Podcasts about Monument Records

Welcome back to this week's episode of Diving In Deep! In this episode Sara welcomes the incredibly talented Walker Hayes! In this heartfelt conversation, Walker shares his remarkable life story, including the challenges he faced as a father of six, and the profound impact of losing his daughter, Oakley.Discover how this tragedy shaped his faith and transformed his perspective on life, family, and music. Walker opens up about his journey to sobriety, the struggles of navigating grief, and the importance of vulnerability in relationships.They also dive into the music industry, discussing Walker's rise to fame, his hit songs like "Fancy Like." With a blend of humor and honesty, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of personal struggles and artistic expression.Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment to support the podcast!Listen to Unbroke: (https://ffm.to/seunbroke).About Walker Hayes:Walker Hayes is an American country pop singer and songwriter from Mobile, Alabama. He has released four studio albums: Reason to Rhyme in 2011 on Capitol Records Nashville as well as Boom, Country Stuff the Album, and New Money on Monument Records. Hayes won the “Top Country Song” award for his song “Fancy Like” at the Billboard Music Awards in 2022. He has also been nominated for several other awards throughout his career. Those awards include but aren't limited to Breakthrough Video of the Year award at the CMT Awards, Favorite Breakout Artist at the Kid's Choice Awards, and Top Country Album at the Billboard Music Awards.LET'S BE SOCIAL:Follow Walker Hayes:Instagram - (@walkerhayes)Facebook - (@Walker Hayes)TikTok - (@walkerhayesofficial)X - (@walkerhayes)Follow Diving in Deep Podcast:Instagram –(@divingindeeppod)TikTok – (@divingindeeppod)X – (@divingindeeppod)Facebook – (@divingindeeppod)Follow Sara Evans:Instagram – (@saraevansmusic)TikTok – (@saraevansmusic)Twitter – (@saraevansmusic)Facebook – (@saraevansmusic)Produced and Edited by: The Cast Collective (Nashville, TN)YouTube – (‪@TheCastCollective‬)Instagram – (@TheCastCollective)Twitter – (@TheCastCollective)Directed by: Erin DuganEdited By: Sean Dugan, Corey Williams, & Michaela Dolphhttps://www.thecastcollective.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shelby Lynne's voice resonates with hard-won wisdom and the unseen scars of love and loss. After returning home to Nashville after years in Palm Springs, CA, she and a core unit of talented women collaborated on her stunning new album, Consequences of the Crown which her new label (Monument Records) accurately describes as "a haunting exploration of the labyrinth of human pain that emerges with grace." The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music.  Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, visit RecordStoreDay.com)   Sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (dogfish.com), Tito's Handmade Vodka (titosvodka.com), RSDMRKT.com, and Furnace Record Pressing, the official vinyl pressing plant of Record Store Day.   Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.

You may have heard of Monument Records recording artist Walker Hayes from his hit “Fancy Like” which topped every country music sales and streaming chart, spent more than six months at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot Country Songs Chart and also gave Walker his first GRAMMY Award nomination as an artist for Best Country Song. Another thing you may or may not know, is that Walker had his own struggles with Alcohol and through his success is now sharing this journey on his most recent project, Sober Thoughts. Walker finds himself where he so often does – letting fans into his world in a way only he can do. Hayes has always written about his personal experiences from a place of deep authenticity and, sometimes brutal, truth – sharing his fears, insecurities, and demons with the world. We watch him do this on “AA” where he was struggling to stay sober after a whirlwind year, or on “Beer in the Fridge” when he sings “guess I've got to live without you now, cause I couldn't live without that beer in the fridge” during a particularly difficult time where he and his wife Laney were struggling with his addiction. But really, what Walker does with his music, is make people feel seen. This has never been truer than on new single “Same Drunk,” where he sings that everyone is dealing with something and were all in it together. Walker has performed his music, including the Double-Platinum RIAA certified hit “You Broke Up With Me,” to national audiences on Good Morning America, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and TODAY, and he was profiled for CBS Sunday Morning. He just announced his next headlining tour, The Same Drunk Tour, which follows his last arena tours The Duck Buck Tour and the Glad You're Here Tour. The Glad You're Here Tour is the same title as the book Hayes released in 2022 with his best friend, Craig Allen Cooper, detailing his journey to finding Christ.    IG - @walkerhayes https://www.walkerhayes.com/   Tired of Drinking? Try Our 30 Day Quit Drinking Dude Challenge!  Follow us on Instagram @ThatSoberGuyPodcast Work with Shane 1 on 1 Coaching - https://www.thatsoberguy.com/coaching Join Us in That Sober Guy Men's Locals Group and connect with over 500 men living free from alcohol at  https://www.thatsoberguy.com/mens-group For More Resources go to http://www.ThatSoberGuy.com Invite Shane to Speak - https://www.thatsoberguy.com/speaking Contact Us: https://www.thatsoberguy.com/contactus Music - Going Late courtesy of Humans & Haven Sounds Inc. Need a Meeting? https://www.thatsoberguy.com/meetings National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1-800-273-TALK (8255)  

We are delighted to present this mix by D-Leria, and, at the same time, announce his album with Monument Records - Multiverso. Much like the album, this mix takes on a wild ride of abstract soundscapes complex rhythms and intricate sound design. Guaranteed to make you sweat. Multiverso is ready to be pre-ordered now via Bandcamp, and will see the light of day at the end of April. Follow: https://mnmt.bandcamp.com/album/multiverso @d-leria www.facebook.com/D.Leria.official www.instagram.com/giuseppe_di_leria/

Today we launch a new mix with Italo/Iranian DJ and producer Sciahri, to mark the release of his brand new EP on Monument Records "Stranger Infatuation." Sciahri has been meandering throughout the spectrum of Techno ever since his 2014 debut EP on Ilian Tape. He has since released on some of the most influential labels, such as Opal Tapes, Manhigh, Semantica, Mord, and, in parallel, via his own outlet Sublunar Records since 2017. More recently in 2022 he started a live project focused on ambient/ experimental Techno, with a world premiere at the Tehran Contemporary Sounds festival. Since 2023, he has been resident at his hometown club Warehouse303. Tune in now and be sure to also check out Stranger Infatuation - out now. https://soundcloud.com/sciahri https://www.facebook.com/Sciahri/ https://www.instagram.com/sciahri__sublunar/ https://mnmt.bandcamp.com/album/sciahri-stranger-infatuation

Alex Hall and I talk about his fatherhood journey. We talk about the values he looks to instill into his son as he grows up. He also discusses how tough it was to start a family during the pandemic. In addition, Alex shares how fatherhood made him realize what is really important in his life. After that we talk about his music career. He talks about his album Side Effects of the Heart. Lastly, we finish the interview with the Fatherhood Quick Five.  About Alex Hall When Alex was in high school, he was playing over 150 shows a year. After graduation, Hall moved to Nashville, TN and signed with Monument Records. After that, he opened for Tanya Tucker. He hit the road with Brandy Clark, Little Big Town, and Tenille Townes. During that time, his debut EP on Monument Records, Six Strings, was a guitar focused project. Additionally, it featured the playing and vocal stylings of Hall's heroes and friends. Those heroes included Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, and more. Alex and his wife have one son. Follow Alex on Twitter and Instagram at @MusicByAlexHall. Make sure you check out all of his music, like his new album, Side Effects of the Heart. You can do this at his website, www.musicbyalexhall.com.  Beli Is This Week's Sponsor  Attention all dads-to-be! It's time to supercharge your journey to fatherhood with Beli Prenatal for Men. Why Beli? Because sperm counts and you are 50% of the pregnancy equation. This is your legacy so why not bring the best genes you can to the whole baby making process. It's an easy way to support your partner, optimize your fertility, promote healthy sperm, and give your future (little) you a great start to life. Visit belibaby.com now and get ready to rock the adventure of fatherhood with Beli by your side. Beli, where fatherhood truly begins. About The Art of Fatherhood Podcast  The Art of Fatherhood Podcast follows the journey of fatherhood. Your host, Art Eddy talks with fantastic dads from all around the world where they share their thoughts on fatherhood. Therefore you get a unique perspective on fatherhood. You get to hear from guests like Joe Montana, Kevin Smith, Danny Trejo, Jerry Rice, Jeff Foxworthy, Patrick Warburton, Jeff Kinney, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Kyle Busch, Dennis Quaid, Dwight Freeney and many more.

Coming from our nation's capital, Monument provided us with the Roy Orbison hit-making machine. Hit after hit from the Big O, while he also made the label for what it would become to be, when he discovered 4 high school students and their teacher Virgil Johnson who would later become the Velvets, and he introduced them to the label. You'll also hear the label's very first release hit "Gotta Travel On" by Billy Grammar, the original "Tobacco Road" by Bobby Brinkley and you'll end up dancing the "Shag", all guaranteed!

Teddy Robb Interview - From Football to Country Music Thank goodness his football career didn't work out and he chose country music! After years of playing in Nashville Honky Tonk's, Teddy Robb sealed the deal with Monument Records in 2018. He has opened for Luke combs, Jordan Davis, Hardy and has performed on NBC's Today Show. His latest single, "Pretty Things" is out now! Watch Teddy Robb perform Pretty Things at the Up N Country Studio - ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCE: https://youtu.be/yMq7II0z5kw http://www.teddyrobb.com https://upncountry.com Marketing & PR for Country Artists: https://bonzellmedia.com Hosted by Sue Bonzell Executive Producer: Sue Bonzell Filmed and produced by: vLiveCast https://vlivecast.com Camera, Sound & Lighting: Ryan Perry, vLiveCast Get the cool Up N Country MERCH Here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/CowChairCountry/explore?asc=u&page=1&sortOrder=recent Check out the Spotify Playlist for all the best NEW COUNTRY! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6raY92bakZGjjAY9OnEeg7?si=be4f50f7a6304609 #newcountry #lovecountry #upncountry

Originally from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Pete has been a songwriter in Nashville since 2009. When Pete was a child, his father wrote and sang country songs. Eventually, Pete started playing around with his father's recording equipment, ultimately developing a love of music that brought him to Nashville. He has written for artists such as Tim McGraw, Darius Rucker, Walker Hayes, Rascal Flatts, Alana Springsteen, Trea Landon, Jerrod Niemann and more. Most recently, Pete produced Monument recording artist Brandon Ratcliff's debut EP, due in 2019. He had the debut singles “Rockin' All Night Long” from UMG Nashville's Adam Hambrick and “Rules of Breaking Up” from Monument Records' Brandon Ratcliff, the latter of whose debut album he produced. Some of Good's recent cuts include “Truth Is” by Tim McGraw, “Quick, Fast, In A Hurry” by Rascal Flatts and Rachel Wammack, “Black Sheep” by Walker Hayes, “Last One To Leave” by Alex Hall featuring Brad Paisley, and “Girlfriend” by Alana Springsteen. We are also honored that Pete's good friend, Matt Stange, graces us with his co-host skills as Mr. Ryan Konz was busy being a husband and dad! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mandate/message

Label: Monument 851Year: 1964Condition: M-Last Price: $40.00. Not currently available for sale.Both sides of this classic 45 are credited to Roy Orbison and The Candy Men. It's worth noting that this single is on both the Dave Marsh (#39) and Rolling Stone magazine's (#224) "top 45s" lists. An essential single for a complete collection, for sure ... and this is perhaps the nicest, reference-Mint copy I've run across yet. This copy's audio is so gorgeous I had to make an mp3 file for the "jukebox"... so have a listen! Nothing like the audio on this original 45. I wish Orbison had actually joined a band like the Candymen. He needed a great rock band behind him, but never really found one until the Traveling Wilbury's sessions shortly before he died. Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Monument Records factory sleeve. It has pristine Mint sound. (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)

Walker Hayes is a Grammy nominated singer/songwriter originally from Mobile, Alabama, signed to Monument Records. Throughout his career, he has released multi-Platinum singles "Fancy Like" and "You Broke Up With Me," performed on national television with Good Morning America, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and The TODAY Show, and has been written about in the LA Times, Esquire, Billboard and Rolling Stone. His single "Craig" -- a song about a neighbor who reached out to Hayes in a time of need -- was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2018 AIMP Nashville Awards and prompted Hayes to start the Be a Craig Fund to help other families during their own times of need. A new version of the track featuring MercyMe is on Hayes' forthcoming album Country Stuff the Album. The song inspired this book. Craig Cooper is a gifted storyteller and Bible teacher. For over twenty years, he has spoken at numerous churches, men's retreats, college campuses, and various gatherings. He has traveled across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia with a desire to see and serve the world. An encourager at heart, Craig's passion is to help people perceive the gifts of God in their lives and deploy them for Jesus' glory. Having served as one of the founding pastors of Redeeming Grace Church in Franklin, Tennessee, Craig now resides in the greater Nashville area with his amazing wife, Laura, and their four kids as next-door neighbors to the Hayes family. You can follow Craig on Instagram @craigallencooper and for more information or for speaking inquiries, please visit craigallencooper.com. Visit to purchase their new book. Check out Bob's new book ‘Undistracted' here

Walker Hayes is a Grammy nominated singer/songwriter originally from Mobile, Alabama, signed to Monument Records. Throughout his career, he has released multi-Platinum singles "Fancy Like" and "You Broke Up With Me," performed on national television with Good Morning America, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and The TODAY Show, and has been written about in the LA Times, Esquire, Billboard and Rolling Stone. His single "Craig" -- a song about a neighbor who reached out to Hayes in a time of need -- was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2018 AIMP Nashville Awards and prompted Hayes to start the Be a Craig Fund to help other families during their own times of need. A new version of the track featuring MercyMe is on Hayes' forthcoming album Country Stuff the Album. The song inspired this book. Craig Cooper is a gifted storyteller and Bible teacher. For over twenty years, he has spoken at numerous churches, men's retreats, college campuses, and various gatherings. He has traveled across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia with a desire to see and serve the world. An encourager at heart, Craig's passion is to help people perceive the gifts of God in their lives and deploy them for Jesus' glory. Having served as one of the founding pastors of Redeeming Grace Church in Franklin, Tennessee, Craig now resides in the greater Nashville area with his amazing wife, Laura, and their four kids as next-door neighbors to the Hayes family. You can follow Craig on Instagram @craigallencooper and for more information or for speaking inquiries, please visit craigallencooper.com. Visit to purchase their new book. Check out Bob's new book ‘Undistracted' here

CHARLIE McCOY is a Grammy-winning American session musician, harmonica player, and multi-instrumentalist. In 2009, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Based in Nashville, McCoy's playing is heard on recordings by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings and Loretta Lynn. He has recorded thirty-seven studio albums, including fourteen for Monument Records. Thirteen of his singles have entered the Billboard country charts. He was a member of Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry. In 2007, McCoy was inducted into the International Musicians Hall of Fame as a part a group of session musicians dubbed "The Nashville A-Team" --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rick-flynn/support

We continue our pod celebration with Part 2 of our Anniversary Quadrilogy. This time we hit our hormone fueled teenage years and we pick songs from the 90s!We begin by discussing the beginnings of playing music, then head into some grunge, and end with a bluegrass leaning pop country tune.Stay tuned to part 3 which will be released next week where we tackle the 2000s!Our songs for this week:My Wave by Soundgarden, from their 1994 album Superunknown released via A&M Records .Sin Wagon by by The Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks), from their 1999 album Fly released via Monument Records.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/2songs1couple)

Happy Halloween! On this week's episode, Peter and Sam share a few spooky stories, and swap songs that are dark and macabre.WARNING: Explicit content! Well, there's explicit content every week, but in particular we speak a bit about domestic abuse as well as a truly vile cannibal true crime story.Our songs for this week:Goodbye Earl by The Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks), from their 1999 album Fly released via Monument Records.Eaten by Bloodbath, from their 2004 album Nightmares Made Flesh released via Century Media Records.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/2songs1couple)

...hits and treasures from the most successful record label you've never heard of...

Episode 134 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “In the Midnight Hour", the links between Stax, Atlantic, and Detroit, and the career of Wilson Pickett. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Mercy Mercy" by Don Covay. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say “After Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records” – I meant to say “Dot Records” here, the label that Alexander moved to *before* Monument. I also misspeak at one point and say "keyboard player Chips Moman", when I mean to say "keyboard player Spooner Oldham". This is correct in the transcript/script, I just misread it. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Pickett. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Wilson Pickett was In the Midnight Hour: The Life and Soul of Wilson Pickett. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. The episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I reference are the ones on Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team. And information on the Falcons comes from Marv Goldberg. Pickett's complete Atlantic albums can be found in this excellent ten-CD set. For those who just want the hits, this single-CD compilation is significantly cheaper. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start, just to say that this episode contains some discussion of domestic abuse, drug use, and abuse of employees by their employer, and one mention of an eating disorder. Also, this episode is much longer than normal, because we've got a lot to fit in. Today we're going to move away from Motown, and have a look at a record recorded in the studios of their great rival Stax records, though not released on that label. But the record we're going to look at is from an artist who was a bridge between the Detroit soul of Motown and the southern soul of Stax, an artist who had a foot in both camps, and whose music helped to define soul while also being closer than that of any other soul man to the music made by the white rock musicians of the period. We're going to look at Stax, and Muscle Shoals, and Atlantic Records, and at Wilson Pickett and "In the Midnight Hour" [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett: "In the Midnight Hour"] Wilson Pickett never really had a chance. His father, Wilson senior, was known in Alabama for making moonshine whisky, and spent time in prison for doing just that -- and his young son was the only person he told the location of his still. Eventually, Wilson senior moved to Detroit to start earning more money, leaving his family at home at first. Wilson junior and his mother moved up to Detroit to be with his father, but they had to leave his older siblings in Alabama, and his mother would shuttle between Michigan and Alabama, trying vainly to look after all her children. Eventually, Wilson's mother got pregnant while she was down in Alabama, which broke up his parents' marriage, and Wilson moved back down to Alabama permanently, to live on a farm with his mother. But he never got on with his mother, who was physically abusive to him -- as he himself would later be to his children, and to his partners, and to his bandmates. The one thing that Wilson did enjoy about his life in Alabama was the gospel music, and he became particularly enamoured of two gospel singers, Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Blind Boys, "Will My Jesus Be Waiting?"] And Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales: [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "God's World Will Never Pass Away"] Wilson determined to become a gospel singer himself, but he couldn't stand living with his mother in rural Alabama, and decided to move up to be with his father and his father's new girlfriend in Detroit.  Once he moved to Detroit, he started attending Northwestern High School, which at the time was also being attended by Norman Whitfield, Florence Ballard, and Melvin Franklin. Pickett also became friendly with Aretha Franklin, though she didn't attend the same school -- she went to school at Northern, with Smokey Robinson -- and he started attending services at New Bethel Church, the church where her father preached. This was partly because Rev. Franklin was one of the most dynamic preachers around, but also because New Bethel Church would regularly feature performances by the most important gospel performers of the time -- Pickett saw the Soul Stirrers perform there, with Sam Cooke singing lead, and of course also saw Aretha singing there. He joined a few gospel groups, first joining one called the Sons of Zion, but he was soon poached by a more successful group, the Violinaires. It was with the Violinaires that he made what is almost certainly his first recording -- a track that was released as a promo single, but never got a wide release at the time: [Excerpt: The Violinaires, "Sign of the Judgement"] The Violinaires were only moderately successful on the gospel circuit, but Pickett was already sure he was destined for bigger things. He had a rivalry with David Ruffin, in particular, constantly mocking Ruffin and saying that he would never amount to anything, while Wilson Pickett was the greatest. But after a while, he realised that gospel wasn't where he was going to make his mark. Partly his change in direction was motivated by financial concern -- he'd physically attacked his father and been kicked out of his home, and he was also married while still a teenager, and had a kid who needed feeding. But also, he was aware of a certain level of hypocrisy among his more religious acquaintances. Aretha Franklin had two kids, aged only sixteen, and her father, the Reverend Franklin, had fathered a child with a twelve-year-old, was having an affair with the gospel singer Clara Ward, and was hanging around blues clubs all the time. Most importantly, he realised that the audiences he was singing to in church on Sunday morning were mostly still drunk from Saturday night. As he later put it "I might as well be singing rock 'n' roll as singing to a drunken audience. I might as well make me some money." And this is where the Falcons came in. The Falcons were a doo-wop group that had been formed by a Black singer, Eddie Floyd, and a white singer, Bob Manardo. They'd both recruited friends, including bass singer Willie Schofield, and after performing locally they'd decided to travel to Chicago to audition for Mercury Records. When they got there, they found that you couldn't audition for Mercury in Chicago, you had to go to New York, but they somehow persuaded the label to sign them anyway -- in part because an integrated group was an unusual thing. They recorded one single for Mercury, produced by Willie Dixon who was moonlighting from Chess: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Baby That's It"] But then Manardo was drafted, and the group's other white member, Tom Shetler, decided to join up along with him. The group went through some other lineup changes, and ended up as Eddie Floyd, Willie Schofield, Mack Rice, guitarist Lance Finnie, and lead singer Joe Stubbs, brother of Levi. The group released several singles on small labels owned by their manager, before having a big hit with "You're So Fine", the record we heard about them recording last episode: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "You're So Fine"] That made number two on the R&B charts and number seventeen on the pop charts. They recorded several follow-ups, including "Just For Your Love", which made number 26 on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Just For Your Love"] To give you some idea of just how interrelated all the different small R&B labels were at this point, that was originally recorded and released on Chess records. But as Roquel Davis was at that point working for Chess, he managed to get the rights to reissue it on Anna Records, the label he co-owned with the Gordy sisters -- and the re-released record was distributed by Gone Records, one of George Goldner's labels. The group also started to tour supporting Marv Johnson. But Willie Schofield was becoming dissatisfied. He'd written "You're So Fine", but he'd only made $500 from what he was told was a million-selling record. He realised that in the music business, the real money was on the business side, not the music side, so while staying in the Falcons he decided he was going to go into management too. He found the artist he was going to manage while he was walking to his car, and heard somebody in one of the buildings he passed singing Elmore James' then-current blues hit "The Sky is Crying": [Excerpt: Elmore James, "The Sky is Crying"] The person he heard singing that song, and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, was of course Wilson Pickett, and Schofield signed him up to a management contract -- and Pickett was eager to sign, knowing that Schofield was a successful performer himself. The intention was at first that Schofield would manage Pickett as a solo performer, but then Joe Stubbs got ideas above his station, and started insisting that the group be called "Joe Stubbs and the Falcons", which put the others' backs up, and soon Stubbs was out of the group. This experience may have been something that his brother later had in mind -- in the late sixties, when Motown started trying to promote groups as Lead Singer and The Group, Levi Stubbs always refused to allow his name to go in front of the Four Tops. So the Falcons were without a lead singer. They tried a few other singers in their circle, including Marvin Gaye, but were turned down. So in desperation, they turned to Pickett. This wasn't a great fit -- the group, other than Schofield, thought that Pickett was "too Black", both in that he had too much gospel in his voice, and literally in that he was darker-skinned than the rest of the group (something that Schofield, as someone who was darker than the rest of the group but less dark than Pickett, took offence at). Pickett, in turn, thought that the Falcons were too poppy, and not really the kind of thing he was at all interested in doing. But they were stuck with each other, and had to make the most of it, even though Pickett's early performances were by all accounts fairly dreadful. He apparently came in in the wrong key on at least one occasion, and another time froze up altogether and couldn't sing. Even when he did sing, and in tune, he had no stage presence, and he later said “I would trip up, fall on the stage and the group would rehearse me in the dressing room after every show. I would get mad, ‘cos I wanted to go out and look at the girls as well! They said, ‘No, you got to rehearse, Oscar.' They called me Oscar. I don't know why they called me Oscar, I didn't like that very much.” Soon, Joe Stubbs was back in the group, and there was talk of the group getting rid of Pickett altogether. But then they went into the studio to record a song that Sam Cooke had written for the group, "Pow! You're in Love". The song had been written for Stubbs to sing, but at the last minute they decided to give Pickett the lead instead: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Pow! You're in Love"] Pickett was now secure as the group's lead singer, but the group weren't having any success with records. They were, though, becoming a phenomenal live act -- so much so that on one tour, where James Brown was the headliner, Brown tried to have the group kicked off the bill, because he felt that Pickett was stealing his thunder. Eventually, the group's manager set up his own record label, Lu Pine Records, which would become best known as the label that released the first record by the Primettes, who later became the Supremes.  Lu Pine released the Falcons' single "I Found a Love",   after the group's management had first shopped it round to other labels to try to get them to put it out: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] That song, based on the old Pentecostal hymn "Yes Lord", was written by Pickett and Schofield, but the group's manager, Robert West, also managed to get his name on the credits. The backing group, the Ohio Untouchables, would later go on to become better known as The Ohio Players. One of the labels that had turned that record down was Atlantic Records, because Jerry Wexler hadn't heard any hit potential in the song. But then the record started to become successful locally, and Wexler realised his mistake. He got Lu Pine to do a distribution deal with Atlantic, giving Atlantic full rights to the record, and it became a top ten R&B hit. But by this point, Pickett was sick of working with the Falcons, and he'd decided to start trying for a solo career. His first solo single was on the small label Correc-Tone, and was co-produced by Robert Bateman, and featured the Funk Brothers as instrumental backing, and the Primettes on vocals. I've seen some claims that the Andantes are on there too, but I can't make them out -- but I can certainly make out the future Supremes: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Let Me Be Your Boy"] That didn't do anything, and Pickett kept recording with the Falcons for a while, as well as putting out his solo records. But then Willie Schofield got drafted, and the group split up. Their manager hired another group, The Fabulous Playboys, to be a new Falcons group, but in 1964 he got shot in a dispute over the management of Mary Wells, and had to give up working in the music industry. Pickett's next single, which he co-wrote with Robert Bateman and Sonny Schofield, was to be the record that changed his career forever. "If You Need Me" once again featured the Funk Brothers and the Andantes, and was recorded for Correc-Tone: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "If You Need Me"] Jerry Wexler was again given the opportunity to put the record out on Atlantic, and once again decided against it. Instead, he offered to buy the song's publishing, and he got Solomon Burke to record it, in a version produced by Bert Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] Burke wasn't fully aware, when he cut that version, that Wilson Pickett, who was his friend, had recorded his own version. He became aware, though, when Double-L Records, a label co-owned by Lloyd Price, bought the Correc-Tone master and released Pickett's version nationally, at the same time as Burke's version came out. The two men were annoyed that they'd been put into unwitting competition, and so started an unofficial nonaggression pact -- every time Burke was brought into a radio station to promote his record, he'd tell the listeners that he was there to promote Wilson Pickett's new single. Meanwhile, when Pickett went to radio stations, he'd take the opportunity to promote the new record he'd written for his good friend Solomon Burke, which the listeners should definitely check out. The result was that both records became hits -- Pickett's scraped the lower reaches of the R&B top thirty, while Burke, as he was the bigger star, made number two on the R&B chart and got into the pop top forty. Pickett followed it up with a soundalike, "It's Too Late", which managed to make the R&B top ten as there was no competition from Burke. At this point, Jerry Wexler realised that he'd twice had the opportunity to release a record with Wilson Pickett singing, twice he'd turned the chance down, and twice the record had become a hit. He realised that it was probably a good idea to sign Pickett directly to Atlantic and avoid missing out. He did check with Pickett if Pickett was annoyed about the Solomon Burke record -- Pickett's response was "I need the bread", and Wilson Pickett was now an Atlantic artist. This was at the point when Atlantic was in something of a commercial slump -- other than the records Bert Berns was producing for the Drifters and Solomon Burke, they were having no hits, and they were regarded as somewhat old-fashioned, rooted in a version of R&B that still showed its roots in jazz, rather than the new sounds that were taking over the industry in the early sixties. But they were still a bigger label than anything else Pickett had recorded for, and he seized the opportunity to move into the big time. To start with, Atlantic teamed Pickett up with someone who seemed like the perfect collaborator -- Don Covay, a soul singer and songwriter who had his roots in hard R&B and gospel music but had written hits for people like Chubby Checker.  The two got together and recorded a song they wrote together, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)"] That did nothing commercially -- and gallingly for Pickett, on the same day, Atlantic released a single Covay had written for himself, "Mercy Mercy", and that ended up going to number one on the R&B chart and making the pop top forty. As "I'm Gonna Cry" didn't work out, Atlantic decided to try to change tack, and paired Pickett with their established hitmaker Bert Berns, and a duet partner, Tami Lyn, for what Pickett would later describe as "one of the weirdest sessions on me I ever heard in my life", a duet on a Mann and Weil song, "Come Home Baby": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett and Tami Lyn, "Come Home Baby"] Pickett later said of that track, "it didn't sell two records", but while it wasn't a hit, it was very popular among musicians -- a few months later Mick Jagger would produce a cover version of it on Immediate Records, with Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and the Georgie Fame brass section backing a couple of unknown singers: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] Sadly for Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, that didn't get past being issued as a promotional record, and never made it to the shops. Meanwhile, Pickett went out on tour again, substituting on a package tour for Clyde McPhatter, who had to drop out when his sister died. Also on the tour was Pickett's old bandmate from the Falcons, Mack Rice, now performing as Sir Mack Rice, who was promoting a single he'd just released on a small label, which had been produced by Andre Williams. The song had originally been called "Mustang Mama", but Aretha Franklin had suggested he call it "Mustang Sally" instead: [Excerpt: Sir Mack Rice, "Mustang Sally"] Pickett took note of the song, though he didn't record it just yet -- and in the meantime, the song was picked up by the white rock group The Young Rascals, who released their version as the B-side of their number one hit, "Good Lovin'": [Excerpt: The Young Rascals, "Mustang Sally"] Atlantic's problems with having hits weren't only problems with records they made themselves -- they were also having trouble getting any big hits with Stax records. As we discussed in the episode on "Green Onions", Stax were being distributed by Atlantic, and in 1963 they'd had a minor hit with "These Arms of Mine" by Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] But throughout 1964, while the label had some R&B success with its established stars, it had no real major breakout hits, and it seemed to be floundering a bit -- it wasn't doing as badly as Atlantic itself, but it wasn't doing wonderfully. It wasn't until the end of the year when the label hit on what would become its defining sound, when for the first time Redding collaborated with Stax studio guitarist and producer Steve Cropper on a song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] That record would point the way towards Redding's great artistic triumphs of the next couple of years, which we'll look at in a future episode. But it also pointed the way towards a possible future sound for Atlantic. Atlantic had signed a soul duo, Sam & Dave, who were wonderful live performers but who had so far not managed to translate those live performances to record. Jerry Wexler thought that perhaps Steve Cropper could help them do that, and made a suggestion to Jim Stewart at Stax -- Atlantic would loan out Sam & Dave to the label. They'd remain signed to Atlantic, but make their records at Stax studios, and they'd be released as Stax records. Their first single for Stax, "A Place Nobody Can Find", was produced by Cropper, and was written by Stax songwriter Dave Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "A Place Nobody Can Find"] That wasn't a hit, but soon Porter would start collaborating with another songwriter, Isaac Hayes, and would write a string of hits for the duo. But in order to formalise the loan-out of Sam and Dave, Atlantic also wanted to formalise their arrangement with Stax. Previously they'd operated on a handshake basis -- Wexler and Stewart had a mutual respect, and they simply agreed that Stax would give Atlantic the option to distribute their stuff. But now they entered into a formal, long-term contract, and for a nominal sum of one dollar, Jim Stewart gave Atlantic the distribution rights to all past Stax records and to all future records they released for the next few years. Or at least, Stewart *thought* that the agreement he was making was formalising the distribution agreement. What the contract actually said -- and Stewart never bothered to have this checked over by an entertainment lawyer, because he trusted Wexler -- was that Stax would, for the sum of one dollar, give Atlantic *permanent ownership* of all their records, in return. The precise wording was "You hereby sell, assign and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever and without any limitations or restrictions whatever, not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title and interest in and to each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon." Jerry Wexler would later insist that he had no idea that particular clause was in the contract, and that it had been slipped in there by the lawyers. Jim Stewart still thought of himself as the owner of an independent record label, but without realising it he'd effectively become an employee of Atlantic. Atlantic started to take advantage of this new arrangement by sending other artists down to Memphis to record with the Stax musicians. Unlike Sam and Dave, these would still be released as Atlantic records rather than Stax ones, and Jerry Wexler and Atlantic's engineer Tom Dowd would be involved  in the production, but the records would be made by the Stax team. The first artist to benefit from this new arrangement was Wilson Pickett, who had been wanting to work at Stax for a while, being a big fan of Otis Redding in particular. Pickett was teamed up with Steve Cropper, and together they wrote the song that would define Pickett's career. The seeds of "In the Midnight Hour" come from two earlier recordings. One is a line from his record with the Falcons, "I Found a Love": [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] The other is a line from a record that Clyde McPhatter had made with Billy Ward and the Dominoes back in 1951: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Do Something For Me"] Those lines about a "midnight hour" and "love come tumbling down" were turned into the song that would make Pickett's name, but exactly who did what has been the cause of some disagreement. The official story is that Steve Cropper took those lines and worked with Pickett to write the song, as a straight collaboration. Most of the time, though, Pickett would claim that he'd written the song entirely by himself, and that Cropper had stolen the credit for that and their other credited collaborations. But other times he would admit "He worked with me quite a bit on that one". Floyd Newman, a regular horn player at Stax, would back up Pickett, saying "Every artist that came in here, they'd have their songs all together, but when they leave they had to give up a piece of it, to a certain person. But this person, you couldn't be mad at him, because he didn't own Stax, Jim Stewart owned Stax. And this guy was doing what Jim Stewart told him to do, so you can't be mad at him." But on the other hand, Willie Schofield, who collaborated with Pickett on "I Found a Love", said of writing that "Pickett didn't have any chord pattern. He had a couple of lyrics. I'm working with him, giving him the chord change, the feel of it. Then we're going in the studio and I've gotta show the band how to play it because we didn't have arrangers. That's part of the songwriting. But he didn't understand. He felt he wrote the lyrics so that's it." Given that Cropper didn't take the writing credit on several other records he participated in, that he did have a consistent pattern of making classic hit records, that "In the Midnight Hour" is stylistically utterly different from Pickett's earlier work but very similar to songs like "Mr. Pitiful" cowritten by Cropper, and Pickett's longstanding habit of being dismissive of anyone else's contributions to his success, I think the most likely version of events is that Cropper did have a lot to do with how the song came together, and probably deserves his credit, but we'll never know for sure exactly what went on in their collaboration. Whoever wrote it, "In the Midnight Hour" became one of the all-time classics of soul: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] But another factor in making the record a success -- and in helping reinvent the Stax sound -- was actually Jerry Wexler. Wexler had started attending sessions at the Stax studios, and was astonished by how different the recording process was in the South. And Wexler had his own input into the session that produced "In the Midnight Hour". His main suggestion was that rather than play the complicated part that Cropper had come up with, the guitarist should simplify, and just play chords along with Al Jackson's snare drum. Wexler was enthusing about a new dance craze called the Jerk, which had recently been the subject of a hit record by a group called the Larks: [Excerpt: The Larks, "The Jerk"] The Jerk, as Wexler demonstrated it to the bemused musicians, involved accenting the second and fourth beats of the bar, and delaying them very slightly. And this happened to fit very well with the Stax studio sound. The Stax studio was a large room, with quite a lot of reverb, and the musicians played together without using headphones, listening to the room sound. Because of this, to stay in time, Steve Cropper had started taking his cue not just from the sound, but from watching Al Jackson's left hand going to the snare drum. This had led to him playing when he saw Jackson's hand go down on the two and four, rather than when the sound of the snare drum reached his ears -- a tiny, fraction-of-a-second, anticipation of the beat, before everyone would get back in sync on the one of the next bar, as Jackson hit the kick drum. This had in turn evolved into the whole group playing the backbeat with a fractional delay, hitting it a tiny bit late -- as if you're listening to the echo of those beats rather than to the beat itself. If anyone other than utterly exceptional musicians had tried this, it would have ended up as a car crash, but Jackson was one of the best timekeepers in the business, and many musicians would say that at this point in time Steve Cropper was *the* best rhythm guitarist in the world, so instead it gave the performances just enough sense of looseness to make them exciting. This slight delayed backbeat was something the musicians had naturally fallen into doing, but it fit so well with Wexler's conception of the Jerk that they started deliberately exaggerating it -- still only delaying the backbeat minutely, but enough to give the record a very different sound from anything that was out there: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] That delayed backbeat sound would become the signature sound of Stax for the next several years, and you will hear it on the run of classic singles they would put out for the next few years by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MGs, Eddie Floyd and others. The sound of that beat is given extra emphasis by the utter simplicity of Al Jackson's playing. Jackson had a minimalist drum kit, but played it even more minimally -- other than the occasional fill, he never hit his tom at all, just using the kick drum, snare, and hi-hat -- and the hi-hat was not even miced, with any hi-hat on the actual records just being the result of leakage from the other mics. But that simplicity gave the Stax records a power that almost no other records from the period had: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] "In the Midnight Hour" made number one on the R&B charts, and made number twenty-one on the pop charts, instantly turning Pickett from an also-ran into one of the major stars of soul music. The follow-up, a soundalike called "Don't Fight It", also made the top five on the R&B charts. At his next session, Pickett was reunited with his old bandmate Eddie Floyd. Floyd would soon go on to have his own hits at Stax, most notably with "Knock on Wood", but at this point he was working as a staff songwriter at Stax, coming up with songs like "Comfort Me" for Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "Comfort Me"] Floyd had teamed up with Steve Cropper, and they'd been... shall we say, "inspired"... by a hit for the Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789", written by Marvin Gaye, Gwen Gordy and Mickey Stevenson: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789"] Cropper and Floyd had come up with their own song, "634-5789", which Pickett recorded, and which became an even bigger hit than "In the Midnight Hour", making number thirteen on the pop charts as well as being Pickett's second R&B number one: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "634-5789"] At the same session, they cut another single. This one was inspired by an old gospel song, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do", recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe among others: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] The song was rewritten by Floyd, Cropper, and Pickett, and was also a moderate R&B hit, though nowhere as big as "634-5789": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] That would be the last single that Pickett recorded at Stax, though -- though the reasoning has never been quite clear. Pickett was, to put it as mildly as possible, a difficult man to work with, and he seems to have had some kind of falling out with Jim Stewart -- though Stewart always said that the problem was actually that Pickett didn't get on with the musicians. But the musicians disagree, saying they had a good working relationship -- Pickett was often an awful person, but only when drunk, and he was always sober in the studio. It seems likely, actually, that Pickett's move away from the Stax studios was more to do with someone else -- Pickett's friend Don Covay was another Atlantic artist recording at Stax, and Pickett had travelled down with him when Covay had recorded "See Saw" there: [Excerpt: Don Covay, "See Saw"] Everyone involved agreed that Covay was an eccentric personality, and that he rubbed Jim Stewart up the wrong way. There is also a feeling among some that Stewart started to resent the way Stax's sound was being used for Atlantic artists, like he was "giving away" hits, even though Stax's company got the publishing on the songs Cropper was co-writing, and he was being paid for the studio time. Either way, after that session, Atlantic didn't send any of its artists down to Stax, other than Sam & Dave, who Stax regarded as their own artists. Pickett would never again record at Stax, and possibly coincidentally once he stopped writing songs with Steve Cropper he would also never again have a major hit record with a self-penned song. But Jerry Wexler still wanted to keep working in Southern studios, and with Southern musicians, and so he took Pickett to FAME studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We looked, back in the episode on Arthur Alexander, at the start of FAME studios, but after Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records, Rick Hall had turned FAME into a home for R&B singers looking for crossover success. While Stax employed both Black and white musicians, FAME studios had an all-white rhythm section, with a background in country music, but that had turned out to be absolutely perfect for performers like the soul singer Joe Tex, who had himself started out in country before switching to soul, and who recorded classics like "Hold What You Got" at the studio: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "Hold What You Got"] That had been released on FAME's record label, and Jerry Wexler had been impressed and had told Rick Hall to call him the next time he thought he had a hit. When Hall did call Wexler, Wexler was annoyed -- Hall phoned him in the middle of a party. But Hall was insistent. "You said to call you next time I've got a hit, and this is a number one". Wexler relented and listened to the record down the phone. This is what he heard: [Excerpt: Percy Sledge, "When a Man Loves a Woman"] Atlantic snapped up "When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge, and it went to number one on the pop charts -- the first record from any of the Southern soul studios to do so. In Wexler's eyes, FAME was now the new Stax. Wexler had a bit of culture shock when working at FAME, as it was totally unlike anything he'd experienced before. The records he'd been involved with in New York had been mostly recorded by slumming jazz musicians, very technical players who would read the music from charts, and Stax had had Steve Cropper as de facto musical director, leading the musicians and working out their parts with them. By contrast, the process used at FAME, and at most of the other studios in what Charles Hughes describes as the "country-soul triangle" of Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Nashville, was the process that had been developed by Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team in Nashville (and for a fuller description of this, see the excellent episodes on Bradley and the A-Team in the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones). The musicians would hear a play through of the song by its writer, or a demo, would note down the chord sequences using the Nashville number system rather than a more detailed score, do a single run-through to get the balance right, and then record. Very few songs required a second take. For Pickett's first session at FAME, and most subsequent ones, the FAME rhythm section of keyboard player Spooner Oldham, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bass player Junior Lowe and drummer Roger Hawkins was augmented with a few other players -- Memphis guitarists Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill, and the horn section who'd played on Pickett's Stax records, moonlighting. And for the first track they recorded there, Wexler wanted them to do something that would become a signature trick for Pickett over the next couple of years -- record a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul record. Wexler's thinking was that the best way for Pickett to cross over to a white audience was to do songs that were familiar to them from white pop cover versions, but songs that had originated in Pickett's soul style. At the time, as well, the hard backbeat sound on Pickett's hits was one that was more associated with white rock music than with soul, as was the emphasis on rhythm guitar. To modern ears, Pickett's records are almost the definition of soul music, but at the time they were absolutely considered crossover records. And so in the coming months Pickett would record cover versions of Don Covay's "Mercy Mercy", Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", and Irma Thomas' "Time is on My Side", all of which had been previously covered by the Rolling Stones -- and two of which had their publishing owned by Atlantic's publishing subsidiary. For this single, though, he was recording a song which had started out as a gospel-inspired dance song by the R&B singer Chris Kenner: [Excerpt: Chris Kenner, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] That had been a minor hit towards the bottom end of the Hot One Hundred, but it had been taken up by a lot of other musicians, and become one of those songs everyone did as album filler -- Rufus Thomas had done a version at Stax, for example. But then a Chicano garage band called Cannibal and the Headhunters started performing it live, and their singer forgot the lyrics and just started singing "na na na na", giving the song a chorus it hadn't had in its original version. Their version, a fake-live studio recording, made the top thirty: [Excerpt: Cannibal and the Headhunters, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] Pickett's version was drastically rearranged, and included a guitar riff that Chips Moman had come up with, some new lyrics that Pickett introduced, and a bass intro that Jerry Wexler came up with, a run of semiquavers that Junior Lowe found very difficult to play. The musicians spent so long working on that intro that Pickett got annoyed and decided to take charge. He yelled "Come on! One-two-three!" and the horn players, with the kind of intuition that comes from working together for years, hit a chord in unison. He yelled "One-two-three!" again, and they hit another chord, and Lowe went into the bass part. They'd found their intro. They ran through that opening one more time, then recorded a take: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] At this time, FAME was still recording live onto a single-track tape, and so all the mistakes were caught on tape with no opportunity to fix anything, like when all but one of the horn players forget to come in on the first line of one verse: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] But that kind of mistake only added to the feel of the track, which became Pickett's biggest hit yet -- his third number one on the R&B chart, and his first pop top ten. As the formula of recording a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul song had clearly worked, the next single Pickett recorded was "Mustang Sally", which as we saw had originally been an R&B record by Pickett's friend Mack Rice, before being covered by the Young Rascals. Pickett's version, though, became the definitive version: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] But it very nearly wasn't. That was recorded in a single take, and the musicians went into the control room to listen to it -- and the metal capstan on the tape machine flew off while it was rewinding. The tape was cut into dozens of tiny fragments, which the machine threw all over the room in all directions. Everyone was horrified, and Pickett, who was already known for his horrific temper, looked as if he might actually kill someone. Tom Dowd, Atlantic's genius engineer who had been a physicist on the Manhattan Project while still a teenager, wasn't going to let something as minor as that stop him. He told everyone to take a break for half an hour, gathered up all the randomly-thrown bits of tape, and spliced them back together. The completed recording apparently has forty splices in it, which would mean an average of a splice every four seconds. Have a listen to this thirty-second segment and see if you can hear any at all: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] That segment has the one part where I *think* I can hear one splice in the whole track, a place where the rhythm hiccups very slightly -- and that might well just be the drummer trying a fill that didn't quite come off. "Mustang Sally" was another pop top thirty hit, and Wexler's crossover strategy seemed to have been proved right -- so much so that Pickett was now playing pretty much all-white bills. He played, for example, at Murray the K's last ever revue at the Brooklyn Paramount, where the other artists on the bill were Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Young Rascals, Al Kooper's Blues Project, Cream, and the Who. Pickett found the Who extremely unprofessional, with their use of smoke bombs and smashing their instruments, but they eventually became friendly. Pickett's next single was his version of "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", the Solomon Burke song that the Rolling Stones had also covered, and that was a minor hit, but his next few records after that didn't do particularly well. He did though have a big hit with his cover version of a song by a group called Dyke and the Blazers. Pickett's version of "Funky Broadway" took him to the pop top ten: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Funky Broadway"] It did something else, as well. You may have noticed that two of the bands on that Paramount bill were groups that get called "blue-eyed soul". "Soul" had originally been a term used for music made by Black people, but increasingly the term was being used by white people for their music, just as rock and roll and rhythm and blues before it had been picked up on by white musicians. And so as in those cases, Black musicians were moving away from the term -- though it would never be abandoned completely -- and towards a new slang term, "funk". And Pickett was the first person to get a song with "funk" in the title onto the pop charts. But that would be the last recording Pickett would do at FAME for a couple of years. As with Stax, Pickett was moved away by Atlantic because of problems with another artist, this time to do with a session with Aretha Franklin that went horribly wrong, which we'll look at in a future episode. From this point on, Pickett would record at American Sound Studios in Memphis, a studio owned and run by Chips Moman, who had played on many of Pickett's records. Again, Pickett was playing with an all-white house band, but brought in a couple of Black musicians -- the saxophone player King Curtis, and Pickett's new touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who had had a rough few years, being largely ostracised from the music community because of his relationship with Sam Cooke's widow. Womack wrote what might be Pickett's finest song, a song called "I'm in Love" which is a masterpiece of metrical simplicity disguised as complexity -- you could write it all down as being in straight four-four, but the pulse shifts and implies alternating bars of five and three at points: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm In Love"] Womack's playing on those sessions had two effects, one on music history and one on Pickett. The effect on music history was that he developed a strong working relationship with Reggie Young, the guitarist in the American Sound studio band, and Young and Womack learned each other's styles. Young would later go on to be one of the top country session guitarists, playing on records by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings and more, and he was using Womack's style of playing -- he said later "I didn't change a thing. I was playing that Womack style on country records, instead of the hillbilly stuff—it changed the whole bed of country music." The other effect, though, was a much more damaging one. Womack introduced Pickett to cocaine, and Pickett -- who was already an aggressive, violent, abusive, man, became much more so. "I'm in Love" went to number four on the R&B charts, but didn't make the pop top forty. The follow-up, a remake of "Stagger Lee", did decently on the pop charts but less well on the R&B charts. Pickett's audiences were diverging, and he was finding it more difficult to make the two come together. But he would still manage it, sporadically, throughout the sixties. One time when he did was in 1968, when he returned to Muscle Shoals and to FAME studios. In a session there, the guitarist was very insistent that Pickett should cut a version of the Beatles' most recent hit. Now obviously, this is a record that's ahead in our timeline, and which will be covered in a future episode, but I imagine that most of you won't find it too much of a spoiler when I tell you that "Hey Jude" by the Beatles was quite a big hit: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] What that guitarist had realised was that the tag of the song gave the perfect opportunity for ad-libbing. You all know the tag: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] And so on. That would be perfect for a guitar solo, and for Pickett to do some good soul shouting over. Neither Pickett nor Rick Hall were at all keen -- the Beatles record had only just dropped off number one, and it seemed like a ridiculous idea to both of them. But the guitarist kept pressing to do it, and by the time the other musicians returned from their lunch break, he'd convinced Pickett and Hall. The record starts out fairly straightforward: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] But it's on the tag when it comes to life. Pickett later described recording that part -- “He stood right in front of me, as though he was playing every note I was singing. And he was watching me as I sang, and as I screamed, he was screaming with his guitar.”: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] That was not Pickett's biggest hit, but it was one of the most influential. It made the career of the guitarist, Duane Allman, who Jerry Wexler insisted on signing to his own contract after that, and as Jimmy Johnson, the rhythm guitarist on the session said, "We realised then that Duane had created southern rock, in that vamp." It was big enough that Wexler pushed Pickett to record a whole series of cover versions of rock songs -- he put out versions of "Hey Joe", "Born to be Wild" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" -- the latter going back to his old technique of covering a white cover version of a Black record, as his version copied the Vanilla Fudge's arrangement rather than the Supremes' original. But these only had very minor successes -- the most successful of them was his version of "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. As the sixties turned into the seventies, Pickett continued having some success, but it was more erratic and less consistent. The worlds of Black and white music were drifting apart, and Pickett, who more than most had straddled both worlds, now found himself having success in neither. It didn't help that his cocaine dependency had made him into an egomaniac. At one point in the early seventies, Pickett got a residency in Las Vegas, and was making what by most standards was a great income from it. But he would complain bitterly that he was only playing the small room, not the big one in the same hotel, and that the artist playing the big room was getting better billing than him on the posters. Of course, the artist playing the big room was Elvis Presley, but that didn't matter to Pickett -- he thought he deserved to be at least that big. He was also having regular fights with his record label. Ahmet Ertegun used to tell a story -- and I'm going to repeat it here with one expletive cut out in order to get past Apple's ratings system. In Ertegun's words “Jerry Wexler never liked Crosby, Stills & Nash because they wanted so much freaking artistic autonomy. While we were arguing about this, Wilson Pickett walks in the room and comes up to Jerry and says, ‘Jerry,' and he goes, ‘Wham!' And he puts a pistol on the table. He says, ‘If that [Expletive] Tom Dowd walks into where I'm recording, I'm going to shoot him. And if you walk in, I'm going to shoot you. ‘Oh,' Jerry said. ‘That's okay, Wilson.' Then he walked out. So I said, ‘You want to argue about artistic autonomy?' ” As you can imagine, Atlantic were quite glad to get rid of Pickett when he decided he wanted to move to RCA records, who were finally trying to break into the R&B market. Unfortunately for Pickett, the executive who'd made the decision to sign him soon left the company, and as so often happens when an executive leaves, his pet project becomes the one that everyone's desperate to get rid of.  RCA didn't know how to market records to Black audiences, and didn't really try, and Pickett's voice was becoming damaged from all the cocaine use. He spent the seventies, and eighties going from label to label, trying things like going disco, with no success. He also went from woman to woman, beating them up, and went through band members more and more quickly as he attacked them, too. The guitarist Marc Ribot was in Pickett's band for a short time and said, (and here again I'm cutting out an expletive) " You can write about all the extenuating circumstances, and maybe it needs to be put in historical context, but … You know why guys beat women? Because they can. And it's abuse. That's why employers beat employees, when they can. I've worked with black bandleaders and white bandleaders who are respectful, courteous and generous human beings—and then I've worked with Wilson Pickett." He was becoming more and more paranoid. He didn't turn up for his induction in the rock and roll hall of fame, where he was scheduled to perform -- instead he hid in his house, scared to leave. Pickett was repeatedly arrested throughout this time, and into the nineties, spending some time in prison, and then eventually going into rehab in 1997 after being arrested for beating up his latest partner. She dropped the charges, but the police found the cocaine in his possession and charged him with that. After getting out, he apparently mellowed out somewhat and became much easier to get along with -- still often unpleasant, especially after he'd had a drink, which he never gave up, but far less violent and more easy-going than he had been. He also had something of a comeback, sparked by an appearance in the flop film Blues Brothers 2000. He recorded a blues album, It's Harder Now, and also guested on Adlib, the comeback duets album by his old friend Don Covay, singing with him and cowriting on several songs, including "Nine Times a Man": [Excerpt: Don Covay and Wilson Pickett, "Nine Times a Man"] It's Harder Now was a solid blues-based album, in the vein of similar albums from around that time by people like Solomon Burke, and could have led to Pickett having the same kind of late-career resurgence as Johnny Cash. It was nominated for a Grammy, but lost in the category for which it was nominated to Barry White. Pickett was depressed by the loss and just decided to give up making new music, and just played the oldies circuit until 2004, at which point he became too ill to continue. The duet with Covay would be the last time he went into the studio. The story of Pickett's last year or so is a painful one, with squabbles between his partner and his children over his power of attorney while he spent long periods in hospital, suffering from kidney problems caused by his alcoholism, and also at this point from bulimia, diabetes, and more. He was ill enough that he tried to make amends with his children and his ex-wife, and succeeded as well as anyone can in that situation. On the eighteenth of January 2006, two months before his sixty-fifth birthday, his partner took him to get his hair cut and his moustache shaped, so he'd look the way he wanted to look, they ate together at his assisted living facility, and prayed together, and she left around eleven o'clock that night. Shortly thereafter, Pickett had a heart attack and died, alone, some time close to the midnight hour.

On a special Live! episode of our show, we welcome back Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh of country music-duo Tigirlily. To say that Tigirlily is blowing up the charts would be an understatement. This year has seen them release hit after hit, including a career defining single: 'Somebody Does. The song debuted at #1 on the iTunes all-genre charts, and has since been streamed over 2 million times and has been featured on the Bobby Bones Show. Shortly after this release, Tigirlily signed with Monument Records and Smack Publishing. Tigirlily released their self-titled debut EP in July 2021 which charted at #2 on the iTunes Country Charts. Join us, as we chat with the sibling artists about everything from performing in lower Broadway and now arenas, the enduring connection with their fans and an in-depth look at 'Somebody Does', its history, impact and legacy. For more on Tigirlily, visit, www.tigirlily.com.

Dolly Parton is the first ever successful female singer-songwriter, writing over 3,000 songs. In this unique conversation about her writing process she describes her early days at Monument Records under the guidance of Fred Foster, turning down several requests to meet with Elvis and refusing his demand for a publishing credit on one of her biggest hits. She talks about her relationship with collaborators Porter Wagoner and Kenny Rogers, being mad at Linda Ronstadt for missing out a key lyric in one of her songs and the clause she gave Whitney Houston for the use of I Will Always Love You in The Bodyguard soundtrack. Dolly shares the stories behind her songs and the real events centred around her humble up-bringing. Plus she describes the opportunity to bring her songs to the stage for 9 To 5 The Musical and revisit the themes of the original movie in the #MeToo movement.

On this week's episode, Peter and Sam discuss a couple shows they have been watching  lately, the comfort we find in our rituals, and the suburbs.The shows are Giri/Haji on Netflix, and Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu.Our songs for this week:Rituals by Rolo Tomassi, from their 2018 album Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It released via Holy Roar Records.I Can't by Caitlyn Smith, from her 2020 album Supernova released via Monument Records.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/2songs1couple)

Label: Monument 851Year: 1964Condition: MLast Price: $45.00. Not currently available for sale.Both sides of this classic 45 record are credited to Roy Orbison and The Candy Men. This is a pristine Mint copy, the finest I've yet had in the store since opening in 2001! Note: This record comes in a vintage Monument Records factory sleeve. It has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

This week Betsy Spina celebrates Walker Hayes! Monument Records recording artist Walker Hayes is a country singer/songwriter, known for smash hits like, "You Broke Up With Me," "90s Country," "Don't Let Her," and "Trash My Heart." Originally from Mobile, Alabama, now living in Nashville, Tennessee, Walker shares his incredible story filled with trials and triumphs, each moment leading him to where he is today. In this episode, Betsy and Walker celebrate, Walker's new single, "I Hope You Miss Me," the Celebrate People theme song, created by Walker Hayes, family, and a beautiful full-circle moment in Walker's life.    Keep up with Walker Hayes: Walker Hayes: Spotify Walker Hayes: Instagram Walker Hayes: Twitter Walker Hayes: Website   Betsy and Walker celebrate Walker's production work for Nikita Karmen. Follow Nikita on Spotify: Nikita Karmen   Celebrate People theme song: Walker Hayes   Keep up with Betsy Spina: Betsy Spina: Instagram Betsy Spina: Twitter Betsy Spina: Website   About Betsy Spina:  Betsy Spina is an actor (SAG-AFTRA, AEA), radio personality, and host, best known for her work on Radio Disney Country, SiriusXM, One Life To Live, and Greek. Born in Maine, and raised in New York, Betsy made her way to Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, where she graduated with her BA in Theatre and Music Performance. Betsy has been heard nationally on Radio Disney, Radio Disney Country, and SiriusXM (The Highway, Today Show Radio, Prime Country, The Message), reaching over 32 million subscribers.  She has been seen on the Disney Channel, and television shows like Greek and One Life To Live.  Betsy is a passionate host of live events and has anchored events in New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Nashville, including the ACM Awards, the American Music Awards, the CMA Awards, CMA Fest, and the Radio Disney Music Awards.  She has performed at Carnegie Hall with the Young New Yorkers' Chorus, and she was the co-host/co-creator of the YouTube series, Just Off Broadway. Betsy has interviewed outstanding celebrities like Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, Keith Urban, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Blake Shelton, Maren Morris, Gwen Stefani, Idina Menzel, Phillipa Soo, Hoda Kotb, Savannah Guthrie, Al Roker, Carson Daly, and HGTV's Property Brothers. Betsy loves to celebrate others, spread joy, and give back. She is an active volunteer with Musicians On Call, a special program that delivers the healing power of music to hospital patients at their bedside. When you spend time with Betsy, there's a good chance you'll find her with a cup of coffee in her hand, and a positive word to brighten your day. Betsy hopes to encourage you to be kind to others, and to follow your dreams!    

Hey Brothers and Sisters ...... I'm back with some soul sanctifying slabs of wax!Opening Salvo starts with Jimmy Hall [Wet Willie] and his take on JB Hutto's pounder "That's the Truth" he ain't lyin'...killer no filler!Link Wray provides the bed music with "The Fuzz"Set 1 Chuck Who?- John Hammond with a groovin' cover of Chuck Berry's "Nadine" followed by the Chuck-ster his own bad self "Too much monkey business" followed by a pace setting instro by The Pacesetters " The Monkey Whip" and BJ Thomas got out of the rain long enough to serve up "Candy baby".Set 2 Elements & Things-Ric Cartey & the Jiv-A-Tones "Oooh Eeee" starts the second set and Ed Pauling fills the floor with "Soul House". And probably the first swamper Tony Joe White ain't singin' about Annie with "Elements & Things" a great cut from his 2nd LP on Monument Records. Phil Brown & the Apaches from Paris come stateside for a noir version of Jimi's "Manic Depression"...of course Link Wray lays down the bed.lSet 3 Slums & Blackouts-The 5 Royales sing about slums with "The Slummer the Slum" with killed guitar by Ed [Loman] Pauling / The Faces "Flying" gets a visit from Cheech and Chong / Tony Pigg with a soundcheck from 1977 / Amy Ray checks in with "Give in" and The Funkees from Nigeria lay down a groove with "Acid Rock"That's it for this week.....next week : A 45 RPm S**tshow!

Alex Hall is one of Nashville's fastest rising guitar slingers. He new EP is titled 6 Strings and features some of Country music's biggest artists like Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, John Osborne, Tenille Townes and others. Hall is signed to Shane McAnally's Monument Records.Check out Alex's new project here.Check out the Armchair Expert podcast with Keith Urban here.Read more about Alex's new project here.

Label: Monument 1206Year: 1970Condition: M-Price: $15.00Like White's masterpiece, "Polk Salad Annie," the sound of this track borders on three genres: Rockabilly, Southern Rock, and, given the beat and backing vocals, Northern Soul. Not to be missed! Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Monument Records factory sleeve. It has Near Mint labels and, despite some light scuffing on the vinyl, very nearly pristine audio.

Together with American Songwriter, we had the pleasure of interviewing Sam DeRosa over Zoom video! Pop singer-songwriter Sam DeRosa makes an immaculate debut with The Medicine. With an army of dedicated fans behind her - both brokenhearted and learning to heal - she continues to impress with the official video for the title track off the EP. Listen to the all 6 tracks of the EP / watch “The Medicine” out now globally via Monument Records.The highly anticipated debut EP from Sam DeRosa is an honest storybook outfitted with relatable lyrics applauded by American Songwriter, Billboard, Earmilk, Flaunt, PARADE, PEOPLE, PopCrush, Refinery29, among many others. Upon graduating from Berklee College of Music, the NY-raised and LA-based artist co-wrote “Broken” - the multi-platinum smash hit by lovelytheband now marked the longest charting alt-pop-rock song in radio history. Sam’s credits have grown exponentially since, including cuts with Dixie D’Amelio on her groundbreaking #1 debut "Be Happy" featuring blackbear and Lil Mosey (which has surpassed 100M+ streams), Adam Jensen, Jared Lee, Peking Duk and Alisa Xayalith (of The Naked And Famous), Welshly Arms, and more. Now, after years of honing in on her craft and helping others find their voice, Sam DeRosa shines in her own spotlight and gets her due on The Medicine.A sincere glimpse into the singer-songwriter’s sensibility, the EP opens with “Unfinished.” Sam notes, “I really wanted ‘The Medicine’ to start the whole EP and I knew that I wanted to touch on this idea that maybe this is what it is. Maybe we are just meant to be open-ended and there's no ending, and there’s no reason for that?”Also featured on the EP is fan-favorite release “Sad Faces” which comes at a time where we all need to take a moment to pause for a mental health check. The songwriter behind mega-hit “Be Happy” by Dixie D’Amelio continues to step into her own, her slick vocals eclipsing over a magnetic drumline that has you hooked instantly and positions her as not only a force behind the scenes but as a welcomed face in the incredible squad of artists who are sharing ‘sadgirlpop’ with the world (à la Julia Michaels and Sasha Sloan).Other songs that complete the body of work include “321” and slow-burner “The Medicine.” Penning the track from her own experience bumping into an ex, “321” perfectly captures the universal emotional turmoil that takes over you from the unexpected encounter. On the title-track, Sam says, “I’ve always wanted to write a song called ‘The Medicine’, but I didn’t realize that it would end up being a part two to ‘Pill For This’. This whole body of work is meant to be the start to finish of my journey to closure and surviving...”The EP closes out with none other than “Pill For This” - the song that uprooted the trajectory of her music career forever, following her SONGLAND appearance on S1E1 with fellow Berklee student and pop artist Charlie Puth. While “Pill For This” began as a quest for the cure to a broken heart, the life of the track itself has evolved a hundred times over and ultimately opened a door to a new season for self-love, acceptance, and prosperity for the rising star.“The whole idea of my EP is supposed to feel like I’m walking myself through my own love rehab. From track one until the final track, I really wanted it to feel like each song is a full day of healing.” Sam DeRosa elaborates, “Hopefully someone will hear this and feel like I’m right there with them - whether we are stumbling home, dancing around the house, or crying it out on the bedroom floor. I’ve been there, so I’ll sing them through it.” She also asserts, “There are a lot of people who can’t process what they’re feeling, so my responsibility as an artist and songwriter is to speak my truth as best I can with the hopes that it will help someone else who’s hurting.”We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.www.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod  #foryou #foryoupage #stayhome #togetherathome #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetworkListen & Subscribe to BiBFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! 

This week we welcome, star of The Grand Ole Opry, Jeannie Seely! On the night of September 16, 1967, Jeannie Seely marked an important milestone in her music career by joining the world-famous Grand Ole Opry. The distinctive-voiced lady referred to as “Miss Country Soul” became the first Pennsylvania native to become an Opry member. Today Jeannie makes clear that it's still a thrill and an honor each time she performs on the Opry stage. "I feel very fortunate to be part of the Opry tradition," the Grammy-winning singer says, "and I truly am indebted to all the wonderful fans who have supported me over the years.” Jeannie Seely is among a select group of country artists who have scored chart- topping hits as a solo artist, as a duet partner, and as a songwriter. Born on July 6, 1940, in Titusville, Pennsylvania – the town where the world’s very first oil well was drilled in 1859 – Jeannie grew up as the youngest of Leo and Irene Seely's four children. The family's two-story farmhouse still stands along a dirt road outside of nearby Townville, a community of about 300 folks located in the northwestern corner of the Keystone State. Jeannie's interest in music was influenced strongly by her parents. Leo Seely worked hard on the family's farm and at a Titusville steel mill, but found time on weekends to play the banjo and call local square dances. Irene Seely would sing with her daughter every Saturday morning while the two baked bread together. “I grew up in a time when all the neighbors gathered together to help each other get the hay in and that kind of thing,” recalls Jeannie. “It seemed like everybody back in the country played guitars and fiddles, and when we got together there was always pickin’ and singin’.” When she was barely tall enough to reach the dial on her family's big Philco console radio, Jeannie was tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on station WSM 650. At age 11, she began singing for a Saturday morning radio show on Meadville station WMGW. "I can still remember standing on a stack of wooden soda cases because I wasn't tall enough to reach the unadjustable microphones," she laughs. By age 16, Jeannie was performing on television station WICU in Erie. Jeannie recalls many Saturday nights as a teenager when she would sit in her family's car, eat popcorn and listen to the Grand Ole Opry while her parents played cards at the homes of friends. "I also remember looking forward to attending country music shows at a place near Franklin called Hillbilly Park," says Jeannie. “They would do an afternoon and an evening show. Mother would bake a chicken and fix up a picnic basket, and we’d just go there and spend the whole day and the evening. I was always on the ground right in front of the front row, looking up at the stage.” At Hillbilly Park Jeannie had the opportunity to see performers like Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley, as well as Josh Graves who would later play on her Life’s Highway CD. "I still have the 8 by 10 photos I bought and had autographed there by stars like Jean Shepard, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper," she proudly notes. “I’ve been very blessed to later become friends with these Opry legends.” A cheerleader, majorette, and honor student while attending Townville High School, Jeannie sang at local amateur contests and began performing at weekend dances throughout northwestern Pennsylvania. "Back then a lot of people made fun of me because I sang country," she admits today. "In those days calling somebody 'country' was actually a put-down." Jeannie remembers how the residents of tiny Townville didn't believe that anyone, especially a female, could make a living by singing or writing songs. "Some people didn't even think it was right for a girl to be singing with a band at dances,” she remembers. Following high school graduation in 1958, Jeannie worked for three years at the Titusville Trust Company. Initially hired as a stenographer at the bank, she was later promoted to a secretarial position for the bank's auditor. During this period Jeannie continued her education by completing night classes that were conducted by the American Institute of Banking in Oil City. "Those courses in subjects like business finance and law were beneficial even later in my music career," Jeannie says. Both the local and national American Institute of Banking organizations have since made Jeannie an honorary lifetime member for her efforts in promoting the name and spirit of the organization. According to Jeannie, it was the weather conditions one Sunday morning on a country back road that finalized her decision to move to California. "It was Easter, and I got my car stuck in a snow bank," she chuckles. "I had to walk the whole way home in my new dress to get my Dad's help. I decided right then and there that I was ready to make a change." At age 21, Jeannie packed everything she could into her car, shipped the rest to "General Delivery, Los Angeles", and headed west. She initially took a job at a Beverly Hills bank, but left it after a year to take a secretarial position for half the money at Liberty and Imperial Records in Hollywood. With a foot in the door of the music business, she began writing songs for Four Star Music and became a regular act, along with an unknown Glen Campbell, on the "Hollywood Jamboree" television series. Rhythm and blues artist Irma Thomas recorded a composition by Jeannie titled "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is" and scored a national pop and R&B hit with it. Jeannie's songwriting led to her own recording contract on Challenge Records. A couple regional hits and a West Coast tour resulted, but unfortunately she received no national attention. A young songwriter visiting California named Hank Cochran was impressed with Jeannie's talent and suggested she move to Nashville. Jeannie, however, didn't think she was ready. Upon the encouragement of singer Dottie West who recorded one of her songs, Jeannie finally moved to Nashville in the fall of 1965. "When I arrived in town, I only had $50 and a Ford Falcon to my name," she recalls. "Within a month though, Porter Wagoner hired me to replace Norma Jean as the female singer for his road show and syndicated television series." Initially turned down by every record label in town, Jeannie finally got the big break she needed when a recording contract was offered by Monument Records. She went in the studio and recorded a Hank Cochran ballad titled "Don't Touch Me" on March 12, 1966. Within only a few weeks the song debuted on the country music charts where it stayed for over five months. Although it held at the No. 2 position for three weeks on Billboard, the record went to No. 1 on all the other major charts, including Cashbox and Record World. It was also a crossover hit on the national pop charts. Today "Don't Touch Me" is considered a standard in country music. Jeannie’s recording of the song is ranked at No. 97 in the book titled Heartaches By the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles written by David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren. The book, released in 2003, was published by the Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation Press. “Don’t Touch Me” is also included in The Stories Behind Country Music’s All-Time Greatest 100 Songs written by Ace Collins and published by Boulevard Books. The author writes, “Cochran’s ‘Don’t Touch Me’ has stood the test of time like few other works. Hauntingly beautiful, poetry set to meter, this composition merits particular praise for the exquisite manner in which it relates its story of love, doubt, and commitment.” The book describes how Buck Owens desperately wanted the song that Jeannie ultimately recorded and made a hit. Country versions of “Don’t Touch Me” have been recorded by Don Gibson, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Lorrie Morgan, Ray Price, Lynn Anderson, Eddy Arnold, Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark, Jack Greene, Dottie West, and many others (but none were charted singles). The popularity of “Don’t Touch Me” has crossed all musical styles – Etta James recorded a rhythm and blues version, Carolyn Hester a folk version, Bettye Swann a soul version, and Eleni Mandell a pop version. A reggae version was even recorded by Nicky Thomas. In June of 1966 Jeannie was invited to make her first guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. She received "Most Promising New Artist" awards that same year from all the national trade publications including Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World, as well as from polls of country music fans and radio DJs across the country. On March 2, 1967, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences honored Jeannie with the 1966 Grammy Award for the "Best Country Vocal Performance by a Female". Edging out friends and fellow nominees Loretta Lynn (“Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’”), Dottie West (“Would You Hold It Against Me”), Connie Smith (“Ain’t Had No Loving”), and Jan Howard (“Evil On your Mind”), Jeannie Seely became only the third female country artist to receive the coveted Grammy. She accepted her award from Chet Atkins. With a successful breakthrough hit, Jeannie found herself traveling from coast to coast for concert appearances. The new demands forced her to leave Porter Wagoner's show – and today Jeannie jokes that she was replaced by friend Dolly Parton because Dolly’s ‘hits’ were bigger. New opportunities for Jeannie included many concert and television appearances with the legendary Ernest Tubb. On the liner notes for one of Jeannie's early albums, the legendary Tubb wrote, "She puts heart and soul into every ballad she sings. Whether a new song or an old one, when Jeannie sings it, it becomes 'Jeannie's song'." In September of 1967, Jeannie fulfilled her lifelong dream by joining the Grand Ole Opry. She remembers her Opry induction, attended by her parents from Pennsylvania, as "a very emotional night." "I started crying," she recalls, "and then I encored and that was even worse." Often referred to as the "Mother Church of Country Music", the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville was home to the Opry when Jeannie became a member. Although hot in the summer and drafty in the winter, Jeannie says the Ryman had a magic all its own. She fondly recalls sharing a crowded dressing room, which was actually the ladies restroom, with fellow performers like Minnie Pearl and Barbara Mandrell (who today lists Jeannie as one of her major influences). After 31 years at the Ryman, the Grand Ole Opry moved on March 16, 1974, to the new 4,400 seat Opry House on the grounds of the Opryland theme park. At the much- publicized grand opening show which was broadcast on over 1,300 radio stations worldwide, special guest President Richard Nixon told the audience, "Some girls have looks but can't sing. Others can sing but don't have looks. Jeannie Seely's got them both." That quote subsequently appeared in newspapers across the country. Known throughout her career as an individualist, as well as for her infectious humor, Jeannie Seely is widely recognized for changing the image of female country performers. Jeannie is in fact credited for breaking the "calico curtain" by being the first woman to wear a mini-skirt on the Grand Ole Opry stage. "I really didn't think anything of it at the time, but it did cause quite a stir," she laughs. "The Opry manager even called me into his office." In their book Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, authors Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann wrote, "Jeannie's frank talk, striking intelligence, free- spirited life-style, and deeply moving vocals have long set her apart from most female country stars. When she arrived in Nashville in 1965, women were still expected to portray the submissive country sweetheart. Jeannie blazed a nonconformist trail from the moment she hit the Opry in her miniskirt...." A string of hit records in the late '60's and early '70's solidified Jeannie's reputation as a country torch singer and earned her the nickname of "Miss Country Soul", a title still frequently used today. Country Music Hall of Fame member Marty Robbins once said, "Jeannie Seely is one of the great stylists of our time." When at home, Jeannie made frequent guest appearances on television shows like "Hee Haw" and “That Nashville Music”. On March 22, 1970, Jeannie was a featured guest on "Glen Campbell's Goodtime Hour" on CBS-TV. Working with distinguished producers like Fred Foster and Owen Bradley, the blonde, blue-eyed singer recorded more than a dozen albums and over two dozen singles on the Monument, Decca, MCA, and Columbia labels. Jeannie placed singles on Billboard's national country music charts for 13 consecutive years from 1966 through 1978. Among over two dozen hits were "It's Only Love,” "A Wanderin' Man,” "I'll Love You More,” "He Can Be Mine,” "Welcome Home To Nothing,” "Little Things,” "Farm in Pennsyltucky,” and "When It's Over.” In 1973 Jeannie transformed the hobo lament "Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?" into the top ten hit "Can I Sleep In Your Arms?". The following year she adapted the Appalachian ballad "Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies" into another hit single titled "Lucky Ladies.” For two years Jeannie served as a radio disc jockey on her own Armed Forces Network Show, and for several months she traveled on military tours throughout Europe and Asia. Upon returning from an overseas tour, Jeannie noted during an Opry performance that there was no U.S. flag — a patriotic symbol that she was accustomed to seeing. There has been an American flag displayed on the Opry stage ever since. A 1969 duet recorded with fellow Opry member Jack Greene titled "Wish I Didn't Have to Miss You" went to No. 1 on the charts and launched one of the most successful duos and road shows in country music history. Nominated for numerous Country Music Association (CMA) awards and a Grammy, Jack Greene and Jeannie Seely toured together for over ten years, performing everywhere from New York's Madison Square Garden to London's Wembley Arena. The duo changed the format of “package shows” and were considered forerunners in opening doors and bringing country music to wider audiences around the world. Through a special invitation from the White House they were named Goodwill Ambassadors to the annual United Nations Concert. A long list of artists – including Dottie West, Norma Jean, Tex Williams, Lorrie Morgan, Jack Greene, Chris LeDoux, Doyle Lawson, and Hank Williams, Jr. – have recorded compositions written by Jeannie. In 1972, Faron Young took “Leavin’ And Sayin’ Goodbye” to the No. 1 position, earning Jeannie a BMI Songwriter’s Award. In addition to Faron Young, other Country Music Hall of Fame members have recorded Jeannie’s songs – including Merle Haggard, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb, Grandpa Jones, and Connie Smith. The lyrics to one of Jeannie’s songs was used for a Hallmark greeting card. For several years Jeannie was married to Hank Cochran, the writer of such songs as “Make The World Go Away.” “She’s Got You,” “I Fall To Pieces,” “The Chair,” and “Ocean Front Property.” The marriage – the first for Jeannie but the fourth for Hank – finally ended in a divorce. In 1977 the career of Jeannie Seely almost ended abruptly when she was involved in a near fatal automobile accident that left her with serious multiple injuries. "You know, it sounds like a cliche, but it's true that your perspective changes when you have a close call," she reflects. "What you took for granted you come to appreciate more." It was with the help and support of best friend Dottie West that Jeannie was able to recover and get back on her feet. Ironically, Dottie West's death in 1991 was due to injuries she suffered in an automobile accident while en route to the Opry. "I still think about Dottie all the time and miss her very much," says Jeannie. In 1995 she served as a consultant for the CBS television movie about Dottie’s life titled Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story. Jeannie was portrayed in the movie by actress Cathy Worthington. In the early 80's, Jeannie performed as the opening act for friend Willie Nelson's concert dates across the country. She also appeared in Willie's successful Honeysuckle Rose movie and sang on the soundtrack recording, a contribution which earned her a platinum album. Jeannie became the first female artist to regularly host half-hour segments of the Grand Ole Opry. Those hosting duties actually began on January 19, 1985, when she was called upon as a last minute replacement for Del Reeves, the scheduled host, who was caught in a rare Nashville snowstorm. During the late 80's Jeannie starred in several major stage productions. She played Jean Shepard’s daughter and Lorrie Morgan’s mother in the 1986 country musical called Takin' It Home. In 1988 she portrayed "Miss Mona" in a sold-out run of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and the following year took a nonmusical role as the title character in Everybody Loves Opal. In 1988 Jeannie published her own book, Pieces of a Puzzled Mind, containing a collection of Jeannie's unique witticisms. The popular book was out of print for several years, but Jeannie republished the book in 2012. Also known as "Seely-isms" around Nashville, Jeannie notes that many of the sayings actually began as song titles or opening lines. “County music has made so many of my dreams come true,” Jeannie wrote in the book, “I just wish someone would have warned me about the nightmares.” One of the most popular quotes from the book is “You don’t have to kiss anyone’s a-- in this world, but sometimes it’s best to bend a little bit and make ‘em think you’re goin’ to.” Jeannie portrayed lead singer Danny Shirley’s mother in Confederate Railroad’s 1993 chart-topping music video for the song “Trashy Women”. She also was featured in a video shot at Dollywood for the song “Wrapped Around” by fellow Opry member Brad Paisley who took Jeannie as his date to the 2000 CMA Awards Show. Ironically, the video was shown during Brad’s performance on the 2001 CMA Awards Show – and Jeannie could be seen in the video clip. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, Jeannie appeared frequently on shows like “Nashville Now,” “Crook and Chase,” “Music City Tonight,” “Grand Ole Opry Live,” “You Can Be A Star,” “Family Feud,” and “Prime Time Country.” She served as a regular host of “Opry Backstage,” interviewing everyone from new and upcoming acts to superstars like Garth Brooks. County artist Lorrie Morgan recorded a song co-written by Jeannie titled "I've Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand" for her 1997 album Shakin' Things Up. Lorrie has credited Jeannie as being a major influence in her career and often refers to the Opry cohort as her "second mom.” Lorrie’s father, the late George Morgan, was an Opry star who became a close friend of Jeannie’s. “I admire Lorrie not only for her musical talent, but because she also inherited that wonderful sense of humor that her dad had,” notes Jeannie. “I don’t take lightly the fact that I was fortunate enough to know people like George Morgan, to work with him, and then to go on and become friends and work with his daughter. That’s pretty amazing.” Together Jeannie and Lorrie sang George’s hit “Candy Kisses” for an Opry anniversary special televised on CBS. According to Jeannie, recent years have been some of the busiest years of her career. Nashville music critic Robert K. Oermann wrote in his 2003 book Finding Her Voice: Women In Country Music, "With her chin-out, tough/tender, heart-of-gold manner, Jeannie Seely remains one of country's most completely modern female personalities." Jeannie has entertained on several cruise ships, including the week-long Grand Ole Opry cruises, and for several summers she performed at the Dollywood theme park. She’salso been part of a successful overseas tour with the "Grand Ladies of the Grand Ole Opry,” Jeannie performed on extensive tours of Ireland in both 2008 and 2009. Jeannie continues to enjoy acting and for three months in 2000 she portrayed the role of Louise Seger during a successful run of the Always, Patsy Cline musical in Atlantic City. Along with friends Jan Howard and Rita Coolidge, Jeannie filmed the heart-warming motion picture Changing Hearts in late 2001. The movie, which featured Faye Dunaway, Lauren Holly, Tom Skerritt, and Ian Somerhalder, is now available on DVD and VHS. Jeannie portrays a comical role as a do-good Women’s Baptist League hospital volunteer named Mrs. Shelby. Proceeds from the movie help non-profit organizations dedicated to cancer research, education and support. From 2004 to 2007, Jeannie and fellow country singer Helen Cornelius starred in successful runs of the musical production Count It Be Love, including a performance at the historic Ryman Auditorium. In February 2005, Jeannie was featured in a Nashville performance of The Vagina Monologues with fellow entertainers Pam Tillis and Kathy Mattea. Among the many honors and accolades that Jeannie has received is the 2000 induction to the North America Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2003 she was honored with induction into the George D. Hay Music Hall of Fame located in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas. Jeannie also received the 2003 Legend Award from Bluebird Country News. In 2006 Jeannie received the Songwriter of the Year Award from the R.O.P.E. (Reunion of Professional Entertainers) organization. In 2007 she received R.O.P.E.’s Entertainer of the Year Award. In 2009 Jeannie was honored with the prestigious Colonel Aide-de-Camp Award presented by Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. The award recognizes citizens for meritorious public service with the distinction of being included in the Honorable Order of Tennessee Colonels. Also in 2009, an interview conducted by Rik Paleri with Jeannie at the Grand Ole Opry for Rik’s “Songwriters Notebook” television show was permanently entered into the archives of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Re-released on CD format, Jeannie Seely's Greatest Hits On Monument continues to receive strong praise, including a review in the All Music Guide To Country. Jeannie’s music projects in recent years include a 23-song anthology CD called Personal, an album or traditional holiday songs titled Number One Christmas and a collection of standards, fan favorites, and duets appropriately labeled Been There, Sung That. In 2001 Jeannie sang with fellow Opry member Ralph Stanley on Clinch Mountain Sweethearts which received an International Bluegrass Music Association Award for “Recorded Event of the Year”, as well as a Grammy nomination for “Bluegrass Album of the Year”. In addition to her own recordings, Jeannie’s vocals can be found on over 75 additional compilation albums and CDs.Her vocals on the Janis Joplin hit “Piece Of My Heart” appear on Bluegrass Goes To Town: Pop Songs Bluegrass Style released in April of 2002. In the fall of 2003 Jeannie released her own acoustic and bluegrass project on OMS Records titled Life’s Highway. The album features musicians Josh Graves, Glen Duncan, Steve Wariner, Jesse McReynolds, and Buck White – as well as harmony vocals from Charlie Louvin, the Osborne Brothers, and the Whites. Country Weekly magazine reviewed the CD and wrote, “Life’s Highway is one of the year’s most welcome surprises – a thoughtful, inventive acoustic winner that’s a much- needed slap in the face for anyone who might have forgotten how Jeannie earned her gig as one of the friendliest faces on the Grand Ole Opry. Jeannie simply owns these 13 tracks...” The recording career of Jeannie Seely spanned six decades with the early 2011 release of a new CD titled Vintage Country which is available on Jeannie’s website and at select retail and online outlets. In 2017, Jeannie’s long-awaited new album Written In Song became available in select stores, through digital retailers, and on her website. The 14-track album contains original songs recorded by artists like Merle Haggard (“Life of a Rodeo Cowboy), Dottie West (“He’s All I Need”), Ernest Tubb (“Sometimes I Do”), Willie Nelson (“Senses”) and several more. Written In Song topped the list of CMT’s ‘New Albums in the New Year,’ and The Boot’s ‘Most Anticipated Albums’ and it continues to receive great reviews: She is “Miss Country Soul,” a beloved member of the Grand Ole Opry, a country icon and a Pennsylvania hit-maker well before Taylor Swift was born... Seely’s latest album WRITTEN IN SONG features 14 updated timeless classics she has written and co-written. -CMT.com, Lauren Tingle Jeannie Seely proves that her songs and her voice are as great as they ever were on this fantastic new album. -Roughstock, Matt Bjorke The country music singer has written songs for numerous artists and it’s refreshing to hear her voice along with her very own take and production on these songs. These are, after all, her songs to sing and she certainly has the vocal prowess to do so! -Backstage Axxess, Dee Haley Jeannie Seely soars on her new album, Written in Song. "Miss Country Soul" is back stronger than ever. There is a variety on her latest musical effort. It garners an A rating. -Digital Journal, Markos Papadatos Jeannie brought back the traditional country sound that fans have been longing for on Written In Song. Tracks include “Leavin’ & Sayin’ Goodbye” featuring special guests Kenny and Tess Sears, “Senses” with guests Connie Smith and Marty Stuart and “We’re Still Hangin’ In There Ain’t We Jessi” with Jan Howard and Jessi Colter. Written In Song is distributed by Smith Music Group. “Written In Song is such an exciting project for me for many reasons,” states Seely. “It consists of 14 songs that I have written over the years, most of them recorded by my peers and my heroes. It’s also very rewarding to know that these songs have stood the test of time and are just as viable today. I am extremely grateful to the musicians and singers who made them sound brand new.” For the past three decades Jeannie has lived close to the Grand Ole Opry in a quaint and comfortable home along the Cumberland River that she renovated and decorated herself. A major setback occurred in May 2010 when Jeannie lost her home, car and personal belongings in the devastating Nashville flood. Jeannie decided to rebuild her home and returned to it around the same time the Grand Ole Opry returned to the Opry House, her second home, which was also damaged. On November 20, 2010, Jeannie married Nashville attorney Gene Ward. Jeannie routinely performs at benefit shows for a wide variety of charities and causes. She has served as the co-host for the annual awards program for SOURCE, a nonprofit organization seeking to unify women executives and professionals that work in all facets of the Nashville music industry. Jeannie is proud to serve as a longtime spokesperson for the Humane Society by recording public service announcements and by serving as a HSUS “Special Friend” involved in supporting their animal protection programs. Jeannie is actively involved in numerous other organizations and causes such as the Opry Trust Fund (which provides financial assistance to needy individuals in the country music industry) and R.O.P.E. (Reunion Of Professional Entertainers). In April 2017, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives unanimously approved House Resolution 259 honoring Jeannie Seely on her 50th anniversary as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. In accepting the honor Jeannie noted, “Never have I been more proud of my heritage than I was today. It is my hope that I will always represent Pennsylvania in a manner that would make them proud of their native daughter, and I thank them for this distinguished honor.” Jeannie will be honored by the Nashville Association of Talent Directors (NATD) at their 7th Annual NATD Honors Gala scheduled for November 14, 2017, at the Hermitage Hotel. NATD has been a vital part of the Nashville Music Business Community by professionally representing, directing, and promoting the entertainment industry through its members. When not booked on concert dates out of town, Jeannie performs weekly on the Grand Ole Opry’s shows. She frequently hosts the Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree, appears on RFD television shows and specials, and has been featured in the Family Reunion TV and DVD tapings. Jeannie will be one of the featured performers on the Country Music Cruise that will set sail in February of 2018. Looking to the future of the Grand Ole Opry, Jeannie hopes for a peaceful coexistence of the old and the new. “I like adding the new talent to the Opry, but I don’t want them to ever change the Opry to where it becomes just another concert venue,” she states. “I like seeing the new artists, but value that tradition also and the uniqueness of it. And the music and all should change and will change. It always has.” “Hopefully, I will see a future of doing pretty much what I have done in the past,” explains Jeannie. “I want to keep doing personal appearances and shows and what I’ve been so blessed to be able to do in my life. I want to be anywhere they ask me to be. There are plenty of life’s highways I want to travel. I’m not done yet.” Jeannie notes, “I want to extend a huge ‘thanks’ to all of you who have been on my bandwagon for such a long time. To those of you just joining us, I hope the ride’s not over - so welcome aboard - and hang on!” Fans can write to Jeannie Seely in care of the Grand Ole Opry, 2804 Opryland Drive, Nashville, TN 37214. Jeannie’s website can be found at www.JeannieSeely.com, and Jeannie maintains a Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/JeannieSeely.

Teddy Robb's brand new single "Heaven On Dirt" is out on Country radio right now. He is signed to Shane McAnally's Monument Records and is one of the nicest rising stars in Nashville.

En un corto plazo de tiempo hemos perdido a dos de los grandes representantes del llamado movimiento outlaw, aunque sus nombres no han gozado de la popularidad de otros. Hablamos de Jerry Jeff Walker y Billy Joe Shaver, a quienes hoy vamos a recordar en el tiempo de TOMA UNO. Jerry Jeff Walker es considerado uno de los más relevantes cantautores norteamericanos, siguiendo sus propias formas al margen de las modas y de sus cambios. Hasta su muerte, siempre mantuvo la frescura y las directrices de los mejores años del que podríamos llamar redneck rock. Su carrera la inició con una banda psicodélica llamada Circus Maximus, la primera que se acercó al country. Tocó por todos los bares de Estados Unidos y tuvo a su mujer, Susan, como manager y responsable de su propio sello discográfico, Tried & True Music. Fue en junio del 1968 cuando se lanzó al mercado en single una canción llamada “Mr. Bojangles”, como anticipo del álbum que Jerry Jeff Walker publicaría en octubre con ese título que contó con la producción de Tom Dowd. Es una canción inspirada en un encuentro tres años antes con un artista callejero en la cárcel del First Precinct de Nueva Orleans, donde Walker había ingresado por embriaguez. Aquel bailarín, apodado Mr. Bojangles, contó historias de su vida hasta que todo se entristeció cuando recordó el atropello de su perro. Cuando alguien pidió levantar el ánimo, aquel hombre empezó a bailar claqué. La versión que la Nitty Gritty Dirt Band realizó dos años después y que se publicó también en single consiguió alcanzar el Top 10 de las listas y llamó de la atención hacia su compositor, Un mocetón llamado en realidad Ronald Clyde Crosby y nacido en e Oneonta, del estado de Nueva York. Fue entonces cuando Jerry Jeff Walker se mudó a Austin y todo cambió. La llegada a Austin de Jerry Jeff Walker, que moría el pasado día 23, le asoció con el movimiento outlaw tejano que tenía a Willie Nelson y Michael Martin Murphey como cabezas visibles. Allí encontró el ambiente que necesitaba y una cierta consideración a nivel popular, gracias a discos como Ridin ’High y, sobre todo, un álbum memorable con el nombre de Viva Terlingua!, grabado en vivo en ese dancehall de la tejana Luckenbach. En aquel registro de 1973 encontramos “Sangria Wine”, otra de sus canciones emblemáticas, que daba cuenta de cómo aquellas primitivas tonalidades folkies propias de la escena neoyorquina habían cambiado. Aquel disco nos enseñó lo que el artista llamaba el "gonzo country", con una base campera mezclada con blues y tonalidades de la tradición del norte de México. Durante este tiempo le acompañaba Lost Gonzo Band, un grupo informal de músicos de Austin entre los que se encontraban Michael Martin Murphey, Mickey Raphael y Ray Wylie Hubbard, por el que Jerry Jeff Walker sentía un gran respeto. En aquel concierto incluyó una versión divertida versión de "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother", una canción bien arraigada en la zona y un excelente ejemplo del fenómeno "outlaw". Veinte años después de la grabación en directo de aquel antológico ¡Viva Terlingua!, el neoyorquino se trasladó de nuevo a aquel lugar y despachó en ¡Viva Luckenbach! otro puñado de grandes canciones entre las que encontramos “I’ll Be Here In The Morning” de Townes Van Zandt, uno de sus referentes y otro de los pilares de la música tejana. “London Homesick Blues” fue la canción que cerró en 1973 aquel Viva Terlingua! siempre recordado. Lo grabó con la Lost Gonzo Band en la que militaba Gary P Nunn, un bajista y teclista de Oklahoma emigrado a Texas para convertirse en otro revolucionario de la música más enraizada de aquellas tierras. Aquella canción fue durante dos décadas el tema del mítico Austin City Limits de la televisión pública estadounidense, cuyo piloto fue grabado el 17 de Octubre de 1974 con Willie Nelson de protagonista. Hace 13 años, Cowboy Town se convirtió en el último álbum de Brooks & Dunn antes de anunciar su separación en 2009 tras una larga gira. En aquel disco encontramos “The Ballad Of Jerry Jeff Walker”, una canción que Kix Brooks y Bob DiPiero compusieron juntos para rendir homenaje al hoy desaparecido artista, al que invitaron a participar vocalmente en un tema. Las canciones de Jerry Jeff Walker dejan siempre una sensación de melancolía confortable, tanto en sus grabaciones como en sus apariciones en vivo. Son una introspección sobre las cosas sencillas que ocurren todos los días y que se encuentran en tu propia casa o en el béisbol. Son temas que, por encima de todo, tenían mucho sentido para él. Siempre pareció que era un proscrito diferente. En septiembre de 2017 supimos que tenía cáncer de garganta. A pesar de ello, al año siguiente lanzó el que fue su último álbum, It’s About Time. Hace una semana moría con 78 años debido a una fatal recaída en el cáncer que sufría. Billy Joe Shaver era más conocido por sus canciones que como cantante. Era nativo de Corsicana y creció en Waco, siempre dentro de los límites del estado de Texas. Escribió canciones desde muy pequeño, animado por su profesora de inglés y tras su paso obligado por el ejército, se marchó a Houston para relacionarse con los círculos de poetas y cantantes de folk. Por entonces conoció a Willie Nelson, cuya influencia le ayudó a convertirse en compositor. Billy Joe Shaver y Willie Nelson son dos de los personajes a los que mejor les cuadra el calificativo de outlaws. Ambos músicos tejanos han convergido en la escena musical y han tenido también desencuentros con la ley. Amigos desde hace tiempo, regresaron juntos con "Hard to Be an Outlaw", el anticipo de Long in the Tooth, editado en el verano de 2014 y convertido en el primer álbum de Billy Joe Shaver que entraba en las listas de country. Sin embargo, en "Hard to Be an Outlaw" hablaba sobre estrellas que nunca han pisado carreteras secundarias, en una mirada resuelta al estado de la country music, suficiente como para ser un renegado. Billy Joe Shaver decidió trasladarse a Nashville en busca de un reconocimiento que no tenía. La suerte no le acompañó hasta que contactó con Bobby Bare y firmó para su editora por una cantidad cercana a los 50 dólares semanales. Desde entonces han sido muchos quienes grabaron sus canciones, especialmente Waylon Jennings, que fue uno de sus grandes apoyos, llegando a grabar un nombre completo con sus composiciones. Desde entonces han sido muchos quienes han interpretado sus canciones y sería otro tejano como Kris Kristofferson quien en aquel 1973 produjera su disco de debut, Old Five And Dimers Like Me, donde encontramos una de las más dinámicas canciones de trenes: “I Been To Georgia On A Fast Train”. Kris Kristofferson dio el impulso inicial a Billy Joe Shaver produciendo su primer álbum para Monument Records, al que daba nombre “Old Five And Dimers Like Me”, demostrando que sin gozar de una voz tan perfecta como la de otros colegas, su forma de expresarse era tan conmovedora como la de ellos. Tom T. Hall, además, escribió el comentario de la contraportada. Desde el primero de sus trabajos discográficos, Billy Joe Shaver mantuvo una dignidad apabullante y una elegancia innata. Siempre poseyó un sentido de dignidad que convirtió muchos de sus discos en obras maestras de la composición y en ejemplos indispensables del outlaw country. Old Five And Dimers Like Me y Gypsy Boy han sido dos álbumes favoritos para TOMA UNO desde siempre. El primero llegó a la vez que inauguramos el programa, y el segundo, de 1977, fue una manifestación de poderío por parte Phil Walden, de Capricorn Records, que le había fichado, y del propio Billy Joe Shaver. La producción corrió a cargo de Brian Ahern, por entonces marido de Emmylou Harris, y reunieron a los mejores músicos del momento, desde la artista de Alabama, pasando por algunos de los miembros de su Hot Band, como Rodney Crowell y Ricky Skaggs; hizo coros Nicolette Larson, aparecieron Willie Nelson, James Burton, Mickey Raphael y Randy Scruggs. Para rematarlo contaron con David Briggs y Ben Keith, además de una base de ritmo formada por Karl Himmel y Norbert Putnam. En aquel disco escuchamos su propia versión de uno de sus himnos, "Honky Tonk Heroes", que Waylon había estrenado cuatro años antes. Uno de los momentos mágicos de aquel Gypsy Boy de 1977 fue “Silver Wings Of Time”, una canción acogedora que destapa la profundidad emocional de un contador de historias de su nivel, algo que parece contrastar con el aspecto rudo de Billy Joe Shaver, que no se implicó en la música hasta hasta casi los 30 años. Tiene que ver con un accidente que sufrió en un aserradero en los años 60 en el que se cortó prácticamente dos dedos y partes de otros dos de su mano derecha. Una infección tras el accidente finalmente lo empeoró aún más, de tal forma que quedó inhabilitado para realizar trabajos manuales y decidió dedicarse a la música para ganarse la vida. Otras de las canciones fundamentales de la discografía de Billy Joe Shaver es “Live Forever”, con referencias a su fe religiosa. La música era de su hijo, el guitarrista Eddy Shaver, que murió a consecuencia de una sobredosis de drogas en 2000. Se la enseñó a su padre cuando actuaban juntos con el simple nombre de Shaver y él puso la letra. La grabaron dos veces, en el álbum Tramp On Your Street de 1993 y cinco años después en Victory. En los últimos tiempos, Billy Joe Shaver se concentró en la composición e incluso pudimos verle en la película The Apostle con Robert Duvall. El actor haría casi 20 años después de aquello una interpretación a cappella de parte de aquel “Live Forever” en Crazy Heart. Además de Waylon y Willie, Bobby Bare, Jessi Colter, David Allan Coe, Guy Clark o Townes Van Zandt, también fueron pioneros de aquel movimiento outlaw que ahora se recuerda con veneración Jerry Jeff Walker y Billy Joe Shaver. Ambos han muerto con muy pocos días de diferencia y hoy han sido protagonistas de TOMA UNO. Escuchar audio

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. 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 “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Better Move On", and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. 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 "Mother-In-Law" by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it's been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander's Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger's biography of Alexander. It's unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we're going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we're going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties -- studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it's also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians -- there were jobs that weren't open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist -- many were very vocally opposed to racism -- but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we've looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we're going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we're going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we're going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You'd Better Move On"] Arthur Alexander's is one of the most tragic stories we'll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander's hit single "You Better Move On". He said to Harrison, "Did you know I played bass on that?" and Harrison replied, "If I phoned Paul up now, he'd come over and kiss your feet". That's how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it's hard to escape the fact that Alexander's music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself -- in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films -- people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry -- and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would "play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn't make no distinction. That's the way it was until much later". The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold's 1946 country hit "That's How Much I Love You": [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "That's How Much I Love You"] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place -- by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn't even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it's almost always the latter, so from this point on, I'll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander's music, but as we've seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander's father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as "June", for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it -- he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he'd never made a nickel as a player, and didn't want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said -- he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn't stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat "King" Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes -- though he wasn't satisfied by McPhatter's answer that "It's just there", thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song "One Mint Julep": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "One Mint Julep"] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like "Sixty Minute Man", and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn't need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening -- there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it -- W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they'd all done truly great things, but they'd done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big -- making records of people's weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. "A Fallen Star" was done as cheaply as humanly possible -- it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time -- he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn't a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I've not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people -- Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn't understand his type of music -- but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton's recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison's first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Sweet and Innocent"] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I've been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a "reality-hacking poet", and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way -- and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I'm not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn't count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don't even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm's length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford's fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley's studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, "She Wanna Rock"] That record wasn't a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun's Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" with Tammy Wynette, and produced "He Stopped Loving Her Today" for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford's studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford's partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton's record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, "Sally Sue Brown"] It's a good record, but it didn't have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events -- his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he'd found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, "You Better Move On", to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn't produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King -- he would later say, "It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to 'Stand By Me', which was a big record at the time. But I didn't want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You Better Move On"] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues", which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues"] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on "You Better Move On", and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said "If it wasn't for Arthur Alexander, we'd all be at Reynolds" -- the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn't record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out -- allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine -- and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander's talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander's heart wasn't in it -- his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley's studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, "Where Have You Been?" was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Where Have You Been?"] While the B-side, "Soldiers of Love" (and yes, it was called "Soldiers of Love" on the original label, rather than "Soldier"), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee's backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Soldiers of Love"] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn't having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur's songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He'd started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he'd better write one himself, and he'd make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann -- though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Anna (Go To Him)"] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry's country classic "I Hang My Head and Cry" as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, "Go Home Girl", another attempt at a "You Better Move On" soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn't want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, "Every Day I Have To Cry"] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He'd often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox's old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with "Snap Your Fingers": [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, "Snap Your Fingers"] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other's addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn't been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison's classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with "Raunchy" on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, "Baby For You": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Baby For You"] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life -- he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, "Johnny's Heartbreak": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Johnny's Heartbreak"] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur's plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him -- and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur's version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song "Every Day I Have To Cry", as "Every Day I Have To Cry Some", in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Every Day I Have To Cry Some"] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn't chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland -- construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. 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 “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it’s been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander’s Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger’s biography of Alexander. It’s unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we’re going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we’re going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties — studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it’s also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians — there were jobs that weren’t open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist — many were very vocally opposed to racism — but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we’ve looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we’re going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we’re going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we’re going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You’d Better Move On”] Arthur Alexander’s is one of the most tragic stories we’ll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander’s hit single “You Better Move On”. He said to Harrison, “Did you know I played bass on that?” and Harrison replied, “If I phoned Paul up now, he’d come over and kiss your feet”. That’s how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it’s hard to escape the fact that Alexander’s music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself — in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films — people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would “play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn’t make no distinction. That’s the way it was until much later”. The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold’s 1946 country hit “That’s How Much I Love You”: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “That’s How Much I Love You”] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place — by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn’t even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it’s almost always the latter, so from this point on, I’ll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander’s music, but as we’ve seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander’s father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as “June”, for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it — he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he’d never made a nickel as a player, and didn’t want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said — he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn’t stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat “King” Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes — though he wasn’t satisfied by McPhatter’s answer that “It’s just there”, thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song “One Mint Julep”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “One Mint Julep”] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like “Sixty Minute Man”, and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn’t need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening — there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it — W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they’d all done truly great things, but they’d done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big — making records of people’s weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. “A Fallen Star” was done as cheaply as humanly possible — it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time — he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn’t a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I’ve not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people — Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn’t understand his type of music — but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton’s recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison’s first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Sweet and Innocent”] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I’ve been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a “reality-hacking poet”, and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way — and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I’m not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn’t count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don’t even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm’s length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford’s fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley’s studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, “She Wanna Rock”] That record wasn’t a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun’s Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote “Stand By Your Man” with Tammy Wynette, and produced “He Stopped Loving Her Today” for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford’s studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford’s partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton’s record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, “Sally Sue Brown”] It’s a good record, but it didn’t have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events — his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he’d found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, “You Better Move On”, to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn’t produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King — he would later say, “It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to ‘Stand By Me’, which was a big record at the time. But I didn’t want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You Better Move On”] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”, which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on “You Better Move On”, and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said “If it wasn’t for Arthur Alexander, we’d all be at Reynolds” — the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn’t record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out — allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine — and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander’s talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander’s heart wasn’t in it — his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley’s studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, “Where Have You Been?” was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Where Have You Been?”] While the B-side, “Soldiers of Love” (and yes, it was called “Soldiers of Love” on the original label, rather than “Soldier”), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee’s backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Soldiers of Love”] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn’t having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur’s songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He’d started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he’d better write one himself, and he’d make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann — though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Anna (Go To Him)”] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry’s country classic “I Hang My Head and Cry” as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, “Go Home Girl”, another attempt at a “You Better Move On” soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn’t want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, “Every Day I Have To Cry”] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He’d often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox’s old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with “Snap Your Fingers”: [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, “Snap Your Fingers”] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other’s addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn’t been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison’s classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with “Raunchy” on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, “Baby For You”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Baby For You”] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life — he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur’s plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him — and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur’s version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song “Every Day I Have To Cry”, as “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”, in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn’t chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland — construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

It's a tough business we work in. Often times we're working from paycheck to paycheck, and some items such as health insurance can be considered a luxury to those that work in the trenches, trying to make a living in the music industry. Then there's Music Health Alliance. Founded in 2013 with the goal of helping find affordable (and in some cases, next to nothing in cost) health / medical insurance for anyone who works within the music business. Shelia Shipley Biddy who is the COO and Senior Advisor for MHA discusses what options are available for anyone who works in the music biz, and is seeking to find the medical insurance coverage that they can actually afford. With over 4 decades of diverse music industry experience and a continued passion for the well being of music and its makers, Shelia Shipley Biddy is the perfect advocate for the music industry. Her career began in an entry-level position at the legendary Monument Records (home to Roy Orbison, Larry Gatlin, and Kris Kristofferson). Over the next eight years, she worked her way up the ranks of RCA and MCA to become Vice President of Promotion at MCA and most notably, the first woman to sit at the helm of a major record label in Music City. During her tenure with MCA, the label was named Country Label of the Year seven times by Billboard Magazine, three times by R&R Magazine, and the promotion department garnered over 137 # 1 singles under her leadership. Shelia went on to become senior vice president and general manager of Decca Records, another first for a woman in Nashville. Decca's roster included Mark Chesnutt, Lee Ann Womack, Gary Allan, Rhett Akins, Chris Knight, and others. Shelia has continued to leave a positive mark on music as an artist manager and partner with Hallmark Direction Company and as President of Flying Island Entertainment. Shelia was voted Gavin Magazine's Country Promotion Vice President of the Year on three occasions, and Nashville Life Magazine named her one of Nashville's Top 25 Most Influential Women and named one of Billboard Magazine's 2019 Top 100 Country Power Players. She was presented with the Country Radio Broadcasters President's Award recognizing her significant contribution to the marketing, production, growth and development of the Country Radio Seminar and the services that CRB provides to the country radio and music communities. In 2012, she was inducted into the SOURCE Hall of Fame, an organization she co-founded in 1991 to support female executives in the Nashville music industry. She is a 1992 Alumni and past President of Leadership Music. She has served on the Boards of Country Radio Broadcasters, Leadership Music, Academy of Country Music, NARAS, Nashville Film Commission, and the Music Industry Retirement Center. She is also a member of Brentwood Baptist Church. Shelia has been married to a music publisher, Ken Biddy, for over 27 years and together they share a blended family of five children and six grandchildren. Shelia's addition to the MHA team is like coming home. In addition to utilizing her executive experience to develop the operations of MHA, she is implementing the MHA Senior Care programs and services for the family she has been a part of for over forty years. The Business Side of Music ™ © 2020 Beyond the Music Co-Produced & Hosted (by the guy who has a face for podcasting): Bob Bender  Co-Producer, Creator & Technical Advisor (the man behind the curtain): Tom Sabella Audio Engineer (one really cool guy): Jim Tennaboe Director of Video & Continuity (the brains of the entire operation): Deborah Halle Lighting Director (the inventor of video): Mark Pleasant Marketing & Social Media: Kaitlin Fritts All Around Problem Solver: Connie Ribas Recorded at: The Coffee House and Underground Bunker in Franklin, TN (except during the COVID 19 pandemic, then it's pretty much done VIA Skype or over the phone, with the exception for those fearless enough to come to Bob Bender's living room… and there are a few). Mixed & Mastered at Music Dog Studios in Nashville, TN Website: businesssideofmusic.com  Stream or Download (free) businesssideofmusic.com  To submit to be interviewed: musicpodcast@mail.com Sponsorship information businesssideofmusic.com/sponsor-affiliate/ Join our mailing list for show announcements, career advice, industry discounts, free gifts, and more.  Like Free Special Thanks to Tom Sabella and Traci Snow for producing and hosting over 100 episodes of the original “Business Side of Music” podcast, and trusting us to carry on their legacy. For our disclaimer and all its details, please click on the applicable link on our website. The music provided for this episode is from: Artist: Cheryl B. Engelhardt Single: Earthshine Album: Luminary (2019) Composer: Cheryl B. Engelhardt Website: www.iamluminary.com

This week's episode features a discussion with Ric Gordon, a Kansas City & Nashville based artist and Director of A&R and a staff songwriter with music publisher Ammar Music Group is this week's guest. Recently his original songs have been recorded by pop singer Taylor Mac and country artist Jim Martin. We took some time to chat about a pivotal record in Ric Gordon's life and rock music as a whole: 1967's The Velvet Underground and Nico.In a career spanning 5 decades, Ric has forged an innovative and original Americana/alt-country sound. Ric moved to NYC’s Greenwich Village as a 17 year old singer/songwriter in 1970, where he honed his craft; next landing in Nashville in 1976 as an up and coming record producer, where he co-produced three releases with Country Music Hall of Fame Producer Fred Foster on historic label Monument Records. Ric released his debut album "Just Can't Get Enough" in 1980 and has now released 16 albums and EPs under various monikers, ranging from punk rock to electronic music to folk/Americana. In 1983,Ric returned to the music business full time in 2007, founding indie label Russian Winter Records in 2008. From 2011 to 2019 Ric also published the Floorshime Zipper Boots music blog, featuring daily reviews of releases from emerging artists worldwide. During its operation the blog published 2,300 features. In 2018, Ric launched his second independent label, Buffalo Burger Records as a home for his special projects focused on Americana and acoustic music. He produced the debut album from Nashville stalwart Jim Martin and the debut single from Midwest folk duo Ehrnman/Pearson Over his career, Ric has produced 54 albums and EPs by 26 different artists. Enjoy the conversation!

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com (more…)

How lack of distribution and promotion affects exposure of a hit record; the music industry needs to be aware of an artist's enduring appeal to his audience; how badly the press treated Elvis until his death; Roy looks ahead to the next step in his career. Recorded in Vancouver, July 1978 Roy Orbison was one of the original Sun Recording stars, but his long stay with Monument Records brought his greatest success. By the time we booked Roy into Vancouver his list of top sellers was most impressive: memorable songs like "Uptown", "Only The Lonely", "Blue Angel", "I'm Hurtin'", the classic "Running Scared", "Crying" and "Candy Man". Roy Orbison charted 29 hits, establishing him as one of the biggest chartbusters of the early Sixties. Friend and business partner Les Vogt and I became good friends with Roy over the years and he appeared in Vancouver many times. When we were not the promoters we always found time to get together during his visits. Les became his de facto manager during a period when Roy was without a record contract. Roy was not alone at that particular time as the record business was going through some major changes. The artists who started rock and roll suddenly found themselves out of favor. Les suggested Roy move from Nashville to Los Angeles. He did and his shows in and around the L. A. area were sold out. After the first show backstage, Roy was surprised to find people like Linda Ronstadt and others in the industry praising his talent. This gave him a new lease on life and he began his creative process all over again. From this “second wind” came his collaborative effort with the Traveling Wilburys and his new hits like I Drove All Night and You Got It. When Les and I were planning the acts for EXPO 86 we thought our old friend Roy Orbison would be a great headliner. Roy was on the comeback trail with the Traveling Wilburys and his Mystery Girl CD was enjoying success. He agreed without hesitation, saying “I will cancel some appearances and work with you, as you and Les were the only people to give me a bonus in my entire career.” Roy Orbison was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 by Bruce Springsteen. He died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at the peak of his renewed popularity. Roy gets my vote as the nicest performer I ever met. He was a wonderful, honourable guy. We miss him and his music.

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Only the Lonely" by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts -- part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----  Resources Apologies for the delay this week -- I'm still trying to catch up after last week.    As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. I have relied for biographical information mostly on two books -- The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison's children, and Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth.  For the musicological analysis, I referred a lot to the essay “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style,” by Albin Zak, in Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music.   There are many Orbison collections available, but many have rerecordings rather than the original versions of his hits. The Monument Singles Collection is the originals.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript It's been nearly a year since we last looked at Roy Orbison, so it's probably a good idea to quickly catch up with where we were up to. Roy Orbison had started out as a rockabilly singer, with a group called the Wink Westerners who changed their name to the Teen Kings and were signed to Sun Records. Orbison had thought that he would like to be a ballad singer, but everyone at Sun was convinced that he would never make it as anything other than a rocker. He had one minor hit on Sun, "Ooby Dooby", but eventually got dissatisfied with the label and asked to be allowed to go to another label -- Sam Phillips agreed to free him from his contract, in return for all the songwriting royalties and credits for everything he'd recorded for Sun. Newly free, Orbison signed to a major publisher and a major record label, recording for RCA with the same Nashville A-Team that were recording with Elvis and Brenda Lee. He had some success as a songwriter, writing "Claudette", which became a hit for the Everly Brothers, but he did no better recording for RCA than he had recording for Sun, and soon he was dropped by his new label, and the money from "Claudette" ran out. By the middle of 1959, Roy Orbison was an absolute failure. But this episode, we're going to talk about what happened next, and the startling way in which someone who had been a failure when produced by both Sam Phillips and Chet Atkins managed to become one of the most important artists in the world on a tiny label with no track record. Today, we're going to look at "Only the Lonely", and the records that turned Roy Orbison into a star: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely"] It seems odd that Roy Orbison could thank Wesley Rose for introducing him to Monument Records. Rose was the co-owner of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest country music publishing company in the world, and the company to which Orbison had signed as a songwriter. Fred Foster, the owner of Monument, describes being called to a meeting of various Nashville music industry professionals, at which Rose asked him in front of everyone "Why are you trying to destroy Nashville by making these..." and then used an expletive I can't use here and a racial slur I *won't* use here, to describe the slightly R&B-infused music Foster was making. Foster was part of the new wave of Nashville record makers that also included Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, though at this time he was far less successful than either of them. Foster had started out as a songwriter, writing the words for the McGuire Sisters' hit "Picking Sweethearts": [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, "Picking Sweethearts"] He had moved from there into record production, despite having little musical or technical ability. He did, though, have a good ear for artists, and he made his career in the business by picking good people and letting them do the music they wanted. He started out at 4 Star Records, a small country label. From there he moved to Mercury Records, but he only spent a brief time there -- he was in favour of moving into the rockabilly market, while his superiors in the company weren't. He quickly found another role at ABC/Paramount, where he produced hits for a number of people, including one track we've already covered in this podcast, Lloyd Price's version of "Stagger Lee". He then put his entire life savings into starting up his own company, Monument, which he initially co-owned with a DJ named Buddy Deane. As Foster and Deane were based in Washington at this time, they used an image of the Washington Monument as the label's logo, and that also inspired the name. The first single they put out on the label caused them some problems. Billy Grammer, their first signing, recorded a song that they believed to be in the public domain, "Done Laid Around", which had recently been recorded by the Weavers under the name "Gotta Travel On": [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Gotta Travel On"] However, after putting out Grammer's version, Foster discovered that the song was actually in copyright, with a credit to the folk singer and folklorist Paul Clayton. I don't know if Clayton actually wrote the song or not -- it was common practice at that time for folk songs to be copyrighted in the name of an artist. But whether Clayton wrote the song or not, "Done Laid Around" had to be withdrawn from sale, and reissued under the name "Gotta Travel On", with Clayton credited as the composer -- something which cost the new label a substantial amount of money. But it worked out well for everyone, with Grammer's record eventually reaching number four on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Billy Grammer, "Gotta Travel On"] After that success, Foster bought out Buddy Deane and moved the label down to Nashville. They put out a few more singles over the next year, mostly by Grammer, but nothing recaptured that initial success. But it did mean that Foster started working with the Nashville A-Team of session musicians -- people like Bob Moore, the bass player who played on almost every important record to come out of Nashville at that time, including the Elvis records we looked at last week. Moore had also played on Roy Orbison's last sessions for RCA, where he'd seen how downcast Orbison was. Orbison had explained to Moore about how this was going to be his last session for RCA -- his contract was about to expire, and it was clear that Chet Atkins had no more idea than Sam Phillips how to make a successful Roy Orbison record. Moore told him not to worry -- he very obviously had talent, and Moore would speak to Wesley Rose about him. As well as being Orbison's music publisher, Rose was also Orbison's manager, something that would nowadays be considered a conflict of interest, but was par for the course at the time -- he was also the Everly Brothers' manager and publisher, which is how Orbison had managed to place "Claudette" with them. There were a lot of such backroom deals in the industry at the time, and few people knew about them -- for example, none of Bob Moore's fellow session players on the A-Team knew that he secretly owned thirty-seven percent of Monument Records. While Fred Foster is credited as the producer on most of Orbison's sessions from this point on, it's probably reasonable to think of Bob Moore as at the very least an uncredited co-producer -- he was the arranger on all of the records, and he was also the person who booked the other musicians on the sessions. Orbison was by this point so depressed about his own chances in the music industry that he couldn't believe that anyone wanted to sign him at all -- he was convinced even after signing that Fred Foster was confusing his own "Ooby Dooby" with another Sun single, Warren Smith's similar sounding "Rock and Roll Ruby": [Excerpt: Warren Smith, "Rock and Roll Ruby"] Wesley Rose had very clear ideas as to what Orbison's first single for Monument should be -- that last session at RCA had included two songs, "Paper Boy", and "With the Bug", that RCA had not bothered to release, and so Orbison went into the studio with much the same set of musicians he'd been working with at RCA, and cut the same songs he'd recorded there. The single was released, and made absolutely no impact -- unsurprising for a record that was really the end of Orbison's period as a failure, rather than the beginning of his golden period. That golden period came when he started collaborating with Joe Melson. The two men had known each other for a while, but the legend has it that they started writing songs together after Melson was walking along and saw Orbison sat in his car playing the guitar -- Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently had a son, Roy DeWayne Orbison (his middle name was after Orbison's friend Duane Eddy, though spelled differently), and the flat they were living in was so small that the only way Orbison could write any songs without disturbing the baby was to go and write them in the car. Melson apparently tapped on the car window, and asked what Roy was doing, and when Roy explained, he suggested that the two of them start working together. Both men were more than capable songwriters on their own, but they brought out the best in one another, and soon they were writing material that was unlike anything else in popular music at the time. Their first collaboration to be released was Orbison's second Monument single, "Uptown", a bluesy rock and roll track which saw the first big change in Orbison's style -- the introduction of a string section along with the Nashville A-Team. This was something that was only just starting to be done in Nashville, and it made little sense to most people involved that Orbison would want strings on what would otherwise be a rockabilly track, but they went ahead: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Uptown"] The string arrangement was written by Anita Kerr, of the Anita Kerr Singers, the female vocal group that would be called into any Nashville session that required women's voices (the male equivalent was the Jordanaires). Kerr would write a lot of the string arrangements for Orbison's records, and her vocal group -- with Joe Melson adding a single male voice -- would provide the backing vocals on them for the next few years. Wesley Rose was still unsure that Orbison could ever be a star, mostly because he thought he was so odd-looking, but "Uptown" started to prove him wrong. It made number seventy-two on the pop charts -- still not a massive hit, but the best he'd done since "Ooby Dooby" three years and two record labels earlier. But it was the next single, another Orbison/Melson collaboration, that would make him into one of the biggest stars in music. "Only the Lonely" had its roots in two other songs. Melson had written a song called "Cry" before ever meeting Orbison, and the two of them had reworked it into one called "Only the Lonely", but they were also working on another song at the same time. They had still not had a hit, and were trying to write something in the style of a current popular record. At the time, Mark Dinning was having huge success with a ballad called "Teen Angel", about a girl who gets run over by a train: [Excerpt: Mark Dinning, "Teen Angel"] Orbison and Melson were writing their own knock-off of that, called "Come Back to Me My Love". But when they played it for Fred Foster, he told them it was awful, and they should scrap the whole thing -- apart from the backing vocal hook Joe was singing. That was worth doing something with: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", vocal intro] They took that vocal part and put it together with "Only the Lonely" to make a finished song. According to most reports, rather than have Orbison record it, they initially tried to get Elvis to do it -- if they did, they must have known that they had no chance of it getting recorded, because Elvis was only recording songs published by Hill and Range, and Orbison and Melson were Acuff-Rose songwriters. They also, though, tried to get it recorded by the Everly Brothers, who were friends of Orbison, were also signed with Acuff-Rose, and were also managed by Wesley Rose, and even they turned it down. This is understandable, because the finished "Only the Lonely" is one of the most bizarrely structured songs ever to be a hit. Now, I've known this song for more than thirty years, I have a fair understanding of music, *and* I am explaining this with the help of a musicological essay on the song I've read, analysing it bar by bar. I am *still* not sure that my explanation of what's going on with this song is right. *That's* how oddly structured this song is. The intro is straightforward enough, the kind of thing that every song has. But then the lead vocal comes in, and rather than continue under the lead, like you would normally expect, the lead and backing vocals alternate, and push each other out of phase as a result. Where in the intro, the first "dum dum dum" starts on the first bar of the phrase, here it starts on the *second* bar of the phrase and extends past the end of Orbison's line, meaning the first line of the verse is actually five bars (from where the instruments come in after the a capella "Only the"), and not only that, the backing vocals are stressing different beats to the ones the lead vocal is stressing: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", first line of verse] This is quite astonishingly jarring. Pop songs, of whatever genre -- country, or blues, or rock and roll, or doo-wop, or whatever -- almost all work in fours. You have four-bar phrases that build up into eight- or twelve-bar verses, choruses, and bridges. Here, by overlaying two four-bar phrases out of synch with each other, Orbison and Melson have created a five-bar phrase -- although please note if you try to count bars along with these excerpts, you may come out with a different number, because phrases cross bar lines and I'm splitting these excerpts up by the vocal phrase rather than by the bar line. The lead vocal then comes back, on a different beat than expected -- the stresses in the melody have moved all over the place. Because the lead vocal starts on a different beat for the second phrase, even though it's the same length as the first phrase, it crosses more bar lines, meaning two five-bar phrases total eleven bars. Not only that, but the bass doesn't move to a new chord where you expect, but it stays on its original chord for an extra two beats, giving the impression of a six-beat bar, even though the drums are staying in four-four. So the first half of the verse is eleven bars long, if you don't get thrown by thinking one of the bars is six beats rather than four. Structurally, harmonically, and rhythmically, it feels like someone has tried to compromise between a twelve-bar blues and an eight-bar doo-wop song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", second line] There's then another section, which in itself is perfectly straightforward -- an eight-bar stop-time section, whose lyric is possibly inspired by the Drifters song that had used strings and rhythmic disorientation in a similar way a few months earlier: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", "There goes my baby..."] The only incongruity there is a very minor one -- a brief move to the fifth-of-fifth chord, which is the kind of extremely minor deviation from the key that's par for the course in pop music. That section by itself is nothing unusual. But then after that straightforward eight-bar section, which seems like a return to normality, we then get a five-bar section which takes us to the end of the verse: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely", "But only the lonely know why..."] The song then basically repeats all its musical material from the start, with a few changes – the second time, the verse starts on the third of the scale rather than the first, and the melody goes up more, but it's structured similarly, and finishes in under two and a half minutes. So the musical material of the song covers twenty-four bars, not counting the intro. Twenty-four bars is actually a perfectly normal number of bars for a song to cover, but it would normally be broken down into three lots of eight or two lots of twelve -- instead it's a five, a six, an eight, and a five. I think. Honestly, I've gone back and forth several times about how best to break this up. The song is so familiar to most of us now that this doesn't sound strange any more, but I distinctly remember my own first time listening to it, when I was about eight, and wondering if the backing vocalists just hadn't known when to come in, if the people making the record just hadn't known how to make one properly, because this just sounded *wrong* to me. But it's that wrongness, that strangeness, of course -- along with Orbison's magnificent voice -- that made the record a hit, expressing perfectly the confusion and disorientation felt by the song's protagonist. It went to number two in the US, and number one in the UK, and instantly made Roy Orbison a star. A couple of slightly more conventional singles followed -- "Blue Angel" and "I'm Hurtin'" -- and they were both hits, but nowhere near as big as "Only the Lonely", and this seems to have convinced Orbison and Melson that they needed to follow their instincts and go for different structures than the norm. They started to make their songs, as far as possible, through-composed pieces. While most songs of the time break down into neat little sections -- verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, instrumental solo, chorus to fade, or a similar structure, Orbison and Melson's songs rarely have sections that repeat without any changes. Instead a single melody develops and takes twists and turns over the course of a couple of minutes, with Orbison usually singing throughout. This also had another advantage, as far as Orbison was concerned -- their songs hardly ever had space for an instrumental break, and so he never had to do the rock and roll star thing of moving around the stage and dancing while the instrumentalists soloed, which was something he felt uncomfortable doing. Instead he could just stand perfectly still at the microphone and sing. The first single they released that fit this new style was inspired by a piece of music Fred Foster introduced Orbison to -- Ravel's "Bolero": [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero" (West-Eastern Divan Orchestra)] Orbison and Melson took that basic feel and changed it into what would become Orbison's first number one in the US, "Running Scared": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Running Scared"] That song was apparently one that met some resistance from the Nashville A-Team. A chunk of the song is in rubato, or "free time", where the musicians speed up or slow down slightly to make the music more expressive. This was not something that Bob Moore, in particular, was comfortable with -- they were making pop music, weren't they? Pop music was for kids to dance to, and if kids were going to dance to it, it had to have a steady beat. Orbison wasn't very good at all at dealing with conflict, and wherever possible he would try to take the most positive attitude possible, and in this case he just went into the control room and waited, while the musicians tried to figure out a way of playing the song in strict tempo, and found it just didn't work. After a while, Orbison walked back into the studio and said "I think we should play it the way it was written", and the musicians finally went along with him. It may also have been on "Running Scared" that they pioneered a new recording technique, or at least new for Nashville, which was surprisingly conservative about recording technology for a town so rooted in the music industry. I've seen this story written about three different early Orbison songs, and it could have been any of them, but the descriptions of the "Running Scared" session are the most detailed. While Orbison had a great voice, at this point it wasn't especially powerful, and with the addition of strings, the band were overpowering his voice. At this time, it was customary for singers to record with the band, all performing together in one room, but the sound of the instruments was getting into Orbison's mic louder than his voice, making it impossible to get a good mix. Eventually, they brought a coatrack covered with coats into the studio, and used it to partition the space -- Orbison would stand on one side of it with his mic, and the band and their mics would be on the other side. The coats would deaden the sound of the musicians enough that Orbison's voice would be the main sound on his vocal mic. In this case, the reason his voice was being overpowered was that right at the end of the song he had to hit a high A in full voice -- something that's very difficult for a baritone like Orbison to do without going into falsetto. It may also be that he was nervous about trying this when the musicians could see him, and the coats in the way helped him feel more secure. Either way, he does a magnificent job on that note: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Running Scared", tag] Apparently when Chet Atkins popped into the studio for a visit, he was utterly bemused by what he saw -- but then he was impressed enough by the idea that he got RCA to build a proper vocal isolation booth at their studios to get the same effect. "Running Scared" also came along just after Orbison made one big change to his image. He'd been on tour with Patsy Cline, promoting "Blue Angel", and had left his glasses on the plane. As he couldn't see well without them, he had to resort to using his prescription sunglasses on stage, and was astonished to find that instead of looking gawky and rather odd-looking, the audience now seemed to think he looked cool and brooding. From that point on, he wore them constantly. For the next three years, Orbison and Melson continued working together and producing hits -- although Orbison also wrote several hits solo during this time, including "In Dreams", which many consider his greatest record. But Melson was becoming increasingly convinced that he was the real talent in the partnership. Melson was also putting out singles on his own at this time, and you can judge for yourself whether his most successful solo track, "Hey Mr. Cupid" is better or worse than the tracks Orbison did without him. [Excerpt: Joe Melson, "Hey Mr. Cupid"] Eventually Melson stopped working with Orbison altogether, after their last major collaboration, "Blue Bayou". This turned out to be the beginning of the collapse of Orbison's entire life, though it didn't seem like it at the time. It was the first crack in the team that produced his biggest hits, but for now he was on a roll. He started collaborating with another writer, Bill Dees, and even though Beatlemania was raging in the UK, and later in the US, he was one of a tiny number of American artists who continued to have hits. Indeed, two of the early collaborations by Orbison and Dees were the *only* two records by an American artist to go to number one in the UK between August 1963 and February 1965. The second of those, "Oh, Pretty Woman", also went to number one in the US, and became one of his most well-known songs: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Oh, Pretty Woman"] That song again caused problems with his new collaborator, as Bill Dees sang the harmony vocals on it, and felt he wasn't getting enough credit for that. But that was the high point for Orbison. Wesley Rose and Fred Foster had never got on, and Rose decided that he was going to move Orbison over to MGM Records, who gave him an advance of a million dollars, but immediately the hits dried up. And the events of the next few years were the kind of thing that would would break almost anyone. He had divorced his wife Claudette, who had inspired "Oh, Pretty Woman", in November 1964, just before signing to MGM, because he'd discovered she was cheating on him. But the two of them had been so in love they'd ended up reconciling and remarrying in December 1965. But then six months later, they were out riding motorbikes together, Claudette crashed hers, and she died. And then a little over two years later, while he was on tour in the UK, his house burned down, killing two of his three children. Orbison continued to work, putting out records that no-one was buying, and playing the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in the UK. He even remarried in 1969, and found happiness and a new family with his second wife. But for about twenty years, from 1965 through to 1985, he was in a wilderness period. Between personal tragedy, changing fashions in music, and the heart condition he developed in the 70s, he was no longer capable of making records that resonated with the public, even though his voice was as strong as ever, and he could still get an audience when singing those old hits. And even the old hits were hard to get hold of -- Monument Records went bankrupt in the seventies, and reissues of his old songs were tied up in legal battles over their ownership. But then things started to change for him in the mid-eighties. A few modern artists had had hits with cover versions of his hits, but the big change came in 1985, when he collaborated with his fellow ex-Sun performers Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, on an album called Class of 55: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Class of 55, "Coming Home"] That came out in 1986, and made the top twenty on the country charts -- the first time he'd had an album make any chart at all since 1966. Also in 1986, David Lynch used Orbison's "In Dreams" in his film Blue Velvet, which brought the record to a very different audience. He collaborated with k.d. lang, who was then one of the hottest new singers in country music, on a new version of his hit "Crying": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, "Crying"] That later won a Grammy. He recorded a new album of rerecordings of his greatest hits, which made the lower reaches of the charts. He got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame, and recorded a live TV special, A Black and White Night, where he was joined by Elvis' seventies backing band, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits, among others, all just acting as backing singers and musicians for a man they admired. He also joined with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys, whose first album made the top five: [Excerpt: The Travelling Wilburys, "Handle With Care"] And he recorded an album of new material, his best in decades, Mystery Girl, produced by Lynne and with songs written by Orbison, Lynne, and Petty -- along with a couple of songs contributed by famous admirers like Bono and the Edge of U2. But by the time that came out, Orbison was dead -- after a day flying model aeroplanes with his sons, he had a heart attack and died, aged only fifty-two. When Mystery Girl came out a couple of months later, it rose to the top five or better almost everywhere -- and in the UK and US, he had two albums in the top five at the same time, as in the UK a hits compilation was also up there, while in the US the Wilburys album was still near the top of the charts. Orbison's is one of the saddest stories in rock music, with one of the greatest talents in history getting derailed for decades by heartbreaking tragedies unimaginable to most of us, and then dying right at the point he was finally starting to get the recognition he deserved. But the work he did, both as a songwriter and as a singer, would inspire people long after his death.

Roy recalls his early days at Sun Records; Elvis' Texas performances and the unique sound of Scotty Moore's guitar; Johnny Cash puts Roy in touch with Sam Phillips; the secret of the Sun Sound; Roy works briefly with Chet Atkins at RCA before signing with Monument Records in 1959; the success of "Uptown" and "Only The Lonely"; Roy tells the story behind recording "Running Scared". Recorded in Vancouver, July 1978 Roy Orbison was one of the original Sun Recording stars, but his long stay with Monument Records brought his greatest success. By the time we booked Roy into Vancouver his list of top sellers was most impressive: memorable songs like "Uptown", "Only The Lonely", "Blue Angel", "I'm Hurtin'", the classic "Running Scared", "Crying" and "Candy Man". Roy Orbison charted 29 hits, establishing him as one of the biggest chartbusters of the early Sixties. Friend and business partner Les Vogt and I became good friends with Roy over the years and he appeared in Vancouver many times. When we were not the promoters we always found time to get together during his visits. Les became his de facto manager during a period when Roy was without a record contract. Roy was not alone at that particular time as the record business was going through some major changes. The artists who started rock and roll suddenly found themselves out of favor. Les suggested Roy move from Nashville to Los Angeles. He did and his shows in and around the L. A. area were sold out. After the first show backstage, Roy was surprised to find people like Linda Ronstadt and others in the industry praising his talent. This gave him a new lease on life and he began his creative process all over again. From this “second wind” came his collaborative effort with the Traveling Wilburys and his new hits like I Drove All Night and You Got It. When Les and I were planning the acts for EXPO 86 we thought our old friend Roy Orbison would be a great headliner. Roy was on the comeback trail with the Traveling Wilburys and his Mystery Girl CD was enjoying success. He agreed without hesitation, saying “I will cancel some appearances and work with you, as you and Les were the only people to give me a bonus in my entire career.” Roy Orbison was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 by Bruce Springsteen. He died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at the peak of his renewed popularity. Roy gets my vote as the nicest performer I ever met. He was a wonderful, honourable guy. We miss him and his music.

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’m still trying to catch up after last week.    As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. I have relied for biographical information mostly on two books — The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children, and Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth.  For the musicological analysis, I referred a lot to the essay “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style,” by Albin Zak, in Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music.   There are many Orbison collections available, but many have rerecordings rather than the original versions of his hits. The Monument Singles Collection is the originals.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript It’s been nearly a year since we last looked at Roy Orbison, so it’s probably a good idea to quickly catch up with where we were up to. Roy Orbison had started out as a rockabilly singer, with a group called the Wink Westerners who changed their name to the Teen Kings and were signed to Sun Records. Orbison had thought that he would like to be a ballad singer, but everyone at Sun was convinced that he would never make it as anything other than a rocker. He had one minor hit on Sun, “Ooby Dooby”, but eventually got dissatisfied with the label and asked to be allowed to go to another label — Sam Phillips agreed to free him from his contract, in return for all the songwriting royalties and credits for everything he’d recorded for Sun. Newly free, Orbison signed to a major publisher and a major record label, recording for RCA with the same Nashville A-Team that were recording with Elvis and Brenda Lee. He had some success as a songwriter, writing “Claudette”, which became a hit for the Everly Brothers, but he did no better recording for RCA than he had recording for Sun, and soon he was dropped by his new label, and the money from “Claudette” ran out. By the middle of 1959, Roy Orbison was an absolute failure. But this episode, we’re going to talk about what happened next, and the startling way in which someone who had been a failure when produced by both Sam Phillips and Chet Atkins managed to become one of the most important artists in the world on a tiny label with no track record. Today, we’re going to look at “Only the Lonely”, and the records that turned Roy Orbison into a star: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”] It seems odd that Roy Orbison could thank Wesley Rose for introducing him to Monument Records. Rose was the co-owner of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest country music publishing company in the world, and the company to which Orbison had signed as a songwriter. Fred Foster, the owner of Monument, describes being called to a meeting of various Nashville music industry professionals, at which Rose asked him in front of everyone “Why are you trying to destroy Nashville by making these…” and then used an expletive I can’t use here and a racial slur I *won’t* use here, to describe the slightly R&B-infused music Foster was making. Foster was part of the new wave of Nashville record makers that also included Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, though at this time he was far less successful than either of them. Foster had started out as a songwriter, writing the words for the McGuire Sisters’ hit “Picking Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Picking Sweethearts”] He had moved from there into record production, despite having little musical or technical ability. He did, though, have a good ear for artists, and he made his career in the business by picking good people and letting them do the music they wanted. He started out at 4 Star Records, a small country label. From there he moved to Mercury Records, but he only spent a brief time there — he was in favour of moving into the rockabilly market, while his superiors in the company weren’t. He quickly found another role at ABC/Paramount, where he produced hits for a number of people, including one track we’ve already covered in this podcast, Lloyd Price’s version of “Stagger Lee”. He then put his entire life savings into starting up his own company, Monument, which he initially co-owned with a DJ named Buddy Deane. As Foster and Deane were based in Washington at this time, they used an image of the Washington Monument as the label’s logo, and that also inspired the name. The first single they put out on the label caused them some problems. Billy Grammer, their first signing, recorded a song that they believed to be in the public domain, “Done Laid Around”, which had recently been recorded by the Weavers under the name “Gotta Travel On”: [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Gotta Travel On”] However, after putting out Grammer’s version, Foster discovered that the song was actually in copyright, with a credit to the folk singer and folklorist Paul Clayton. I don’t know if Clayton actually wrote the song or not — it was common practice at that time for folk songs to be copyrighted in the name of an artist. But whether Clayton wrote the song or not, “Done Laid Around” had to be withdrawn from sale, and reissued under the name “Gotta Travel On”, with Clayton credited as the composer — something which cost the new label a substantial amount of money. But it worked out well for everyone, with Grammer’s record eventually reaching number four on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Billy Grammer, “Gotta Travel On”] After that success, Foster bought out Buddy Deane and moved the label down to Nashville. They put out a few more singles over the next year, mostly by Grammer, but nothing recaptured that initial success. But it did mean that Foster started working with the Nashville A-Team of session musicians — people like Bob Moore, the bass player who played on almost every important record to come out of Nashville at that time, including the Elvis records we looked at last week. Moore had also played on Roy Orbison’s last sessions for RCA, where he’d seen how downcast Orbison was. Orbison had explained to Moore about how this was going to be his last session for RCA — his contract was about to expire, and it was clear that Chet Atkins had no more idea than Sam Phillips how to make a successful Roy Orbison record. Moore told him not to worry — he very obviously had talent, and Moore would speak to Wesley Rose about him. As well as being Orbison’s music publisher, Rose was also Orbison’s manager, something that would nowadays be considered a conflict of interest, but was par for the course at the time — he was also the Everly Brothers’ manager and publisher, which is how Orbison had managed to place “Claudette” with them. There were a lot of such backroom deals in the industry at the time, and few people knew about them — for example, none of Bob Moore’s fellow session players on the A-Team knew that he secretly owned thirty-seven percent of Monument Records. While Fred Foster is credited as the producer on most of Orbison’s sessions from this point on, it’s probably reasonable to think of Bob Moore as at the very least an uncredited co-producer — he was the arranger on all of the records, and he was also the person who booked the other musicians on the sessions. Orbison was by this point so depressed about his own chances in the music industry that he couldn’t believe that anyone wanted to sign him at all — he was convinced even after signing that Fred Foster was confusing his own “Ooby Dooby” with another Sun single, Warren Smith’s similar sounding “Rock and Roll Ruby”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “Rock and Roll Ruby”] Wesley Rose had very clear ideas as to what Orbison’s first single for Monument should be — that last session at RCA had included two songs, “Paper Boy”, and “With the Bug”, that RCA had not bothered to release, and so Orbison went into the studio with much the same set of musicians he’d been working with at RCA, and cut the same songs he’d recorded there. The single was released, and made absolutely no impact — unsurprising for a record that was really the end of Orbison’s period as a failure, rather than the beginning of his golden period. That golden period came when he started collaborating with Joe Melson. The two men had known each other for a while, but the legend has it that they started writing songs together after Melson was walking along and saw Orbison sat in his car playing the guitar — Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently had a son, Roy DeWayne Orbison (his middle name was after Orbison’s friend Duane Eddy, though spelled differently), and the flat they were living in was so small that the only way Orbison could write any songs without disturbing the baby was to go and write them in the car. Melson apparently tapped on the car window, and asked what Roy was doing, and when Roy explained, he suggested that the two of them start working together. Both men were more than capable songwriters on their own, but they brought out the best in one another, and soon they were writing material that was unlike anything else in popular music at the time. Their first collaboration to be released was Orbison’s second Monument single, “Uptown”, a bluesy rock and roll track which saw the first big change in Orbison’s style — the introduction of a string section along with the Nashville A-Team. This was something that was only just starting to be done in Nashville, and it made little sense to most people involved that Orbison would want strings on what would otherwise be a rockabilly track, but they went ahead: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Uptown”] The string arrangement was written by Anita Kerr, of the Anita Kerr Singers, the female vocal group that would be called into any Nashville session that required women’s voices (the male equivalent was the Jordanaires). Kerr would write a lot of the string arrangements for Orbison’s records, and her vocal group — with Joe Melson adding a single male voice — would provide the backing vocals on them for the next few years. Wesley Rose was still unsure that Orbison could ever be a star, mostly because he thought he was so odd-looking, but “Uptown” started to prove him wrong. It made number seventy-two on the pop charts — still not a massive hit, but the best he’d done since “Ooby Dooby” three years and two record labels earlier. But it was the next single, another Orbison/Melson collaboration, that would make him into one of the biggest stars in music. “Only the Lonely” had its roots in two other songs. Melson had written a song called “Cry” before ever meeting Orbison, and the two of them had reworked it into one called “Only the Lonely”, but they were also working on another song at the same time. They had still not had a hit, and were trying to write something in the style of a current popular record. At the time, Mark Dinning was having huge success with a ballad called “Teen Angel”, about a girl who gets run over by a train: [Excerpt: Mark Dinning, “Teen Angel”] Orbison and Melson were writing their own knock-off of that, called “Come Back to Me My Love”. But when they played it for Fred Foster, he told them it was awful, and they should scrap the whole thing — apart from the backing vocal hook Joe was singing. That was worth doing something with: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, vocal intro] They took that vocal part and put it together with “Only the Lonely” to make a finished song. According to most reports, rather than have Orbison record it, they initially tried to get Elvis to do it — if they did, they must have known that they had no chance of it getting recorded, because Elvis was only recording songs published by Hill and Range, and Orbison and Melson were Acuff-Rose songwriters. They also, though, tried to get it recorded by the Everly Brothers, who were friends of Orbison, were also signed with Acuff-Rose, and were also managed by Wesley Rose, and even they turned it down. This is understandable, because the finished “Only the Lonely” is one of the most bizarrely structured songs ever to be a hit. Now, I’ve known this song for more than thirty years, I have a fair understanding of music, *and* I am explaining this with the help of a musicological essay on the song I’ve read, analysing it bar by bar. I am *still* not sure that my explanation of what’s going on with this song is right. *That’s* how oddly structured this song is. The intro is straightforward enough, the kind of thing that every song has. But then the lead vocal comes in, and rather than continue under the lead, like you would normally expect, the lead and backing vocals alternate, and push each other out of phase as a result. Where in the intro, the first “dum dum dum” starts on the first bar of the phrase, here it starts on the *second* bar of the phrase and extends past the end of Orbison’s line, meaning the first line of the verse is actually five bars (from where the instruments come in after the a capella “Only the”), and not only that, the backing vocals are stressing different beats to the ones the lead vocal is stressing: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, first line of verse] This is quite astonishingly jarring. Pop songs, of whatever genre — country, or blues, or rock and roll, or doo-wop, or whatever — almost all work in fours. You have four-bar phrases that build up into eight- or twelve-bar verses, choruses, and bridges. Here, by overlaying two four-bar phrases out of synch with each other, Orbison and Melson have created a five-bar phrase — although please note if you try to count bars along with these excerpts, you may come out with a different number, because phrases cross bar lines and I’m splitting these excerpts up by the vocal phrase rather than by the bar line. The lead vocal then comes back, on a different beat than expected — the stresses in the melody have moved all over the place. Because the lead vocal starts on a different beat for the second phrase, even though it’s the same length as the first phrase, it crosses more bar lines, meaning two five-bar phrases total eleven bars. Not only that, but the bass doesn’t move to a new chord where you expect, but it stays on its original chord for an extra two beats, giving the impression of a six-beat bar, even though the drums are staying in four-four. So the first half of the verse is eleven bars long, if you don’t get thrown by thinking one of the bars is six beats rather than four. Structurally, harmonically, and rhythmically, it feels like someone has tried to compromise between a twelve-bar blues and an eight-bar doo-wop song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, second line] There’s then another section, which in itself is perfectly straightforward — an eight-bar stop-time section, whose lyric is possibly inspired by the Drifters song that had used strings and rhythmic disorientation in a similar way a few months earlier: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, “There goes my baby…”] The only incongruity there is a very minor one — a brief move to the fifth-of-fifth chord, which is the kind of extremely minor deviation from the key that’s par for the course in pop music. That section by itself is nothing unusual. But then after that straightforward eight-bar section, which seems like a return to normality, we then get a five-bar section which takes us to the end of the verse: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”, “But only the lonely know why…”] The song then basically repeats all its musical material from the start, with a few changes – the second time, the verse starts on the third of the scale rather than the first, and the melody goes up more, but it’s structured similarly, and finishes in under two and a half minutes. So the musical material of the song covers twenty-four bars, not counting the intro. Twenty-four bars is actually a perfectly normal number of bars for a song to cover, but it would normally be broken down into three lots of eight or two lots of twelve — instead it’s a five, a six, an eight, and a five. I think. Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth several times about how best to break this up. The song is so familiar to most of us now that this doesn’t sound strange any more, but I distinctly remember my own first time listening to it, when I was about eight, and wondering if the backing vocalists just hadn’t known when to come in, if the people making the record just hadn’t known how to make one properly, because this just sounded *wrong* to me. But it’s that wrongness, that strangeness, of course — along with Orbison’s magnificent voice — that made the record a hit, expressing perfectly the confusion and disorientation felt by the song’s protagonist. It went to number two in the US, and number one in the UK, and instantly made Roy Orbison a star. A couple of slightly more conventional singles followed — “Blue Angel” and “I’m Hurtin'” — and they were both hits, but nowhere near as big as “Only the Lonely”, and this seems to have convinced Orbison and Melson that they needed to follow their instincts and go for different structures than the norm. They started to make their songs, as far as possible, through-composed pieces. While most songs of the time break down into neat little sections — verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, instrumental solo, chorus to fade, or a similar structure, Orbison and Melson’s songs rarely have sections that repeat without any changes. Instead a single melody develops and takes twists and turns over the course of a couple of minutes, with Orbison usually singing throughout. This also had another advantage, as far as Orbison was concerned — their songs hardly ever had space for an instrumental break, and so he never had to do the rock and roll star thing of moving around the stage and dancing while the instrumentalists soloed, which was something he felt uncomfortable doing. Instead he could just stand perfectly still at the microphone and sing. The first single they released that fit this new style was inspired by a piece of music Fred Foster introduced Orbison to — Ravel’s “Bolero”: [Excerpt: Ravel, “Bolero” (West-Eastern Divan Orchestra)] Orbison and Melson took that basic feel and changed it into what would become Orbison’s first number one in the US, “Running Scared”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Running Scared”] That song was apparently one that met some resistance from the Nashville A-Team. A chunk of the song is in rubato, or “free time”, where the musicians speed up or slow down slightly to make the music more expressive. This was not something that Bob Moore, in particular, was comfortable with — they were making pop music, weren’t they? Pop music was for kids to dance to, and if kids were going to dance to it, it had to have a steady beat. Orbison wasn’t very good at all at dealing with conflict, and wherever possible he would try to take the most positive attitude possible, and in this case he just went into the control room and waited, while the musicians tried to figure out a way of playing the song in strict tempo, and found it just didn’t work. After a while, Orbison walked back into the studio and said “I think we should play it the way it was written”, and the musicians finally went along with him. It may also have been on “Running Scared” that they pioneered a new recording technique, or at least new for Nashville, which was surprisingly conservative about recording technology for a town so rooted in the music industry. I’ve seen this story written about three different early Orbison songs, and it could have been any of them, but the descriptions of the “Running Scared” session are the most detailed. While Orbison had a great voice, at this point it wasn’t especially powerful, and with the addition of strings, the band were overpowering his voice. At this time, it was customary for singers to record with the band, all performing together in one room, but the sound of the instruments was getting into Orbison’s mic louder than his voice, making it impossible to get a good mix. Eventually, they brought a coatrack covered with coats into the studio, and used it to partition the space — Orbison would stand on one side of it with his mic, and the band and their mics would be on the other side. The coats would deaden the sound of the musicians enough that Orbison’s voice would be the main sound on his vocal mic. In this case, the reason his voice was being overpowered was that right at the end of the song he had to hit a high A in full voice — something that’s very difficult for a baritone like Orbison to do without going into falsetto. It may also be that he was nervous about trying this when the musicians could see him, and the coats in the way helped him feel more secure. Either way, he does a magnificent job on that note: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Running Scared”, tag] Apparently when Chet Atkins popped into the studio for a visit, he was utterly bemused by what he saw — but then he was impressed enough by the idea that he got RCA to build a proper vocal isolation booth at their studios to get the same effect. “Running Scared” also came along just after Orbison made one big change to his image. He’d been on tour with Patsy Cline, promoting “Blue Angel”, and had left his glasses on the plane. As he couldn’t see well without them, he had to resort to using his prescription sunglasses on stage, and was astonished to find that instead of looking gawky and rather odd-looking, the audience now seemed to think he looked cool and brooding. From that point on, he wore them constantly. For the next three years, Orbison and Melson continued working together and producing hits — although Orbison also wrote several hits solo during this time, including “In Dreams”, which many consider his greatest record. But Melson was becoming increasingly convinced that he was the real talent in the partnership. Melson was also putting out singles on his own at this time, and you can judge for yourself whether his most successful solo track, “Hey Mr. Cupid” is better or worse than the tracks Orbison did without him. [Excerpt: Joe Melson, “Hey Mr. Cupid”] Eventually Melson stopped working with Orbison altogether, after their last major collaboration, “Blue Bayou”. This turned out to be the beginning of the collapse of Orbison’s entire life, though it didn’t seem like it at the time. It was the first crack in the team that produced his biggest hits, but for now he was on a roll. He started collaborating with another writer, Bill Dees, and even though Beatlemania was raging in the UK, and later in the US, he was one of a tiny number of American artists who continued to have hits. Indeed, two of the early collaborations by Orbison and Dees were the *only* two records by an American artist to go to number one in the UK between August 1963 and February 1965. The second of those, “Oh, Pretty Woman”, also went to number one in the US, and became one of his most well-known songs: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Oh, Pretty Woman”] That song again caused problems with his new collaborator, as Bill Dees sang the harmony vocals on it, and felt he wasn’t getting enough credit for that. But that was the high point for Orbison. Wesley Rose and Fred Foster had never got on, and Rose decided that he was going to move Orbison over to MGM Records, who gave him an advance of a million dollars, but immediately the hits dried up. And the events of the next few years were the kind of thing that would would break almost anyone. He had divorced his wife Claudette, who had inspired “Oh, Pretty Woman”, in November 1964, just before signing to MGM, because he’d discovered she was cheating on him. But the two of them had been so in love they’d ended up reconciling and remarrying in December 1965. But then six months later, they were out riding motorbikes together, Claudette crashed hers, and she died. And then a little over two years later, while he was on tour in the UK, his house burned down, killing two of his three children. Orbison continued to work, putting out records that no-one was buying, and playing the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in the UK. He even remarried in 1969, and found happiness and a new family with his second wife. But for about twenty years, from 1965 through to 1985, he was in a wilderness period. Between personal tragedy, changing fashions in music, and the heart condition he developed in the 70s, he was no longer capable of making records that resonated with the public, even though his voice was as strong as ever, and he could still get an audience when singing those old hits. And even the old hits were hard to get hold of — Monument Records went bankrupt in the seventies, and reissues of his old songs were tied up in legal battles over their ownership. But then things started to change for him in the mid-eighties. A few modern artists had had hits with cover versions of his hits, but the big change came in 1985, when he collaborated with his fellow ex-Sun performers Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, on an album called Class of 55: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Class of 55, “Coming Home”] That came out in 1986, and made the top twenty on the country charts — the first time he’d had an album make any chart at all since 1966. Also in 1986, David Lynch used Orbison’s “In Dreams” in his film Blue Velvet, which brought the record to a very different audience. He collaborated with k.d. lang, who was then one of the hottest new singers in country music, on a new version of his hit “Crying”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, “Crying”] That later won a Grammy. He recorded a new album of rerecordings of his greatest hits, which made the lower reaches of the charts. He got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame, and recorded a live TV special, A Black and White Night, where he was joined by Elvis’ seventies backing band, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Tom Waits, among others, all just acting as backing singers and musicians for a man they admired. He also joined with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys, whose first album made the top five: [Excerpt: The Travelling Wilburys, “Handle With Care”] And he recorded an album of new material, his best in decades, Mystery Girl, produced by Lynne and with songs written by Orbison, Lynne, and Petty — along with a couple of songs contributed by famous admirers like Bono and the Edge of U2. But by the time that came out, Orbison was dead — after a day flying model aeroplanes with his sons, he had a heart attack and died, aged only fifty-two. When Mystery Girl came out a couple of months later, it rose to the top five or better almost everywhere — and in the UK and US, he had two albums in the top five at the same time, as in the UK a hits compilation was also up there, while in the US the Wilburys album was still near the top of the charts. Orbison’s is one of the saddest stories in rock music, with one of the greatest talents in history getting derailed for decades by heartbreaking tragedies unimaginable to most of us, and then dying right at the point he was finally starting to get the recognition he deserved. But the work he did, both as a songwriter and as a singer, would inspire people long after his death.

Roy shares the story of "Lana" and its success a couple of years after leaving Monument; working with songwriter Joe Melson and writing solo; how great music makes a simple emotional connection; Roy moves to LA from Nashville and Linda Ronstadt records "Blue Bayou". Recorded in Vancouver, July 1978 Roy Orbison was one of the original Sun Recording stars, but his long stay with Monument Records brought his greatest success. By the time we booked Roy into Vancouver his list of top sellers was most impressive: memorable songs like "Uptown", "Only The Lonely", "Blue Angel", "I'm Hurtin'", the classic "Running Scared", "Crying" and "Candy Man". Roy Orbison charted 29 hits, establishing him as one of the biggest chartbusters of the early Sixties. Friend and business partner Les Vogt and I became good friends with Roy over the years and he appeared in Vancouver many times. When we were not the promoters we always found time to get together during his visits. Les became his de facto manager during a period when Roy was without a record contract. Roy was not alone at that particular time as the record business was going through some major changes. The artists who started rock and roll suddenly found themselves out of favor. Les suggested Roy move from Nashville to Los Angeles. He did and his shows in and around the L. A. area were sold out. After the first show backstage, Roy was surprised to find people like Linda Ronstadt and others in the industry praising his talent. This gave him a new lease on life and he began his creative process all over again. From this “second wind” came his collaborative effort with the Traveling Wilburys and his new hits like I Drove All Night and You Got It. When Les and I were planning the acts for EXPO 86 we thought our old friend Roy Orbison would be a great headliner. Roy was on the comeback trail with the Traveling Wilburys and his Mystery Girl CD was enjoying success. He agreed without hesitation, saying “I will cancel some appearances and work with you, as you and Les were the only people to give me a bonus in my entire career.” Roy Orbison was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 by Bruce Springsteen. He died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at the peak of his renewed popularity. Roy gets my vote as the nicest performer I ever met. He was a wonderful, honourable guy. We miss him and his music.

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 “Muleskinner Blues” by the Fendermen. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources Apologies for the delay this week — I’ve been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don’t worry, it’s not anything serious…    No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud’s rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. It’s not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it’s still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis’ sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis’ continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It’s well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo, which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript ERRATUM: I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn’t record it for a few more days. Before I start this week’s episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We’ve already covered his work of course, in episodes on “Tutti Frutti” and “Keep A Knockin'”, and I don’t really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don’t think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don’t think you can argue that those three weren’t the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we’re covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we’ve looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let’s have a few moments’ noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we’re going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we’re entering the sixties, we’re leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we’re definitely leaving for now. Elvis’ two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he’d been separated from everyone he knew, and he’d met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He’d recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years — “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, “Hard-Headed Woman”, “One Night”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”. Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel’s from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted — his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn’t due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don’t want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn’t have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland — the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father’s new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show — he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis’ early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis’ last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session — Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He’ll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He’ll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland — the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis’ last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well — as well as having sung on Elvis’ pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles — Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all — Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going — the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves — and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled “Make Me Know It” took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Make Me Know It”] Elvis’ voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army — he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman’s “A Mess of Blues”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “A Mess of Blues”] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single — a mediocre track called “Stuck on You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Stuck on You”] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of “Stuck on You” backed with “Fame and Fortune” was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders — they came out in sleeves that just read “Elvis’ 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World”, because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra — The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis. Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he’d gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip — that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he’d been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through “Fame and Fortune”. He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, “Stuck on You”, and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings “Love Me Tender” while Elvis sings Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock “Love Me Tender”, but Elvis takes Sinatra’s song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There’s a passage in Umberto Eco’s book about writing The Name of the Rose, where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write “I love you madly”. A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly'”. This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco’s view) can’t. By this definition, Sinatra’s performance is modernist — he’s just showing contempt for the material — while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he’s also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of “Fever” that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Fever”] Then there was “Like a Baby”, a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis’ best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Like a Baby”] The next song was a huge departure from anything he’d done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin’s 1950 hit “There’s No Tomorrow”: [Excerpt: Tony Martin, “There’s No Tomorrow”] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he’d mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, “There’s No Tomorrow” was based on the old song “O Sole Mio”, which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became “It’s Now or Never”. Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he’d given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “It’s Now Or Never”] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn’t have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel’s wife Marie’s favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA’s A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake — because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn’t see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis’ repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that’s almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from “King Creole”, a cover version of “Such a Night”, the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song “Reconsider Baby”, the light Latin pop song “The Girl of My Best Friend”, a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge — in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks — three singles and a twelve-track album — and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it’s very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called “GI Blues”, intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn’t going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were “business reasons” — Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called “Wooden Heart”, based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we’ll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis’ film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren’t songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don’t work as a poem. There’s a habit even among Elvis’ fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn’t happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work — he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it’s clear that the time in the Army wasn’t the problem — it’s just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did — he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he’d been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis’ role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There’s quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis’ acting in them, but there’s no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis’ own musical instincts yet — he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he’d wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “His Hand in Mine”] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn’t like, GI Blues, that was the big success — and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies — an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year — a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like “Ito Eats”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Ito Eats”] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren’t as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn’t going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like “There’s No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car”. When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn’t be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that “Elvis died when he went into the Army”. We’ll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.  

The guys pay tribute to Little Richard before welcoming Minnesota native Caitlyn Smith, who found her way to Nashville as a songwriter before signing with Monument Records and earning a nod as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s “10 New Artists You Need to Know.” Her second album, Supernova, was recently released to critical acclaim. Caitlyn’s list of hit songs that have been recorded by other artists includes “Wasting All These Tears,” a Top 5 single for Cassadee Pope, “You Can’t Make Old Friends” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, and “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” a multi-platinum hit for Meghan Trainor featuring John Legend. Smith, along with co-writers Kate York and Mary Steenburgen, won a Critics’ Choice Award for the song “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” from the film Wild Rose. Other artists who’ve recorded Caitlyn’s songs include Lori McKenna, Lucy Hale, Jason Aldean, Garth Brooks, Rascal Flatts, Laura Bell Bundy, Chris Isaak, Lindsay Ell, Lady Antebellum, and Trisha Yearwood. 

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. 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 “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes.  Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. 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 “16 Candles” by the Crests. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

Trick or treat, Smell my feet, The Black Goat is stepping, We'll be full once we eat.   You can find & subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or anywhere else you stream your podcasts. We're on social media, @unexpectedshow on Twitter and @theunexpectedpodcast on Facebook. You can also find out what we're up to on our website, www.theunexpectedpodcast.com. The Unexpected storytelling podcast is written, produced, and directed by Andrew Soucek and Erik Bergstrom. Each story is somehow a work of fiction, and with the exception of public figures like Tony Danza, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental, and unexpected. All background music is credited to Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 The Unexpected Podcast claims no copyright to the songs used in the story, Trick or Treat, Smell My Knife. The Unexpected Podcast is a non-commercial podcast, and seeks to make no profit off its stories. Candy Man by Roy Orbison is copyright 1961 by Monument Records. Helvetesfönster by Ghost is copyright 2018 by Loma Vista Recordings, Distributed by Concord Music Group, Ltd. Lady Dada's Nightmare by MGMT is copyright 2013 by Legacy. They have no affiliation with and do not endorse The Unexpected.