Podcasts about Nappy Brown

Llegó la hora de dar un repasito a titanes y titanas del blues saltarín y el rhythm and blues como Big Joe Turner, Nappy Brown, Lavern Baker, Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, Wynonie Harris... A partir de las ocho de la mañana del sábado en la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio

 This week it's a rock-a-beatin' boogie extravaganza. Vintage tracks from the rocking archives of the fifties and sixties, all meant to make you feel good. Hand-picked sizzlers and twenty flight scorchers set alongside some of the more familiar sounds of the Everlys, The Dixie Cups and Shirley & Lee. First, second and third helpings of some of the very best of the day including tributes to Kansas City, Caldonia, Peggu Sue, Jim Dandy and a host of others, all brought to you from the sock hop to the rent party. Tune in for some LaVern Baker, Elvis, Nappy Brown, Wynona Carr and Big Joe Turner. They've all got a place in this week's show here on Sonoma County Community Radio in yet another Deeper Roots barn burner. Hope you can join us and spend two hours leading off with Boston's favorite son, Freddy Cannon. All of this coming your way from the outskirts of the Cherry Street Historic District of downtown Santa Rosa. Will there be reason to celebrate? We're countin' on it. 

Intro Song –  The B.B. King Blues Band, “Regal Blues (A Tribute To The King)”, The Soul Of The King, 2019 
First Set -
Big James and the Chicago Playboys, “The Blues Will Never Die”, The Big Payback, 2012
 Nappy Brown, “Keep On Pleasin' You”, Long Time Coming, 2007
Mighty Lester, “Swingin' At Lesters”, We Are Mighty Lester, 2006 
Griff Hamlin And The Single Barrel Blues Band, “Almost Level To The Ground”, I'll Drink To That, 2019

 Second Set - 
Clarence Gatemouth Brown, “Dollar Got The Blues”, Alright Again!, 1987     Anthony Geraci and the Boston All-Stars, “The Blues Never Sleeps”, Fifty Shades of Blue, 2015 
Louis Jordan, “Somebody Done Hoodooed The Hoodoo Man ”, Let The Good Times Roll (1938-1954), 1992 Third Set - WIB Etta James, “Hey Henry”, Miss Etta James, The Complete Modern and Kent Recordings, 2005 Ruth Brown, “R.B.'s Blues”, Miss Rhythm (Greatest Hits and More), 1989 Koko Taylor, “It's A Poor Dog”, Basic Soul, 1972 Fourth Set -  Eddie Martin With His Big Blues Band, “Wannabe Me”, Looking Forward, Looking Back B.B. King, “Caldonia”, The Best of B.B. King
 Pee Wee Crayton, “Ya Know Yeah”, Early Hours Blues, 1999

This week's show, after a 1965 Simon & Garfunkel sop: brand new Ride, Real Estate, Church, New Model Army, Magnet School, Chesterfield Kings, and Pernice Brothers, plus Nappy Brown, Cookie Jackson, Shadows of Knight, Lloyd Robinson, Beatles, Peter ...

Ten Years After "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always"The Pogues "White City"Ruth Brown "It's All In Your Mind"Eilen Jewell "Silver Wheels and Wings"Tommy Tucker "Hi-Heel Sneakers"Adam Faucett "Day Drinker"Country Jim "Sad And Lonely"Buddy Emmons "Witchcraft"Twain And The Deslondes "Run Wild"Nappy Brown "The Right Time"Loretta Lynn "The Darkest Day"Furry Lewis "Casey Jones"She & Him "I Could've Been Your Girl"Bing Crosby "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)"Otis Redding "Try a Little Tenderness"Bob Dylan "Floater (Too Much to Ask)"Oscar 'Papa' Celestin And His New Orleans Band "Didn't He Ramble"Valerie June "Shakedown"Jimmy "Duck" Holmes "It Had to Be the Devil"The Breeders "Saints"Tom Waits "Get Behind the Mule"Ella Fitzgerald "In the Still of the Night"John Prine "Often Is a Word I Seldom Use"Annisteen Allen "Fujiyama Mama"Fastbacks "In the Summer"The Replacements "Left Of The Dial"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Milk Cow Blues"Gordon Lightfoot "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"Clifford Brown & Max Roach "I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Every Day I Write the Book"ZZ Top "Waitin' for the Bus"ZZ Top "Jesus Just Left Chicago"George Lewis "Burgundy Street Blues"Webb Pierce "Slowly"Gang of Four "Armalite Rifle"J Mascis + The Fog "Ammaring"Gillian Welch "Tennessee"Lucero "Nothing's Alright"Drag the River "Tobacco Fields"Pretenders "Mystery Achievement"John Coltrane "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"

Nappy Brown era un cantante de gospel con una entrega vocal distintiva, estirando y rodando sus líneas y llorando "li-li-li-li" como un hombre poseído, pero cuando cruzó al R&B tuvo algunos discos de gran éxito, y sus actuaciones en vivo fueron sensacionales. El estilo de Nappy influyó en muchos de los primeros cantantes de soul, y Elvis se aseguró de ver a Nappy si pasaba por Memphis.

SELECCIÓN 1 ENERO 2023 BLUES SYNDICATE 1- BLUES IN THE GHETTO – PEE WEE CRAYTON 2- DARLING YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU – B.B. KING 3- IRENE – LONG JOHN HUNTER 4- I CAME UP THE HEARD WAY – EDDY CLEARWATER 5- WORKING ON A BUILDING – JOHN STEPHAN BAND 6- WEE BABY BLUES – EDDIE CLEARHEAD VINSON 7- KANSAS CITY – ALBERT KING 8- TAKE OUT SOME INSURANCE – JIMMY REED 9- BOOM BOOM – JOHN LEE HOOKER 10- SHE´S A SWEET ONE – JUNIOR WELLS 11- EVEN THE SAVED NEED SAVING – SELWYN BIRCHWOOD 12- KEEP ON PLEASIN YOU – NAPPY BROWN & SEAN COSTELLO 13- OLD FRIENDS – KENNY NEAL 14- OUT ON THE ROAD – NORTH MISSISSIPPI ALLSTARS 15- LET ME OUT – ELECTRIC MARY 16- LIE TO ME – JOHNNY LANG

The lastest and greatest Sid Podcast features both classic and obscure acts who left great, great music on the cutting room floor.

Today's show features music performed by Muddy Waters and Nappy Brown

Benny Goodman & His Orchestra - Let's Dance - 10 - Stealin' Apples. Angel Forrest (1996-2018)2 - Mother Tongue Blues11 - Someone Angel Forrest (1996-2018)€5 - Here For You6. Come to Me Angel Forest - Electric Love4 Walkin_ Blues Alex Lopez M- Rising Up Bettye_Lavette -when_a_womans_had_enough Big Chief Monk Boudreaux - Bloodstains & TeardropsBloodstains and Teardrops 10. INDIAN BLUES Big Joe Shelton - Black Prairie Blues11 Best I Can Tell Barry Goldberg - Barry Goldberg & Friends4 - It Hurts Me Too Clarence Spady - Surrender Cephas & Wiggins - Richmond Blues8 - John Henry Dynamite Blues BandMedicineDynamite Blues Band - I Still Don't Know AJ (Plug) And The Wildgrooves - Let Go Or Be Dragged3 - train of love Bintangs€2 La Femme Sans Tete3-You Can't Love 'm All Duke Robillard - Discography€8 - A Swingin Session with Duke Robillard10 - Swinging with Lucy Mae Deanna Bogart Dan Leonard Scott Ambush Mike Aubin - 2009 - 11th Hour7 - Have A Little Faith David Maxwell & Louisiana Red - 2009 - You Got To Move3 - You Got To Move Climax Blues Band - 25 Years 1968-1993 (2CD)CD29 - The Last Chance Saloon Legendary Blues Band - 1989 - Woke Up With The Blues2 - I Woke Up With The Blues John MayallJohn Mayall - Compilation3 - Wake Up Call10. I'm A Sucker For Love Big Mike GriffinLivin' LargeBig Mike Griffin - Livin' Large - 05 - Down in Hollywood Big Apple BluesEnergy5. Lost In Thoughts JJ Appleton & Jason Ricci - 2918 - Beautiful Slop10 - Stay Nappy BrownNappy Brown - Apples & Lemons 1990 @256Nappy Brown - 08 - Small Red Apples

The smoke was thick, the music was loud, and the beer was flowing. In the fast-and-loose 1980s, Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club in Hodges, South Carolina, was a festive late-night roadhouse filled with people from all walks of life who gathered to listen to the live music of high-energy performers. Housed in a Reconstruction-era railway station, the blues club embraced local Southern culture and brought a cosmopolitan vibe to the South Carolina backcountry. Over the years, Jackson Station became known as one of the most iconic blues bars in the South. It offered an exciting venue for local and traveling musical artists, including Widespread Panic, the Swimming Pool Qs, Bob Margolin, Tinsley Ellis, and R&B legend Nappy Brown, who loved to keep playing long after sunrise. The good times ground to a terrifying halt in the early morning hours of April 7, 1990. A brutal attack—an apparent hate crime—on the owner Gerald Jackson forever altered the lives of all involved. In this fast-paced narrative, Live At Jackson Station: Music, Community, and Tragedy in a Southern Blues Bar (U South Carolina Press, 2021)emerges as a cultural kaleidoscope that served as an oasis of tolerance and diversity in a time and place that often suffered from undercurrents of bigotry and violence—an uneasy coexistence of incongruent forces that have long permeated southern life and culture. Daniel M. Harrison earned a BA in Social Sciences from New College of the University of South Florida and MS and PhD degrees from Florida State University. He is currently Professor of Sociology at Lander University. He lives in Greenwood, SC, with his wife, artist Rebecca Salter Harrison, their two daughters, three dogs and two cats. Harrison's other work has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture, and Society, Sexualities and Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL: MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The smoke was thick, the music was loud, and the beer was flowing. In the fast-and-loose 1980s, Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club in Hodges, South Carolina, was a festive late-night roadhouse filled with people from all walks of life who gathered to listen to the live music of high-energy performers. Housed in a Reconstruction-era railway station, the blues club embraced local Southern culture and brought a cosmopolitan vibe to the South Carolina backcountry. Over the years, Jackson Station became known as one of the most iconic blues bars in the South. It offered an exciting venue for local and traveling musical artists, including Widespread Panic, the Swimming Pool Qs, Bob Margolin, Tinsley Ellis, and R&B legend Nappy Brown, who loved to keep playing long after sunrise. The good times ground to a terrifying halt in the early morning hours of April 7, 1990. A brutal attack—an apparent hate crime—on the owner Gerald Jackson forever altered the lives of all involved. In this fast-paced narrative, Live At Jackson Station: Music, Community, and Tragedy in a Southern Blues Bar (U South Carolina Press, 2021)emerges as a cultural kaleidoscope that served as an oasis of tolerance and diversity in a time and place that often suffered from undercurrents of bigotry and violence—an uneasy coexistence of incongruent forces that have long permeated southern life and culture. Daniel M. Harrison earned a BA in Social Sciences from New College of the University of South Florida and MS and PhD degrees from Florida State University. He is currently Professor of Sociology at Lander University. He lives in Greenwood, SC, with his wife, artist Rebecca Salter Harrison, their two daughters, three dogs and two cats. Harrison's other work has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture, and Society, Sexualities and Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL: MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Today’s show features music performed by Muddy Waters and Nappy Brown

Label: Savoy 1506Year: 1957Condition: M-Price: $26.00Credited to Nappy Brown With the Zippers Quartet. This terrific number, like all Nappy Brown 45s, was a non-album tune. Note: This beautiful copy has Near Mint labels with a light touch of wear. The vinyl looks untouched, and the audio sounds pristine Mint!

Kid Andersen talks about his blues licks guitar lessons available on TrueFire, performs, and answers questions. To learn more and watch the video from this live session, please visit truefire.com/live.About Kid:Chris “Kid” Andersen was born in Telemark, Norway in 1980. A blues fan since childhood, Andersen fell in love with the music of Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Junior Watson, and the Kings (B.B., Albert and Freddie). By the time he was 18, he was backing all the American blues stars who came through Norway, including Homesick James, Nappy Brown and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. He moved to California at age 21, eventually earning himself a green card as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.”Andersen released four solo albums before joining blues harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite’s band in 2004, a gig that lasted until he joined Rick Estrin & The Nightcats. Kid Andersen is known as the guitarist for Rick Estrin & The Nightcats with 3 BMA Nominations for Guitarist of the Year. The virtuoso also is the man behind Greaseland Studios, THE hub for authentic Blues Music in the Bay Area. Kid is bringing some of his favorite collaborators to Biscuits and Blues.

Welcome to the second in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: ----more---- Transcript Today we're going to talk about a record that wasn't a rock and roll record at all -- in fact it was a novelty record, and regarded as such. But it was a record that would have a huge impact on the whole history of the record industry, in ways you really wouldn't expect from a silly little track. Today, we're going to talk about "The Flying Saucer". "The Flying Saucer" is an extremely early example of what would come to be called sampling. It's a novelty record that in most ways is no different from the kind of thing Stan Freberg was doing at the time with records like "St George and the Dragonet": [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St George and the Dragonet"] Before video, and before even widespread adoption of TV, there was a large market for audio comedy, and we'll see as the series goes on how audio engineering techniques developed for comedy would be repurposed for use in rock and roll music. For comedy records, you needed to be able to make strange and unusual sounds -- and that kind of thing would come in useful when trying to develop a sound that would catch the ear of young people. The track we're talking about today, "The Flying Saucer", was put together by the songwriting and production team Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman. Buchanan was a songwriter who specialised in comedy songs -- for example he wrote several albums' worth of material for the Three Stooges: [Excerpt: The Three Stooges, "We're Coming To Your House"] Goodman, meanwhile, was a producer, and it seems like he only had one idea. That idea was something that he called "break-ins", but would later be better known as sampling or mash-ups. In a break-in recording, there would be a spoken-word narrative, but bits of other people's records would interrupt the narrative, usually acting as punchlines to a set-up. "The Flying Saucer" was the first, and most successful, of these. Flying saucers were very much in the zeitgeist in the early fifties. The term had come to prominence in 1947, as a result of the famous Roswell incident, and for the next few years -- a time of increasing paranoia in the US as the USSR had developed their own nuclear bombs, and there was a real possibility that the world might be rendered unfit for human habitation at any moment -- a lot of the paranoia was filtered into belief that the world was being watched over by malevolent aliens. "The Flying Saucer" tapped in to that, and into the other new craze that was sweeping the nation, rock and roll, and merged the two. It took the format of Orson Welles' famous radio version of War of the Worlds, and parodied it, first having a DJ interrupt the record he was playing -- "Open up That Door" by Nappy Brown -- to announce that a flying saucer had landed, and then having an on-the-spot reporter interview witnesses and the aliens themselves -- and having all the dialogue from those witnesses be excerpts of current hits, including songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Carl Perkins, and Nappy Brown's "Don't Be Angry": [Excerpt: "The Flying Saucer"] Nothing like this had ever been done before -- there had, apparently, been a single other record, decades earlier, that had included samples of other records, but that had been as part of a comedy sketch with people turning the dial of the radio and hearing different songs -- it had been diegetic music that they were listening to. This was something else, and something for which the music industry wasn't prepared. Buchanan and Goodman tried to get several record labels to put it out, but had no success, and eventually took the tape directly to WINS radio, where several DJs, including Alan Freed, played it, and it got an immediate response from the audience. The next day, they took the recording to George Goldner, who you may remember from the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" as having a near-infallible ear for a hit record. He agreed to put it out, and set up a new label, Universe, for Buchanan and Goodman's record. But after they'd pressed up a few thousand records, he discovered there already was a Universe Records. Rather than waste the money, Goldner, Buchanan, Goodman, and a few of Goldner's employees spent all night drawing the letter L at the beginning of "Universe", changing it to "Luniverse". The track became a massive hit, but also a massive legal headache. The record company cut deals with the licensing agencies responsible for the songs sampled, which meant that they ended up paying a massive seventeen cents in songwriting royalties per eighty-nine-cent record sold (by comparison it was not unknown for songwriting royalties to be as low as a cent a record). And that should have been enough to cover them, at a time when there were no federal copyrights on sound recordings, but they were sued nonetheless by Imperial Records, Chess Records, and artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis. The lawsuit was ruled in Buchanan and Goodman's favour, as the record was clearly parody by the standards of 1950s copyright law, and they celebrated with a followup single, "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial", which followed the same formula as "The Flying Saucer", and was a minor hit: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial"] The two men made one further record before Buchanan went on his way, but Goodman kept making records under the Buchanan and Goodman name, with records like "Flying Saucer Goes West", "Flying Saucer the Third", and "Frankenstein of '59". Goodman kept doing this for decades, churning out supposed novelty records long after the novelty had well and truly worn off, and usually trying to cash in on some hit film, with records like "Superfly Meets Shaft", or "Kong" (a parody of the King Kong remake). One time, amazingly enough, he did manage to get to number four with one of these, "Mr Jaws": [Excerpt: Dickie Goodman, "Mr. Jaws"] The follow-up, "Mrs. Jaws", based on Jaws II, didn't do so well, and “Mr. Jaws” would be Goodman's last big hit. He died in 1989. Next week, we'll look at the only group other than Buchanan and Goodman ever to release a record on Luniverse...

Welcome to the second in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: —-more—- Transcript Today we’re going to talk about a record that wasn’t a rock and roll record at all — in fact it was a novelty record, and regarded as such. But it was a record that would have a huge impact on the whole history of the record industry, in ways you really wouldn’t expect from a silly little track. Today, we’re going to talk about “The Flying Saucer”. “The Flying Saucer” is an extremely early example of what would come to be called sampling. It’s a novelty record that in most ways is no different from the kind of thing Stan Freberg was doing at the time with records like “St George and the Dragonet”: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, “St George and the Dragonet”] Before video, and before even widespread adoption of TV, there was a large market for audio comedy, and we’ll see as the series goes on how audio engineering techniques developed for comedy would be repurposed for use in rock and roll music. For comedy records, you needed to be able to make strange and unusual sounds — and that kind of thing would come in useful when trying to develop a sound that would catch the ear of young people. The track we’re talking about today, “The Flying Saucer”, was put together by the songwriting and production team Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman. Buchanan was a songwriter who specialised in comedy songs — for example he wrote several albums’ worth of material for the Three Stooges: [Excerpt: The Three Stooges, “We’re Coming To Your House”] Goodman, meanwhile, was a producer, and it seems like he only had one idea. That idea was something that he called “break-ins”, but would later be better known as sampling or mash-ups. In a break-in recording, there would be a spoken-word narrative, but bits of other people’s records would interrupt the narrative, usually acting as punchlines to a set-up. “The Flying Saucer” was the first, and most successful, of these. Flying saucers were very much in the zeitgeist in the early fifties. The term had come to prominence in 1947, as a result of the famous Roswell incident, and for the next few years — a time of increasing paranoia in the US as the USSR had developed their own nuclear bombs, and there was a real possibility that the world might be rendered unfit for human habitation at any moment — a lot of the paranoia was filtered into belief that the world was being watched over by malevolent aliens. “The Flying Saucer” tapped in to that, and into the other new craze that was sweeping the nation, rock and roll, and merged the two. It took the format of Orson Welles’ famous radio version of War of the Worlds, and parodied it, first having a DJ interrupt the record he was playing — “Open up That Door” by Nappy Brown — to announce that a flying saucer had landed, and then having an on-the-spot reporter interview witnesses and the aliens themselves — and having all the dialogue from those witnesses be excerpts of current hits, including songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Carl Perkins, and Nappy Brown’s “Don’t Be Angry”: [Excerpt: “The Flying Saucer”] Nothing like this had ever been done before — there had, apparently, been a single other record, decades earlier, that had included samples of other records, but that had been as part of a comedy sketch with people turning the dial of the radio and hearing different songs — it had been diegetic music that they were listening to. This was something else, and something for which the music industry wasn’t prepared. Buchanan and Goodman tried to get several record labels to put it out, but had no success, and eventually took the tape directly to WINS radio, where several DJs, including Alan Freed, played it, and it got an immediate response from the audience. The next day, they took the recording to George Goldner, who you may remember from the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” as having a near-infallible ear for a hit record. He agreed to put it out, and set up a new label, Universe, for Buchanan and Goodman’s record. But after they’d pressed up a few thousand records, he discovered there already was a Universe Records. Rather than waste the money, Goldner, Buchanan, Goodman, and a few of Goldner’s employees spent all night drawing the letter L at the beginning of “Universe”, changing it to “Luniverse”. The track became a massive hit, but also a massive legal headache. The record company cut deals with the licensing agencies responsible for the songs sampled, which meant that they ended up paying a massive seventeen cents in songwriting royalties per eighty-nine-cent record sold (by comparison it was not unknown for songwriting royalties to be as low as a cent a record). And that should have been enough to cover them, at a time when there were no federal copyrights on sound recordings, but they were sued nonetheless by Imperial Records, Chess Records, and artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis. The lawsuit was ruled in Buchanan and Goodman’s favour, as the record was clearly parody by the standards of 1950s copyright law, and they celebrated with a followup single, “Buchanan and Goodman on Trial”, which followed the same formula as “The Flying Saucer”, and was a minor hit: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “Buchanan and Goodman on Trial”] The two men made one further record before Buchanan went on his way, but Goodman kept making records under the Buchanan and Goodman name, with records like “Flying Saucer Goes West”, “Flying Saucer the Third”, and “Frankenstein of ’59”. Goodman kept doing this for decades, churning out supposed novelty records long after the novelty had well and truly worn off, and usually trying to cash in on some hit film, with records like “Superfly Meets Shaft”, or “Kong” (a parody of the King Kong remake). One time, amazingly enough, he did manage to get to number four with one of these, “Mr Jaws”: [Excerpt: Dickie Goodman, “Mr. Jaws”] The follow-up, “Mrs. Jaws”, based on Jaws II, didn’t do so well, and “Mr. Jaws” would be Goodman’s last big hit. He died in 1989. Next week, we’ll look at the only group other than Buchanan and Goodman ever to release a record on Luniverse…

Viikonlopun kahvimatineassa Sami Ruokankaan ja Pauli Kauppilan levylautasella pyörii neljä heille rakasta kesäbiisiä: Billy Stewart: Summertime, Chuck Prophet: Summertime Thing, CCR: Green River ja April Wine: Sign Of The Gypsy Queen. Mukana jutuissa ovat myös Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Lucinda Williams, Bobby Fuller, Sweden Rock, Rolling Stones, Danny, Nappy Brown, Pori Jazz, Walkin´ Cane Mark, The Hooters, David Uosikkinen, Kenny Aronoff, Megadeth ja Mika Waltari. Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Mj0eLGrXgP4DMXz13gODQ?si=jp6haZUrTPOgKQrVTpktyA

Featuring The Jordan Bros., The Xtreems, Lee Shot Williams,Onie Wheeler, Paul and Barry Ryan, Johnny Long,Johnny Daye, Jimmy McCracklin, Motherlode,Equipe 84, Ian and The Zodiacs, Nappy Brown,and more! as broadcast live via 5130kc shortwave 2-22-20

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "Ain't Nobody's Business" by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley's side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia's releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we're going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won't properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that's a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure -- a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we're looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, "If You See Mary Lee"] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, "Billy's Blues", featured both Diddley and Diddley's guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, "Billy's Blues"] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker's birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn't know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: "Blues After Hours"] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton's Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, "I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then." Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker's comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on "Need Your Love So Bad" by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, "Need Your Love So Bad"] That's some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we've talked about in previous episodes. That's him on guitar on "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean": [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] And "Shake, Rattle, and Roll": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] and "Money Honey" [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Money Honey"] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of "I Went to Your Wedding": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name "Little Sylvia" -- inspired by "Little Esther", who like her was making records for Savoy records -- and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like "I Went to Your Wedding" there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like "Drive, Daddy, Drive": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "Drive Daddy Drive"] That was the other side of the same single as "I Went to Your Wedding", and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she'd been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters -- nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia's manager. While Sylvia's career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson's idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one -- a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry -- at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success -- he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, "I'm So Glad". It's not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work -- just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, "Se De Boom Run Dun", while it's also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Se De Boom Run Dun"] Unsurprisingly, it didn't sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we've talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops -- usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers -- had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels -- their customers weren't interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren't shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn't buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his "Jump Man Jump": [Excerpt: Piano Red, "Jump Man Jump"] They hadn't had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic's sessions. Mickey and Sylvia's first single on Groove, "Walking in the Rain", had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Walking in the Rain"] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Just Walking in the Rain"] That's a totally different song, of course -- it's a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia's song tanked. They still didn't have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called "Love is Strange", and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley's band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he'd reused the licks he had used for "Billy's Blues" on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Love is Strange"] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play "Love is Strange" for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song's publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith's name made the credits, Williams' didn't, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn't surprise him that they'd missed Williams' name off. We'll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley's contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn't prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn't speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song -- Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley's demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker's lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange", spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, "Love is Strange" was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It's one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Love is Strange". All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Love is Strange"] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, "Love is Strange"] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, "probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world", and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Dearest"] But even though that wasn't a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly -- a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both "Love is Strange" and "Dearest" -- demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Dearest"] But "Dearest" was so obscure that when Holly's single came out, the song was titled "Umm Oh Yeah", and credited to "unknown" for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit... as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat "King" Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool -- who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn't been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record -- and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record -- Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken "Ike" vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren't the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia's recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn't want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: "South of France Blues"] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, "The Blues Suite". Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can't excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called "Mississippi Delta Dues", released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he'd looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It's an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues": [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Terraplane Blues"] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he's using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir's "Alabama Blues", rewritten as "Alabama March", which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Alabama March"] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included "Shame Shame Shame" for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, "Shame Shame Shame"] That's the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called "Footstompin'", into "Fame". Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called "Pillow Talk" that she'd written for Al Green, but which he'd turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, "Pillow Talk"] But I'm afraid we're going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia's biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband's gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock's cultural place.

Discover one of America's most prolific songwriters. On this episode of Arts & Letters, we speak with biographer Arlene Corsano about the life and music of Arkansan songwriter and singer Rose Marie McCoy. Through personal stories and rare interview recordings with McCoy, Corsona tells the in-depth and behind-the-scenes story of a complicated singer and songwriter who broke barrier after barrier as a black woman in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s in the music business. Corsano's book T hought We Were Singing the Blues But They Called It Rock 'N' Roll chronicles McCoy's storied life and turbulent times from her beginnings in Oneida, Arkansas to her partnership with songwriter Charlie Singleton in New York and her office in the famed Brill Building. During her lifetime, McCoy published over 850 songs that were recorded by the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Nappy Brown, Big Maybelle, Little Esther Phillips, Elvis Presley, Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Duke

Kid Andersen discusses his Blues Refinery guitar lessons available on TrueFire, performs, and answers questions. To learn more and watch the video from this live session, please visit truefire.com/live.About Kid Andersen: Chris “Kid” Andersen was born in Telemark, Norway in 1980. A blues fan since childhood, Andersen fell in love with the music of Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Junior Watson, and the Kings (B.B., Albert and Freddie). By the time he was 18, he was backing all the American blues stars who came through Norway, including Homesick James, Nappy Brown and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. He moved to California at age 21, eventually earning himself a green card as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.”Andersen released four solo albums before joining blues harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite’s band in 2004, a gig that lasted until he joined Rick Estrin & The Nightcats. Kid Andersen is known as the guitarist for Rick Estrin & The Nightcats with 3 BMA Nominations for Guitarist of the Year. The virtuoso also is the man behind Greaseland Studios, THE hub for authentic Blues Music in the Bay Area. Kid is bringing some of his favorite collaborators to Biscuits and Blues.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Walk The Line" by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Don't Be Angry" by Nappy Brown.  ----more---- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn't think were worth going back and redoing -- I pronounce "Belshazzar" incorrectly (it's pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to "Get Rhythm" contains the phrase "if you get the blues", when of course it's "when you get the blues". Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash's work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we're going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we're going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week's episode, on "Blue Suede Shoes", because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash's birth name was actually J.R. Cash -- initials rather than a full name -- and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son's name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn't allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he'd been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he'd been the radio operator who'd intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn't know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash's brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn't matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash's voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called "Belshazzar", based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: "Belshazzar"] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they'd heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "This Little Light of Mine"] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that "something more" took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "That's All Right Mama"] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun's phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label's records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He'd never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes -- "Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom" -- he couldn't get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, "You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren't all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash's bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn't need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they'd been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn't tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn't particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There's an urban legend that Phillips said "go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell", though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he'd had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, "Hey Porter", was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash's trademark: [Excerpt, "Hey Porter": Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn't have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash's recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called "Folsom Prison Blues", and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called "Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison", and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he'd put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called "Crescent City Blues", which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): "Crescent City Blues"] If you've not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash's work, you're probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins' song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled "Crescent City Blues", by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, "Crescent City Blues"] The second musical inspiration for Cash's prison song was a song by Cash's idol, Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #1", also known as "T For Texas": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel #1"] The line "I'm gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall" hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to "Crescent City Blues" that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result "Folsom Prison Blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues"] 9) Sam Phillips didn't think that was suitable as the B-side to "Hey Porter", and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled "Cry Cry Cry," but "Folsom Prison Blues" was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn't want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and "Folsom Prison Blues" became Cash's second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It's around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn't going to bother promoting Cash's records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years -- he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun's downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he'd done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That's not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends -- though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl's wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, "All Mama's Children", which became the B-side to Perkins' "Boppin' the Blues": [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, "All Mama's Children"] It's not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis' first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash's career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn't listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he'd written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in "Sixteen Tons", the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash's mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. "I Walk the Line" was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other's argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn't so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that "Hey Porter", "Cry Cry Cry" and "Folsom Prison Blues" had all been performed in -- a rock and roll tempo, for Cash's rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn't need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went "Get rhythm if you get the blues": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: "Get Rhythm"] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn't see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn't be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn't so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "I Walk The Line"] "I Walk The Line" has a very, very, unusual structure. There's a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it's back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it's back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they're playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically -- the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started -- and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics -- the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each -- the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they're not arranged in the standard order that you'd have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it's the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse -- though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that's structured like a normal country and western song, and it's quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It's an expression of one man's very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It's an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn't be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we'll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we'll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown.  —-more—- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn’t think were worth going back and redoing — I pronounce “Belshazzar” incorrectly (it’s pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to “Get Rhythm” contains the phrase “if you get the blues”, when of course it’s “when you get the blues”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we’re going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we’re going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week’s episode, on “Blue Suede Shoes”, because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash’s birth name was actually J.R. Cash — initials rather than a full name — and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son’s name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn’t allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he’d been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he’d been the radio operator who’d intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn’t know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash’s brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn’t matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash’s voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called “Belshazzar”, based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: “Belshazzar”] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they’d heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that “something more” took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right Mama”] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun’s phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label’s records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He’d never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes — “Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom” — he couldn’t get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren’t all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash’s bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn’t need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they’d been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn’t tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn’t particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There’s an urban legend that Phillips said “go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell”, though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he’d had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, “Hey Porter”, was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash’s trademark: [Excerpt, “Hey Porter”: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn’t have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash’s recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called “Folsom Prison Blues”, and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison”, and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he’d put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called “Crescent City Blues”, which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): “Crescent City Blues”] If you’ve not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash’s work, you’re probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins’ song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled “Crescent City Blues”, by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, “Crescent City Blues”] The second musical inspiration for Cash’s prison song was a song by Cash’s idol, Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”, also known as “T For Texas”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”] The line “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall” hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to “Crescent City Blues” that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result “Folsom Prison Blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”] 9) Sam Phillips didn’t think that was suitable as the B-side to “Hey Porter”, and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled “Cry Cry Cry,” but “Folsom Prison Blues” was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn’t want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and “Folsom Prison Blues” became Cash’s second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It’s around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn’t going to bother promoting Cash’s records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years — he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun’s downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he’d done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That’s not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends — though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl’s wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”, which became the B-side to Perkins’ “Boppin’ the Blues”: [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”] It’s not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis’ first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash’s career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn’t listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he’d written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in “Sixteen Tons”, the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash’s mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. “I Walk the Line” was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other’s argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn’t so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that “Hey Porter”, “Cry Cry Cry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” had all been performed in — a rock and roll tempo, for Cash’s rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn’t need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went “Get rhythm if you get the blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: “Get Rhythm”] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn’t see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn’t be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn’t so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “I Walk The Line”] “I Walk The Line” has a very, very, unusual structure. There’s a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it’s back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it’s back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they’re playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically — the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started — and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics — the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each — the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they’re not arranged in the standard order that you’d have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it’s the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse — though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that’s structured like a normal country and western song, and it’s quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It’s an expression of one man’s very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It’s an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn’t be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we’ll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we’ll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown.  —-more—- Errata Two minor errors I noticed while editing but didn’t think were worth going back and redoing — I pronounce “Belshazzar” incorrectly (it’s pronounced as Cash does in the song, as far as I can tell), and I said that the lyric to “Get Rhythm” contains the phrase “if you get the blues”, when of course it’s “when you get the blues”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My main source for this episode is Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This triple-CD set contains everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Cash’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript This podcast is called a history of rock music, but one of the things we’re going to learn as the story goes on is that the history of any genre in popular music eventually encompasses them all. And at the end of 1955, in particular, there was no hard and fast distinction between the genres of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music. So today we’re going to talk about someone who, to many, epitomises country music more than any other artist, but who started out recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, making music that was stylistically indistinguishable from any of the other rockabilly artists there, and whose career would intertwine with all of them for decades to come. Before you listen to this one, you might want to go back and listen to last week’s episode, on “Blue Suede Shoes”, because the stories of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tie together quite a lot, and this is effectively part two of a three-parter, about Sun Records and the birth of rockabilly. Johnny Cash’s birth name was actually J.R. Cash — initials rather than a full name — and that was how he was known until he joined the Air Force. His parents apparently had a disagreement over what their son’s name should be, and so rather than give him full names, they just gave him initials. The Air Force wouldn’t allow him to just use initials as his name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. It was only once he became a professional musician that he took on the name Johnny Cash. He still never had a middle name, just a middle initial. While he was in the military, he’d been the very first American to learn that Stalin had died, as he’d been the radio operator who’d intercepted and decoded the Russian transmissions about it. But the military had never been the career he wanted. He wanted to be a singer. He just didn’t know how. After returning to the US from his stint in the Air Force in Germany, aged twenty-two, Cash got married and moved to Memphis, to be near his brother. Cash’s brother introduced him to two of his colleagues, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. Both Perkins and Grant could play a little guitar, and they started getting together to play a little music, sometimes with a steel player called Red Kernodle. They were very, very, unskilled musicians, but that didn’t matter. They had a couple of things that mattered far more than skill. They had a willingness to try anything if it might sound good, and they had Cash’s voice, which even as a callow young man sounded like Cash had been carved out of rock and imbued with the spirit of an Old Testament prophet. Cash never had a huge range, but his voice had a sonority to it that was quite astonishing, a resonant bass-baritone that demanded you pay attention to what it had to say. And Cash had a determination that he was going to become a famous singer. He had no idea how one was to go about this, but he knew it was what he wanted to do. To start with, they mostly performed the gospel songs that Cash loved. This was the music that is euphemistically called Southern Gospel, but which is really white gospel. Cash had had a religious experience as a kid, when his elder brother, who had wanted to become a priest, had died and had had a deathbed vision of heaven and hell, and Cash wanted to become a gospel singer to pay tribute to his brother while also indulging his own love of music. But then at one of their jam sessions, Cash brought in a song he had written himself, called “Belshazzar”, based on a story from the Bible: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash: “Belshazzar”] The other two were amazed. Not so much by the song itself, but by the fact that you could write a song at all. The idea that songs were something you write was not something that had really occurred to them. Cash, Perkins, and Grant all played acoustic guitar at first, and none of them were particularly good. They were mostly just hanging out together, having fun. They were just singing stuff they’d heard on the radio, and they particularly wanted to sound like the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] They were having fun together, but that was all. But Cash was ambitious to do something more. And that “something more” took shape when he heard a record, one that was recorded the day after the plane that took Cash back into the US touched down: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right Mama”] He liked the sound of that record a lot. And what he liked even more was hearing the DJ, after the song was played, say that the record was out on Sun Records, a label based in Memphis itself. Johnny, Luther, and Marshall went to see Elvis, Scotty, and Bill perform, playing on the back of a flatbed truck and just playing the two songs on their single. Cash was immediately worried – Elvis was clearly a teenager, and Cash himself was a grown man of twenty-two. Had he missed his chance at stardom? Was he too old? Cash had a chat with Elvis, and went along again the next night to see the trio performing a proper set at a nightclub, and this time he talked with Scotty Moore and asked him how to get signed to Sun. Moore told him to speak to Sam Phillips, and so Cash got hold of Sun’s phone number and started calling, asking to speak to Phillips, who was never in – he was out on the road a lot of the time, pushing the label’s records to distributors and radio stations. But Cash also knew that he was going to have to do something more to get recorded. He was going to have to turn his little guitar jam sessions into a proper group like Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, not just three people bashing away together at acoustic guitars. They sometimes had Red on steel guitar, but they still needed some variety. Cash was obviously going to be the lead singer, so it made sense for him to stick with the acoustic rhythm guitar. Luther Perkins got himself an electric guitar and started playing lead lines which amounted to little more than boogie-woogie basslines transposed up an octave. Marshall Grant, meanwhile, got himself a double bass, and taped markers on it to show him where the notes were. He’d never played one before, so all he could do was play single notes every other beat, with big gaps between the notes — “Boom [pause] boom [pause] boom [pause] boom” — he couldn’t get his fingers between the notes any faster. This group was clearly not anything like as professional as Presley and his group, but they had *something*. Their limitations as musicians meant that they had to find ways to make the songs work without relying on complicated parts or virtuoso playing. As Luther Perkins would later put it, “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings? Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.” But Cash was still, frankly, a little worried that his group weren’t all that great, and when he finally went to see Sam Phillips in person, having failed to get hold of him on the phone, he went alone. Phillips was immediately impressed by Cash’s bearing and presence. He was taller, and more dignified, than most of the people who came in to audition for Phillips. He was someone with presence, and gravitas, and Phillips thought he had the makings of a star. The day after meeting Phillips for the first time, Cash brought his musician friends around as well, and Johnny, Luther, Marshall, and Red all had a chat with Phillips. Phillips explained to them that they didn’t need to be technically great musicians, just have the right kind of sound. The four of them rehearsed, and then came back to Phillips with some of the material they’d been practising. But when it came time to audition, their steel player got so scared that he couldn’t tune his guitar, his hands were shaking so much. Eventually he decided that he was holding the other three back, and left the studio, and the audition continued with just the group who had now become the Tennessee Three – a name they chose because while they all now lived in Tennessee, none of them had originally come from there. Phillips liked their sound, but explained that he wasn’t particularly interested in putting out gospel music. There’s an urban legend that Phillips said “go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell”, though this was denied by Cash. But it is true that he’d had no sales success with gospel music, and that he wanted something more commercial. Whatever Phillips said, though, Cash took the hint, and went home and started writing secular songs. The one he came back to Phillips with, “Hey Porter”, was inspired by the sound of the railway, and had a boom-chick-a-boom rhythm that would soon become Cash’s trademark: [Excerpt, “Hey Porter”: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two] Phillips liked it, and the Tennessee Three set to recording it. Or at least that was what they were called when they recorded it, but by the time it was released Sam Phillips had suggested a slight name change, and the single came out under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. As the Tennessee Two didn’t have a drummer, Cash put paper between the strings and the fretboard of his acoustic guitar to deaden the sound and turn it into something that approximated the sound of a snare drum. The resulting boom-chick sound was one that would become a signature of Cash’s recordings for the next few decades, a uniquely country music take on the two-beat rhythm. That sound was almost entirely forced on the group by their instrumental limitations, but it was a sound that worked. The song Cash brought in to Phillips as a possible B-side was called “Folsom Prison Blues”, and it was only an original in the loosest possible sense. Before going off to Germany with the air force, Cash had seen a film called “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison”, and it had given Cash the idea that someone should write a song about that. But he’d put the idea to the back of his mind until two other inspirations arrived. The first was a song called “Crescent City Blues”, which he heard on a Gordon Jenkins album that a fellow airman in Germany owned: [Excerpt: Gordon Jenkins (Beverly Maher vocals): “Crescent City Blues”] If you’ve not heard that song before, and are familiar with Cash’s work, you’re probably mildly in shock right now at just how much like “Folsom Prison Blues” that is. Jenkins’ song in turn is also strongly inspired by another song, also titled “Crescent City Blues”, by the boogie-woogie pianist Little Brother Montgomery: [Excerpt Little Brother Montgomery, “Crescent City Blues”] The second musical inspiration for Cash’s prison song was a song by Cash’s idol, Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”, also known as “T For Texas”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel #1”] The line “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall” hit Cash hard, and he realised that the most morally bankrupt person he could imagine was someone who would kill someone else just to watch them die. He put this bleak amorality together with the idea of a song about Folsom, and changed just enough of the words to “Crescent City Blues” that it worked with this new concept of the character, and he titled the result “Folsom Prison Blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”] 9) Sam Phillips didn’t think that was suitable as the B-side to “Hey Porter”, and they eventually went for a sad song that Cash had written titled “Cry Cry Cry,” but “Folsom Prison Blues” was put aside as a future possibility. When the contract was drawn up, the only person who was actually signed to Sun was Cash – Phillips didn’t want to be tied to the other two musicians. But while only Cash was signed to the label, they split the money more or less equitably, in a forty-thirty-thirty split (other sources say that the split was completely equal). “Hey Porter” and “Cry Cry Cry” both charted, and “Folsom Prison Blues” became Cash’s second single, and one of the songs that would define him for the rest of his career. It went to number four on the country and western chart, and established him as a genuine star of country music. It’s around this time that Sun signed Carl Perkins, which caused problems. Cash resented the way that he was being treated by Phillips as being less important than Perkins. He thought that Phillips was now only interested in his new star, and wasn’t going to bother promoting Cash’s records any more. This would be a recurring pattern with Phillips over the next few years — he would discover some new star and whoever his previous favourite was would be convinced that Phillips no longer cared about them any more. This is ultimately what led to Sun’s downfall, as one by one his discoveries moved on to other labels that they believed valued them more than Phillips did. Phillips, on the other hand, always argued that he had to put in more time when dealing with a new discovery, because he had to build their career up, and that established artists would always forget what he’d done for them when they saw him doing the same things for the next person. That’s not to say, though, that Cash disliked Perkins. Quite the contrary. The two became close friends — though Cash became even closer with Clayton Perkins, Carl’s wayward brother, who had a juvenile sense of humour that appealed to Cash. Cash even co-wrote a song with Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”, which became the B-side to Perkins’ “Boppin’ the Blues”: [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “All Mama’s Children”] It’s not the greatest song either man ever wrote, by any means, but it was the start of a working relationship that would continue off and on for decades, and which both men would benefit from significantly. By this point, Cash had started to build a following, and as you might expect given his inspiration, he was following the exact same career path as Elvis Presley. He was managed by Elvis’ first proper manager, Bob Neal, and he was given a regular slot on the Louisiana Hayride, the country music radio show that Elvis had built his reputation on. But this meant that Cash was being promoted alongside Carl Perkins, as a rock and roll star. This would actually do wonders for Cash’s career in the long term. A lot of people who wouldn’t listen to anything labeled country were fans of Cash in the mid fifties, and remained with him, and this meant that his image was always a little more appealing to rock audiences than many other similar singers. You can trace a direct line between Cash being promoted as a rock and roller in 1955 and 56, and his comeback with the American Recordings series more than forty years later. But when Cash brought in a new song he’d written, about his struggle while on the road to be true to his wife (and, implicitly, also to his God), it caused a clash between him and Sam Phillips. That song was quite possibly inspired by a line in “Sixteen Tons”, the big hit from Tennessee Ernie Ford that year, which Cash fell in love with when it came out, and which made Cash a lifelong fan of its writer Merle Travis: [Excerpt: “Sixteen Tons”, Tennessee Ernie Ford] He never made the connection publicly himself, but that image of walking the line almost definitely stuck in Cash’s mind, and it became the central image of a song he wrote while on the road, thinking about fidelity in every sense. “I Walk the Line” was the subject of a lot of debate between Cash and Phillips, neither of whom were entirely convinced by the other’s argument. Cash was sure that the song was a good one, maybe the best song he ever wrote, but he wanted to play it as a slow, plaintive, lovelorn ballad. Phillips, on the other hand, wasn’t so impressed by the song itself, but he thought that it had some potential if it was sped up to the kind of tempo that “Hey Porter”, “Cry Cry Cry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” had all been performed in — a rock and roll tempo, for Cash’s rock and roll audience. Give it some rhythm, and some of the boom-chika-boom, and there might be something there. Cash argued that he didn’t need to. After all, the other song he had brought in, one that he cared about much less and had originally written to give to Elvis, was a rock and roll song. The lyrics even went “Get rhythm if you get the blues”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: “Get Rhythm”] That song itself would go on to become a hit for Cash, and a staple of his live shows, but Phillips didn’t see a reason why, just because one side of the record was uptempo, the other shouldn’t be as well. He wanted the music to be universal, rather than personal, and to his mind a strong rhythm was necessary for universality. They eventually compromised and recorded two versions, a faster one recorded the way Phillips wanted it, and a slower one, the way Cash liked it. Cash walked out convinced that Phillips would see reason and release the slower version. He was devastated to find that Phillips had released the faster version. Cash later said, “The first time I heard it on the radio, I called him and said, ‘I hate that sound. Please don’t release any more records. I hate that sound.’ ” But then the record became a massive hit, and Cash decided that maybe the sound wasn’t so bad after all. It went to number one on the country jukebox chart, made the top twenty in the pop charts, and sold more than two million copies as a single. Phillips had unquestionably had the right instincts, commercially at least. [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “I Walk The Line”] “I Walk The Line” has a very, very, unusual structure. There’s a key change after every single verse. This is just not something that you do, normally. Most pop songs will either stay in one key throughout, have a different key for different sections (so they might be in a minor key for the verse and a major key for the chorus, for example) or have one key change near the end, to give the song a bit of a kick. Here, the first verse is in F, then it goes up a fourth for the second verse, in B flat. It goes up another fourth, to E flat, for the third verse, then for the fourth verse it’s back down to B flat, and the fifth verse it’s back down to F, though an octave lower. (For those wondering about those keys, either they’re playing with capoes or, more likely, Sam Phillips sped the track up a semitone to make it sound faster.) And this is really very, very, clever in the way it sets the mood of the song. The song starts and ends in the same place both musically and lyrically — the last verse is a duplicate of the first, though sung an octave lower than it started — and the rising and falling overall arc of the song suggests a natural cycle that goes along with the metaphors in the lyrics — the tides, heartbeats, day and night, dark and light. The protagonist of the song is walking a thin line, wobbling, liable at any moment to fall over to one side or another, just like the oscillation and return to the original tonal centre in this song. What sounds like a relatively crude piece of work is, when listened to closely, a much more inventive record. And this is true of the chord sequences in the individual verses too. The verses only have three chords each — the standard three chords that most country or blues songs have, the tonic, subdominant and dominant of the key. But they’re not arranged in the standard order that you’d have them in, in a three-chord trick or a twelve-bar blues. Instead the verses all start with the dominant, an unusual, unstable, choice that came about from Cash having once threaded a tape backwards and having been fascinated by the sound. The dominant is normally the last chord. Here it’s the first. The backwards tape is also one story as to where he got the idea of the humming that starts every verse — though Cash also used to claim that the humming was so he could find the right note because there were so many key changes. This is not a song that’s structured like a normal country and western song, and it’s quite an extraordinarily personal piece of work. It’s an expression of one man’s very personal aesthetic, no matter how much Sam Phillips altered it to fit his own ideas of what Cash should be recording. It’s an utterly idiosyncratic, utterly *strange* record, and a very strong contender for the best thing Sun Records ever put out, which is a high bar to meet. The fact that this sold two million copies in a country market that is usually characterised as conservative shows just how wrong such stereotypes can be. It was a masterpiece, and Johnny Cash was set for a very, very, long and artistically successful career. But that career wouldn’t be with Sun. His life was in turmoil, the marriage that he had written so movingly about trying to keep together was falling apart, and he was beginning to think that he would do better doing as Elvis had and moving to a major label. Soon he would be signed to Columbia, the label where he would spend almost all his career, but we’ll have one last glimpse of him at Sun. before he went off to Columbia and superstardom, in a future episode. And next week, we’ll look at how Elvis was doing away from Sun.

  Welcome to episode eighteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Sh-Boom” by the Chords. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.    —-more—-     Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of almost all the songs in the episode. In this case, I have missed out one track that’s used in the podcast – I use approximately seven seconds of the intro to “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, without any of the lyrics, in the podcast. I am not going to share that song anywhere, given its lyrical content. My main resources are, as with last week  Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett, and Marv Goldberg’s website. The Chords’ music has never been anthologised on CD that I can find out, but almost any good doo-wop compilation should have “Sh-Boom”.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk about one-hit wonders for a while. One-hit wonders have an unusual place in the realm of music history, and one which it’s never easy to decide whether to envy or to pity. After all, a one-hit wonder has had a hit, which is more than the vast majority of musicians ever do. And depending on how big the hit is and how good it is, that one hit might be enough to keep them going through a whole career. There are musicians to this day who can go out and perform in front of a crowd of a few thousand people, every night, who’ve come there just to hear that one song they recorded nearly sixty years ago — and if the musician is good enough they can get that crowd enjoying their other songs as well. But there are other musicians who can never capitalise on that one record, and who never get another shot. And for those people, as the song goes, “a taste of honey’s worse than none at all”. What initially looked like it might be a massive career turns into a fluke. Sometimes they take it well and it just becomes a story to tell the grandkids, but other times it messes up everyone’s life. There are people out there who’ve spent thirty or forty years of their life chasing a second hit, who will never be truly happy because they expected more from their brief success than it brought them. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the world of rock and roll, and a lot of people who end up unlucky, but few have been as unlucky as the Chords, who wrote and recorded one of the biggest hits of all time, but who through a combination of bad luck in choosing a name, and more than a little racism, never managed to have a follow-up. Amazingly, they seem to have handled it far better than most. “Sh-Boom”, the Chords’ only hit, was the first rhythm and blues record by a black artist or group to make the top ten in the Billboard pop charts, so I suppose this is as good a time as any to talk about how the Billboard charts work, and how they differ from charts in the UK and some other countries. While the UK’s singles charts are based only on record sales (and, these days, streams, but that doesn’t really apply to this pre-digital era), the Billboard charts have always been an industry-specific thing rather than aimed at the public, and so they were based on many different metrics. As well as charts for record sales, they had (or have) charts for jukebox plays, for radio plays, and various other things. These would be combined into different genre-specific charts first, and those genres would be based on what the radio stations were playing. This means that the country charts would include all the songs played by country stations, the R&B charts all those played by R&B stations, and so on, rather than Billboard deciding themselves what counted as what genre. Then all of these charts would be combined to make the “Hot 100”, which is sort of a chart of charts. This would sometimes lead to anomalous results, when more than one type of station started playing a song, and some songs would end up on the country chart *and* the rhythm and blues chart *and* the pop chart. Pop is here a separate type of music in itself, and in the early 1950s what got played on “pop” radio was, essentially, the music that was made by white people in the suburbs *for* white people in the suburbs. In 1954, the year we’re talking about, the big hits were “O Mein Papa” by Eddie Fisher… [very short excerpt] “Secret Love” by Doris Day [very short excerpt] and records by Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, and Tony Bennett. Polite, white, middle-class music for polite white middle-class people. None of that hillbilly nonsense, and *certainly* nothing by any black people. Some of it, like the Tony Bennett tracks, was pretty good, but much of it was the kind of horrible pap which made rock and roll, when it finally broke on to the pop charts, seem like such a breath of fresh air. And even the Tony Bennett records weren’t in any way exciting — they were good, but they’d relax you after a hard day, not make you want to get up and dance. What’s noticeable here is that the pop music charts were dominated by music aimed at adults. There was no music for teenagers or younger adults hitting the pop charts, and no music for dancing. During the height of the swing era, the big bands had of course been making dance music, but now every last bit of black or lower-class influence was being eradicated, in order to appeal to the “return to normalcy”. You see, by the end of the Second World War, America had been through a lot — so much so that the first call for a “return to normalcy” had been from Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election, nearly thirty years earlier. In the previous forty-five years, the country had been involved in two world wars, suffered through the depression and the dustbowl, and simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in technology which had brought the car, the plane and now the jet, the cinema and then the talkies, the radio and the TV, and now the atomic bomb, into people’s lives. People had undergone the greatest disruption in history, and several generations had now grown up with an idea of what was “normal” that didn’t match their reality at all. And so the white, semi-prosperous, middle and upper-working class in America made a collective decision around 1946 that they were going to reconstruct that normality for themselves, and to try to pretend as much as possible that nothing had really changed. And that meant pretending that all the black people who’d moved to the Northern cities from the south in that time, and all the poor white people from Oklahoma and Texas who’d moved west to avoid the dustbowl, simply didn’t exist. Obviously those other people had some ideas of their own about that, and about how they fit into the world. And those people had a little more of a voice now than they’d had previously. The black people living in the cities had enjoyed something of a war boom — there had been so much work in the factories that many black people had pulled themselves up into something approaching affluence. That was quickly snatched away when the war ended and those jobs were quote needed by the returning heroes unquote, but a small number of them had managed to get themselves into economically secure positions, and a larger number now knew that it was *possible* for them to make money, and were more motivated than ever for social change that would let them return to their previous status. (This is a recurring pattern in the American economy, incidentally. Every time there’s an economic boom, black people are the last to benefit from it and then the first to be damaged in the downturn that follows. White America is like Lucy, putting the football of the American Dream in front of black people and then taking it away again, over and over.) And so the pop chart was for the people who were working in advertising, having three-martini lunches, and driving home to their new suburban picket-fence houses. And the other charts were for everyone else. And this is why it was the music on the other charts that was so interesting. There’s an argument that what made rock and roll something new and interesting wasn’t any one feature of the genre, but an attitude towards creation. Early rock and roll was very much what we would now think of as “mash ups” — collages or montages of wildly different elements being brought together — and this is what really distinguishes between the innovative musicians and the copycats. If you were bringing together half a dozen elements from different styles, then you were doing rock and roll. But if you were just copying one other record — even if that other record was itself a rock and roll record — and not bringing anything new to it, then you weren’t doing rock and roll, you were doing pop. And it was the people at the margins who would do rock and roll. Because they were the ones who weren’t sealing themselves off and trying to deny reality. We talked a little bit about doo-wop last week, but the songs we talked about there probably wouldn’t be called doo-wop by most listeners, though there are clear stylistic similarities. It’s probably time for me to explain what doo-wop actually is, musically. It’s a style you don’t get now, except in conscious pastiches, but it was basically an extension of the Ink Spots’ style. You have at least four singers, one of whom is a very prominent bass vocalist who sings nonsense words like “doo wop” or “bom bom ba dom”, another of whom is a high tenor who takes most of the leads, and the rest sing harmonies in the middle. While the jump bands and western swing were both music that dominated on the West Coast — the early jump bands were often based in New York, but LA was really the base of the music — doo wop was a music of the North-East. It sometimes got as far west as Detroit, but it was mostly New York, Washington DC, and a bit later New Jersey, that produced doo-wop singers. And it was doo-wop that would really take off as a musical style. While the jump bands remained mildly successful, the early fifties saw them decline in popularity as far as the R&B charts went, because the new vocal groups were becoming the dominant form in R&B — and this was especially true of the “bird groups”. The first “bird group” was the Ravens, and they might be considered the first doo-wop group full stop. They took the Ink Spots’ “top and bottom” format and extended it, so that on their ballads there’d be more interplay between the high and low vocals. Listening to “You Foolish Thing” you can clearly hear the Ink Spots influence: [excerpt “you Foolish Thing”] On their uptempo music, on the other hand, they just had the bass singer sing the lead: [excerpt: the Ravens “Rock Me All Night Long”] And the Ravens became massively influential. They’d found a way to get the catchiest parts of the Ink Spots sound, but without having to stick so closely to the formula. It could work for all kinds of songs, and soon there were a whole host of bands named after birds and singing in the Ravens’ style — the Orioles, the Flamingoes, the Penguins, the Wrens, and many more. We’ve already heard one of the bands they influenced when we listened to the Robins. The other major influential bird group was the Orioles, whose “It’s Too Soon To Know” is another record that’s often considered by some to be “the first rock and roll record” — though to my ears it just sounds like a derivative of the Ink Spots rather than anything new: [excerpt “It’s Too Soon to Know” by the Orioles] So there’s a clear stylistic progression there, but we’re not looking at anything radically different from what came before. The first real doo-wop record to really have a major impact was “Gee”, by the Crows, another bird group, which was recorded and released in 1953, but became a hit in 1954, charting a month after “Sh-Boom” was recorded, but before Sh-Boom itself became a hit: [excerpt: “Gee”, the Crows] “Gee” is doo-wop absolutely fully formed, and it’s a record which had a massive influence, particularly on young California teenagers who were growing up listening to Johnny Otis’ radio show — both Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys would later record their own strange takes on the song, emphasising how odd the record actually sounded. It’s also widely credited as the first R&B record to become a hit with a large part of its audience being white teenagers. More than any other form of R&B, doo-wop traded in the concerns of the adolescent, and so it was the first subgenre to become accessible to that huge demographic of white kids who wanted something new they could appropriate and call their own. “Gee” is a record that deserves an episode to itself, frankly, in terms of importance, but there’s not much to say about it — the Crows had one hit, never had another, split up soon after, and there’s no real biographical information out there about them. The record just stands on its own. That’s also true for “Sh-Boom”, and the Chords were another one-hit wonder, but there’s a difference there. While “Gee” was the first doo-wop record to make money from white people, “Sh-Boom” was the first doo-wop record to lose money to white people. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom”, the Chords] The Chords were, at least, not actually a bird group — they were too individual for that — but in other respects they’re very much in the typical mould of the early doo-wop bands, and “Sh-Boom” is, in many ways, an absolutely typical doo-wop song. “Sh-Boom” was not meant to be a hit. It was released on Cat records, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, but apparently everyone at Atlantic hated the song — it was only recorded at the Chords’ insistence, and it was originally only a B-side until the song started to hit with the DJs. Sh-Boom was arranged by Jesse Stone, but presumably his contribution was the instrumental, rather than the vocal arrangement, as the song was written by the Chords themselves, originally while sitting together in a car. At the time, according to Buddy McCrea of the band, “When they talked to each other, they’d say ‘boom.’ They’d say ‘Hey, man, boom, how ya doin’.” Jimmy Keyes, also of the band, said “‘Boom’ was the slang word. If you were standing on this block for five minutes, you’d hear that slang word fifteen times or more. We would take the ‘boom’ and make it sound like a bomb: ‘shhhhhh-BOOM’.” Even the nonsense words in the background were, according to Keyes, meaningful to the band — “‘A langala langala lang.’ Well, you could hear the church bells over there,” while other parts were references to someone called “Bip”, the uncle of band members Carl and Claude Feaster. Bip was homeless, and apparently stank, and when Bip would come to visit, according to Keyes, “We could smell Bip as soon as he opened the door.” They would cover their noses and sing “here comes Bip, a flip a dooba dip.” And one suspects that this played a big part in the song’s success — while the lyrics are genial gibberish, they’re genial gibberish that had meaning to the singers, if not to the audience. That wasn’t necessarily appreciated by older people though. The great satirist Stan Freberg recorded a rather mean-spirited parody of the song, combining it with a parody of Marlon Brando who was similarly popular at the time and who Freberg thought comparable in unintelligibility: [excerpt: Stan Freberg “Sh-Boom”] But there’s an element of racism in the popular reaction to the success of “Sh-Boom”. There was a belief among many people that since they couldn’t understand the lyrics, they were hiding some secret code. And any secret code sung by black men must, obviously, have to do with sex. We’ll see a lot of this kind of thing as the story goes on, unfortunately. But of course, meaningless lyrics have a long, long, history in popular music — much longer than is usually appreciated. Most people, when they’re talking about nonsense lyrics, trace scat singing back as far as Louis Armstrong imitating his own trumpet. But there’s a good argument that they go back as far as we have records of songs existing, or almost. If you look at traditional folk music you’ll often find a common pattern, of people singing “As I walked out one bright summer’s day/sing too ra la loo ra la loo ra la lay” or similar. That kind of nonsense singing dates back as far as we have records, and no-one knows how it started, but one hypothesis I’ve seen which makes sense to me is that it comes from Gregorian chant and similar religious forms. No, seriously. It makes sense when you think about it. One of the places that people in the Middle Ages were most likely to hear music was in church, and many early motets contained Latin texts — usually sung by the tenors — while other people would sing commentary or explanation of the lyrics in the vernacular — English or French or whatever language. Now, for a peasant hearing this, what do you hear? You hear some of the people singing words that make sense to you, in your own language, but it’s mixed in with this other gibberish that you don’t understand. If the people you’re listening to are singing something that makes sense and they drop into Latin, they might as well be singing “Sh-Boom Sh-Boom sha la la la la la la la la la la la” for all the sense it’ll make to you. So you come to the conclusion that that’s just how songs *are*. They have bits that make sense and then bits of nonsense that sounds good. Indeed, one of the bits of lyric of “Sh-Boom” as it’s commonly transcribed is “hey nonny”, which if that’s the lyric would tie directly back into that old folk tradition — that is, sadly, the one bit of nonsense syllabics that the band weren’t asked about, and so we can’t know if they were thinking of minstrels singing “hey nonny nonny”, or if it had some other inspiration as personal as Uncle Bip. But either way, after “Sh-Boom” doo-wop, and R&B in general, became obsessed with nonsense syllabics. We’ll be hearing a lot of examples of this in the next few years, and it became so prevalent that by 1961 Barry Mann was asking this musical question: [excerpt: “Who Put the Bomp”, Barry Mann] Doo-wop started as a musical style among black teenagers in East Coast cities, but within a few years it became dominated by Italian-American teenagers from the same areas, and we’ll see that progression happen over the next eighty or ninety episodes of this podcast. But we can also see it happening in miniature in the Chords’ career. Because while they had a big hit with “Sh-Boom”, they didn’t have the biggest hit with it. If you vaguely know “Sh-Boom”, maybe from hearing it in a film soundtrack, you might have been surprised when you heard a snatch of it earlier in this episode. It might have sounded very subtly wrong. It will have sounded *more or less* like the record you know, but… different. That’s because the record you know isn’t “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, but “Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts. To explain why, we’re first going to have to talk about “A Little Bird Told Me”: “A Little Bird Told Me” was a song originally recorded by Paula Watson on Supreme Records. Watson, and all the musicians on the record, and the record label’s owner, were all black. Watson’s record went to number two on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the bestseller charts: [excerpt “A Little Bird Told Me”, Paula Watson] And then Decca put out a record — “A Little Bird Told Me”, sung by Evelyn Knight: [excerpt: “A Little Bird Told Me”, Evelyn Knight] That record went to number one on the pop charts. And everyone involved in *that* record — the singer, the backing band, the record label owners — was white. Now, to just show you how ridiculously similar the two are, I’m going to try something — I’m going to play both records together, simultaneously. [excerpt: both versions of “A Little Bird Told Me” played together] As you can imagine, the owners of Supreme Records were more than a little put out by this. This kind of direct copying was *not* the norm in the late 1940s — as we’ve talked about before, it was perfectly normal for people to rework songs into their own style, and to do different versions for different markets, but just to make a record sounding as close as possible to someone else’s hit record of the song, that was unusual. So Supreme Records took Decca to court, and said that Decca’s record was copyright infringement. It was a direct copy of their record and should be treated as such. Before we go any further, you have to know that there are roughly three different concepts that many people confuse when they’re talking about the music industry, all of which are important. There’s the song, the recording, and the arrangement. The song is, to put it simply, just what the singer sings. It’s the words and the melody line, and maybe the chord sequence if the chord sequence is sufficiently original. But basically, if you can sing it to yourself unaccompanied, that bit’s the song. And the copyright in that is owned by the songwriter or her publisher. Now, once a song has been published, either as a record or as sheet music, *anyone* at all can make a recording of it or perform it live. There are certain conditions to that — you can change the song in minor ways, to put it into your own style, or for example to give the protagonist’s love interest a different gender if that’s something that concerns you, but you can’t make major changes to the song’s melody or lyrics without the writer or publisher’s permission. You also can’t use the song in a film or TV show without jumping through some other hoops, just on a record or live performance. But I could, right now, make and release an album of “Andrew Hickey Sings the Lennon and McCartney Songbook in the Bath” and I wouldn’t need anyone’s permission to do so, so long as I paid Lennon and McCartney’s publishers the legal minimum amount for every copy I sold. I need a songwriter’s permission to make the *first* record of their song, but anyone can legally make the second. The next thing is the recording itself — the specific recording of a specific performance. These days, that too is under copyright — I can put out my *own* recording of me singing Beatles songs, but I can’t just release a CD of one of the Beatles’ albums, at least if I don’t want to go to prison. A lot of people get confused by this because we talk, for example, about “She Loves You” being “a Beatles song” — in fact, it’s a Lennon and McCartney *song* performed on a Beatles *recording*. These days, each individual recording has its own copyright, but at the time we’re talking about, in the US, there was no federal legislation giving copyright to sound recordings — that didn’t end up happening, in fact, until the 1970s. Up to that point, the copyright law around sound recordings was based on case law and odd rulings (for example it was ruled that it was illegal to play a record on the radio without permission, not because of copyright, but because of the right to privacy — playing a record which had only been licensed for individual use to a group was considered like opening someone’s mail). But still, there was usually at least state-level copyright law around recordings, and so record labels were fairly safe. But there’s a third aspect, one somewhere between the song and the recording, and that’s the arrangement. The arrangement is all the decisions made about how to perform a song — things like how much of a groove you want it to have, whether you’re going to back it with guitar or harpsichord or accordion, whether the backing instruments are going to play countermelodies or riffs or just strum the chords, whether you’re going to play it as a slow ballad or an uptempo boogie. All that stuff. Until the “A Little Bird Told Me” case, everyone had assumed that arrangements were copyrightable. It makes sense that they would be — you can write them down in sheet music form, they make a massive difference to how the performance sounds, they’re often what we remember most, and they require a huge amount of creative effort. By every basic principle of copyright law, arrangements should be copyrightable. But the court ruled otherwise, and set a precedent that held until very recently — until, in fact, a case that only went through its final appeal in December 2018, the “Blurred Lines” case, which ruled on whether Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” plagiarised Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up”. [excerpts: “Blurred Lines” and “Got To Give It Up”] Between “A Little Bird Told Me” and “Blurred Lines”, copyright law in the US held that you could copyright an actual recording, and you could copyright a song, but you couldn’t copyright an arrangement or groove. And this had two major effects on the music industry, both of them hugely detrimental to black people. The first was simply that people could steal a groove — a riff or rhythm or feel — and make a new record with new lyrics and melody but the same groove, without giving credit. As the genres favoured by black musicians were mostly groove-based, while those favoured by white musicians were mostly melody-based, white musicians were more protected from theft than black musicians were. Bo Diddley, for example, invented the “Bo Diddley beat”, but didn’t receive royalties from Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, or George Michael when they used that rhythm. And secondly, it opened the floodgates to white musicians remaking black musicians’ hits in the same style as the black musicians. Up to this point, if a white singer had covered a black musician, or vice versa, it would have been with a different feel and a different arrangement. But now, all of a sudden, whenever a black musician put out an interesting-sounding record, a white person would put out an identical copy, and the white version would get the radio play and record sales. As the black musicians tended to record for tiny labels while the white ones would be on major labels that wouldn’t sign black musicians, the result was that a whole generation of black innovators saw their work stolen from them. And we’ll be seeing the results of that play out in a lot of the records we talk about in the future. But for most of the records we’re going to look at, the one that’s stood the test of time will be the original — very few people nowadays listen to, say, Pat Boone’s versions of “Tutti Frutti” or “Ain’t That A Shame”, because no-one would do so when the Little Richard or Fats Domino versions are available. But with “Sh-Boom”, the version that still has most traction is by The Crew Cuts. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom” – the Crew Cuts] The Crew Cuts were a white, Canadian, vocal group, who specialised in rerecording songs originally performed by black groups, in near-identical arrangements, and scoring bigger hits with them than the black people had. In the case of “Sh-Boom”, sadly, the characterless white copy has dominated in popular culture over the version that actually has some life in it. The Chords never had another hit, although “Sh-Boom” was successful enough that at one point in 1955 there was even a Sh-Boom shampoo on the market, made by a company owned by the Chords themselves. Lawsuits over the band’s name which made them have to be known for a time as the Chordcats contributed to their decline, and while there were several reunions over the years, they never replicated the magic of “Sh-Boom”. The Crew Cuts, on the other hand, had many more hits, successfully leeching off sales of records of black artists like the Penguins, Gene and Eunice, Nappy Brown, and Otis Williams and the Charms, and getting more airplay and sales from identical copies. They even had the gall to say that those artists should be grateful to the Crew Cuts, for giving their songs exposure. We’ll be talking about several of those songs in the next few weeks. It seems it’s not as hard to follow up your first hit if you don’t have to have any ideas yourself, just be white.

  Welcome to episode eighteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Sh-Boom" by the Chords. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.    ----more----     Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of almost all the songs in the episode. In this case, I have missed out one track that's used in the podcast - I use approximately seven seconds of the intro to "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, without any of the lyrics, in the podcast. I am not going to share that song anywhere, given its lyrical content. My main resources are, as with last week  Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett, and Marv Goldberg's website. The Chords' music has never been anthologised on CD that I can find out, but almost any good doo-wop compilation should have "Sh-Boom".   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about one-hit wonders for a while. One-hit wonders have an unusual place in the realm of music history, and one which it's never easy to decide whether to envy or to pity. After all, a one-hit wonder has had a hit, which is more than the vast majority of musicians ever do. And depending on how big the hit is and how good it is, that one hit might be enough to keep them going through a whole career. There are musicians to this day who can go out and perform in front of a crowd of a few thousand people, every night, who've come there just to hear that one song they recorded nearly sixty years ago -- and if the musician is good enough they can get that crowd enjoying their other songs as well. But there are other musicians who can never capitalise on that one record, and who never get another shot. And for those people, as the song goes, "a taste of honey's worse than none at all". What initially looked like it might be a massive career turns into a fluke. Sometimes they take it well and it just becomes a story to tell the grandkids, but other times it messes up everyone's life. There are people out there who've spent thirty or forty years of their life chasing a second hit, who will never be truly happy because they expected more from their brief success than it brought them. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the world of rock and roll, and a lot of people who end up unlucky, but few have been as unlucky as the Chords, who wrote and recorded one of the biggest hits of all time, but who through a combination of bad luck in choosing a name, and more than a little racism, never managed to have a follow-up. Amazingly, they seem to have handled it far better than most. "Sh-Boom", the Chords' only hit, was the first rhythm and blues record by a black artist or group to make the top ten in the Billboard pop charts, so I suppose this is as good a time as any to talk about how the Billboard charts work, and how they differ from charts in the UK and some other countries. While the UK's singles charts are based only on record sales (and, these days, streams, but that doesn't really apply to this pre-digital era), the Billboard charts have always been an industry-specific thing rather than aimed at the public, and so they were based on many different metrics. As well as charts for record sales, they had (or have) charts for jukebox plays, for radio plays, and various other things. These would be combined into different genre-specific charts first, and those genres would be based on what the radio stations were playing. This means that the country charts would include all the songs played by country stations, the R&B charts all those played by R&B stations, and so on, rather than Billboard deciding themselves what counted as what genre. Then all of these charts would be combined to make the "Hot 100", which is sort of a chart of charts. This would sometimes lead to anomalous results, when more than one type of station started playing a song, and some songs would end up on the country chart *and* the rhythm and blues chart *and* the pop chart. Pop is here a separate type of music in itself, and in the early 1950s what got played on "pop" radio was, essentially, the music that was made by white people in the suburbs *for* white people in the suburbs. In 1954, the year we're talking about, the big hits were "O Mein Papa" by Eddie Fisher... [very short excerpt] "Secret Love" by Doris Day [very short excerpt] and records by Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, and Tony Bennett. Polite, white, middle-class music for polite white middle-class people. None of that hillbilly nonsense, and *certainly* nothing by any black people. Some of it, like the Tony Bennett tracks, was pretty good, but much of it was the kind of horrible pap which made rock and roll, when it finally broke on to the pop charts, seem like such a breath of fresh air. And even the Tony Bennett records weren't in any way exciting -- they were good, but they'd relax you after a hard day, not make you want to get up and dance. What's noticeable here is that the pop music charts were dominated by music aimed at adults. There was no music for teenagers or younger adults hitting the pop charts, and no music for dancing. During the height of the swing era, the big bands had of course been making dance music, but now every last bit of black or lower-class influence was being eradicated, in order to appeal to the "return to normalcy". You see, by the end of the Second World War, America had been through a lot -- so much so that the first call for a "return to normalcy" had been from Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election, nearly thirty years earlier. In the previous forty-five years, the country had been involved in two world wars, suffered through the depression and the dustbowl, and simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in technology which had brought the car, the plane and now the jet, the cinema and then the talkies, the radio and the TV, and now the atomic bomb, into people's lives. People had undergone the greatest disruption in history, and several generations had now grown up with an idea of what was "normal" that didn't match their reality at all. And so the white, semi-prosperous, middle and upper-working class in America made a collective decision around 1946 that they were going to reconstruct that normality for themselves, and to try to pretend as much as possible that nothing had really changed. And that meant pretending that all the black people who'd moved to the Northern cities from the south in that time, and all the poor white people from Oklahoma and Texas who'd moved west to avoid the dustbowl, simply didn't exist. Obviously those other people had some ideas of their own about that, and about how they fit into the world. And those people had a little more of a voice now than they'd had previously. The black people living in the cities had enjoyed something of a war boom -- there had been so much work in the factories that many black people had pulled themselves up into something approaching affluence. That was quickly snatched away when the war ended and those jobs were quote needed by the returning heroes unquote, but a small number of them had managed to get themselves into economically secure positions, and a larger number now knew that it was *possible* for them to make money, and were more motivated than ever for social change that would let them return to their previous status. (This is a recurring pattern in the American economy, incidentally. Every time there's an economic boom, black people are the last to benefit from it and then the first to be damaged in the downturn that follows. White America is like Lucy, putting the football of the American Dream in front of black people and then taking it away again, over and over.) And so the pop chart was for the people who were working in advertising, having three-martini lunches, and driving home to their new suburban picket-fence houses. And the other charts were for everyone else. And this is why it was the music on the other charts that was so interesting. There's an argument that what made rock and roll something new and interesting wasn't any one feature of the genre, but an attitude towards creation. Early rock and roll was very much what we would now think of as "mash ups" -- collages or montages of wildly different elements being brought together -- and this is what really distinguishes between the innovative musicians and the copycats. If you were bringing together half a dozen elements from different styles, then you were doing rock and roll. But if you were just copying one other record -- even if that other record was itself a rock and roll record -- and not bringing anything new to it, then you weren't doing rock and roll, you were doing pop. And it was the people at the margins who would do rock and roll. Because they were the ones who weren't sealing themselves off and trying to deny reality. We talked a little bit about doo-wop last week, but the songs we talked about there probably wouldn't be called doo-wop by most listeners, though there are clear stylistic similarities. It's probably time for me to explain what doo-wop actually is, musically. It's a style you don't get now, except in conscious pastiches, but it was basically an extension of the Ink Spots' style. You have at least four singers, one of whom is a very prominent bass vocalist who sings nonsense words like "doo wop" or "bom bom ba dom", another of whom is a high tenor who takes most of the leads, and the rest sing harmonies in the middle. While the jump bands and western swing were both music that dominated on the West Coast -- the early jump bands were often based in New York, but LA was really the base of the music -- doo wop was a music of the North-East. It sometimes got as far west as Detroit, but it was mostly New York, Washington DC, and a bit later New Jersey, that produced doo-wop singers. And it was doo-wop that would really take off as a musical style. While the jump bands remained mildly successful, the early fifties saw them decline in popularity as far as the R&B charts went, because the new vocal groups were becoming the dominant form in R&B -- and this was especially true of the "bird groups". The first "bird group" was the Ravens, and they might be considered the first doo-wop group full stop. They took the Ink Spots' "top and bottom" format and extended it, so that on their ballads there'd be more interplay between the high and low vocals. Listening to "You Foolish Thing" you can clearly hear the Ink Spots influence: [excerpt "you Foolish Thing"] On their uptempo music, on the other hand, they just had the bass singer sing the lead: [excerpt: the Ravens “Rock Me All Night Long”] And the Ravens became massively influential. They'd found a way to get the catchiest parts of the Ink Spots sound, but without having to stick so closely to the formula. It could work for all kinds of songs, and soon there were a whole host of bands named after birds and singing in the Ravens' style -- the Orioles, the Flamingoes, the Penguins, the Wrens, and many more. We've already heard one of the bands they influenced when we listened to the Robins. The other major influential bird group was the Orioles, whose "It's Too Soon To Know" is another record that's often considered by some to be "the first rock and roll record" -- though to my ears it just sounds like a derivative of the Ink Spots rather than anything new: [excerpt "It's Too Soon to Know" by the Orioles] So there's a clear stylistic progression there, but we're not looking at anything radically different from what came before. The first real doo-wop record to really have a major impact was "Gee", by the Crows, another bird group, which was recorded and released in 1953, but became a hit in 1954, charting a month after "Sh-Boom" was recorded, but before Sh-Boom itself became a hit: [excerpt: "Gee", the Crows] "Gee" is doo-wop absolutely fully formed, and it's a record which had a massive influence, particularly on young California teenagers who were growing up listening to Johnny Otis' radio show -- both Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys would later record their own strange takes on the song, emphasising how odd the record actually sounded. It's also widely credited as the first R&B record to become a hit with a large part of its audience being white teenagers. More than any other form of R&B, doo-wop traded in the concerns of the adolescent, and so it was the first subgenre to become accessible to that huge demographic of white kids who wanted something new they could appropriate and call their own. "Gee" is a record that deserves an episode to itself, frankly, in terms of importance, but there's not much to say about it -- the Crows had one hit, never had another, split up soon after, and there's no real biographical information out there about them. The record just stands on its own. That's also true for "Sh-Boom", and the Chords were another one-hit wonder, but there's a difference there. While "Gee" was the first doo-wop record to make money from white people, "Sh-Boom" was the first doo-wop record to lose money to white people. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom”, the Chords] The Chords were, at least, not actually a bird group -- they were too individual for that -- but in other respects they're very much in the typical mould of the early doo-wop bands, and "Sh-Boom" is, in many ways, an absolutely typical doo-wop song. "Sh-Boom" was not meant to be a hit. It was released on Cat records, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, but apparently everyone at Atlantic hated the song -- it was only recorded at the Chords' insistence, and it was originally only a B-side until the song started to hit with the DJs. Sh-Boom was arranged by Jesse Stone, but presumably his contribution was the instrumental, rather than the vocal arrangement, as the song was written by the Chords themselves, originally while sitting together in a car. At the time, according to Buddy McCrea of the band, "When they talked to each other, they'd say 'boom.' They'd say 'Hey, man, boom, how ya doin'." Jimmy Keyes, also of the band, said "'Boom' was the slang word. If you were standing on this block for five minutes, you'd hear that slang word fifteen times or more. We would take the 'boom' and make it sound like a bomb: 'shhhhhh-BOOM'." Even the nonsense words in the background were, according to Keyes, meaningful to the band -- "'A langala langala lang.' Well, you could hear the church bells over there," while other parts were references to someone called "Bip", the uncle of band members Carl and Claude Feaster. Bip was homeless, and apparently stank, and when Bip would come to visit, according to Keyes, "We could smell Bip as soon as he opened the door." They would cover their noses and sing "here comes Bip, a flip a dooba dip." And one suspects that this played a big part in the song's success -- while the lyrics are genial gibberish, they're genial gibberish that had meaning to the singers, if not to the audience. That wasn't necessarily appreciated by older people though. The great satirist Stan Freberg recorded a rather mean-spirited parody of the song, combining it with a parody of Marlon Brando who was similarly popular at the time and who Freberg thought comparable in unintelligibility: [excerpt: Stan Freberg "Sh-Boom"] But there's an element of racism in the popular reaction to the success of "Sh-Boom". There was a belief among many people that since they couldn't understand the lyrics, they were hiding some secret code. And any secret code sung by black men must, obviously, have to do with sex. We'll see a lot of this kind of thing as the story goes on, unfortunately. But of course, meaningless lyrics have a long, long, history in popular music -- much longer than is usually appreciated. Most people, when they're talking about nonsense lyrics, trace scat singing back as far as Louis Armstrong imitating his own trumpet. But there's a good argument that they go back as far as we have records of songs existing, or almost. If you look at traditional folk music you'll often find a common pattern, of people singing "As I walked out one bright summer's day/sing too ra la loo ra la loo ra la lay" or similar. That kind of nonsense singing dates back as far as we have records, and no-one knows how it started, but one hypothesis I've seen which makes sense to me is that it comes from Gregorian chant and similar religious forms. No, seriously. It makes sense when you think about it. One of the places that people in the Middle Ages were most likely to hear music was in church, and many early motets contained Latin texts -- usually sung by the tenors -- while other people would sing commentary or explanation of the lyrics in the vernacular -- English or French or whatever language. Now, for a peasant hearing this, what do you hear? You hear some of the people singing words that make sense to you, in your own language, but it's mixed in with this other gibberish that you don't understand. If the people you're listening to are singing something that makes sense and they drop into Latin, they might as well be singing "Sh-Boom Sh-Boom sha la la la la la la la la la la la" for all the sense it'll make to you. So you come to the conclusion that that's just how songs *are*. They have bits that make sense and then bits of nonsense that sounds good. Indeed, one of the bits of lyric of “Sh-Boom” as it's commonly transcribed is "hey nonny", which if that's the lyric would tie directly back into that old folk tradition -- that is, sadly, the one bit of nonsense syllabics that the band weren't asked about, and so we can't know if they were thinking of minstrels singing "hey nonny nonny", or if it had some other inspiration as personal as Uncle Bip. But either way, after “Sh-Boom” doo-wop, and R&B in general, became obsessed with nonsense syllabics. We'll be hearing a lot of examples of this in the next few years, and it became so prevalent that by 1961 Barry Mann was asking this musical question: [excerpt: “Who Put the Bomp”, Barry Mann] Doo-wop started as a musical style among black teenagers in East Coast cities, but within a few years it became dominated by Italian-American teenagers from the same areas, and we'll see that progression happen over the next eighty or ninety episodes of this podcast. But we can also see it happening in miniature in the Chords' career. Because while they had a big hit with "Sh-Boom", they didn't have the biggest hit with it. If you vaguely know "Sh-Boom", maybe from hearing it in a film soundtrack, you might have been surprised when you heard a snatch of it earlier in this episode. It might have sounded very subtly wrong. It will have sounded *more or less* like the record you know, but... different. That's because the record you know isn't "Sh-Boom" by the Chords, but "Sh-Boom" by the Crew Cuts. To explain why, we're first going to have to talk about "A Little Bird Told Me": "A Little Bird Told Me" was a song originally recorded by Paula Watson on Supreme Records. Watson, and all the musicians on the record, and the record label's owner, were all black. Watson's record went to number two on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the bestseller charts: [excerpt "A Little Bird Told Me", Paula Watson] And then Decca put out a record -- "A Little Bird Told Me", sung by Evelyn Knight: [excerpt: "A Little Bird Told Me", Evelyn Knight] That record went to number one on the pop charts. And everyone involved in *that* record -- the singer, the backing band, the record label owners -- was white. Now, to just show you how ridiculously similar the two are, I'm going to try something -- I'm going to play both records together, simultaneously. [excerpt: both versions of "A Little Bird Told Me" played together] As you can imagine, the owners of Supreme Records were more than a little put out by this. This kind of direct copying was *not* the norm in the late 1940s -- as we've talked about before, it was perfectly normal for people to rework songs into their own style, and to do different versions for different markets, but just to make a record sounding as close as possible to someone else's hit record of the song, that was unusual. So Supreme Records took Decca to court, and said that Decca's record was copyright infringement. It was a direct copy of their record and should be treated as such. Before we go any further, you have to know that there are roughly three different concepts that many people confuse when they're talking about the music industry, all of which are important. There's the song, the recording, and the arrangement. The song is, to put it simply, just what the singer sings. It's the words and the melody line, and maybe the chord sequence if the chord sequence is sufficiently original. But basically, if you can sing it to yourself unaccompanied, that bit's the song. And the copyright in that is owned by the songwriter or her publisher. Now, once a song has been published, either as a record or as sheet music, *anyone* at all can make a recording of it or perform it live. There are certain conditions to that -- you can change the song in minor ways, to put it into your own style, or for example to give the protagonist's love interest a different gender if that's something that concerns you, but you can't make major changes to the song's melody or lyrics without the writer or publisher's permission. You also can't use the song in a film or TV show without jumping through some other hoops, just on a record or live performance. But I could, right now, make and release an album of "Andrew Hickey Sings the Lennon and McCartney Songbook in the Bath" and I wouldn't need anyone's permission to do so, so long as I paid Lennon and McCartney's publishers the legal minimum amount for every copy I sold. I need a songwriter's permission to make the *first* record of their song, but anyone can legally make the second. The next thing is the recording itself -- the specific recording of a specific performance. These days, that too is under copyright -- I can put out my *own* recording of me singing Beatles songs, but I can't just release a CD of one of the Beatles' albums, at least if I don't want to go to prison. A lot of people get confused by this because we talk, for example, about "She Loves You" being "a Beatles song" -- in fact, it's a Lennon and McCartney *song* performed on a Beatles *recording*. These days, each individual recording has its own copyright, but at the time we're talking about, in the US, there was no federal legislation giving copyright to sound recordings -- that didn't end up happening, in fact, until the 1970s. Up to that point, the copyright law around sound recordings was based on case law and odd rulings (for example it was ruled that it was illegal to play a record on the radio without permission, not because of copyright, but because of the right to privacy -- playing a record which had only been licensed for individual use to a group was considered like opening someone's mail). But still, there was usually at least state-level copyright law around recordings, and so record labels were fairly safe. But there's a third aspect, one somewhere between the song and the recording, and that's the arrangement. The arrangement is all the decisions made about how to perform a song -- things like how much of a groove you want it to have, whether you're going to back it with guitar or harpsichord or accordion, whether the backing instruments are going to play countermelodies or riffs or just strum the chords, whether you're going to play it as a slow ballad or an uptempo boogie. All that stuff. Until the "A Little Bird Told Me" case, everyone had assumed that arrangements were copyrightable. It makes sense that they would be -- you can write them down in sheet music form, they make a massive difference to how the performance sounds, they're often what we remember most, and they require a huge amount of creative effort. By every basic principle of copyright law, arrangements should be copyrightable. But the court ruled otherwise, and set a precedent that held until very recently -- until, in fact, a case that only went through its final appeal in December 2018, the "Blurred Lines" case, which ruled on whether Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" plagiarised Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up". [excerpts: “Blurred Lines” and “Got To Give It Up”] Between "A Little Bird Told Me" and "Blurred Lines", copyright law in the US held that you could copyright an actual recording, and you could copyright a song, but you couldn't copyright an arrangement or groove. And this had two major effects on the music industry, both of them hugely detrimental to black people. The first was simply that people could steal a groove -- a riff or rhythm or feel -- and make a new record with new lyrics and melody but the same groove, without giving credit. As the genres favoured by black musicians were mostly groove-based, while those favoured by white musicians were mostly melody-based, white musicians were more protected from theft than black musicians were. Bo Diddley, for example, invented the "Bo Diddley beat", but didn't receive royalties from Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, or George Michael when they used that rhythm. And secondly, it opened the floodgates to white musicians remaking black musicians' hits in the same style as the black musicians. Up to this point, if a white singer had covered a black musician, or vice versa, it would have been with a different feel and a different arrangement. But now, all of a sudden, whenever a black musician put out an interesting-sounding record, a white person would put out an identical copy, and the white version would get the radio play and record sales. As the black musicians tended to record for tiny labels while the white ones would be on major labels that wouldn't sign black musicians, the result was that a whole generation of black innovators saw their work stolen from them. And we'll be seeing the results of that play out in a lot of the records we talk about in the future. But for most of the records we're going to look at, the one that's stood the test of time will be the original -- very few people nowadays listen to, say, Pat Boone's versions of "Tutti Frutti" or "Ain't That A Shame", because no-one would do so when the Little Richard or Fats Domino versions are available. But with "Sh-Boom", the version that still has most traction is by The Crew Cuts. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom” – the Crew Cuts] The Crew Cuts were a white, Canadian, vocal group, who specialised in rerecording songs originally performed by black groups, in near-identical arrangements, and scoring bigger hits with them than the black people had. In the case of "Sh-Boom", sadly, the characterless white copy has dominated in popular culture over the version that actually has some life in it. The Chords never had another hit, although "Sh-Boom" was successful enough that at one point in 1955 there was even a Sh-Boom shampoo on the market, made by a company owned by the Chords themselves. Lawsuits over the band's name which made them have to be known for a time as the Chordcats contributed to their decline, and while there were several reunions over the years, they never replicated the magic of "Sh-Boom". The Crew Cuts, on the other hand, had many more hits, successfully leeching off sales of records of black artists like the Penguins, Gene and Eunice, Nappy Brown, and Otis Williams and the Charms, and getting more airplay and sales from identical copies. They even had the gall to say that those artists should be grateful to the Crew Cuts, for giving their songs exposure. We'll be talking about several of those songs in the next few weeks. It seems it's not as hard to follow up your first hit if you don't have to have any ideas yourself, just be white.

Intro Song, B.B. King, “B.B. Boogie”, How Blue Can You Get First Set Cash Box Kings, “Default Boogie”, I-94 Blues Frank Bang & The Cook County Kings, “The Blues Don't Care”, The Blues Don't Care Jason King Band, “I'm Your Man”, Blue Skies & Black Shoes Second  Set Elvin Bishop, “Clean Livin'”, Red Dog Speaks Koko Taylor, “Stop Watching Your Enemies”, Jump For Joy Albert King, “Crosscut Saw”, Live ‘69 Third  Set King Ernest, “Black Bag Blues”, King of Hearts , Randy's first CD as Producer! Guy King, “Cookin' With Style”,  Truth Li'l Ronnie & The Grand Dukes, “Chicken Shack Boogie”,  Young & Evil Fourth Set Sue Foley, “Fool's Gold”, The Ice Queen, Billy Gibbons, Chris Layton, and Mike Flanigan Freddie King, “Lowdown In Lodi”, Texas Cannonball The King Bees, “Natchez Burning”, w/ Nappy Brown, Carolina Bound Thanks to Michael Allen Engstrom at the Crossroads Blues Gallery!

Walkin’ Cane Mark has been an established harmonica player on the vibrant Phoenix Blues scene for over 20 years with several albums under his belt. He was discovered in part by Chico Chism (the Howlin’ Wolfs last drummer). He got his first harmonica lesson from Snooky Pryor. Willie Dixon gave him his nickname and the title track for his first effort, Gravedigger. Junior Wells taught him how to put funk in the blues and co-wrote the title track to his fourth album, Tryin’ to Make You Understand. Mark has toured heavily with Nappy Brown and Wayne Cochran.

I've got a feel for some West Coast blues. Of course, that West Coast sound is really almost a migratory blues sound - moving from Texas to the coast. So, there's some Texas in this edition, too. Kirk Fletcher, Johnny Nicholas, Floyd Dixon, Nappy Brown, and The Mannish Boys all make for an hour of uncontrollable chair-dancing and what's clearly a solid hour of the finest blues you've never heard.

Eric Bibb (Talk To Me); Lucky Peterson (Let The Chips Fall Where They May); Magic Slim and The Teardrops (Gambling Blues); The Riotous Brothers (Me And You); Homemade Jamz Blues Band (Buy One Get One Free); Nappy Brown and The Selah Jubilee Singers (Who So Ever Will); Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Leave That Liar Alone); Band Of Friends (I Don't Cry); The Proof (Same Old Blues); Lisa Mann (Kings Of Black Gold); Carolyn Wonderland (Misunderstood); Rufus Thomas (Night Workin' Blues); Sunnyland Slim (Workin' Two Jobs); Lowell Fulson (Hung Down Head); Robin Trower (Reconsider Baby); Joe Louis Walker (I’m Gonna Walk Outside).

show#44306.24.12Final "Twin Toons" show Part 3 Click here for the "Tip Jar" Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention - More Trouble Every Day (Roxy & Elsewhere [Live] 1974)The Nighthawks - Trouble Comin' Every Day (Pain & Paradise 1996)Carolyn Wonderland - I Can Tell (Peace Meal 2011)Billy Hector & The Fairlanes - I Can Tell (And the Crowd Went Wild 1993)James Brown - Cold Sweat, Pt. 1 (20 All Time Greatest Hits! 1967)The Boneshakers - Cold Sweat (Book Of Spells 1997)J.J. Cale with Eric Clapton - Call Me The Breeze (Crossroads Guitar Festival)  Lynyrd Skynyrd - Call Me The Breeze (All Time Greatest Hits 2000)Roy Buchanan - Hey Joe (That's What I Am Here For 1074)Johnny Hallyday (edited) - Hey Joe (Johnny 67 1967 (Volume 23 2011)Mose Allison - Eyesight to the Blind (Allison Wonderland: Anthology Disc 1 1994)The Who - Eyesight to the Blind (Live At Leeds - Disc 2 2001)Bobby Radcliff - Serves You Right to Suffer (There's A Cold Grave In Your Way 2006)The J. Geils Band - Serves You Right to Suffer (The J. Geils Band 1970)Lenny Welch -  Since I Fell For You (Oldies But Goodies Vol. 12 1990)Bonnie Raitt & Freebo - Since I Fell For You (Live at Sigma Sound on WMMR Philadelphia 1972)Eric Burdon & War - Paint It Black Medley (edited) - The Black-Man's Burdon 1970)Chris Farlowe - Paint It Black (The Best Of 2009)Spinner's Section:even more twin toonsSpencer Bohren: drop down mama (3:27) (Snap Your Fingers, Loft, 1989)Geoff Muldaur: drop down mama (3:35) (Password, Hightone, 2000)Nighthawks: hard living (3:37) (Hard Living, Varrick, 1986)Jerry Jeff Walker: hard livin' (3:22) (Gipsy Songman, Sawdust, 1987)Phil Berkowitz: three-handed woman (3:46) (Louis' Blues, Dirty Cat, 2005)Paul deLay Band: three-handed woman (3:15) (Burnin', Criminal, 1988)Nappy Brown: hidden charms (2:23) (Tore Up, Nightflite, 1986)Elvis Costello: hidden charms (3:33) (Kojak Variety, Warner Bros, 1995)Koko Taylor: violent love (2:46) (Basic Soul, Chess, 1972)Dr. Feelgood: violent love (2:18) (A Case Of The Shakes, United Artists, 1980)Robert Johnson: from four until late [1937] (2:25) (The Complete Recordings, Columbia, 1996)Cream: from four until late (2:07) (Fresh Cream, Polydor, 1966)Spencer Bohren: shoppin' for clothes (4:11) (Snap Your Fingers, Loft, 1989)Little Charlie & the Nightcats: clothes line (4:07) (All The Way Crazy, Alligator, 1987)

This week's playlist: • Stay Here In Your Arms (3:17) by Cedric Burnside & Lightnin' Malcolm, from 2 Man Wrecking Crew (2008); available from Delta Groove Productions and the iTunes Music Store. Visit LightninMalcolm.com and their MySpace page for more information. • I Shall Not Be Moved (4:48) by Mississippi John Hurt, from a July 1st, 1964, live performance at the Ash Grove, the legendary Hollywood coffeehouse; by special arrangement with (and endless thanks to) Andrew Goodrich of Wolfgang's Vault, which will soon have available many, many live performances that were recorded at the Ash Grove during its heyday, 1958-1973. • Gin House Blues (3:16) by Nicole Hart, from Treasure (2009). Treasure will be released April 14th, and orders can be placed at Blues Leaf Records' page at CD Universe. Visit Nicole's MySpace page for more information. • Baby's Like A Train (4:53) by Robert Stanley, from Roadman's Hammer (2008); available from DigStation.com, CDConnection.com and the iTunes Music Store. Visit RoadmansHammer.com and Robert's MySpace page for more information. • That Boy (3:40) and Dirtfloorcracker (3:37), both by JJ Grey & Mofro, and both from Lochloosa (2004); available from the band's online store and the iTMS. Visit Mofro.net and this page at the Alligator Records site for more information. • War (3:28) by JJ Grey & Mofro, from Country Ghetto (2007); available from the band's online store and the iTMS. Visit Mofro.net and this page at the Alligator Records site for more information. • The Philly Shimmy (3:06) by Steve Guyger, from Last Train To Dover (1997); available from the iTMS. Visit SteveGuyger.com for more information. • Who (4:36) by Nappy Brown, from Long Time Coming (2007); available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit this page at the Blind Pig Records site, and the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • Chocolate Jesus (5:05) by Martin Harley, from Martin Harley (2003); available from Martin's online shop and the iTMS. Visit MartinHarleyBand.com for more information. Mentioned during this show: The Ash Grove; Music of the Ash Grove; Mississippi John Hurt; Wolfgang's Vault; The Great Northern Blues Society's Blues Cafe 2009. To contact me: in addition to email - murphyssaloon(at)gmail(dot)com - you can contact me through the following social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. You are also welcome to write reviews in iTunes. Excellent sources of information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues; BluesRevue.com, the online home of Blues Revue magazine; BigCityBluesMag.com, the online home of Big City Blues magazine; BluesCritic.com. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. For up-to-the-minute news about things to do in Chicago: TheLocalTourist.com. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #154 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, IODA PROMONET, Download.com or Garageband.com)

This week's playlist: • Color-Blind Angel by Robin Rogers, from Treat Me Right (2008); available from the store at Robin's site, Blind Pig Records and the iTunes Music Store. Visit RobinRogers.com for more information. • One Rock by The Rev. Jimmie Bratcher, from The Electric Rev (2008); available from the store at Jimmie's site. Visit JimmieBratcher.com for more information. • Hard Luck Woman by Sean Costello, from We Can Get Together (2008); available from Delta Groove Music and the iTMS. Visit SeanCostello.com and this page at the Delta Groove Productions site for more information. • Can't Get No Loving On The Telephone by Lucky Peterson, from Lucky Strikes (1989); available from Alligator Records and the iTMS. Visit this page at the Alligator Records site for more information. • Spider In My Stew, Let Me Love You and Crosseyed Cat, all by Magic Slim & The Teardrops, and all from Midnight Blues (2008); available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit this page at the Blind Pig Records site for more information. • You Were A Long Time Coming and Bye Bye Baby by Nappy Brown, both from Long Time Coming (2007); available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit this page at the Blind Pig Records site, and the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • Last Night Baby And The Night Before by Papa Don McMinn, from Home Blues (2008); available from LocoBop.com. Visit DonMcMinn.com for more information. Mentioned during this show: to find me in Facebook, go here; in MySpace, go here; and to find me in Twitter, go here. Excellent resources for more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues; BluesRevue.com, the online home of Blues Revue magazine; BigCityBluesMag.com, the online home of Big City Blues magazine; BluesCritic.com. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. For up-to-the-minute news about things to do in Chicago: TheLocalTourist.com. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #141 courtesy of the artists, their labels, and one of the following: the Podsafe Music Network, IODA PROMONET, Download.com or Garageband.com)

This week's playlist: • Blues Over Baghdad by Fruteland Jackson, from Tell Me What You Say (2007), available direct from the store at his site, Electro-Fi Records and the iTMS. Visit Fruteland.com for more information. • Bad Blood by Janiva Magness from Do I Move You (2006), available from NorthernBlues.com and the iTMS. Visit JanivaMagness.com for more information. • Border Town Blues by The Mannish Boys, from Big Plans (2007), available from DeltaGrooveProductions.com and the iTunes Music Store. Visit TheMannishBoys.com for more information. • Love Don't Care by Tommy Castro, from Painkiller (2007); available from the store at Tommy's site and the iTMS. Visit TCBand.com for more information. • Wrapped Up In Love by Carey & Lurrie Bell, from Second Nature (2004), available from Alligator Records and the iTMS. Visit Carey's Alligator Records bio page for more information. • Goin' to Mississippi by Magic Slim, from The Essential Magic Slim (2007), available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit Slim's bio page at the Blind Pig site for more information. • Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleepin' by Nappy Brown, from Long Time Coming (2007), and available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • Serves Me Right by The Insomniacs, from Left Coast Blues (2007), available from Delta Groove Productions and the iTMS. Visit The Insomniacs' page at the Delta Groove Productions site and The Insomniacs' MySpace page for more information. • Tired Of Crying by Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials, from their brand new album Rattleshake (2006), available from Alligator Records and the iTunes Music Store. • The Wheel Man by Watermelon Slim and the Workers, from The Wheel Man (2007), available from Slim's site, NorthernBlues.com and the iTunes Music Store. Visit WatermelonSlim.com for more information. Mentioned during this show: the 2008 Blues Music Awards nominees and the Murphy's Saloon Listener Survey. Excellent online resources for more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; and be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #123 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, the PROMONET program of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Download.com or Garageband.com)

This week's playlist: • To the River by Michael Holt and the Trophy 500's, from Boogalu (2007); now available from the shop at Michael's site, and available soon at CD Baby and Amazon.com. Visit MichaelHolt.info and the band's MySpace page for more information. • Give Me Your Love by Nappy Brown, all from Long Time Coming (2007), and available from Blind Pig Records and the iTunes Music Store. Visit the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • I'm Here to Stay by Sharrie Williams, from I'm Here to Stay (2007), available from Electro-Fi Records and the iTMS. Visit SharrieWilliams.com for more information. • Drive To Laredo, These Thing I Do and She Don't Have To Be Sad, all by MJ O'Sullivan, from All I Need Is This Guitar (that's all I need) (2008); available from CD Baby. Visit MJOsullivan.com for more information. • Ghost In My House by Mean Gene Kelton, from Mean Guitar (2004), available from Mean Gene's online store and the iTMS. Visit GeneKelton.com for more information. • Goodbye Daughters of The Revolution by The Black Crowes, from Warpaint, set for release on 3/4/08; the single was made available to podcasters through the Podsafe Music Network. Visit BlackCrowes.com for more information. • Meet Me In The City by Richard Johnston, from Official Bootleg #1 (2003), available from the store at Richard's Web site. Visit RichardJohnston.com and Richard's MySpace page for more information. • Talkin' To My Baby by Mississippi Shakedown, included on the compilation BAR, Vol, 4 (2007), available from BluesandRootsPromotions.com. The band's CD, Mississippi Shakedown (2006), is available from MississippiShakedown.com.au and the iTMS. Visit MississippiShakedown.com.au for more information. Excellent online resources for more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; and be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #110 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, the PROMONET program of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Download.com or Garageband.com)

This week's playlist: • How Many Times by Eric Coslop, from a single first released in 2001. Eric has a page at Garageband.com, as does his current band The Curbfinders. In the early '90s, Eric also contributed to a series of CDs by the Home At Last Band. • She What? by Bad Influence, from Tastes Like Chicken (2001), available from CD Baby and the iTMS. For more information, visit BadInfluenceBand.com or their MySpace page. • Dust Me Off by Billy Marquis, from the Blues and Beyond, available for sale through Garageband.com. Visit Billy's Garageband page for more information. • Goodbye Daughters of The Revolution by The Black Crowes, from Warpaint, set for release on 3/4/08; the single was made available to podcasters through the Podsafe Music Network. Visit BlackCrowes.com for more information. • Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleepin', Give Me Your Love and Keep On Pleasin' You by Nappy Brown, all from Long Time Coming (2007), and available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • Get With You by The Ken DeRouchie Band, from Live At Jimmy Mak's (2007); available from CD Baby and the iTMS. For free downloads of other KDB tracks, go to this page. And visit KDBand.net and their MySpace page for more information. • Trouble by Robb Alan McMahan, from the album Mojo Man (2006); available on CD from BuyDirect.com. There are more tracks on Robb's page at the Podsafe Music Network. Visit Robb's MySpace page for more information. • Everybody Loves Me by Alejandro Escovedo, a previously unreleased live recording from 2005. The original version is available on the album Bourbonitis Blues (1999), while an acoustic version (with strings) is on Room of Songs (2005). A version by legendary harpist Charlie Musselwhite is included on Por Vida - A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo (2004). Visit AlejandroEscovedo.com and his MySpace page for more information. Mentioned during this episode: Blues Music Awards; Roots Music Association; SXSW; New Media Expo. Excellent online resources for more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; and be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #109 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, the PROMONET program of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Download.com or Garageband.com)

This week's playlist: • Barnyard Blues by the Phantom Blues Band, from Footprints (2007); available from PhantomBluesBand.com and the iTunes Music Store. Visit PhantomBluesBand.com for more information. • It Ain't Christmas Without You by Tequila Mockingbirds, from Christmas Time of Year (2007); available from GeorgeFletcher.com. Visit GeorgeFletcher.com and the Tequila Mockingbird's MySpace page for more information. • Keep On Pleasin' You by Nappy Brown, from Long Time Coming (2007); available from Blind Pig Records and the iTMS. Visit the Nappy Brown article at Wikipedia for more information. • We're Gonna Have A Party Tonight by The Hollywood Combo, from The Hollywood Combo (2005); available from Swingin Records and CD Baby. Visit the Hollywood Combo page at Swingin' Records and their MySpace page for more information. • If Every Day Was Christmas by Podsafe for Peace, the collaborative effort of 32 singers from nine countries. All proceeds from sales of this single are donated to UNICEF. Visit PodsafeForPeace.org for more information, and to buy the single. Mentioned during this episode: Nate and The Blues Room, his weekly blues show on Community Radio Hamilton (N.Z.) at 9 p.m. (local time) on Wednesdays. Last week's hidden track was: • Podsafe Christmas by Jonathan Coulton, from Thing-a-Week One (2006); available from CD Baby and the iTMS. Visit JonathanCoulton.com for more information. For more information about the blues: The Blues Foundation and the Delta Blues Museum; and be sure to download and listen to the DBM's top-notch (and free) podcast, the Uncensored History of the Blues. Be sure to read Today's Chicago Blues by Karen Hanson, an excellent guide to all things blues in present-day Chicago. (Music on Murphy's Saloon #106 courtesy of the artists and the Podsafe Music Network, the PROMONET program of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Download.com or Garageband.com)

Blues doesn't have to be about an old guy on his front porch. Just to prove the point, this edition of The Roadhouse is chock full of upbeat jump and boogie blues. Lil' Cliff and the Cliffhangers, T-Bone Walker, Mighty Lester, Nappy Brown, and Peppermint Harris provide some of the best upbeat blues from yesterday and today. It's an uptempo hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 143rd Roadhouse Podcast.

Blues doesn't have to be about an old guy on his front porch. Just to prove the point, this edition of The Roadhouse is chock full of upbeat jump and boogie blues. Lil' Cliff and the Cliffhangers, T-Bone Walker, Mighty Lester, Nappy Brown, and Peppermint Harris provide some of the best upbeat blues from yesterday and today. It's an uptempo hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 143rd Roadhouse Podcast.

whole show all eighties, all vinyl, all Spinner Mark Hummel & the Blues Survivors: seven nites to rock (Playing In Your Town, Rockinitus, 1985) Howlin' Wilf & the Vee-Jays: same old nothing (Cry Wilf, Big Beat, 1986) Shout Sister Shout!: same day blues (45 rpm extended play, Love Bandit Records, 1989) The Frog: we got love (Be Kind To Animals Kiss A Frog, Polydor, 1982) Metropolitan Blues Allstars: don't dog my cat (Trying Times, June Appal, 1988) Paul deLay Band: I'm gonna stop (Burnin', Criminal Records, 1988) The Mighty Flyers: somebody (From The Start To The Finnish, BRB Records, 1985) Dr. Feelgood: no mo do yakamo (A Case Of The Shakes, United Artists, 1980) Ivy & the Terrace Tones: big city blues (Live, Blue Shadow, 1985) James Harman Band: rambler's blues (Extra Napkins, Rivera, 1988) Nappy Brown: life's ups and downs (Something Gonna Jump Out The Bushes, Black Top, 1987) Barrelhouse: blue ain't blue (Blue Ain't Blue, Ariola, 1983) Long John Baldry: 25 year of pain (Rock With The Best, Capitol, 1982) Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets: change neighborhoods (Sins, Black Top-Demon, 1987)