Podcasts about My Boy Lollipop

Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.Nicky Bomba, the vibrant lead of the Melbourne Ska Orchestra, takes us on a rhythmic journey through two decades of ska music and collective creativity. How does one harness the energy of 32 musicians without missing a beat? Nicky reveals the passion and chemistry that propel the orchestra forward, sharing stories of their triumphant tours, ARIA wins, and the camaraderie that keeps egos in check. This episode promises a backstage pass to the orchestra's final Australian performance in Adelaide before they embark on an international adventure.In a heartfelt exploration, Nicky opens up about the musical legacy nurtured within his Maltese family, spotlighting a journey that saw him transition from electronics enthusiast and potential park ranger to full-time musician. We trace the roots of ska music, celebrating its evolution from Jamaica's mento and calypso origins to its worldwide acclaim through iconic tracks like "My Boy Lollipop" and "Simmer Down" by Bob Marley and the Wailers. This episode is a vibrant celebration of ska's history and Nicky's personal story, sure to resonate with music lovers and aspiring musicians alike.What has Nicky Bomba been up to lately?  Let's find out!!Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!Visit: ThatRadioChick.com.au

Neil Storey is an old pal from our magazine days who worked in the press office at Island. He looked after U2, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, the B-52's and many others. About 15 years ago he began the mammoth task of compiling a series of books telling the story of virtually every record the label released in its pioneering history, tracking down and talking to all those involved - musicians, producers, designers, photographers, label staff – and collecting old music press ads and ephemera from the time. The book's almost a foot square so LP sleeves can be reproduced ‘actual size'. The first volume is just out, The Island Book Of Records 1959-1968, a thing of very great beauty. As David says, “it's like entering the record shop of your dreams.” We talked to Neil at his home in France about this and much else besides …   … Chris Blackwell's involvement in the making of Dr No and the single Jamaican beach shot that told them they had a hit movie. … the album they released that no-one involved could remember. … Shotgun Wedding by Roy ‘C', Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, Lance Hayward, Millie Small's ‘My Boy Lollipop' … … the letter Blackwell sent to the workshy Spooky Tooth with threats of wage deductions. … the lucrative ascent of Jethro Tull. … the little-known compilations of Rugby songs, ‘Bawdy British Ballads' and risqué adult comedy that “saved the label's bacon” in the mid-‘60s. … the time Neil stumbled across Traffic's fabled Aston Tirrold cottage on a school camping trip. … the highly collectable “Birth of Ska' album that was never released.   … one immortal week at the Marquee Club. … and why Island were banned for Olympic Studios. Order the Island Book of Records Vol 1 here …https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/neil-storey/the-island-book-of-records-volume-i-1959-68?channable=409d926964003230353632383608&gclid=Cj0KCQjw06-oBhC6ARIsAGuzdw1pbKtxLGkjgkiJfcAll84H65dVQ1r_h7obky-QWlVtpr21UgiQP54aAk1BEALw_wcB#hardback-signed-plusTickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyouear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Storey is an old pal from our magazine days who worked in the press office at Island. He looked after U2, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, the B-52's and many others. About 15 years ago he began the mammoth task of compiling a series of books telling the story of virtually every record the label released in its pioneering history, tracking down and talking to all those involved - musicians, producers, designers, photographers, label staff – and collecting old music press ads and ephemera from the time. The book's almost a foot square so LP sleeves can be reproduced ‘actual size'. The first volume is just out, The Island Book Of Records 1959-1968, a thing of very great beauty. As David says, “it's like entering the record shop of your dreams.” We talked to Neil at his home in France about this and much else besides …   … Chris Blackwell's involvement in the making of Dr No and the single Jamaican beach shot that told them they had a hit movie. … the album they released that no-one involved could remember. … Shotgun Wedding by Roy ‘C', Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, Lance Hayward, Millie Small's ‘My Boy Lollipop' … … the letter Blackwell sent to the workshy Spooky Tooth with threats of wage deductions. … the lucrative ascent of Jethro Tull. … the little-known compilations of Rugby songs, ‘Bawdy British Ballads' and risqué adult comedy that “saved the label's bacon” in the mid-‘60s. … the time Neil stumbled across Traffic's fabled Aston Tirrold cottage on a school camping trip. … the highly collectable “Birth of Ska' album that was never released.   … one immortal week at the Marquee Club. … and why Island were banned for Olympic Studios. Order the Island Book of Records Vol 1 here …https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/neil-storey/the-island-book-of-records-volume-i-1959-68?channable=409d926964003230353632383608&gclid=Cj0KCQjw06-oBhC6ARIsAGuzdw1pbKtxLGkjgkiJfcAll84H65dVQ1r_h7obky-QWlVtpr21UgiQP54aAk1BEALw_wcB#hardback-signed-plusTickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyouear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Storey is an old pal from our magazine days who worked in the press office at Island. He looked after U2, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, the B-52's and many others. About 15 years ago he began the mammoth task of compiling a series of books telling the story of virtually every record the label released in its pioneering history, tracking down and talking to all those involved - musicians, producers, designers, photographers, label staff – and collecting old music press ads and ephemera from the time. The book's almost a foot square so LP sleeves can be reproduced ‘actual size'. The first volume is just out, The Island Book Of Records 1959-1968, a thing of very great beauty. As David says, “it's like entering the record shop of your dreams.” We talked to Neil at his home in France about this and much else besides …   … Chris Blackwell's involvement in the making of Dr No and the single Jamaican beach shot that told them they had a hit movie. … the album they released that no-one involved could remember. … Shotgun Wedding by Roy ‘C', Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, Lance Hayward, Millie Small's ‘My Boy Lollipop' … … the letter Blackwell sent to the workshy Spooky Tooth with threats of wage deductions. … the lucrative ascent of Jethro Tull. … the little-known compilations of Rugby songs, ‘Bawdy British Ballads' and risqué adult comedy that “saved the label's bacon” in the mid-‘60s. … the time Neil stumbled across Traffic's fabled Aston Tirrold cottage on a school camping trip. … the highly collectable “Birth of Ska' album that was never released.   … one immortal week at the Marquee Club. … and why Island were banned for Olympic Studios. Order the Island Book of Records Vol 1 here …https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/neil-storey/the-island-book-of-records-volume-i-1959-68?channable=409d926964003230353632383608&gclid=Cj0KCQjw06-oBhC6ARIsAGuzdw1pbKtxLGkjgkiJfcAll84H65dVQ1r_h7obky-QWlVtpr21UgiQP54aAk1BEALw_wcB#hardback-signed-plusTickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on October 30th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ysY3FvyFaeSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyouear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we welcome legendary Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and invite him to reminisce about key moments in his career at the helm of one of the UK's great independent labels.Chris describes his youth in Jamaica, his early exposure to Kingston's sound systems, and his move back to England in 1962. From Millie's 1964 smash 'My Boy Lollipop' to Island's expansion from ska and blue beat into rock and folk, the Harrow-educated mogul reflects on the vital importance of artists such as Steve Winwood, Free, John Martyn and of course the Wailers, the band that made roots reggae a global phenomenon. Clips from a 1988 audio interview with Bunny Wailer prompt reflections on the "Blackheart Man" and his role within the group. A discussion of the Compass Point studio Chris built in the Bahamas takes us to the Island reinvention of Grace Jones and the stunning early '80s albums she made there with the immortal rhythm section of Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare.References to the week's featured writer Rob Partridge — Island's head of press from 1977 to 1991 — leads to recall of the label's biggest act, U2, and the eventual sale of Island to Polygram... not forgetting Chris' signing of the singular Tom Waits in 1983.Many thanks to special guest Chris Blackwell, whose autobiography The Islander is published by Nine Eight Books and available now.Pieces discussed: Maureen Cleave on Ska and Blue Beat, Chris Blackwell in conversation with Richard Green, Richard Williams on Island Records, David Toop on the sale of Island Records, Rob Partridge on Free, Rob Partridge on Reggae and Bunny Wailer in conversation with Mark Sinker (audio).

In this episode we welcome legendary Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and invite him to reminisce about key moments in his career at the helm of one of the UK's great independent labels.Chris describes his youth in Jamaica, his early exposure to Kingston's sound systems, and his move back to England in 1962. From Millie's 1964 smash 'My Boy Lollipop' to Island's expansion from ska and blue beat into rock and folk, the Harrow-educated mogul reflects on the vital importance of artists such as Steve Winwood, Free, John Martyn and of course the Wailers, the band that made roots reggae a global phenomenon. Clips from a 1988 audio interview with Bunny Wailer prompt reflections on the "Blackheart Man" and his role within the group. A discussion of the Compass Point studio Chris built in the Bahamas takes us to the Island reinvention of Grace Jones and the stunning early '80s albums she made there with the immortal rhythm section of Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare.References to the week's featured writer Rob Partridge — Island's head of press from 1977 to 1991 — leads to recall of the label's biggest act, U2, and the eventual sale of Island to Polygram... not forgetting Chris' signing of the singular Tom Waits in 1983.Many thanks to special guest Chris Blackwell, whose autobiography The Islander is published by Nine Eight Books and available now.Pieces discussed: Maureen Cleave on Ska and Blue Beat, Chris Blackwell in conversation with Richard Green, Richard Williams on Island Records, David Toop on the sale of Island Records, Rob Partridge on Free, Rob Partridge on Reggae and Bunny Wailer in conversation with Mark Sinker (audio).

Nearly every Island act seemed impossibly hip, characterful and charismatic and much of that was down to the vision and long-term belief of the man who founded the label and ran it for 30 years. Chris Blackwell beams in from Goldeneye, the Ian Fleming estate he bought in Jamaica, to remember Errol Flynn and his dachshund waterskiing, the wit and charm of Noel Coward, record-buying trips for the local jukeboxes and sound-systems and the story of Millie's My Boy Lollipop, and talks about his relationship with Free, Traffic, Tom Waits, U2 and Roxy Music (also the ones that got away like Madonna). At one point he explains how he and Bob Marley modified Jamaican reggae to give it international appeal and there's a great moment where he relives the overpowering effect of first hearing Trevor Horn's production of Two Tribes. Chris's memoir The Islander is published by Bonnier Books. The Islander by Chris Blackwell … https://www.amazon.co.uk/Islander-My-Life-Music-Beyond/dp/17887057501Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https//www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nearly every Island act seemed impossibly hip, characterful and charismatic and much of that was down to the vision and long-term belief of the man who founded the label and ran it for 30 years. Chris Blackwell beams in from Goldeneye, the Ian Fleming estate he bought in Jamaica, to remember Errol Flynn and his dachshund waterskiing, the wit and charm of Noel Coward, record-buying trips for the local jukeboxes and sound-systems and the story of Millie's My Boy Lollipop, and talks about his relationship with Free, Traffic, Tom Waits, U2 and Roxy Music (also the ones that got away like Madonna). At one point he explains how he and Bob Marley modified Jamaican reggae to give it international appeal and there's a great moment where he relives the overpowering effect of first hearing Trevor Horn's production of Two Tribes. Chris's memoir The Islander is published by Bonnier Books. The Islander by Chris Blackwell … https://www.amazon.co.uk/Islander-My-Life-Music-Beyond/dp/17887057501Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https//www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nearly every Island act seemed impossibly hip, characterful and charismatic and much of that was down to the vision and long-term belief of the man who founded the label and ran it for 30 years. Chris Blackwell beams in from Goldeneye, the Ian Fleming estate he bought in Jamaica, to remember Errol Flynn and his dachshund waterskiing, the wit and charm of Noel Coward, record-buying trips for the local jukeboxes and sound-systems and the story of Millie's My Boy Lollipop, and talks about his relationship with Free, Traffic, Tom Waits, U2 and Roxy Music (also the ones that got away like Madonna). At one point he explains how he and Bob Marley modified Jamaican reggae to give it international appeal and there's a great moment where he relives the overpowering effect of first hearing Trevor Horn's production of Two Tribes. Chris's memoir The Islander is published by Bonnier Books. The Islander by Chris Blackwell … https://www.amazon.co.uk/Islander-My-Life-Music-Beyond/dp/17887057501Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https//www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How To Play My Boy Lollipop On The SaxophoneMy Boy Lollipop by Millie Small is a great little song from the mid 1960's.  It had another round at being famous in the mid 1970's as well.My Boy Lollipop has an infectious little riff that is PERFECT for playing on our saxophones !In this saxophone podcast episode, we learn how to play My Boy Lollipop on the Alto Saxophone.My Boy Lollipop Saxophone.My Boy Lollipop Saxophone Lesson.My Boy Lollipop Saxophone Lessons.How To Play My Boy Lollipop on the Saxophone.How To Play My Boy Lollipop On The Alto Saxophone.My Boy Lollipop Millie Small.Millie Small My Boy Lollipop.Millie Small Saxophone Lessons.Online Saxophone Lessons.Beginner Saxophone Lessons.How To Play The Saxophone.How to Play the Sax.:-)At howToPlayTheSax.com we are all about quick wins, tips, hints and suggestions, as well as helping you take your saxophone playing to the next level.And we have some fun along the way.Even if you have never played the saxophone before, we can get you started with learning how to play the saxophone and have you rocking and rolling in no time.The Cheat Sheets inside the Members Area (and the Members Forums) at HowToPlayTheSax.com make learning how to play the saxophone easier too.This is an edited and abbreviated saxophone lesson.  The full video saxophone lesson for this song inside the Members Area at HowToPlayTheSax.com runs for 14 minutes and 53 seconds.Please don't forget to Have Fun, Play Saxophone, Be Awesome and Repeat

 Download directly here: https://ia801503.us.archive.org/5/items/toppers-millie-small/Toppers%20Hurdy%20Gurdy.mp3 Hear three delightful songs by the Jamaican chanteuse best-known for her hit "My Boy Lollipop," as well as tasteful filler music by Ronnie Aldrich, Lou Rawls, Charol, and more.

Email: audioofftheshelf@gmail.com. Instagram: @audioofftheshelf Twitter: @AOTS204 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audioofftheshelf Armstrong, Louis. “New Orleans Stomp.” Complete Hot 5 and Hot 7 Recordings. Definitive Records, 2001. 4CD. LP. Bridges, Leon. “Lisa Sawyer.” Coming Home. Columbia Records, 2015. Vinyl. LP. Connick, Jr. Harry. “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” 20. RCA Records, 1988. CD. LP. Small, Millie. “Walking to New Orleans.” My Boy Lollipop and 31 Other Songs. Combo Records, 1994. CD. LP. Alice In Chains. “Hate To Feel.” Dirt. Columbia Records, 1991. CD. LP. Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the copyright act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use.

El sol, esa estrella del sistema planetario en el que la Tierra se ubica. Ciento cincuenta millones de kilómetros de distancia, apenas 8 minutos para alcanzarnos. Esta su más veraniega BSO: “Era d´Estate” junto a Battiato o Millie Small, desde Jamaica, “My Boy Lollipop”, primer éxito del evangelio Ska que Madness o Specials propagaron y que Peppino Di Capri , antes aún, importó a Europa en “Operazione Sole”. El sol, ese energético cocktail de hidrógeno y oxígeno salpimentado con carbono, neon y hierro en "Obladi Oblada" de los Beatles pero también en “The Hardy They Come”, que protagonizara Jimmy Cliff. No solo de Ska vive el hombre asi que el “soléil" francés de Françoise Hardy o el verano español en canciones memorables. Una canción, un género, una película, una "operación sol" a corazón abierto. Escuchar audio

Episode 123 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", the Righteous Brothers, Shindig! and "blue-eyed soul".  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 "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. 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/ Erratum I say the music in the bridge drops down to “just the bass”. Obviously there is also a celeste on that section. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of Righteous Brothers songs. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother's Memoir is Bill Medley's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I used it for bits about how Mann and Weil wrote their songs. I've referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. This two-CD set contains all of the Righteous Brothers recordings excerpted here, all their hits, and a selection of Medley and Hatfield's solo work. It would be an absolutely definitive set, except for the Spector-era tracks being in stereo. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that according to BMI is the most-played song of the twentieth century on American radio, and continued to be the most played song for the first two decades of the twenty-first as well, a record that was arguably the artistic highpoint of Phil Spector's career, and certainly the commercial highpoint for everyone involved. We're going to look at "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] In this episode we're going to take one of our first looks at an American act who owed their success to TV. We've seen these before, of course -- we've talked in passing about Ricky Nelson, and there was an episode on Chubby Checker -- but there have been relatively few. But as we pass into the mid-sixties, and television becomes an even more important part of the culture, we'll see more of this. In 1964, ABC TV had a problem. Two years before, they'd started a prime-time folk TV show called Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Jack Linkletter introducing Hootenanny] That programme was the source of some controversy -- it blacklisted Pete Seeger and a few other Communist folk musicians, and while Seeger himself argued against a boycott, other musicians were enraged, in part because the term Hootenanny had been popularised by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other Communist musicians. As a result, several of the top names in the folk scene, like Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, refused to appear on the show.  But plenty of performers did appear on the show, usually those at the poppier end of the spectrum, like the New Christie Minstrels: [Excerpt: The New Christie Minstrels, "This Train (live on Hootenanny)"] That lineup of the New Christie Minstrels featured, among others, Barry McGuire, Gene Clark, and Larry Ramos, all of whom we should be seeing in future episodes.  But that in itself says something about the programme's problems, because in 1964, the music industry changed drastically. Suddenly, folk music was out, and rock music was in. Half the younger musicians who appeared on Hootenanny -- like those three, but also John Sebastian, John Phillips, Cass Elliot, and others -- all decided they were going to give up singing mass harmony versions of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" accompanied by banjo, and instead they were going to get themselves some electric guitars. And the audience, likewise, decided that they'd rather see the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark Five than the New Christie Minstrels, the Limeliters, and the Chad Mitchell Trio, if that was all the same to the TV companies. And so ABC needed a new prime-time music variety show, and they needed it in a hurry. But there was a problem -- when the music industry is shifting dramatically and all of a sudden it's revolving around a style of music that is based on a whole other continent, what do you do to make a TV show featuring that music? Well, you turn to Jack Good, of course.  For those of you who haven't listened to all the earlier episodes, Jack Good had basically invented rock and roll TV, and he'd invented it in the UK, at a time when rock and roll was basically a US-only genre. Good had produced a whole string of shows -- Six-Five Special, Oh Boy!, Boy Meets Girls, and Wham! -- which had created a set of television conventions for the presentation of rock and roll, and had managed to get an audience by using a whole host of British unknowns, with the very occasional guest appearance by a visiting American rocker. In 1962, he'd moved to the US, and had put together a pilot episode of a show called "Young America Swings the World", financed with his own money. That programme had been on the same lines as his UK shows, and had featured a bunch of then-unknowns, like Jackie DeShannon. It had also featured a band led by Leon Russell and containing Glen Campbell and David Gates, none of whom were famous at the time, and a young singer named P.J. Proby, who was introduced to Good by DeShannon and her songwriting partner Sharon Sheeley, whose demos he worked on. We talked a bit about Proby back in the episode on "LSD-25" if you want to go back and listen to the background on that. Sheeley, of course, had known Good when he worked with her boyfriend Eddie Cochran a few years earlier. "Young America Swings the World" didn't sell, and in 1964, Good returned to England to produce a TV special for the Beatles, "Around the Beatles", which also featured Millie singing "My Boy Lollipop", Cilla Black, Sounds Incorporated, the Vernons Girls, and Long John Baldry singing a Muddy Waters song with the Beatles shouting the backing vocals from the audience: [Excerpt: Long John Baldry, "Got My Mojo Working"] The show also featured Proby, who Good had brought over from the US and who here got his first TV exposure, singing a song Rufus Thomas had recorded for Stax: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "Walking the Dog"] Around the Beatles obviously sold to the US, and ABC, who bought it, were suddenly interested in Jack Good's old pilot, too. They asked him to produce two more pilots for a show which was eventually named Shindig! Incidentally, I've seen many people, including some on the production staff, say that the first episode of Shindig! was an episode of Ready Steady Go! with the titles changed. It wasn't. The confusion seems to arise because early in Shindig's run, Around the Beatles was also broadcast by ABC, and when Dave Clark later bought the rights to Around The Beatles and Ready Steady Go!, he released a chunk of Around the Beatles on VHS as a Ready Steady Go special, even though it was made by a totally different production team. Good got together with Sharon Sheeley and her husband, the DJ Jimmy O'Neill, and they started collaborating on the pilots for the show, which eventually credited the three of them as co-creators and producers. The second pilot went in a very different direction -- it was a country music programme, hosted by Roy Clark, who would later become a household name for co-hosting Hee-Haw, and featuring Johnny Cash, along with PJ Proby doing a couple of cover versions of old folk songs that Lonnie Donegan had made famous -- "Rock Island Line" and "Cumberland Gap".  But for the third pilot, Good, Sheeley, and O'Neill went back to the old Oh Boy! formula -- they got a couple of properly famous big guest stars, in this case Little Richard and the Angels, who had had a number one the previous year with "My Boyfriend's Back", and a rotating cast of about a dozen unknown or little-known musical acts, all local, who they could fill the show with. The show opened with a medley with all or most of the cast participating: [Excerpt: Shindig Pilot 3 Opening Medley] And then each artist would perform individually, surrounded by a dancing audience, with minimal or no introductions, in a quick-paced show that was a revelation to American audiences used to the polite pacing of American Bandstand. For the most part, they performed cover versions -- on that pilot, even the Angels, rather than doing their own recentish number one record, sang a cover version of "Chapel of Love" -- and in a sign of the British influence, the pilot also featured what may be the first ska performance by an American group -- although they seem to think that "the ska" is a dance, rather than ska being a style of music: [Excerpt: the Hollywood All-Stars, "Jamaica Ska", plus Jimmy O'Neill intro] That show featured Delaney Bramlett, who would later go on to become a fairly well-known and important performer, and the Blossoms, who we've talked about previously. Both of those would become regular parts of the Shindig cast, as would Leon Russell, Bobby Sherman, Jackie and Gayle, Donna Loren, and Glen Campbell. That pilot led to the first broadcast episode, where the two main star acts were Sam Cooke, who sang a non-waltz version of "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Blowin' in the Wind", both from his cabaret act, and the Everly Brothers -- who as well as doing their own songs performed with Cooke at the end of the show in a recording which I only wish wasn't so covered with audience screams, though who can blame the audience? [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers, "Lucille"] Shindig was the first prime-time pop music show in the US, and became massively popular -- so much so that it quickly spawned a rival show on NBC, Hullabaloo. In a sign of just how much transatlantic back-and-forth there was at this time, and possibly just to annoy future researchers, NBC's Hullabaloo took its name, though nothing else, from a British TV show of the same name. That British TV show was made by ABC, which is not the same company as American ABC, and was a folk and blues show clearly patterned after Hootenanny, the show Shindig had replaced on American ABC. (And as a quick aside, if you're at all interested in the early sixties British folk and blues movements, I can't recommend Network's double-DVD set of the British Hullabaloo highly enough). Shindig! remained on air for two years, but the show's quality declined markedly after Jack Good left the show a year or so in, and it was eventually replaced on ABC's schedules by Batman, which appealed to largely the same audience. But all that was in the future. Getting back to the first broadcast episode, the Everlys also appeared in the opening medley, where they sang an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe song with Jackie and Gayle and another unknown act who had appeared in the pilot -- The Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: Jackie and Gayle, The Righteous Brothers, and the Everly Brothers, "Gonna Build a Mountain/Up Above My Head"] The Righteous Brothers would appear on nine out of sixteen episodes broadcast between September and December 1964, and a further seventeen episodes during 1965 -- by which time they'd become the big breakout stars of the show, and had recorded the song that would become the most-played song, *ever*, on American radio, beating out such comparatively unpopular contenders as "Never My Love", "Yesterday", "Stand By Me" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", a record that was played so much that in thirty-six years it had clocked up forty-five years of continuous airtime.  The Righteous Brothers were a Californian vocal duo consisting of baritone Bill Medley and tenor Bobby Hatfield. Medley's career in the music business had started when he was nineteen, when he'd just decided to go to the office of the Diamonds, the white vocal group we mentioned in passing in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" who much like the Crew Cuts had had hits by covering records by Black artists: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Little Darlin'"] Young Bill Medley fancied himself as a songwriter, and he brought the Diamonds a few of his songs, and they ended up recording two of them -- "Chimes of My Heart", which remained unreleased until a later compilation, and "Woomai-Ling", which was the B-side to a flop single: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Woomai-Ling"] But Medley was inspired enough by his brief brush with success that he decided to go into music properly. He formed a band called the Paramours, which eventually gained a second singer, Bobby Hatfield, and he and Hatfield also started performing as a duo, mostly performing songs by Black R&B artists they grew up listening to on Hunter Hancock's radio show. While Medley doesn't say this directly in his autobiography, it seems likely that the duo's act was based specifically on one particular Black act -- Don and Dewey. We've mentioned Don and Dewey before, and I did a Patreon episode on them, but for those who don't remember their brief mentions, Don "Sugarcane" Harris and Dewey Terry were an R&B duo signed to Specialty Records, and were basically their second attempt at producing another Little Richard, after Larry Williams. They were even less successful than Williams was, and had no hits themselves, but they wrote and recorded many songs that would become hits for others, like "Farmer John", which became a garage-band staple, and "I'm Leaving it Up to You", which was a hit for Donny and Marie Osmond. While they never had any breakout success, they were hugely popular among R&B lovers on the West Coast, and two of their other singles were "Justine": [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] And "Ko Ko Joe", which was one of their few singles written by someone else -- in this case by Sonny Bono, who was at that time working for Specialty: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Ko Ko Joe"] Hatfield and Medley would record both those songs in their early months working together, and would also perform them on Shindig! The duo were different in many ways -- Medley was tall and Hatfield comparatively short, Medley sang in a deep bass-baritone and Hatfield in a high tenor, and Hatfield was gregarious, outgoing, and funny while Medley was self-effacing and shy. The duo would often perform comedy routines on stage, patterned after Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Hatfield was always the comedian while Medley was the straight man. But on the other hand, Hatfield was actually quite uncomfortable with any level of success -- he just wanted to coast through life and had no real ambition, while Medley was fiercely driven and wanted to become huge. But they both loved R&B music, and in many ways had similar attitudes to the British musicians who, unknown to them at the time, were trying to play R&B in the UK. They were white kids who loved Black music, and desperately wanted to do justice to it. Orange County, where Medley and Hatfield lived, was at the time one of the whitest places in America, and they didn't really have much competition on the local scene from authentic R&B bands. But there *was* a Marine base in the area, with a large number of Black Marines, who wanted to hear R&B music when they went out. Medley and Hatfield quickly became very popular with these audiences, who would address them as "brother", and called their music "righteous" -- and so, looking for a name for their duo act, they became The Righteous Brothers. Their first single, on a tiny local label, was a song written by Medley, "Little Latin Lupe Lou": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] That wasn't a success to start with, but picked up after the duo took a gig at the Rendezvous Ballroom, the surf-rock venue where Dick Dale had built his reputation. It turned out that "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a perfect song to dance the Surfer's Stomp to, and the song caught on locally, making the top five in LA markets, and the top fifty nationally. It became a standard part of every garage band's repertoire, and was covered several times with moderate success, most notably by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, whose cover version made the top twenty in 1966: [Excerpt: Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] The Righteous Brothers became *the* act that musicians in Southern California wanted to see, even though they were very far from being huge -- Elvis, for example, would insist on his friends coming to see the duo when he was in LA filming, even though at the time they were playing at bowling alleys rather than the more glamorous venues his friends would rather visit. Georgie Woods, a Black DJ in Philadelphia who enjoyed their music but normally played Black records coined a term to describe them -- "blue-eyed soul" -- as a way of signalling to his listeners that they were white but he was going to play them anyway. The duo used that as the title of their second album, and it soon became a generic term for white people who were influenced by Black music -- much to Medley's annoyance. As he put it later "It kind of bothers me when other singers call themselves “blue-eyed soul” because we didn't give ourselves that name. Black people named us that, and you don't just walk around giving yourself that title." This will, of course, be something that comes up over and over again in this history -- the question of how much it's cultural appropriation for white people to perform in musical styles created by Black people, and to what extent it's possible for that to be given a pass when the white musicians in question are embraced by Black musicians and audiences. I have to say that *to me*, Medley's attempts to justify the duo's use of Black styles by pointing out how much Black people liked their music don't ring *entirely* true, but that at the same time, I do think there's a qualitative difference between the early Righteous Brothers singles and later blue-eyed soul performers like Michael Bolton or Simply Red, and a difference between a white act embraced by Black audiences and one that is mostly appealing to other white people. This is something we're going to have to explore a lot more over the course of the series, and my statements about what other people thought about this at the time should not be taken as me entirely agreeing with them -- and indeed it shouldn't be taken as me agreeing with *myself*. My own thoughts on this are very contradictory, and change constantly. While "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a minor hit and established them as locally important, none of their next few singles did anything at all, and nor did a solo single that Bobby Hatfield released around this time: [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Hot Tamales"] But the duo picked up enough of a following as a live act that they were picked for Shindig! -- and as an opening act on the Beatles' first US tour, which finished the same week that Shindig! started broadcasting. It turned out that even though the duo's records hadn't had any success, the Beatles, who loved to seek out obscure R&B records, had heard them and liked them, and George Harrison was particularly interested in learning from Barry Rillera, the guitarist who played with them, some of  the guitar techniques he'd used. Shindig! took the duo to stardom, even though they'd not yet had a hit. They'd appear most weeks, usually backed by a house band that included Delaney Bramlett, James Burton, Russ Titelman, Larry Knechtel, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Ray Pohlman, Glenn Hardin, and many other of the finest studio musicians in LA -- most, though not all, of them also part of the Wrecking Crew. They remained favourites of people who knew music, even though they were appearing on this teen-pop show -- Elvis would apparently regularly phone the TV company with requests for them to sing a favourite song of his on the next week's show, and the TV company would arrange it, in the hopes of eventually getting Elvis on the show, though he never made an appearance. Medley had a certain level of snobbery towards white pop music, even after being on that Beatles tour, but it started to soften a bit after the duo started to appear on Shindig! and especially after meeting the Beach Boys on Shindig's Christmas episode, which also featured Marvin Gaye and Adam Faith. Medley had been unimpressed with the Beach Boys' early singles, but Brian Wilson was a fan of the Righteous Brothers, and asked Medley to accompany him into the men's toilets at the ABC studios -- not for any of the reasons one might imagine, but because the acoustics in the room were so good that the studio had actually installed a piano in there. There, Wilson asked Medley to listen to his group singing their version of "The Lord's Prayer": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Lord's Prayer"] Medley was blown away by the group's tight harmonies, and instantly gained a new respect for Wilson as an arranger and musician. The two became lifelong friends, and as they would often work in adjoining rooms in the same studio complex, they would often call on each other to help solve a musical problem. And the reason they would work in the same studios is because Brian Wilson was a huge admirer of Phil Spector, and those were the studios Spector used, so Wilson had to use them as well. And Phil Spector had just leased the last two years of the Righteous Brothers' contract from Moonglow Records, the tiny label they'd been on to that point. Spector, at this point, was desperate to try something different -- the new wave of British acts that had come over were swamping the charts, and he wasn't having hits like he had been a few months earlier. The Righteous Brothers were his attempt to compromise somewhat with that -- they were associated with the Beatles, after all, and they were big TV stars. They were white men, like all the new pop stars, rather than being the Black women he'd otherwise always produced for his own label, but they had a Black enough sound that he wasn't completely moving away from the vocal sound he'd always used.  Medley, in particular, was uneasy about working with Spector -- he wanted to be an R&B singer, not a pop star. But on the other hand, Spector made hits, and who didn't want a hit? For the duo's first single on Philles, Spector flew Mann and Weil out from New York to LA to work with him on the song. Mann and Weil took their inspiration from a new hit record that Holland-Dozier-Holland had produced for a group that had recently signed to Motown, the Four Tops: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] Mann and Weil took that feeling, and came up with a verse and chorus, with a great opening line, "You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips". They weren't entirely happy with the chorus lyric though, considering it a placeholder that they needed to rewrite. But when they played it for Spector, he insisted that "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was a perfect title, and shouldn't be changed. Spector added a long bridge, based around a three-chord riff using the "La Bamba" chords, and the song was done. Spector spent an inordinate amount of time getting the backing track done -- Earl Palmer has said that he took two days to get one eight-bar section recorded, because he couldn't communicate exactly how he wanted the musicians to play it. This is possibly partly because Spector's usual arranger, Jack Nitzsche, had had a temporary falling out with him, and Spector was working with Gene Page, who did a very good job at copying Nitzsche's style but was possibly not as completely in tune with Spector's wishes. When Spector and Mann played the song to the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley thought that the song, sung in Spector and Mann's wispy high voices, sounded more suitable for the Everly Brothers than for him and Hatfield, but Spector insisted it would work. Of course, it's now impossible to think of the song without hearing Medley's rich, deep, voice: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] When Mann first heard that, he thought Spector must have put the record on at the wrong speed, Medley's voice was so deep. Bobby Hatfield was also unimpressed -- the Righteous Brothers were a duo, yet Medley was singing the verses on his own. "What am I supposed to do while the big guy's singing?" he asked. Spector's response, "go to the bank!" But while Medley is the featured singer during Mann and Weil's part of the song, Hatfield gets his own chance to shine, in the bridge that Spector added, which for me makes the record -- it's one of the great examples of the use of dynamics in a pop record, as after the bombast of the chorus the music drops down to just a bass, then slowly builds in emotional intensity as Medley and Hatfield trade off phrases: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] The record was released in December 1964, and even though the Righteous Brothers didn't even perform it on Shindig! until it had already risen up the charts, it made number one on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts, and became the fifth biggest hit of 1965 in the US.  In the UK, it looked like it wasn't going to be a hit at all. Cilla Black, a Liverpudlian singer who was managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin, rushed out a cover version, which charted first: [Excerpt: Cilla Black, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] On their second week on the charts, Black was at number twelve, and the Righteous Brothers at number twenty. At this point, Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager and a huge fan of Spector's work, actually took out an ad in Melody Maker, even though he had no financial interest in the record (though it could be argued that he did have an interest in seeing his rival Brian Epstein taken down a peg), saying: "This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR Record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing ‘YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELING'. Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow's sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry. Signed Andrew Oldham P.S. See them on this week's READY, STEADY, GO!" The next week, Cilla Black was at number two, and the Righteous Brothers at number three. The week after, the Righteous Brothers were at number one, while Black's record had dropped down to number five. The original became the only single ever to reenter the UK top ten twice, going back into the charts in both 1969 and 1990. But Spector wasn't happy, at all, with the record's success, for the simple reason that it was being credited as a Righteous Brothers record rather than as a Phil Spector record. Where normally he worked with Black women, who were so disregarded as artists that he could put records by the Ronettes or the Blossoms out as Crystals records and nobody seemed to care, here he was working with two white men, and they were starting to get some of the credit that Spector thought was due only him.  Spector started to manipulate the two men. He started with Medley, who after all had been the lead singer on their big hit. He met up with Medley, and told him that he thought Bobby Hatfield was dead weight. Who needed a second Righteous Brother? Bill Medley should go solo, and Spector should produce him as a solo artist. Medley realised what was happening -- the Righteous Brothers were a brand, and Spector was trying to sabotage that brand. He turned Spector down. The next single was originally intended to be a song that Mann and Weil were working on, called "Soul and Inspiration", but Spector had second thoughts, and the song he chose was written by Goffin and King, and was essentially a rewrite of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". To my mind it's actually the better record, but it wasn't as successful, though it still made the US top ten: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Just Once in My Life"] For their third Philles single, Spector released "Hung on You", another intense ballad, very much in the mould of their two previous singles, though not as strong a song as either. But it was the B-side that was the hit. While Spector produced the group's singles, he wasn't interested in producing albums, leaving Medley, a decent producer in his own right, to produce what Spector considered the filler tracks. And Medley and Hatfield had an agreement that on each album, each of them would get a solo spot.  So for Hatfield's solo spot on the first album the duo were recording for Philles, Medley produced Hatfield singing the old standard "Unchained Melody", while Medley played piano: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Unchained Melody"] That went out on the B-side, with no production credit -- until DJs started playing that rather than "Hung on You". Spector was furious, and started calling DJs and telling them they were playing the wrong side, but they didn't stop playing it, and so the single was reissued, now with a Spector production credit for Medley's production. "Unchained Melody" made the top five, and now Spector continued his plans to foment dissent between the two singers. This time he argued that they should follow up "Unchained Melody" with "Ebb Tide" -- "Unchained Melody" had previously been a hit for both Roy Hamilton and Al Hibbler, and they'd both also had hits with "Ebb Tide", so why not try that? Oh, and the record was only going to have Bobby Hatfield on. It would still be released as a Righteous Brothers record, but Bill Medley wouldn't be involved. That was also a hit, but it would be the last one the duo would have with Philles Records, as they moved to Mercury and Medley started producing all their records. But the damage had been done -- Spector had successfully pit their egos against each other, and their working relationship would never be the same. But they started at Mercury with their second-biggest hit -- "Soul and Inspiration", the song that Mann and Weil had written as a follow-up to "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration"] That went to number one, and apparently to this day Brian Wilson will still ask Bill Medley whenever they speak "Did you produce that? Really?", unable to believe it isn't a Phil Spector production. But the duo had been pushed apart. and were no longer happy working together. They were also experiencing personal problems -- I don't have details of Hatfield's life at this period, but Medley had a breakdown, and was also having an affair with Darlene Love which led to the breakup of his first marriage. The duo broke up in 1968, and Medley put out some unsuccessful solo recordings, including a song that Mann and Weil wrote for him about his interracial relationship with Love, who sang backing vocals on the record. It's a truly odd record which possibly says more about the gender and racial attitudes of everyone involved at that point than they might have wished, as Medley complains that his "brown-eyed woman" doesn't trust him because "you look at me and all you see are my blue eyes/I'm not a man, baby all I am is what I symbolise", while the chorus of Black women backing him sing "no no, no no" and "stay away": [Excerpt: Bill Medley, "Brown-Eyed Woman"] Hatfield, meanwhile, continued using the Righteous Brothers name, performing with Jimmy Walker, formerly the drummer of the Knickerbockers, who had been one-hit wonders with their Beatles soundalike "Lies": [Excerpt: The Knickerbockers, "Lies"] Walker and Hatfield recorded one album together, but it was unsuccessful, and they split up. Hatfield also tried a solo career -- his version of "Only You" is clearly patterned after the earlier Righteous Brothers hits with "Unchained Melody" and "Ebb Tide": [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Only You"] But by 1974, both careers floundering, the Righteous Brothers reformed -- and immediately had a hit with "Rock and Roll Heaven", a tribute to dead rock stars, which became their third highest-charting single, peaking at number three. They had a couple more charting singles, but then, tragically, Medley's first wife was murdered, and Medley had to take several years off performing to raise his son. They reunited in the 1980s, although Medley kept up a parallel career as a solo artist, having several minor country hits, and also having a pop number one with the theme song from Dirty Dancing, "I've Had the Time of My Life", sung as a duet with Jennifer Warnes: [Excerpt: Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, "I've Had the Time of My Life"] A couple of years later, another Patrick Swayze film, Ghost, would lead to another unique record for the Righteous Brothers. Ghost used "Unchained Melody" in a crucial scene, and the single was reissued, and made number nineteen in the US charts, and hit number one in many other countries. It also sparked a revival of their career that made "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" rechart in the UK.  But "Unchained Melody" was only reissued on vinyl, and the small label Curb Records saw an opportunity, and got the duo to do a soundalike rerecording to come out as a CD single. That CD single *also* made the top twenty, making the Righteous Brothers the only artist ever to be at two places in the top twenty at the same time with two versions of the same song -- when Gene and Eunice's two versions of "Ko Ko Mo" had charted, they'd been counted as one record for chart purposes. The duo continued working together until 2003, when Bobby Hatfield died of a cocaine-induced heart attack. Medley performed as a solo artist for several years, but in 2016 he took on a partner, Bucky Heard, to perform with him as a new lineup of Righteous Brothers, mostly playing Vegas shows. We'll see a lot more blue-eyed soul artists as the story progresses, and we'll be able to look more closely at the issues around race and appropriation with them, but in 1965, unlike all the brown-eyed women like Darlene Love who'd come before them, the Righteous Brothers did become the first act to break free of Phil Spector and have hits without him -- though we will later see at least one Black woman Spector produced who became even bigger later. But still, they'll always be remembered primarily for the work they did with Spector, and somewhere, right now, at least one radio station is still playing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", and it'll probably continue to do so as long as radio exists. 

This week's episode looks at "My Boy Lollipop" and the origins of ska 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 "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode -- a content warning applies for the song "Bloodshot Eyes" by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won't link to because of the paywall). Millie's early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to "Barbara Gaye" when I should say "Barbie Gaye" Transcript Today, we're going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we're looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We're going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We're going to look at "My Boy Lollipop" by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] Most of the music we've looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I'm afraid that that's going to remain largely the case -- while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock's detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we're going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations -- I'm trying to give as much information about Jamaica's musical culture in one episode as I've given about America's in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I'm missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn't even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems -- big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people -- in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a "rhumba box", and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle -- this form of mento is often still called "country music" in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, "Matilda"] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it's a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don't know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like "Hoola Hoop Calypso", and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music -- people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on -- and I honestly can't hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, "Strip Tease"] But I'll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there's a difference I'm not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first -- there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris -- the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes". I'm going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes"] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair -- a musician we've not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz -- Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren't widely available in Jamaica -- indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The "sound man" was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records -- they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound -- usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had -- if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he'd scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious -- it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ -- one of the few in Jamaica -- presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith's "My Mother's Eyes", would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, "My Mother's Eyes"] Reid's Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd's system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn't perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well -- one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid's shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be -- he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid's edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties -- as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, "Later For Gator" by Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it "Coxsone Hop": [Excerpt: Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, "Later For Gator"] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested -- Reid wanted Dodd to know he'd been beaten.  Now, here I'm going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we're likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I'm mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent -- which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I'm choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: "So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him." There was a second problem with using American records, as well -- American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren't. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn't keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious -- they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds -- a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn't have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn't touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience -- if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was "Lollipop Girl", a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record -- and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd's assistants to get hold of Dodd's copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash -- a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over -- and Reid played his own copy of "Lollipop Girl", Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of "Lollipop Girl", he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing -- he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, "Lollipop Girl"] Reid didn't make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress "ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and". In mento, though, you'd often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be "one AND two AND three AND four AND". Seaga had the guitarist on "Manny Oh" by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, "Manny Oh"] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term "ska" came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying "play it ska... ska... ska..." Where "Manny Oh" had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, "Easy Snappin'" is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, "Easy Snappin'"] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single "Oh Carolina", incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, "Oh Carolina"] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska's first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on "Ko Ko Mo", but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio, pairing Leonard Lee's baritone voice with Shirley Goodman's soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists -- for example Shirley and Lee's "Sweethearts": [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Sweethearts"] bears a very strong resemblance to "Double-Crossing Blues": [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, "Double-Crossing Blues"] But they'd soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like "Feel So Good" showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Feel So Good"] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille's voice sounded enough like Shirley's that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like "Sit and Cry", a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of "The Twist": [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, "Sit and Cry"] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and "We'll Meet" by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, "We'll Meet"] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country -- there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men -- Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn't performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming's mistress -- Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there -- according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming's death, his wife instructed the villa's manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He'd started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents' money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, "Boogie in My Bones", by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Boogie in My Bones"] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He'd been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time -- there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain "bluebeat" became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, "King of Kings", performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, "King of Kings"] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came "Mockingbird Hill", a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts' uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, "Mockingbird Hill"] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that "Mockingbird Hill" was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to "I Call Your Name": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Call Your Name"] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie's mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn't have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie's first British single, "Don't You Know", was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, "Don't You Know"] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye's biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she'd briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. "My Boy Lollipop" had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game -- and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, "My Boy Lollipop"] That hadn't been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording "Night of the Vampire": [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions' harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] "My Boy Lollipop" came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, "Sweet William", only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, "Sweet William"] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of "Bloodshot Eyes", without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, "Bloodshot Eyes"] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, "Hey Boy, Hey Girl"] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, "Pledging My Love"] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner's "I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song)": [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] But the Spencer Davis Group didn't revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track "Enoch Power", in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, "Enoch Power"] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of "My Boy Lollipop": [Excerpt: Bad Manners, "My Girl Lollipop"] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska 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 “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode — a content warning applies for the song “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won’t link to because of the paywall). Millie’s early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to “Barbara Gaye” when I should say “Barbie Gaye” Transcript Today, we’re going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we’re looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We’re going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We’re going to look at “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] Most of the music we’ve looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I’m afraid that that’s going to remain largely the case — while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock’s detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we’re going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations — I’m trying to give as much information about Jamaica’s musical culture in one episode as I’ve given about America’s in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I’m missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn’t even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems — big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people — in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a “rhumba box”, and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle — this form of mento is often still called “country music” in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, “Matilda”] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it’s a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don’t know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like “Hoola Hoop Calypso”, and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music — people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on — and I honestly can’t hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, “Strip Tease”] But I’ll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there’s a difference I’m not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first — there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris — the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris’ “Bloodshot Eyes”. I’m going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Bloodshot Eyes”] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair — a musician we’ve not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz — Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren’t widely available in Jamaica — indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The “sound man” was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records — they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound — usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had — if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he’d scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious — it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ — one of the few in Jamaica — presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith’s “My Mother’s Eyes”, would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, “My Mother’s Eyes”] Reid’s Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd’s system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn’t perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well — one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid’s shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be — he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid’s edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties — as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, “Later For Gator” by Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it “Coxsone Hop”: [Excerpt: Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, “Later For Gator”] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested — Reid wanted Dodd to know he’d been beaten.  Now, here I’m going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we’re likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I’m mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent — which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I’m choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: “So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him.” There was a second problem with using American records, as well — American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren’t. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn’t keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious — they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds — a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn’t have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn’t touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience — if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was “Lollipop Girl”, a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record — and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd’s assistants to get hold of Dodd’s copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash — a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over — and Reid played his own copy of “Lollipop Girl”, Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of “Lollipop Girl”, he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing — he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, “Lollipop Girl”] Reid didn’t make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress “ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and”. In mento, though, you’d often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be “one AND two AND three AND four AND”. Seaga had the guitarist on “Manny Oh” by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, “Manny Oh”] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term “ska” came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying “play it ska… ska… ska…” Where “Manny Oh” had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, “Easy Snappin'” is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, “Easy Snappin'”] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single “Oh Carolina”, incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, “Oh Carolina”] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska’s first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on “Ko Ko Mo”, but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, pairing Leonard Lee’s baritone voice with Shirley Goodman’s soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists — for example Shirley and Lee’s “Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Sweethearts”] bears a very strong resemblance to “Double-Crossing Blues”: [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, “Double-Crossing Blues”] But they’d soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like “Feel So Good” showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Feel So Good”] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille’s voice sounded enough like Shirley’s that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like “Sit and Cry”, a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of “The Twist”: [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, “Sit and Cry”] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and “We’ll Meet” by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, “We’ll Meet”] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country — there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men — Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn’t performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming’s mistress — Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there — according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming’s death, his wife instructed the villa’s manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He’d started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents’ money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, “Boogie in My Bones”, by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Boogie in My Bones”] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He’d been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time — there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain “bluebeat” became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, “King of Kings”, performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, “King of Kings”] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came “Mockingbird Hill”, a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts’ uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, “Mockingbird Hill”] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that “Mockingbird Hill” was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to “I Call Your Name”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Call Your Name”] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie’s mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn’t have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie’s first British single, “Don’t You Know”, was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, “Don’t You Know”] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye’s biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she’d briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. “My Boy Lollipop” had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game — and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, “My Boy Lollipop”] That hadn’t been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording “Night of the Vampire”: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions’ harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] “My Boy Lollipop” came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, “Sweet William”, only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, “Sweet William”] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of “Bloodshot Eyes”, without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, “Bloodshot Eyes”] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, “Pledging My Love”] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “I’m Blue (the Gong Gong Song)”: [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, “I’m Blue (The Gong Gong Song)”] But the Spencer Davis Group didn’t revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track “Enoch Power”, in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, “Enoch Power”] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of “My Boy Lollipop”: [Excerpt: Bad Manners, “My Girl Lollipop”] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska 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 “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. 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…)

 On this episode I take a look at a number of key Gen X era musicians who dabbled in or experimented with playing ska and reggae music before they went on to have huge star making careers. While kids in the UK lived next door to Jamaican neighbors and were accustomed to hearing reggae music all the time, there was no corresponding culture or experience with the genre here in the U.S.  Occasionally a song like “My Boy Lollipop” or “The Israelites” or “Mother and Child Reunion” would end up on Top 40 radio in the 60s or 70s, but it was rare. But that began to change in the late 70s and early 80s when notable British musicians and bands like The Clash, The Police, Elvis Costello, and Joe Jackson -- began to incorporate the rhythms of ska and reggae into their songwriting and these songs began to find a receptive audience here in the U.S.  And as the sound of ska and reggae expanded, more American bands began to experiment. So let's have some fun. I'll play a ska or reggae song by three  of these future Gen X superstars and you see if you can guess who they are. Please note: The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting.

Julian Worricker on Millie Jones, the singer who brought ska rhythms and Jamaican culture to a global audience with her hit song My Boy Lollipop. JJ Williams, the Llanelli, Wales and British Lions winger who became one of the stars of world rugby. Dame Fanny Waterman, who co-founded the Leeds International Piano Festival and introduced many of the greatest pianists of our time. And consumer champion Maurice Healy, editor of Which? magazine and director of the National Consumer Council, who was instrumental in bringing in shopping on a Sunday, cheaper air fares and better food labelling. Interviewed guest: Chris Blackwell Interviewed guest: Chris Salewicz Interviewed guest: Phil Bennett Interviewed guest: Petroc Trelawny Interviewed guest: Richard Thomas Producer: Paul Waters

This episode we interview Mystic Bowie of Talking Dreads and talk about surviving 2020, his favorite strain,new music and funny tour stories.Well-schooled in the world of reggae and other Caribbean musical genres, it would be a performance in 1991 that opened a new path for him, a collaboration that would shape his future in more ways than one. Scheduled to perform on the Mardi Gras Fest bill at Tramps (NYC), Mystic had the opportunity to perform with the founding members of the Tom Tom Club as his backing band. Thanks to his performance with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz (Talking Heads), it evolved into a partnership that has lasted to this day. Mystic has worked steadily with the Tom Tom Club since 1992. With the release of their album, "The Good, The Bad and The Funky" (2000), featuring his vocals on the dub-heavy tracks "Time to Bounce"and a remake of Lee Perry's "Soul Fire", Mystic Bowie emerged as a force in his own right as their lead singer. Touring worldwide with the Tom Tom Club since 2000, Mystic's performances have been praised for his seemingly ceaseless supply of energy and the excitement he generates with crowds everywhere. The irresistible vibe of this tour, and Mystic's performances, has been captured magically on the Tom Tom Club's "Live at the Clubhouse" CD (2002). Songs from this period also appear on the Tom Tom Club's DVDs, "Time to Bounce" and "In a Bootleg Style. Mystic also performs solo where he lives in Connecticut, using portions of his proceeds to fund the project he started in Jamaica to bring music to the children through building a youth center to give them somewhere to go where they will learn music and have a place to go where they can keep out of trouble. He has performed at many SONO ArtsFests in Norwalk, CT as the headliner. His energetic vivacious style together with his easy approachability make him a favourite with area fans, Talking Dreads is the brainchild of Head Dread, Mystic Bowie, a Jamaican artist whose long and close relationship with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth,founding members of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, began when he joined the latter group as a singer in 1996. He then recorded and performed with Tom Tom Club for nearly twenty years and continues to bear fruit from their unending collaborations. This inaugural effort from Talking Dreads features an amazing lineup of stellar reggae stalwarts including Freddie McGregor (‘Rastaman Camp', Bobby Babylon), ska-guitar master Ernest Ranglin (session player and arranger of Millie's smash ‘My Boy Lollipop', the Melodians ‘Rivers Of Babylon', and countless other tracks), and Tarrus Reilly ('Start Anew', ‘Good Girl Gone Bad') as well as a little help from punk-pop diva Cindy Wilson of the B-52's (‘Rock Lobster', ‘Love Shack'). Talking Heads' music was a formative influence on Mystic Bowie since childhood. For more info

My Boy Lollipop by Millie Small and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

Precursora do ska, famosa por "My Boy Lollipop", Millie Small sofreu um AVC aos 73 anos. Confira agora em poucos minutos com o DJ Waldiney.

Ska Tribute To Jamaica's Millie Small My Boy Lollipop  1946-2020 Crsradio.com #Millie Small, the #Jamaican singer known for her global 1964 hit My Boy Lollipop, has #died aged 73. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who originally produced that song, told the Jamaican Observer that she died from a stroke.Recorded under the name Millie, My Boy #Lollipop reached No 2 in the UK #crsradio, #helptrain1000blackdoctor  

Radio Nova revisite ses propres classiques : les raretés de tous bords qui rythment notre antenne, de la soul-funk au hip-hop en passant par les musiques afro-latines et la pop. Aujourd'hui : « My Boy Lollipop » de Millie Small.Aujourd’hui, c’est un hommage à une artiste qui nous a quitté hier. Une artiste méconnue mais qui a pourtant changé l’histoire de la musique jamaïcaine avec un unique morceau : « My Boy Lollipop » de Millie Small.Le principe d’un classique c'est qu'il s'agit d'un morceau que tout le monde connait, sur lequel tout le monde a dansé, sans forcement savoir ce que c’est. Un classique c’est aussi parfois, un morceau qui change l’histoire de la musique.Flash Back : nous sommes en 1960 à Montego Bay en Jamaïque. Une jeune inconnue répondant au nom de Millicent Dolly May Small qui deviendra plus tard Millie Small, gagne un concours de chant pour lequel elle reçoit la somme de 10 schillings soit quelques centimes.Forte d’une petite reconnaissance locale, Millie Small, âgé de 12 ans et demi, produits quelques morceaux qui feront le tour de l’ile produit par Sir Cosxone - fondateur du label Studio One -. Non loin de là, de l’autre côté de l’ile, un jeune homme prénommé Chris Blackwell, âgé d’une vingtaine d’année, vient alors de monter, grâce au 10 000 dollars avancé par ses parents, une maisons de disques encore inconnue : Island Records. Il cherche partout dans son ile d’adoption le premier artiste qui lui permettra de devenir le haut-parleur de la musique jamaïcaine qu’il porte en amour. À cette époque, le calypso, le boogie, le rythme and blues, font danser la Jamaïque.Et c’est le premier éclair de génie de Chis Blackwell. En 1962, il convainc Sir Coxsone de prendre Millie Small sous son aile. Il l’emmène promouvoir Island Records de l’autre côté du monde, en Angleterre. Puis, c’est le deuxième éclair : Blackwell fait reprendre à Millie Small une chanson de Barbie Gaye, chanteuse américaine enregistrée quelques années auparavant : « My Boy Lollipop ». La voix enfantine, haut perché, mais surtout aussi souriante que la Jamaïque, associé à un rythme dansant, joyeux 4/4 propulse la reprise de Millie Small directement numéro 1 des charts devant Les Beatles.Le son de la Jamaïque est enfin sorti de son île. Le SKA est né, et depuis, la planète danse dessus. « My Boy Lollipop » est encore aujourd’hui le disque le plus vendu de l’histoire catégorie Reggae/Ska.Visuel © Getty Images / Bettmann See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es; 23,05h) Adiós a Millie Small, la cantante jamaicana más conocida por su éxito de 1964 “My Boy Lollipop”. Sr. Chinarro estrena nuevo single, "Una Famiglia Reale". Fontaines D.C. sorprenden con el anuncio de un nuevo álbum de estudio titulado A Hero’s Death. Hinds presentan "Just Like Kids (Miau)", último adelanto antes de que vea la luz "The Prettiest Curse", su esperado tercer álbum. “Love and Squalor” es el primer álbum de J'AIME (Jaime Cristóbal de Souvenir). Un disco que hace justicia al talento y lleva la obra de J'AIME a su continuación y consolidación natural. Antonio GalvañParade anuncia el disco de maquetas de "La deriva sentimental". Pshycotic Beats, entre Lynch y Tarantino en ‘You Cannot Hide’. Nuevo adelanto, "El breve romance", de los malagueños Arista Fiera. ‘A Flor de Piel’, el nuevo single de Cora Yako. Glass Animals han anunciado la salida de su tercer álbum de estudio, ‘Dreamland’. Bryn Slack nos presenta Vaca Pop festival online en dos fechas (AYOHO, Austin Slack)

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es; 23,05h) Adiós a Millie Small, la cantante jamaicana más conocida por su éxito de 1964 “My Boy Lollipop”. Sr. Chinarro estrena nuevo single, "Una Famiglia Reale". Fontaines D.C. sorprenden con el anuncio de un nuevo álbum de estudio titulado A Hero’s Death. Hinds presentan "Just Like Kids (Miau)", último adelanto antes de que vea la luz "The Prettiest Curse", su esperado tercer álbum. “Love and Squalor” es el primer álbum de J'AIME (Jaime Cristóbal de Souvenir). Un disco que hace justicia al talento y lleva la obra de J'AIME a su continuación y consolidación natural. Antonio GalvañParade anuncia el disco de maquetas de "La deriva sentimental". Pshycotic Beats, entre Lynch y Tarantino en ‘You Cannot Hide’. Nuevo adelanto, "El breve romance", de los malagueños Arista Fiera. ‘A Flor de Piel’, el nuevo single de Cora Yako. Glass Animals han anunciado la salida de su tercer álbum de estudio, ‘Dreamland’. Bryn Slack nos presenta Vaca Pop festival online en dos fechas (AYOHO, Austin Slack)

The Insecurity Guards hunt down ideas before they can make it onto George’s podcast. Written by George The Poet. Produced by Benbrick & George The Poet. Original music by Benbrick. Featured songs: Playa Hater by The Notorious B.I.G., St. Thomas by Sonny Rollins, Middle of the Night by The Clovers, Easy Snapping by Theophilus Beckford, Freedom Sound by The Skatalites, Simmer Down by The Wailers, My Boy Lollipop by Millie Small, Joe Liges by Delroy Wilson, I Spy (feat. Headie One & K-Trap) by Krept & Konan Featured guests: Jawad Ifraz, Andrew Bell, Chris Bernard, Patrin, Tasneim Zyada, Aaron Daniels, Lams, Tyra Mai, Petra Clips taken from the BBC Archive: Reggae – The Story of Jamaican Music (Forward March). Have You Heard George’s Podcast? is a George the Poet production for BBC Sounds. Commissioning Executive for BBC: Dylan Haskins Commissioning Editor for BBC: Jason Phipps

In this episode: Holiday Prep Which Platforms Approved Knitting Patterns: Purlbreak by Stephen West, My Boy Lollipop by Nancy Ricci, & a sock WIP (Seamfree Rounded Toe for a Toe-Up Sock by Lynne Ashton) Yarn Being Used: Forbidden Fiber Co's Pride LF (fingering) in Slytherin House, Vault 713, House of Ravenclaw, House of Ravenclaw II + Seismic Yarns DK in It's Not "San Fran" Either + Zen Yarn Garden, Serenity 20 in Flamenco + Periwinkle Sheep, Sock Dream in Ember Books: Hannah Swensen series by Joanne Fluke, Empire of Sand (The Books of Ambha #1) by Tasha Suri, Timber Creek K-9 Mystery series by Margaret Mizushima, & The Cavanaughs series by Stephanie Laurens Book Club reads: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly + No and Me by Delphine de Vigan What I've Learned about Making Cookies Go-To Recipes: M&M Cookie Bites by Baker by Nature, Sarah Copeland's Chocolate Chip Cookie for Modern Times, & Mac & Cheese by Barefoot Contessa Instagram: mscrownonseseventh Blog: mscrownonseventh.com (photos of knitting WIP's are located here in the episode's post)

Sweater progress! What I've Finished:Jill made four Knitted Knockers out of Cascade Ultra Pima in a taupe color with aqua backing color.My Current Fix:Jill has finished the body and first sleeve on her Marklee pullover by Elizabeth Doherty in Invictus Yarns Reward in the Contemplate colorway.  She is almost done with her Ixchel by Catherine Clark, but has to do redo the top of the neck.  Her Rav page is here.  She is using Sweet Sparrow Gosling in Dusty Rose and Magpie in Butter Beer.  She just started the Butterfly/Papillon shawl by Marin Melchior out of Uneek Fingering and Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Burgundy.What I'm Jonesing For:Jill wants to make a neutral color open front cardigan.  She's looking at Howell Mountain by Sloane Rosenthal, Ebbetts by Elizabeth Doherty and Portage by Melissa Schaschwary.  She also likes the My Boy Lollipop by Nancy Ricci and Soundwave by Faye Kennington.  She thinks the Spring Charm Set by Susan B. Anderson is adorable.ReUps:Serendipidye DyeworksGood Stuff Crafts etsyDinaRipperCreationsSlipped Stitch StudiosThe Shawl Society - Season 1Uppers and Downers:Christopher Robin (2018)Shazam! (2019)The Perfect Date (2019)To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Bobby (Boris) Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers [00:22] a side: "Monster Mash" b side: "Monsters' Mash Party" Garpax Records GP-44167 1962 Indeed, the greatest pop song ever recorded. I think I'm going to name my next adventuring party The Crypt Kicker Five. Buck Owens [06:20] a side: "(It's a) Monster's Holiday" b side: "Great Expectations" Capitol Records 3907 1974 Yup, that's a Buck Owens song, sure as stakin. Wait, sexy sensations?! Yikes! Welcome to the 70s I guess. Derrick Morgan a side: "Moon Hop" [12:03] Reggaites b side: "Harris Wheel" [15:18] Crab Records CRAB 32 1969 Love this a-side to the moon and back. Charlie Rich [17:48] a side: "The Most Beautiful Girl" b side: "I Feel Like Going Home" Epic Records 5-11040 1973 Ah the rich vocal stylings the Silver Fox, Charlie Rich. Some exemplary countrypolitan. Palace Songs [26:01] a side: "The Mountain" b side: "(End of) Travelling" Palace Records PR3 1995 Landscape as metaphor? The Byrds [32:01] a side: "Mr. Spaceman" b side: "What's Happening?!?!" Columbia Records 4-43766 1966 And thus Space Rock was born. Or wait, was it Country Rock? Millie Small [37:34] a side: "My Boy Lollipop" b side: "Sweet William" Smash Records S-1411 1970 (1964) The single that helped launch Island Records. The Angels [41:21] a side: "My Boyfriend's Back" b side: "Now" Smash Records S-1834 1963 Wait, is the flipside a comedy track? Music Behind the DJ: "The Mexican Shuffle" by Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass.

As Blur and Gorillaz front man Damon Albarn joins the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians to open the Glastonbury Festival, John talks to Damon and Lebanese-Syrian rapper Eslam Jawaad about working and performing with the orchestra.In Inspiring Impressionism, the National Galleries of Scotland will stage the first ever large-scale exhibition to examine the important relationship between the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny and the Impressionists, including Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. Curators Lynne Ambrosini and Frances Fowle discuss.The Bethlem Museum of the Mind in South London is one of five museums and galleries in the UK to make the shortlist for Museum of the Year. In the third of our reports from the shortlisted venues, John Wilson visits the museum which cares for an internationally-renowned collection of archives, art and historic objects relating to the history of mental healthcare and treatment. The Jamaican guitarist and composer Ernest Ranglin is probably best known for Millie Small's 1964 ska version of My Boy Lollipop, but during his long career he has worked with the likes of Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, and jazz pianist Monty Alexander. At the age of 83, Ernest is embarking on his farewell tour, starting with an appearance at this year's Glastonbury Festival. Music journalist Kevin Le Gendre looks back on the career of the musician, and explains why he's still a hot ticket after thousands of gigs and recording sessions over almost seven decades. Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

Once again we return to 221B Con for a live podcast, this year with BBC Sherlock's David Nellist! Join BSBs Amy, Ashley, Taylor, and Sarah as we learn more about David's way of acting, his headcanons about Stamford (is he SECRETLY MORIARTY?!), what type of dog Stamford has, as well as his favorite roles he's played and wants to play. David Nellist will be best known to Sherlock Holmes fans as portraying Stamford in BBC's Sherlock.  He trained at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and has since taken on a number of acting roles both on and off screen. Stage credits include War Horse, Billy Elliot, Nicholas Nickleby, Taming of the Shrew, and Cherry Orchard. Other television credits are 55 Degrees North, The Bill, and Breeze Block, and he's been in the films My Boy Lollipop, Bad Dads, and Leda. You can find him on twitter @nellidge.

The history of Jamaica's music is a fascinating one, and seldom has a nation's pop music been so celebratory, political, and concerned with civil rights, all rolled into an upside-down one-drop rhythm that is as recognizable as it is pervasive. Part mento, part African drums, part American jazz, soul, and R&B, part a Marcus Garvey-derived treatise on human rights and repatriation, Jamaica's reggae is pop music with clear revolutionary goals, intent on dancing in the face of Babylon while forthrightly chanting it down. This Is Reggae Music hits most of the historical high points, including Jamaica's entry into the international pop market with early hits like Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" (arranged by the venerable Ernest Ranglin) and Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," following these up with key tracks from Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack (including Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross," the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon," and the Slickers' immortal "Johnny Too Bad" and some early reggae gems like Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" (produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the Heptones' "Hypocrite," and Cliff's "Vietnam." The final disc finds reggae poised to take over the world (on the wings of one Bob Marley), and includes essential tracks like Delroy Wilson's "Better Must Come," Zap Pow's bit of reggae-meets-Stax, "This Is Reggae Music," Slim Smith's stunningly beautiful "The Time Has Come," and the concluding song, the classic Jack Ruby-produced "Marcus Garvey" by Burning Spear.www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradio.com

The history of Jamaica's music is a fascinating one, and seldom has a nation's pop music been so celebratory, political, and concerned with civil rights, all rolled into an upside-down one-drop rhythm that is as recognizable as it is pervasive. Part mento, part African drums, part American jazz, soul, and R&B, part a Marcus Garvey-derived treatise on human rights and repatriation, Jamaica's reggae is pop music with clear revolutionary goals, intent on dancing in the face of Babylon while forthrightly chanting it down. This Is Reggae Music hits most of the historical high points, including Jamaica's entry into the international pop market with early hits like Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" (arranged by the venerable Ernest Ranglin) and Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," following these up with key tracks from Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack (including Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross," the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon," and the Slickers' immortal "Johnny Too Bad" and some early reggae gems like Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" (produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the Heptones' "Hypocrite," and Cliff's "Vietnam." The final disc finds reggae poised to take over the world (on the wings of one Bob Marley), and includes essential tracks like Delroy Wilson's "Better Must Come," Zap Pow's bit of reggae-meets-Stax, "This Is Reggae Music," Slim Smith's stunningly beautiful "The Time Has Come," and the concluding song, the classic Jack Ruby-produced "Marcus Garvey" by Burning Spear.www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradio.com

The history of Jamaica's music is a fascinating one, and seldom has a nation's pop music been so celebratory, political, and concerned with civil rights, all rolled into an upside-down one-drop rhythm that is as recognizable as it is pervasive. Part mento, part African drums, part American jazz, soul, and R&B, part a Marcus Garvey-derived treatise on human rights and repatriation, Jamaica's reggae is pop music with clear revolutionary goals, intent on dancing in the face of Babylon while forthrightly chanting it down. This Is Reggae Music hits most of the historical high points, including Jamaica's entry into the international pop market with early hits like Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" (arranged by the venerable Ernest Ranglin) and Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," following these up with key tracks from Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack (including Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross," the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon," and the Slickers' immortal "Johnny Too Bad" and some early reggae gems like Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" (produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the Heptones' "Hypocrite," and Cliff's "Vietnam." The final disc finds reggae poised to take over the world (on the wings of one Bob Marley), and includes essential tracks like Delroy Wilson's "Better Must Come," Zap Pow's bit of reggae-meets-Stax, "This Is Reggae Music," Slim Smith's stunningly beautiful "The Time Has Come," and the concluding song, the classic Jack Ruby-produced "Marcus Garvey" by Burning Spear.www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradio.com

The history of Jamaica's music is a fascinating one, and seldom has a nation's pop music been so celebratory, political, and concerned with civil rights, all rolled into an upside-down one-drop rhythm that is as recognizable as it is pervasive. Part mento, part African drums, part American jazz, soul, and R&B, part a Marcus Garvey-derived treatise on human rights and repatriation, Jamaica's reggae is pop music with clear revolutionary goals, intent on dancing in the face of Babylon while forthrightly chanting it down. This Is Reggae Music hits most of the historical high points, including Jamaica's entry into the international pop market with early hits like Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" (arranged by the venerable Ernest Ranglin) and Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," following these up with key tracks from Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack (including Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross," the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon," and the Slickers' immortal "Johnny Too Bad" and some early reggae gems like Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" (produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the Heptones' "Hypocrite," and Cliff's "Vietnam." The final disc finds reggae poised to take over the world (on the wings of one Bob Marley), and includes essential tracks like Delroy Wilson's "Better Must Come," Zap Pow's bit of reggae-meets-Stax, "This Is Reggae Music," Slim Smith's stunningly beautiful "The Time Has Come," and the concluding song, the classic Jack Ruby-produced "Marcus Garvey" by Burning Spear.www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradio.com

The Celebrity Link: #1 songs  by Jamaicans  reaching UK Singles National Chart The incidence of Jamaican recordings reaching the United Kingdom charts and impacting British culture has become commonplace. Millie Small's 1964 remake of Barbie Gaye's 1957 R&B hit, My Boy Lollipop set the trend when it climbed to No. 2 on the British charts. It effectively opened the floodgates for a deluge of Jamaican recordings to flow incessantly onto the British charts. Earlier, others like Laurel Aitken and Dandy Livingstone created an initial impact, with Aitken's Boogie in My Bones and Little Sheila in 1957 becoming the first Jamaican-made recordings to be distributed in England. A couple years after Millie Small's hit, ska legend Prince Buster burst onto the UK music scene with the ultimate rude-boy song, Al capone Guns Don't Argue, which established his career in Britain. The year 1967 saw the biggest Jamaica-UK hit of that period, when Desmond Dekker's 007 (Shanty Town) found its way to the No. 14 slot on the charts. Dekker, who had ushered in a more conscious form of Jamaican rocksteady, revealed to the outside world, through the recording, the condition of ghetto dwellers and gun-toting hoodlums in a society going through a transition: Two years later, Dekker and the Aces would return to register Jamaica's greatest impact on the UK charts and the first Jamaican record to hit the No. 1 spot there — Israelites. Although few could understand its lyrics, it became a timeless masterpiece, merely on the strength of its intense reggae beat, reaching the top in April 1969.http://www.herald.co.zw/jamaican-music-rules-uk/ 661-467-2407 www.crsradio.com

The history of Jamaica's music is a fascinating one, and seldom has a nation's pop music been so celebratory, political, and concerned with civil rights, all rolled into an upside-down one-drop rhythm that is as recognizable as it is pervasive. Part mento, part African drums, part American jazz, soul, and R&B, part a Marcus Garvey-derived treatise on human rights and repatriation, Jamaica's reggae is pop music with clear revolutionary goals, intent on dancing in the face of Babylon while forthrightly chanting it down. This Is Reggae Music hits most of the historical high points, including Jamaica's entry into the international pop market with early hits like Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" (arranged by the venerable Ernest Ranglin) and Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," following these up with key tracks from Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack (including Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross," the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon," and the Slickers' immortal "Johnny Too Bad" and some early reggae gems like Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" (produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the Heptones' "Hypocrite," and Cliff's "Vietnam." The final disc finds reggae poised to take over the world (on the wings of one Bob Marley), and includes essential tracks like Delroy Wilson's "Better Must Come," Zap Pow's bit of reggae-meets-Stax, "This Is Reggae Music," Slim Smith's stunningly beautiful "The Time Has Come," and the concluding song, the classic Jack Ruby-produced "Marcus Garvey" by Burning Spear.www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradio.com