC Entertainment presents The Dieselpunk Podcast - The Voice of Dieselpunk!   "Big Daddy Cool," Larry Amyett, Daisy O'Dair, and Eric Fisk talk all things Dieselpunk, and Johnny FINALLY shares his thoughts about The Man In The High Castle!   Like us on Face Book - www.facebook.com/dieselpoweredpodcast Follow us on Twitter - www.twitter.com/DieselPodcast   Theme song, "Minnie The Moocher" by Wolfgang Parker, used by permission. 

Wily Bo Walker, (Wile -Eee) is a solo artist and performer noted for his characterful vocals and swaggering 'live' performances. He is also the frontman with both ‘Rattlin Bone’ and ‘The Mescal Canyon Troubadours’. Wily Bo works across many styles and genres; blues, soul, jazz, alternative, indie, rock and adult contemporary.Having just finished working on his album 'Wily Bo Walker & The Danny Flam Big Band' (Nov 2013), Wily Bo is currently working on a solo album 'Moon Over Indigo' with Grammy Award winning musician and arranger, Danny Flam and a host of talented musicians spanning a network of musicians across the globe.Wily Bo is also working with vocalist and songwriter, Kareña K, on their own separate album; 'A Long Way From Heaven'.Wily Bo is the frontman (and performer of legend!!!) with Rattlin Bone. 

Big Band Serenade presents Cab Calloway and His Orchestra 1933-1953  The music in this program is listed in order of play;1) "Minnie The Moocher" 2) "Chinese Rhythm" 19343) "Father's Got His Glasses Off" Cab Calloway & His Orchestra w/ Edwin Swayze  19334) "Jes' Natch'ully Lazy" 1936 5) "Harlem Camp Meeting" Cab Calloway & His Orchestra w/ Harold White 19336) "Dawn Time" 19457) "Ogeechee River Lullaby" 19428) "Deep In A Dream"  19389) "Queen Isabel" 193710) "I'll Get By" Cab Calloway & 4 Belles 1953