Podcasts about pee wee king

32.028 For the finest vintage and the greatest modern roots rockin'-billy music, you've just gotta listen to DJ Del Villarreal's "Go Kat, GO!" We've got incredibly fresh and exclusive cuts to hear from the likes of Marcel Riesco, Angela Hoodoo, Joe Bombast, The Messer Chups, The Hot Rod Gang, The Hyperjax, The Chop Tops, The Pepperpot Bats, The Casinos, Mama's Hot Sauce, Willie Barry, Jane Rose & The Deadends, The Untamed Youth and Union Avenue to name a few! WOW! Plenty of reliably rocking's old school tunes included as well. You can hear selections from such classic rockin' artists as Pee Wee King, Gene Vincent, Lefty Frizzell, Sleepy LaBeef, Ben Hewitt, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Larry Collins & Joe Maphis, Johnny Burnette, Wanda Jackson, Charlie Feathers and even Nervous Norvus (oh my!). It's a midweek rockabilly smorgasbord at a Southern-Fried all-you-can-eat musical diner! The Aztec Werewolf™ is picking up the tab, so grab a bib, dig in and fill your ears -it's good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!

Bruce maintains a peculiar kind of calendar, perhaps unique in the world, featuring the birthdays of many of the most renowned accordionists of all time. That way, when it’s time for us to put together an episode of our weekly radio program, there’s always somebody worthwhile we can celebrate on that occasion! This time around, […]

Instrumental "Tennessee Waltz" SING ALONG !Time to Sing and Dance !Melody Written by : Pee Wee KingLyrics Written by : Redd Stewart 1946Producer Renee plays her version on Piano + Guitar Here are the lyrics: I was dancing with my darling to The Tennessee WaltzWhen an old friend I happened to seeI introduced her to my fella and while they were dancingMy friend stole my fella from meI remember the night and The Tennessee WaltzNow I know just how much I have lostYes, I lo...st my fella on the night they were dancingTo The  Beautiful Tennessee WaltzNow I wonder how a dance like The Tennessee WaltzCould have broken my heart so completeWell I could blame my fellaBut who could help but a fallingIn love with my fellow so sweetWell it must be the fault of The Tennessee WaltzWish I'd known just how much it would costBut I didn't see it comingIt's all over but the cryingI blame it all on The Tennessee WaltzIt must have been The Tennessee Waltzhttp://PinkieThePigPodcast.com

PINKIE SINGS "Tennessee Waltz"Melody Written by : Pee Wee KingLyrics Written by : Redd Stewart 1946Producer Renee: Vocals/ Piano/ Guitar http://PinkieThePigPodcast.com

Bo Diddley "Pretty Thing"Patti Smith "Peaceable Kingdom"Drive-By Truckers "Dragon Pants"R.L. Burnside "Goin' Down South"Shannon Shaw "Freddies 'n' Teddies"ZZ Top "Master of Sparks"Nina Nastasia "Just Stay in Bed"Willie Nelson "Always On My Mind"Dolly Parton "Down from Dover"Patsy Cline "Crazy"Robbie Fulks "Every Kind of Music But Country"Sally Timms & John Langford "Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain"Jeff Tweedy "Opaline"Palace Songs "Christmastime in the Mountains"Elizabeth Cotten "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"Irma Thomas "Don't Mess with My Man"M. Ward "Never Had Nobody Like You"Craig Finn "God in Chicago"Counting Crows "A Long December"Slobberbone "Pinball Song"Superchunk "Kicked In"Jake Xerxes Fussell "The River St. Johns"Sweet Emma Barrett "The Bell Gal" And Her Dixieland Boys "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None Of This Jelly Roll"James McMurtry "Copper Canteen"Hank Williams "Window Shopping"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Louise"Billy Bragg & Wilco "Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key"Reverend Gary Davis "Samson and Delilah"John Prine "Pretty Good"Kim Deal "Wish I Was"Magnolia Electric Co. "Lonesome Valley"Leon Redbone "Winin' Boy Blues"John Mellencamp "No Better Than This"Blue Lu Barker "Trombone Man Blues"Loretta Lynn "Gonna Pack My Troubles"Guy Clark "Rain In Durango"Skip James "Crow Jane"Pee Wee King "Oh Monah"Dr. John "Gimme That Old Time Religion (feat. Willie Nelson)"Shannon Wright "Defy This Love"Nina Nastasia "You Can Take Your Time"

This week's show, after a new Beths warble: brand new Primitives, Bird Streets, Dazy, Alvvays, Beths, Laughing Chimes, and The Damned; plus Marvin Gaye, Poppy Family, Kiki Dee, Melodians, Pee Wee King, Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald, and Shirley Col...

Today's episode of Cowboy Tracks is called "Ten Gallon Boogie" and is named after the opening song by Pee Wee King. (Rebroadcast) Song Title  Artist  Album Ten Gallon Boogie Pee Wee King & His Golden Cowboys/Various Artists The Definitive Blues Collection, Vol. 5 Night Rider Hot Texas Swing Band single Desert Skies The Marshall Tucker Band Carolina Dreams Blue Bonnet Breeze LeeLee Robert Swing Set Louis L'Amour Corb Lund Agricultural Tragic Exactly Like You Hot Club of Cowtown Continental Stomp The Code The Wardens Sold Out at Ironwood Old Fashioned Love Rusted Spurs West Ridin' Ropin'&  Rounders Shasta Song Rita Hosking Are You Ready Ornery Old Woman Dave Stamey Good Dog Crazy 'Cause I Love You Ginny Mac Sweet Sentimental Dream A Little Farther West Walt Wilkins A Good Ramble Cowgirl Lullaby Andy Wilkinson, Andy Hedges, Feat. Allissa Hedges The Outlands Sunset Gallop (instr) The Thick Crust Doughboys Home on the Range

155. Make it cooler with the best rockin' sounds around! Summer nites are always hopping with the Aztec Werewolf, DJ Del's "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Another amazing week of incredible rockin' records here as we unwrap & sample some sizzlin' songs from The Spikes ("It's Only Rock 'n' Roll!"), Lobo Jones and his Rhythm Hounds ("Howlin'"), Seatbelt ("Gasoline & Tacos"), Justin Pickard and the Thunderbird Winos ("The Memphis Recordings"), Darrel Higham ("Made In England"), Whiskey Jean and The Chasers ("My Little Miss"), Tami Neilson ("Kingmaker"), The Satellites ("28 Years), The Ichi-Bons ("Show Me The Ropes"), The Jerrells ("Wanted Man") and even Hal Peters and His Trio ("Takes On Carl Perkins")! Whew! As if that wasn't enough to make your ears cry with greasy joy, we've also got vintage tracks sure to flip your wig hat including Bo Diddley, Dick Dale, Marvin Rainwater, Simon Crum, Carl Smith, Pee Wee King, Patsy Cline, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson and even Charlie Feathers makes an appearance in tonight's playlist! Spook out to a Haunted Hearse set (in honor of the 7th Annual HEARSE CRUISE-IN & HAUNTED GARAGE SALE (Sat. July 30th, Avon Lake, OH) and spin out with some hot rod rockers for the 12th Annual Piston Jammer's PANTY RAID CAR SHOW (Sat. July 30th, Lambertville, MI)! Too much fun packed into 3.5 hours of DJ Del's "Go Kat, GO!" -good to the last BOP!™

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 522, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Hi Ya, Maya! 1: Maya Angelou's "The Heart of a Woman" was the first nonfiction work selected for this woman's book club. Oprah. 2: For this president's inauguration, Maya wrote and recited the poem "On the Pulse of Morning". Bill Clinton. 3: In 1977 Maya played Nyo Boto on this acclaimed miniseries. Roots. 4: It's the avian title of the first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiographical works. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 5: Maya wrote all the original poems performed by this actress in the 1993 film "Poetic Justice". Janet Jackson. Round 2. Category: Faulkner Titles 1: "Go Down...". Moses. 2: "Intruder in the...". Dust. 3: "Absalom...". Absalom. 4: "As I Lay...". Dying. 5: "Light in...". August. Round 3. Category: A "D" In History 1: To keep Delaware's capital away from the invading British, it was moved to this city in 1777. Dover. 2: James Oglethorpe founded Georgia in 1733 as a haven for people in trouble for this back in Britain. debt. 3: In 1868 and again in 1880, he was succeeded as British Prime Minister by William Gladstone. Disraeli. 4: In 1952 the U.N. started a commission on this to make the world a less lethal place. disarmament. 5: In the 16th century these assemblies of German potentates took place at Speyer, Augsburg and (yummy!) Worms. a diet. Round 4. Category: The Waltz 1: Waltzes are characterized by swift, gliding turns and music that has this many quarter notes to a measure. 3. 2: A dance in the 1786 opera "Una Cosa Rara" popularized this waltz style named for a city. Viennese. 3: Act III of this 1893 Engelbert Humerpdinck opera features the "Gingerbread Waltz". Hansel and Gretel. 4: Although known as the "Waltz King", he also composed many marches and well-known polkas. (Johann) Strauss. 5: Pee Wee King co-wrote this waltz and had a country hit with it in 1948; later it became a state song. "The Tennessee Waltz". Round 5. Category: English Lit 1: The "Book of the Duchesse" is an elegy for the Duchess of Lancaster by this author of "The Canterbury Tales". Geoffrey Chaucer. 2: Chapters in this novel include "Wickfield and Heep" and "Mr. Micawber's Gauntlet". David Copperfield. 3: Published in 1590, "The Legend of the Red Cross Knight" is the first of 6 books in this poetic epic. The Faerie Queene. 4: Her title "Sonnets from the Portuguese" referred to her husband's nickname for her. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 5: She's the heroine of the long-banned 18th century novel "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure". Fanny Hill. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!

Muy buenas amigos, el noveno episodio de OLD COUNTRY MUSIC, en esta ocasión con PEE WEE KING. Una pequeña sección dedicada a los sonidos pioneros de la música country dentro del espacio "Blowin' In The Ameripolitan Winds" de mi compañera en La Aventura Americana Radio, Mariví Yubero. Un entrega semanal que oscila entre los 10 y 12 minutos de duración, aquí tenéis el capítulo en Ivoox, un saludo a todos y muchas gracias por seguir estos epidosios.

Albert King "I Almost Lost My Mind"Bonnie Raitt "Livin' for the Ones"Old & In the Way "Midnight Moonlight"Doc & Merle Watson "Tennessee Stud (Live)"Doc & Merle Watson "Black Mountain Rag (Live)"Brown Bird "Danger and Dread"Eilen Jewell "Shakin' All Over"Taj Mahal "Slave Driver"Adia Victoria "Stuck in the South"Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit "Sometimes Salvation"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Shout, Sister, Shout!"Wilson Pickett "I Found the One"Blind Willie McTell "Motherless Children Have a Hard Time"Little Richard "Rip It Up"Pee Wee King "Oh Monah"Loretta Lynn "This Old House"Waxahatchee "Under a Rock"Shovels & Rope "Hail Hail"Allen Toussaint "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"Willie Nelson "Stardust"Ruth Brown "Love Me Baby"Charles Mingus "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"Marvin Gaye "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"The Black Keys "Ten Cent Pistol"Bobby "Blue" Bland "Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City"Sly Stone "Who Do You Love?"Charles Mingus "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting"Craig Finn "Birthdays"Bob Dylan "The Wicked Messenger"LaVern Baker "See See Rider"Ella Fitzgerald "'Tain't What You Do"B. B. King "It's My Own Fault Darling"Albert King "She Caught The Katy And Left Me A Mule To Ride"Buddy Emmons "Four, Five Times"Carl Perkins "Honey Don't"Ted Hawkins "California Song"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"The Everly Brothers "Cathy's Clown"Lil Green "Why Don't You Do Right"Otis Blackwell "Daddy Rolling Stone"Bonnie Raitt "Everybody's Cryin' Mercy (Remastered Version)"Mississippi Fred McDowell "I Ain't Gonna Be Bad No Mo'"Ike & Tina Turner "Funkier Than a Mosquita's Tweeter"Otis Redding "A Fool for You"John Brim "Ice Cream Man"Johnny Cash "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle"Georgia White "Tain't Nobody's Fault But Yours"

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

Para todos hay en esta nueva edición casera de Melodías Pizarras. Country boogie, blues, western swing, mambo, novelty, guajira, calypso, hillbilly blues, rhythm and blues, de la mano de titanes como John Lee Hooker, Tito Rodríguez, Sir Lancelot, Pee Wee King, Hartman's Heartbreakers, Juanito Sanabria, Joe Turner, Allen Brothers... A partir de las 23 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

So many years have gone bye. So many people have left us. But, there are so many memories available to us. On this Jailhouse Radio program we will visit two musical giants; one in the Big Band era and the other in Country Music. You'll hear Pee Wee King and his Orchestra, and then the sound of a legend, Mr. Hank Williams Sr. Grady will be along with his craziness. And, we will end the program with two surprise musical guests. Enjoy!  

26. C'mon, everybody! Get onboard the real rockin' roll train with your engineer, DJ Del Villarreal and "Go Kat, GO!" -roaring over the airwaves of WCBN FM on a Tuesday nite. Fresh music to dig from CA honky tonk kings West Of Texas, boppin' billy from Betty Sue & The Hot Dots, Lone Star rockers from Charles Christy and some tasty twang from Mexico's Secret Agent! Say "Happy Birthday" to Merle Haggard, head for the hills with Tennessee Ernie Ford, get crazy with the Carlisles, go boppin' with Alvis Wayne , bust some strings with Ray Melton and take a trip with Pee-Wee King on this week's show! Hear the finest vintage rockabilly & 50's styled rock n' roll every week on "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" -seriously rockin'!™#gokatgo #rockabilly #rock-a-billy #rocknroll #50s #fifties #djdel #aztecwerewolf #garage #country #hillbilly

Con Roscoe Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Fats Domino, SuperCat, Otis Redding, Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, Los Panchos con los Jordanaires, Joan Webber, Fairport Convention, Tom Waits y Crystal Gayle, Carlsberg, Glen Cambell, Ashley Cambell, Quique González y Roxy Music.#cronicasapasionadas #joaquinzamora #oldies #50´s #60´s #70´s #80´s #covers

Jim's talent on the steel guitar has made him one of the top "A" team recording musicians in the world. He is the recipient of the "Super Picker Award" (for musicians who have played on million-selling records). Some of the artists Jim has recorded with include: Waylon Jennings, Ronnie McDowell, David Allan Coe, T. G. Sheppard, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Duncan, Charlie Louvin, Pee Wee King, Bobby Vinton, John Anderson, Janie Frickie, Shelby Lynne, Grandpa Jones, Joe Stampley, Vern Gosdin, Freddy Weller, Linda Davis, Tim Mensey, George Jones, Roy Acuff, Less Taylor, Charlie Rich, Kansas, Moe Bandy, Willie Nelson, Hank Cockran, Boxcar Willie, Ray Price, Statler Brothers, Ivory Joe Hunter, Lorrie Morgan, and many more.

Playlist: Pee Wee King & His Golden West Cowboys - Brother Drop Dead BoogieThe Louvin Brothers - KentuckyThe Louvin Brothers - The Kneeling Drunkard's PleaThe Louvin Brothers - When I Stop DreamingBuck Owens - Root BeerJesse Daniel, featuring Jodi Lyford - Only Money, HoneyPorter Wagoner & Dolly Parton - Fight & ScratchLogan Ledger - (I'm Gonna Get Over This) SomedayNorma MacDonald - Wonder In the SummerLindi Ortega - All These CatsKayla Luky - Bottom of a BottlePokey LaFarge - End of My RopeKatie Pruitt - Searching For the TruthJunior Brown, featuring Tanya Rae Brown - So Close, Yet So Far AwayTim Myers - The Passenger

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble” by Elvis Presley, his induction into the army, and his mother’s death. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “When” by the Kalin Twins. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis’ 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And King Creole itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   As 1957 turned into 1958, Elvis’ personal life was going badly wrong, even as he was still the biggest star in the world. In particular, his relationships with everyone involved in his career — everyone except the Colonel, of course — were getting weakened. In September, Scotty Moore and Bill Black had written to Elvis, resigning from his band — they’d been put on a salary, rather than a split of the money, and then Elvis’ concert schedule had been cut back so much that they’d only played fourteen shows so far all year. They were getting into debt while Elvis was earning millions, but worse than that, they felt that the Colonel was controlling access to Elvis so much that they couldn’t even talk to him. DJ Fontana wouldn’t sign the letter — he’d joined the group later than the others, and so he’d not lost his position in the way that the others had. But the other two were gone. Elvis offered them a fifty dollar raise, but Scotty said that on top of that he would need a ten thousand dollar bonus just to clear his debts — and while Elvis was considering that, a newspaper interview with Moore and Black appeared, in which they talked about Elvis having broken his promise to them that when he earned more, they would earn more. Elvis was incensed, and decided that he didn’t need them anyway. He could replace them easily. And for one show, he did just that. He played the fair at his old home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, with DJ and the Jordanaires, and with two new musicians. On guitar was Hank Garland, a great country session musician who was best known for his hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Hank Garland, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Garland would continue to play with Elvis on recordings and occasional stage performances until 1961, when he was injured in an accident and became unable to perform. On bass, meanwhile, was Chuck Wigington, a friend of DJ’s who, like DJ, had been a regular performer in the Louisiana Hayride band, and who had also played for many years with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys: [Excerpt: Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, “Screwball”] Wigington actually didn’t have a contract for the show, and he wasn’t even a full-time musician at the time — he had to take a leave of absence from his job working in a bank in order to play the gig. Meanwhile, Scotty and Bill were off on their own playing the Dallas State Fair. But Elvis found that performing live without Scotty and Bill was just not the same, even though Garland and Wigington were perfectly fine musicians, and he decided to offer Scotty and Bill their old jobs back — sort of. They’d be getting paid a per diem whether or not they were performing, which was something, but after the next recording sessions Bill never again recorded with Elvis — he was replaced in the studio by Bob Moore. Scotty remained a regular in Elvis’ studio band too, but only on rhythm guitar — Hank Garland was going to be the lead player on Elvis’ records from now on. The new arrangement required a lot of compromise on both sides, but it meant that Moore and Black were on a better financial footing, and Elvis could remain comfortable on stage, but it was now very clear that the Colonel, at least, saw Black and Moore as replaceable, and neither of them were necessary for Elvis to continue making hit records. His relationship with the two men who had come up with him had now permanently changed — and that was going to be the case with a lot of other relationships as well. In particular, the Colonel was starting to think that Leiber and Stoller should be got rid of. The two of them were dangerous as far as the Colonel was concerned. Elvis respected them, they weren’t under the Colonel’s control, they didn’t even *like* the Colonel, and they had careers that didn’t rely on their association with Elvis. But they were also people who were able to generate hits for Elvis, and they were currently working for RCA, so while that was the case he would put them to use. But they were loose cannons. Now, before we go further, I should point out that what I’m about to describe is *one* way that Leiber and Stoller have explained what happened. In various different tellings, they’ve told events in different orders, and described things slightly differently. This is, to the best of my understanding, the most likely series of events, but I could be wrong. Leiber and Stoller had a complex attitude towards their work with Elvis. They liked Elvis himself, a lot, and they admired and respected his work ethic in the studio, and shared his taste in blues music. But at the same time, they didn’t consider the work they were doing with Elvis to be real art, in the way that they considered their R&B records to be. It was easy money — anything Elvis recorded was guaranteed to sell in massive amounts, so they didn’t have to try too hard to write anything particularly good for him, but they didn’t like the Colonel, and they were already, after a couple of films, getting bored with the routine nature of writing for Elvis’ films. I’m going to paraphrase a quote from Jerry Leiber here, because I don’t want to get this podcast moved into the adults-only section on Apple Podcasts, and the Leiber quote is quite full of expletives, but the gist of it is that they believed that if they were given proper artistic freedom with Elvis they could have made history, but that the people in his management team only wanted money. Every film needed just a few songs to plug into gaps, and they were usually the same type of songs to go in the same type of gaps. They were bored. And they actually had a plan for a project that would stretch them all creatively. Leiber vaguely knew the film producer Charles Feldman, who had produced On The Waterfront and The Seven-Year Itch, and Feldman had come to Leiber with a proposition. He’d recently acquired the rights to the novel A Walk on the Wild Side, set in New Orleans, and he thought that it would be perfect for Elvis. He’d have the script written by Budd Schulberg, and have Elia Kazan direct — the same team that had made On The Waterfront. Elvis would be working with people who had made Marlon Brando, one of his idols, a star. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs, and given that Kazan was known as an actors’ director, the chances were that the film could take Elvis to the next level in film stardom — he could become another Sinatra, someone who was equally respected as an actor and as a singer. Leiber took the proposal to Jean Aberbach, who was one of the heads of Hill and Range, the music publishing company that handled all the songs that Elvis performed. Aberbach listened to the proposal, called the Colonel to relay the idea, and then said “If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking in this direction again, you will never work for us again.” So they resigned themselves to just churning out the same stuff for Elvis’ films. Although, while they were soured on the process, the next film would be more interesting: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “King Creole”] “King Creole” was the first of Elvis’ films to be based on a book — though “Loving You” had been based on a short story that had appeared in a magazine. “A Stone For Danny Fisher” was one of Harold Robbins’ early novels, and was about a boxer in New York who accepts a bribe from criminals to lose a fight, but then wins the fight anyway, goes on the run, but encounters the criminals who bribed him two years later. It’s the kind of basic plot that has made perfectly good films in the past — like the Bruce Willis sequence in Pulp Fiction, for example. But while it’s a fairly decent plot, it is… not the plot of “King Creole”. Hal Wallis had bought the rights to the book in the hope of making it a vehicle for James Dean, before Dean’s death. When it was reworked as a Presley vehicle, obviously it was changed to be about a singer rather than a boxer, and so the whole main plotline about throwing a fight was dropped, and then the setting was changed to New Orleans… and truth be told, the resulting film seems to have more than a hint of “Walk on the Wild Side” about it, with both being set in New Orleans’ underworld, and both having a strained relationship between a father and a son as a main theme. Oddly, Leiber and Stoller have never mentioned these similarities, even though it seems very likely to me that someone involved in the Elvis organisation took their idea and used it without credit. They’ve both, though, talked about how dull they found working on the film’s soundtrack — and even though they were currently Elvis’ favourite writers, and producing his sessions, they ended up writing only three of the eleven songs for the film. “King Creole” is, in fact, a rather good film. It has a good cast, including Walter Matthau, and it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was one of those directors of the time who could turn his hand to anything and make good films in a huge variety of genres. He’d directed, among many, many, many other films, “White Christmas”, the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and “Casablanca”. However, Leiber and Stoller’s writing for the film was more or less on autopilot, and they produced songs like “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, which is widely regarded as the very worst song they ever wrote: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”] That said, there is an important point that should be made about the songs Elvis recorded for his films generally, and which applies to that song specifically. Many of the songs Elvis would record for his films in later years are generally regarded as being terrible, terrible songs, and with good reason. Songs like “There’s No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car”, “Yoga is as Yoga Does”, “Queenie Wahini’s Papaya”, or “Ito Eats” have few if any merits. But in part that’s because they are not intended to work as songs divorced from their context in the film. They’re part of the storytelling, not songs that were ever intended to be listened to as songs on their own. But still, Leiber and Stoller could undoubtedly have come up with something better than “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, had they not been working with the attitude of “that’ll do, it’s good enough”. Indeed, the most artistically interesting song on the soundtrack is one that was not written by Leiber and Stoller at all, a jazz song sung as a duet with Kitty White, “Crawfish”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Kitty White, “Crawfish”] While other songwriters were turning out things like that, Leiber and Stoller were putting in a minimal amount of effort, despite their previous wish to try to be more artistically adventurous with their work with Elvis. They still, however, managed to write one song that would become known as a classic, even if they mostly did it as a joke: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble”] That song combines two different elements of Leiber and Stoller’s writing we’ve looked at previously. The first is their obsession with that stop-time blues riff, which had first turned up in Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” back in 1954: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Leiber and Stoller had latched on to that riff, as we saw when we talked about “Riot in Cell Block #9” back in the episode on “The Wallflower”. They would consistently use it as a signifier of the blues — they used the same riff not only in “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Trouble”, but also “I’m A Woman” for Peggy Lee and “Santa Claus is Back in Town” for Elvis, and slight variations of it in “Framed” by the Robins and “Alligator Wine” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, among many others. It’s clearly a riff that they loved — so much so that they pretty much single-handedly made it into something people will now think of as a generic indicator of the blues rather than, as it was originally, a riff that was used on one specific song — but it’s also a riff they could fall back on when they were just phoning in a song. The other aspect of their songwriting that “Trouble” shows is their habit of writing songs as jokes and then giving them to singers as serious songs. They’d done this before with Elvis, when they’d written “Love Me” as a parody of a particular kind of ballad, and he’d then sung it entirely straight. Leiber compared “Trouble” to another song they’d written as a joke, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”: [Excerpt: The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”] Leiber later said of “Trouble”, comparing it to that song, “the only people who are going to take them seriously are Hell’s Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose there was a bit of contempt on our part.” He went on to say “There’s something laughable there. I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis did not sound right to us. “ Either way, Elvis performs the song with enough ferocity that it sounded right to a lot of other people: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble” 2] He thought well enough of the song that when, a decade later, he recorded what became known as his comeback special, that was the first song in the show. And while Leiber clearly thought that Elvis didn’t really sound like he was trouble in that song, you only have to compare, for example, the French cover version of it by Johnny Hallyday — the man often referred to as the French Elvis — to see how much less intense the vocal could have been: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, “La Bagarre”] But some time after the King Creole sessions, the Colonel had the chance to separate Elvis from Leiber and Stoller for good. Elvis wanted them at all of his sessions, but Jerry Leiber got pneumonia and was unable to travel to a session. The Colonel kept insisting, and eventually Leiber asked Stoller what he should do, and Stoller said to tell him to do something to himself using words that you can’t use without being bumped into the adult section of the podcast directories. I assume from looking at the dates that this was for a session in June 1958 which Chet Atkins produced. From this point on, Leiber and Stoller would never work in the studio with Elvis again, and nor would they ever again be commissioned to write a song for him. They soon lost their jobs at RCA, which left them to concentrate on their work with R&B artists like the Clovers, the Coasters, and the Drifters. Their active collaboration with Elvis — a collaboration that would define all of them in the eyes of the public — had lasted only ten months, from April 1957 through February 1958. But Elvis kept an eye on their careers. He took note of songs they wrote for LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, “Saved”] The Clovers: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Bossa Nova Baby”] The Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] and more, and would record many more of their songs. He’d just never again have them write a song specifically for him. Not that this mattered in the short term for Leiber and Stoller, as that June 1958 session was Elvis’ last one for a couple of years. Because Colonel Parker had forced Elvis into the Army. At the time, and for many years afterwards, the US military still drafted every man in his early twenties for two years, and so of course Elvis was going to be drafted, but both the Army and Elvis assumed he’d be able to join Special Services, which would mean he’d be able to continue his career, so long as he performed a few free concerts for the military. But Colonel Parker had other ideas. He didn’t want his boy going around doing free shows all over the place and devaluing his product, and he also thought that Elvis was getting too big for his boots. Getting him sent away to Germany to spend two years scrubbing latrines and driving tanks, and away from all the industry people who might fill his head with ideas, sounded like an excellent plan. And not only that, but if he didn’t give RCA much of a backlog to release while he was away, RCA would realise how much they needed the Colonel. So the Colonel leaked to the press that Elvis was going to get special treatment, and got a series of stories planted saying how awful it was that they were going to treat Elvis with kid gloves, so that he could then indignantly deny that Elvis would do anything other than his duty. For the next two years, the only recordings Elvis would make would be private ones, of himself and his army friends playing and singing during their down time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Earth Angel”] But there was still one final person in the Colonel’s way, and fate took care of that: [Excerpt: Gladys Presley, “Home Sweet Home”] Elvis’ mother had been unwell for some time — and the descriptions of her illness sound an awful lot like the descriptions of Elvis’ own final illness a couple of decades later. Recent reports have suggested that Elvis may have had hereditary autoimmune problems — and that would seem to make a lot of sense given everything we know about him. Given that, it seems likely that his mother also had those problems. It also won’t have helped that she was on a series of fad diets, and taking diet pills, in order to lose weight, as the Colonel kept pressuring her to look thinner in photos with Elvis. Whatever the cause, she ended up hospitalised with hepatitis, which seemed to come from nowhere. Elvis was given compassionate leave to visit her in hospital, where she had the pink Cadillac that Elvis had bought her parked outside the window, so she could see it. When she died on August 14, aged forty-six, Elvis was distraught. There are descriptions in biographies of him that go into detail about his reactions. I won’t share those, because reading about them, even more than sixty years later, after everyone involved is dead, feels prurient to me, like an intrusion on something we’re not meant to see or even really to comprehend. Suffice it to say that his mother’s death was almost certainly the greatest trauma, by far, that Elvis ever experienced. At the funeral, Elvis got the Blackwood Brothers — Gladys’ favourite gospel quartet — to sing “Precious Memories”: [Excerpt: The Blackwood Brothers, “Precious Memories”] Gladys’ death, even more than his induction into the army, was the real end of the first phase of Elvis’ life and career. From that point on, while he always cared about his father, he had nobody in his life who he could trust utterly. And even more importantly, Colonel Parker now had nobody standing in his way. Gladys had never really liked or trusted Colonel Parker, but Vernon Presley saw him as somebody with whom he could do business, and as the only person around his son who really understood business. The Colonel had little but contempt for Vernon Presley, but knew how to keep him happy. While Elvis was in the Army, of course Scotty and Bill had to find other work. Scotty became a record producer, producing the record “Tragedy” for Thomas Wayne, whose full name was Thomas Wayne Perkins, and who was the brother of Johnny Cash’s guitarist Luther Perkins: [Excerpt: Thomas Wayne, “Tragedy”] That went to number five on the pop charts, and after that Scotty took a job working for Sam Phillips, and when Elvis got out of the Army and Scotty rejoined him, he continued working for Phillips for a number of years. Bill Black, meanwhile, formed Bill Black’s Combo, who had a number of instrumental hits over the next few years: [Excerpt: Bill Black’s Combo, “Hearts of Stone”] Unlike Scotty, Bill never worked with Elvis again after Elvis joined the army, and he concentrated on his own career. Bill Black’s Combo had eight top forty hits, and were popular enough that they became the opening act for the Beatles’ first US tour. Unfortunately, by that point, Black himself was too ill to tour, and he had to send the group out without him. He died in 1965, aged thirty-nine, from a brain tumour. As Elvis entered the Army, a combination of deliberate effort on the Colonel’s part and awful events had meant that every possible person who could give Elvis advice about his career, everyone who might tell him to trust his own artistic instincts, or who might push him in new directions, was either permanently removed from his life or distanced from him enough that they could have no further influence on him. From now on, the Colonel was in charge.    

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble” by Elvis Presley, his induction into the army, and his mother’s death. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “When” by the Kalin Twins. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis’ 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And King Creole itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   As 1957 turned into 1958, Elvis’ personal life was going badly wrong, even as he was still the biggest star in the world. In particular, his relationships with everyone involved in his career — everyone except the Colonel, of course — were getting weakened. In September, Scotty Moore and Bill Black had written to Elvis, resigning from his band — they’d been put on a salary, rather than a split of the money, and then Elvis’ concert schedule had been cut back so much that they’d only played fourteen shows so far all year. They were getting into debt while Elvis was earning millions, but worse than that, they felt that the Colonel was controlling access to Elvis so much that they couldn’t even talk to him. DJ Fontana wouldn’t sign the letter — he’d joined the group later than the others, and so he’d not lost his position in the way that the others had. But the other two were gone. Elvis offered them a fifty dollar raise, but Scotty said that on top of that he would need a ten thousand dollar bonus just to clear his debts — and while Elvis was considering that, a newspaper interview with Moore and Black appeared, in which they talked about Elvis having broken his promise to them that when he earned more, they would earn more. Elvis was incensed, and decided that he didn’t need them anyway. He could replace them easily. And for one show, he did just that. He played the fair at his old home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, with DJ and the Jordanaires, and with two new musicians. On guitar was Hank Garland, a great country session musician who was best known for his hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Hank Garland, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Garland would continue to play with Elvis on recordings and occasional stage performances until 1961, when he was injured in an accident and became unable to perform. On bass, meanwhile, was Chuck Wigington, a friend of DJ’s who, like DJ, had been a regular performer in the Louisiana Hayride band, and who had also played for many years with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys: [Excerpt: Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, “Screwball”] Wigington actually didn’t have a contract for the show, and he wasn’t even a full-time musician at the time — he had to take a leave of absence from his job working in a bank in order to play the gig. Meanwhile, Scotty and Bill were off on their own playing the Dallas State Fair. But Elvis found that performing live without Scotty and Bill was just not the same, even though Garland and Wigington were perfectly fine musicians, and he decided to offer Scotty and Bill their old jobs back — sort of. They’d be getting paid a per diem whether or not they were performing, which was something, but after the next recording sessions Bill never again recorded with Elvis — he was replaced in the studio by Bob Moore. Scotty remained a regular in Elvis’ studio band too, but only on rhythm guitar — Hank Garland was going to be the lead player on Elvis’ records from now on. The new arrangement required a lot of compromise on both sides, but it meant that Moore and Black were on a better financial footing, and Elvis could remain comfortable on stage, but it was now very clear that the Colonel, at least, saw Black and Moore as replaceable, and neither of them were necessary for Elvis to continue making hit records. His relationship with the two men who had come up with him had now permanently changed — and that was going to be the case with a lot of other relationships as well. In particular, the Colonel was starting to think that Leiber and Stoller should be got rid of. The two of them were dangerous as far as the Colonel was concerned. Elvis respected them, they weren’t under the Colonel’s control, they didn’t even *like* the Colonel, and they had careers that didn’t rely on their association with Elvis. But they were also people who were able to generate hits for Elvis, and they were currently working for RCA, so while that was the case he would put them to use. But they were loose cannons. Now, before we go further, I should point out that what I’m about to describe is *one* way that Leiber and Stoller have explained what happened. In various different tellings, they’ve told events in different orders, and described things slightly differently. This is, to the best of my understanding, the most likely series of events, but I could be wrong. Leiber and Stoller had a complex attitude towards their work with Elvis. They liked Elvis himself, a lot, and they admired and respected his work ethic in the studio, and shared his taste in blues music. But at the same time, they didn’t consider the work they were doing with Elvis to be real art, in the way that they considered their R&B records to be. It was easy money — anything Elvis recorded was guaranteed to sell in massive amounts, so they didn’t have to try too hard to write anything particularly good for him, but they didn’t like the Colonel, and they were already, after a couple of films, getting bored with the routine nature of writing for Elvis’ films. I’m going to paraphrase a quote from Jerry Leiber here, because I don’t want to get this podcast moved into the adults-only section on Apple Podcasts, and the Leiber quote is quite full of expletives, but the gist of it is that they believed that if they were given proper artistic freedom with Elvis they could have made history, but that the people in his management team only wanted money. Every film needed just a few songs to plug into gaps, and they were usually the same type of songs to go in the same type of gaps. They were bored. And they actually had a plan for a project that would stretch them all creatively. Leiber vaguely knew the film producer Charles Feldman, who had produced On The Waterfront and The Seven-Year Itch, and Feldman had come to Leiber with a proposition. He’d recently acquired the rights to the novel A Walk on the Wild Side, set in New Orleans, and he thought that it would be perfect for Elvis. He’d have the script written by Budd Schulberg, and have Elia Kazan direct — the same team that had made On The Waterfront. Elvis would be working with people who had made Marlon Brando, one of his idols, a star. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs, and given that Kazan was known as an actors’ director, the chances were that the film could take Elvis to the next level in film stardom — he could become another Sinatra, someone who was equally respected as an actor and as a singer. Leiber took the proposal to Jean Aberbach, who was one of the heads of Hill and Range, the music publishing company that handled all the songs that Elvis performed. Aberbach listened to the proposal, called the Colonel to relay the idea, and then said “If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking in this direction again, you will never work for us again.” So they resigned themselves to just churning out the same stuff for Elvis’ films. Although, while they were soured on the process, the next film would be more interesting: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “King Creole”] “King Creole” was the first of Elvis’ films to be based on a book — though “Loving You” had been based on a short story that had appeared in a magazine. “A Stone For Danny Fisher” was one of Harold Robbins’ early novels, and was about a boxer in New York who accepts a bribe from criminals to lose a fight, but then wins the fight anyway, goes on the run, but encounters the criminals who bribed him two years later. It’s the kind of basic plot that has made perfectly good films in the past — like the Bruce Willis sequence in Pulp Fiction, for example. But while it’s a fairly decent plot, it is… not the plot of “King Creole”. Hal Wallis had bought the rights to the book in the hope of making it a vehicle for James Dean, before Dean’s death. When it was reworked as a Presley vehicle, obviously it was changed to be about a singer rather than a boxer, and so the whole main plotline about throwing a fight was dropped, and then the setting was changed to New Orleans… and truth be told, the resulting film seems to have more than a hint of “Walk on the Wild Side” about it, with both being set in New Orleans’ underworld, and both having a strained relationship between a father and a son as a main theme. Oddly, Leiber and Stoller have never mentioned these similarities, even though it seems very likely to me that someone involved in the Elvis organisation took their idea and used it without credit. They’ve both, though, talked about how dull they found working on the film’s soundtrack — and even though they were currently Elvis’ favourite writers, and producing his sessions, they ended up writing only three of the eleven songs for the film. “King Creole” is, in fact, a rather good film. It has a good cast, including Walter Matthau, and it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was one of those directors of the time who could turn his hand to anything and make good films in a huge variety of genres. He’d directed, among many, many, many other films, “White Christmas”, the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and “Casablanca”. However, Leiber and Stoller’s writing for the film was more or less on autopilot, and they produced songs like “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, which is widely regarded as the very worst song they ever wrote: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”] That said, there is an important point that should be made about the songs Elvis recorded for his films generally, and which applies to that song specifically. Many of the songs Elvis would record for his films in later years are generally regarded as being terrible, terrible songs, and with good reason. Songs like “There’s No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car”, “Yoga is as Yoga Does”, “Queenie Wahini’s Papaya”, or “Ito Eats” have few if any merits. But in part that’s because they are not intended to work as songs divorced from their context in the film. They’re part of the storytelling, not songs that were ever intended to be listened to as songs on their own. But still, Leiber and Stoller could undoubtedly have come up with something better than “Steadfast, Loyal, and True”, had they not been working with the attitude of “that’ll do, it’s good enough”. Indeed, the most artistically interesting song on the soundtrack is one that was not written by Leiber and Stoller at all, a jazz song sung as a duet with Kitty White, “Crawfish”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Kitty White, “Crawfish”] While other songwriters were turning out things like that, Leiber and Stoller were putting in a minimal amount of effort, despite their previous wish to try to be more artistically adventurous with their work with Elvis. They still, however, managed to write one song that would become known as a classic, even if they mostly did it as a joke: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble”] That song combines two different elements of Leiber and Stoller’s writing we’ve looked at previously. The first is their obsession with that stop-time blues riff, which had first turned up in Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” back in 1954: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Leiber and Stoller had latched on to that riff, as we saw when we talked about “Riot in Cell Block #9” back in the episode on “The Wallflower”. They would consistently use it as a signifier of the blues — they used the same riff not only in “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Trouble”, but also “I’m A Woman” for Peggy Lee and “Santa Claus is Back in Town” for Elvis, and slight variations of it in “Framed” by the Robins and “Alligator Wine” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, among many others. It’s clearly a riff that they loved — so much so that they pretty much single-handedly made it into something people will now think of as a generic indicator of the blues rather than, as it was originally, a riff that was used on one specific song — but it’s also a riff they could fall back on when they were just phoning in a song. The other aspect of their songwriting that “Trouble” shows is their habit of writing songs as jokes and then giving them to singers as serious songs. They’d done this before with Elvis, when they’d written “Love Me” as a parody of a particular kind of ballad, and he’d then sung it entirely straight. Leiber compared “Trouble” to another song they’d written as a joke, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”: [Excerpt: The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”] Leiber later said of “Trouble”, comparing it to that song, “the only people who are going to take them seriously are Hell’s Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose there was a bit of contempt on our part.” He went on to say “There’s something laughable there. I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis did not sound right to us. “ Either way, Elvis performs the song with enough ferocity that it sounded right to a lot of other people: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trouble” 2] He thought well enough of the song that when, a decade later, he recorded what became known as his comeback special, that was the first song in the show. And while Leiber clearly thought that Elvis didn’t really sound like he was trouble in that song, you only have to compare, for example, the French cover version of it by Johnny Hallyday — the man often referred to as the French Elvis — to see how much less intense the vocal could have been: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, “La Bagarre”] But some time after the King Creole sessions, the Colonel had the chance to separate Elvis from Leiber and Stoller for good. Elvis wanted them at all of his sessions, but Jerry Leiber got pneumonia and was unable to travel to a session. The Colonel kept insisting, and eventually Leiber asked Stoller what he should do, and Stoller said to tell him to do something to himself using words that you can’t use without being bumped into the adult section of the podcast directories. I assume from looking at the dates that this was for a session in June 1958 which Chet Atkins produced. From this point on, Leiber and Stoller would never work in the studio with Elvis again, and nor would they ever again be commissioned to write a song for him. They soon lost their jobs at RCA, which left them to concentrate on their work with R&B artists like the Clovers, the Coasters, and the Drifters. Their active collaboration with Elvis — a collaboration that would define all of them in the eyes of the public — had lasted only ten months, from April 1957 through February 1958. But Elvis kept an eye on their careers. He took note of songs they wrote for LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, “Saved”] The Clovers: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Bossa Nova Baby”] The Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] and more, and would record many more of their songs. He’d just never again have them write a song specifically for him. Not that this mattered in the short term for Leiber and Stoller, as that June 1958 session was Elvis’ last one for a couple of years. Because Colonel Parker had forced Elvis into the Army. At the time, and for many years afterwards, the US military still drafted every man in his early twenties for two years, and so of course Elvis was going to be drafted, but both the Army and Elvis assumed he’d be able to join Special Services, which would mean he’d be able to continue his career, so long as he performed a few free concerts for the military. But Colonel Parker had other ideas. He didn’t want his boy going around doing free shows all over the place and devaluing his product, and he also thought that Elvis was getting too big for his boots. Getting him sent away to Germany to spend two years scrubbing latrines and driving tanks, and away from all the industry people who might fill his head with ideas, sounded like an excellent plan. And not only that, but if he didn’t give RCA much of a backlog to release while he was away, RCA would realise how much they needed the Colonel. So the Colonel leaked to the press that Elvis was going to get special treatment, and got a series of stories planted saying how awful it was that they were going to treat Elvis with kid gloves, so that he could then indignantly deny that Elvis would do anything other than his duty. For the next two years, the only recordings Elvis would make would be private ones, of himself and his army friends playing and singing during their down time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Earth Angel”] But there was still one final person in the Colonel’s way, and fate took care of that: [Excerpt: Gladys Presley, “Home Sweet Home”] Elvis’ mother had been unwell for some time — and the descriptions of her illness sound an awful lot like the descriptions of Elvis’ own final illness a couple of decades later. Recent reports have suggested that Elvis may have had hereditary autoimmune problems — and that would seem to make a lot of sense given everything we know about him. Given that, it seems likely that his mother also had those problems. It also won’t have helped that she was on a series of fad diets, and taking diet pills, in order to lose weight, as the Colonel kept pressuring her to look thinner in photos with Elvis. Whatever the cause, she ended up hospitalised with hepatitis, which seemed to come from nowhere. Elvis was given compassionate leave to visit her in hospital, where she had the pink Cadillac that Elvis had bought her parked outside the window, so she could see it. When she died on August 14, aged forty-six, Elvis was distraught. There are descriptions in biographies of him that go into detail about his reactions. I won’t share those, because reading about them, even more than sixty years later, after everyone involved is dead, feels prurient to me, like an intrusion on something we’re not meant to see or even really to comprehend. Suffice it to say that his mother’s death was almost certainly the greatest trauma, by far, that Elvis ever experienced. At the funeral, Elvis got the Blackwood Brothers — Gladys’ favourite gospel quartet — to sing “Precious Memories”: [Excerpt: The Blackwood Brothers, “Precious Memories”] Gladys’ death, even more than his induction into the army, was the real end of the first phase of Elvis’ life and career. From that point on, while he always cared about his father, he had nobody in his life who he could trust utterly. And even more importantly, Colonel Parker now had nobody standing in his way. Gladys had never really liked or trusted Colonel Parker, but Vernon Presley saw him as somebody with whom he could do business, and as the only person around his son who really understood business. The Colonel had little but contempt for Vernon Presley, but knew how to keep him happy. While Elvis was in the Army, of course Scotty and Bill had to find other work. Scotty became a record producer, producing the record “Tragedy” for Thomas Wayne, whose full name was Thomas Wayne Perkins, and who was the brother of Johnny Cash’s guitarist Luther Perkins: [Excerpt: Thomas Wayne, “Tragedy”] That went to number five on the pop charts, and after that Scotty took a job working for Sam Phillips, and when Elvis got out of the Army and Scotty rejoined him, he continued working for Phillips for a number of years. Bill Black, meanwhile, formed Bill Black’s Combo, who had a number of instrumental hits over the next few years: [Excerpt: Bill Black’s Combo, “Hearts of Stone”] Unlike Scotty, Bill never worked with Elvis again after Elvis joined the army, and he concentrated on his own career. Bill Black’s Combo had eight top forty hits, and were popular enough that they became the opening act for the Beatles’ first US tour. Unfortunately, by that point, Black himself was too ill to tour, and he had to send the group out without him. He died in 1965, aged thirty-nine, from a brain tumour. As Elvis entered the Army, a combination of deliberate effort on the Colonel’s part and awful events had meant that every possible person who could give Elvis advice about his career, everyone who might tell him to trust his own artistic instincts, or who might push him in new directions, was either permanently removed from his life or distanced from him enough that they could have no further influence on him. From now on, the Colonel was in charge.    

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Trouble" by Elvis Presley, his induction into the army, and his mother's death. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "When" by the Kalin Twins. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I'm using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis' 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And King Creole itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   As 1957 turned into 1958, Elvis' personal life was going badly wrong, even as he was still the biggest star in the world. In particular, his relationships with everyone involved in his career -- everyone except the Colonel, of course -- were getting weakened. In September, Scotty Moore and Bill Black had written to Elvis, resigning from his band -- they'd been put on a salary, rather than a split of the money, and then Elvis' concert schedule had been cut back so much that they'd only played fourteen shows so far all year. They were getting into debt while Elvis was earning millions, but worse than that, they felt that the Colonel was controlling access to Elvis so much that they couldn't even talk to him. DJ Fontana wouldn't sign the letter -- he'd joined the group later than the others, and so he'd not lost his position in the way that the others had. But the other two were gone. Elvis offered them a fifty dollar raise, but Scotty said that on top of that he would need a ten thousand dollar bonus just to clear his debts -- and while Elvis was considering that, a newspaper interview with Moore and Black appeared, in which they talked about Elvis having broken his promise to them that when he earned more, they would earn more. Elvis was incensed, and decided that he didn't need them anyway. He could replace them easily. And for one show, he did just that. He played the fair at his old home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, with DJ and the Jordanaires, and with two new musicians. On guitar was Hank Garland, a great country session musician who was best known for his hit "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] Garland would continue to play with Elvis on recordings and occasional stage performances until 1961, when he was injured in an accident and became unable to perform. On bass, meanwhile, was Chuck Wigington, a friend of DJ's who, like DJ, had been a regular performer in the Louisiana Hayride band, and who had also played for many years with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys: [Excerpt: Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, "Screwball"] Wigington actually didn't have a contract for the show, and he wasn't even a full-time musician at the time -- he had to take a leave of absence from his job working in a bank in order to play the gig. Meanwhile, Scotty and Bill were off on their own playing the Dallas State Fair. But Elvis found that performing live without Scotty and Bill was just not the same, even though Garland and Wigington were perfectly fine musicians, and he decided to offer Scotty and Bill their old jobs back -- sort of. They'd be getting paid a per diem whether or not they were performing, which was something, but after the next recording sessions Bill never again recorded with Elvis -- he was replaced in the studio by Bob Moore. Scotty remained a regular in Elvis' studio band too, but only on rhythm guitar -- Hank Garland was going to be the lead player on Elvis' records from now on. The new arrangement required a lot of compromise on both sides, but it meant that Moore and Black were on a better financial footing, and Elvis could remain comfortable on stage, but it was now very clear that the Colonel, at least, saw Black and Moore as replaceable, and neither of them were necessary for Elvis to continue making hit records. His relationship with the two men who had come up with him had now permanently changed -- and that was going to be the case with a lot of other relationships as well. In particular, the Colonel was starting to think that Leiber and Stoller should be got rid of. The two of them were dangerous as far as the Colonel was concerned. Elvis respected them, they weren't under the Colonel's control, they didn't even *like* the Colonel, and they had careers that didn't rely on their association with Elvis. But they were also people who were able to generate hits for Elvis, and they were currently working for RCA, so while that was the case he would put them to use. But they were loose cannons. Now, before we go further, I should point out that what I'm about to describe is *one* way that Leiber and Stoller have explained what happened. In various different tellings, they've told events in different orders, and described things slightly differently. This is, to the best of my understanding, the most likely series of events, but I could be wrong. Leiber and Stoller had a complex attitude towards their work with Elvis. They liked Elvis himself, a lot, and they admired and respected his work ethic in the studio, and shared his taste in blues music. But at the same time, they didn't consider the work they were doing with Elvis to be real art, in the way that they considered their R&B records to be. It was easy money -- anything Elvis recorded was guaranteed to sell in massive amounts, so they didn't have to try too hard to write anything particularly good for him, but they didn't like the Colonel, and they were already, after a couple of films, getting bored with the routine nature of writing for Elvis' films. I'm going to paraphrase a quote from Jerry Leiber here, because I don't want to get this podcast moved into the adults-only section on Apple Podcasts, and the Leiber quote is quite full of expletives, but the gist of it is that they believed that if they were given proper artistic freedom with Elvis they could have made history, but that the people in his management team only wanted money. Every film needed just a few songs to plug into gaps, and they were usually the same type of songs to go in the same type of gaps. They were bored. And they actually had a plan for a project that would stretch them all creatively. Leiber vaguely knew the film producer Charles Feldman, who had produced On The Waterfront and The Seven-Year Itch, and Feldman had come to Leiber with a proposition. He'd recently acquired the rights to the novel A Walk on the Wild Side, set in New Orleans, and he thought that it would be perfect for Elvis. He'd have the script written by Budd Schulberg, and have Elia Kazan direct -- the same team that had made On The Waterfront. Elvis would be working with people who had made Marlon Brando, one of his idols, a star. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs, and given that Kazan was known as an actors' director, the chances were that the film could take Elvis to the next level in film stardom -- he could become another Sinatra, someone who was equally respected as an actor and as a singer. Leiber took the proposal to Jean Aberbach, who was one of the heads of Hill and Range, the music publishing company that handled all the songs that Elvis performed. Aberbach listened to the proposal, called the Colonel to relay the idea, and then said "If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking in this direction again, you will never work for us again." So they resigned themselves to just churning out the same stuff for Elvis' films. Although, while they were soured on the process, the next film would be more interesting: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "King Creole"] "King Creole" was the first of Elvis' films to be based on a book -- though "Loving You" had been based on a short story that had appeared in a magazine. "A Stone For Danny Fisher" was one of Harold Robbins' early novels, and was about a boxer in New York who accepts a bribe from criminals to lose a fight, but then wins the fight anyway, goes on the run, but encounters the criminals who bribed him two years later. It's the kind of basic plot that has made perfectly good films in the past -- like the Bruce Willis sequence in Pulp Fiction, for example. But while it's a fairly decent plot, it is... not the plot of "King Creole". Hal Wallis had bought the rights to the book in the hope of making it a vehicle for James Dean, before Dean's death. When it was reworked as a Presley vehicle, obviously it was changed to be about a singer rather than a boxer, and so the whole main plotline about throwing a fight was dropped, and then the setting was changed to New Orleans... and truth be told, the resulting film seems to have more than a hint of "Walk on the Wild Side" about it, with both being set in New Orleans' underworld, and both having a strained relationship between a father and a son as a main theme. Oddly, Leiber and Stoller have never mentioned these similarities, even though it seems very likely to me that someone involved in the Elvis organisation took their idea and used it without credit. They've both, though, talked about how dull they found working on the film's soundtrack -- and even though they were currently Elvis' favourite writers, and producing his sessions, they ended up writing only three of the eleven songs for the film. "King Creole" is, in fact, a rather good film. It has a good cast, including Walter Matthau, and it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was one of those directors of the time who could turn his hand to anything and make good films in a huge variety of genres. He'd directed, among many, many, many other films, "White Christmas", the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and "Casablanca". However, Leiber and Stoller's writing for the film was more or less on autopilot, and they produced songs like "Steadfast, Loyal, and True", which is widely regarded as the very worst song they ever wrote: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Steadfast, Loyal, and True"] That said, there is an important point that should be made about the songs Elvis recorded for his films generally, and which applies to that song specifically. Many of the songs Elvis would record for his films in later years are generally regarded as being terrible, terrible songs, and with good reason. Songs like "There's No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car", "Yoga is as Yoga Does", "Queenie Wahini's Papaya", or "Ito Eats" have few if any merits. But in part that's because they are not intended to work as songs divorced from their context in the film. They're part of the storytelling, not songs that were ever intended to be listened to as songs on their own. But still, Leiber and Stoller could undoubtedly have come up with something better than "Steadfast, Loyal, and True", had they not been working with the attitude of "that'll do, it's good enough". Indeed, the most artistically interesting song on the soundtrack is one that was not written by Leiber and Stoller at all, a jazz song sung as a duet with Kitty White, "Crawfish": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Kitty White, "Crawfish"] While other songwriters were turning out things like that, Leiber and Stoller were putting in a minimal amount of effort, despite their previous wish to try to be more artistically adventurous with their work with Elvis. They still, however, managed to write one song that would become known as a classic, even if they mostly did it as a joke: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Trouble"] That song combines two different elements of Leiber and Stoller's writing we've looked at previously. The first is their obsession with that stop-time blues riff, which had first turned up in Muddy Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man" back in 1954: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Leiber and Stoller had latched on to that riff, as we saw when we talked about "Riot in Cell Block #9" back in the episode on "The Wallflower". They would consistently use it as a signifier of the blues -- they used the same riff not only in "Riot in Cell Block #9" and "Trouble", but also "I'm A Woman" for Peggy Lee and "Santa Claus is Back in Town" for Elvis, and slight variations of it in "Framed" by the Robins and "Alligator Wine" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, among many others. It's clearly a riff that they loved -- so much so that they pretty much single-handedly made it into something people will now think of as a generic indicator of the blues rather than, as it was originally, a riff that was used on one specific song -- but it's also a riff they could fall back on when they were just phoning in a song. The other aspect of their songwriting that "Trouble" shows is their habit of writing songs as jokes and then giving them to singers as serious songs. They'd done this before with Elvis, when they'd written "Love Me" as a parody of a particular kind of ballad, and he'd then sung it entirely straight. Leiber compared “Trouble” to another song they'd written as a joke, "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots": [Excerpt: The Cheers, "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots"] Leiber later said of "Trouble", comparing it to that song, "the only people who are going to take them seriously are Hell's Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose there was a bit of contempt on our part." He went on to say "There's something laughable there. I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis did not sound right to us. " Either way, Elvis performs the song with enough ferocity that it sounded right to a lot of other people: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Trouble" 2] He thought well enough of the song that when, a decade later, he recorded what became known as his comeback special, that was the first song in the show. And while Leiber clearly thought that Elvis didn't really sound like he was trouble in that song, you only have to compare, for example, the French cover version of it by Johnny Hallyday -- the man often referred to as the French Elvis -- to see how much less intense the vocal could have been: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "La Bagarre"] But some time after the King Creole sessions, the Colonel had the chance to separate Elvis from Leiber and Stoller for good. Elvis wanted them at all of his sessions, but Jerry Leiber got pneumonia and was unable to travel to a session. The Colonel kept insisting, and eventually Leiber asked Stoller what he should do, and Stoller said to tell him to do something to himself using words that you can't use without being bumped into the adult section of the podcast directories. I assume from looking at the dates that this was for a session in June 1958 which Chet Atkins produced. From this point on, Leiber and Stoller would never work in the studio with Elvis again, and nor would they ever again be commissioned to write a song for him. They soon lost their jobs at RCA, which left them to concentrate on their work with R&B artists like the Clovers, the Coasters, and the Drifters. Their active collaboration with Elvis -- a collaboration that would define all of them in the eyes of the public -- had lasted only ten months, from April 1957 through February 1958. But Elvis kept an eye on their careers. He took note of songs they wrote for LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "Saved"] The Clovers: [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Bossa Nova Baby"] The Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Little Egypt"] and more, and would record many more of their songs. He'd just never again have them write a song specifically for him. Not that this mattered in the short term for Leiber and Stoller, as that June 1958 session was Elvis' last one for a couple of years. Because Colonel Parker had forced Elvis into the Army. At the time, and for many years afterwards, the US military still drafted every man in his early twenties for two years, and so of course Elvis was going to be drafted, but both the Army and Elvis assumed he'd be able to join Special Services, which would mean he'd be able to continue his career, so long as he performed a few free concerts for the military. But Colonel Parker had other ideas. He didn't want his boy going around doing free shows all over the place and devaluing his product, and he also thought that Elvis was getting too big for his boots. Getting him sent away to Germany to spend two years scrubbing latrines and driving tanks, and away from all the industry people who might fill his head with ideas, sounded like an excellent plan. And not only that, but if he didn't give RCA much of a backlog to release while he was away, RCA would realise how much they needed the Colonel. So the Colonel leaked to the press that Elvis was going to get special treatment, and got a series of stories planted saying how awful it was that they were going to treat Elvis with kid gloves, so that he could then indignantly deny that Elvis would do anything other than his duty. For the next two years, the only recordings Elvis would make would be private ones, of himself and his army friends playing and singing during their down time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Earth Angel"] But there was still one final person in the Colonel's way, and fate took care of that: [Excerpt: Gladys Presley, "Home Sweet Home"] Elvis' mother had been unwell for some time -- and the descriptions of her illness sound an awful lot like the descriptions of Elvis' own final illness a couple of decades later. Recent reports have suggested that Elvis may have had hereditary autoimmune problems -- and that would seem to make a lot of sense given everything we know about him. Given that, it seems likely that his mother also had those problems. It also won't have helped that she was on a series of fad diets, and taking diet pills, in order to lose weight, as the Colonel kept pressuring her to look thinner in photos with Elvis. Whatever the cause, she ended up hospitalised with hepatitis, which seemed to come from nowhere. Elvis was given compassionate leave to visit her in hospital, where she had the pink Cadillac that Elvis had bought her parked outside the window, so she could see it. When she died on August 14, aged forty-six, Elvis was distraught. There are descriptions in biographies of him that go into detail about his reactions. I won't share those, because reading about them, even more than sixty years later, after everyone involved is dead, feels prurient to me, like an intrusion on something we're not meant to see or even really to comprehend. Suffice it to say that his mother's death was almost certainly the greatest trauma, by far, that Elvis ever experienced. At the funeral, Elvis got the Blackwood Brothers -- Gladys' favourite gospel quartet -- to sing "Precious Memories": [Excerpt: The Blackwood Brothers, "Precious Memories"] Gladys' death, even more than his induction into the army, was the real end of the first phase of Elvis' life and career. From that point on, while he always cared about his father, he had nobody in his life who he could trust utterly. And even more importantly, Colonel Parker now had nobody standing in his way. Gladys had never really liked or trusted Colonel Parker, but Vernon Presley saw him as somebody with whom he could do business, and as the only person around his son who really understood business. The Colonel had little but contempt for Vernon Presley, but knew how to keep him happy. While Elvis was in the Army, of course Scotty and Bill had to find other work. Scotty became a record producer, producing the record "Tragedy" for Thomas Wayne, whose full name was Thomas Wayne Perkins, and who was the brother of Johnny Cash's guitarist Luther Perkins: [Excerpt: Thomas Wayne, "Tragedy"] That went to number five on the pop charts, and after that Scotty took a job working for Sam Phillips, and when Elvis got out of the Army and Scotty rejoined him, he continued working for Phillips for a number of years. Bill Black, meanwhile, formed Bill Black's Combo, who had a number of instrumental hits over the next few years: [Excerpt: Bill Black's Combo, "Hearts of Stone"] Unlike Scotty, Bill never worked with Elvis again after Elvis joined the army, and he concentrated on his own career. Bill Black's Combo had eight top forty hits, and were popular enough that they became the opening act for the Beatles' first US tour. Unfortunately, by that point, Black himself was too ill to tour, and he had to send the group out without him. He died in 1965, aged thirty-nine, from a brain tumour. As Elvis entered the Army, a combination of deliberate effort on the Colonel's part and awful events had meant that every possible person who could give Elvis advice about his career, everyone who might tell him to trust his own artistic instincts, or who might push him in new directions, was either permanently removed from his life or distanced from him enough that they could have no further influence on him. From now on, the Colonel was in charge.    

Jack talks record collecting, hunting down rare old 78s and discusses the music of: Jack Rivers, Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys with Gene Stewart, Woody Herman and his Orchestra, Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra with Rose Anne Stevens, Jane Froman, Jo Stafford with Paul Weston and his Orchestra, Jack Johnson and his Orchestra, Bessie Smith, Emmett Miller and his Georgia Crackers with Phil Pavey. Visit: www.JackSpinsShellac.com for more info. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jackspinsshellac/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jackspinsshellac/support

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I’m also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick — Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll — for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here — the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are 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 for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we’re not going to stop there. Today we’re going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records — and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We’re going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we’re going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin’ Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we’ve talked about — for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we’ll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips’ studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames’ first single, “You’re My Angel”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, “You’re My Angel”] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn’t particularly interesting — “Feelin’ Good” was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior’s Blue Flames: “Feelin’ Good”] But it’s their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames’ second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, “Love my Baby”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Love My Baby”] That record was one that Sam Phillips — a man who made a lot of great records — considered among the greatest he’d ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn’t. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called “Mystery Train”. That song actually dates back to the old folk song, “Worried Man Blues”, which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: “Worried Man Blues”, the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we’ll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. “Worried Man Blues” was one of those, and those lyrics, “the train arrived, sixteen coaches long” became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker’s song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Mystery Train”] That song’s composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title “Mystery Train”, which has been a big part of the song’s appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen — Parker had been singing “fifty coaches long”. And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on “Tiger Man”, a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with “Mystery Train” in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, “Tiger Man”] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over “Bear Cat”, the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to “Hound Dog”, and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips’ artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn’t stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let’s talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we’re going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we’ll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel’s footsteps. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character — as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren’t so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people — except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny — working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he’d put a hot-plate under a chicken’s feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don’t know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot — it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn’t matter what the show was — what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would “get married” at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “Ain’t She Sweet?”] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn’t actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who’d been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven”] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, “For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.” But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff’s career thus far. In particular, he’d tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He’d cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff’s manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn’t want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker — though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising — Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold’s second single, in 1945, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”, reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers’ songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes’ bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold’s manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel’s commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as “Colonel”, even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up — Parker was originally meant to be Arnold’s exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the “exclusive” manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Of course, Parker didn’t leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed — he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously — with Snow later saying “I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I’ve ever had dealings with.” The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners — right up until he discovered they weren’t. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula — a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay — songs like “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis’ own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future — whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else — even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips — the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn’t as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis’ last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn’t play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band — Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis’ fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”] That’s a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of “Mystery Train”, was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker’s single, as “Love My Baby” provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis’ version of “Mystery Train”. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters — as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn’t a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters — B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it’s likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn’t understand at all why those girls were screaming at him — he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis’ music — but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis’ family — and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis’ family. Elvis’ parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn’t work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he’d do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn’t mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We’ll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn’t seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label — a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’ contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn’t want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis’ success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That’s great! Except they will not pay you for several months — if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you’ve been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips’ money, and he didn’t have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn’t have any artists who could take Elvis’ place. He’d found the musician he’d been looking for — the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips’ dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis’ contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted — but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount for Elvis’ contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist’s contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips’ view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn’t — as seemed likely — he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus — of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker’s pocket. RCA quickly reissued “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train”, while they were waiting for Elvis’ first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I’m also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick — Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll — for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here — the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are 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 for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we’re not going to stop there. Today we’re going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records — and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We’re going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we’re going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin’ Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we’ve talked about — for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we’ll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips’ studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames’ first single, “You’re My Angel”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, “You’re My Angel”] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn’t particularly interesting — “Feelin’ Good” was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior’s Blue Flames: “Feelin’ Good”] But it’s their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames’ second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, “Love my Baby”: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Love My Baby”] That record was one that Sam Phillips — a man who made a lot of great records — considered among the greatest he’d ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn’t. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called “Mystery Train”. That song actually dates back to the old folk song, “Worried Man Blues”, which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: “Worried Man Blues”, the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we’ll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. “Worried Man Blues” was one of those, and those lyrics, “the train arrived, sixteen coaches long” became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker’s song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, “Mystery Train”] That song’s composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title “Mystery Train”, which has been a big part of the song’s appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen — Parker had been singing “fifty coaches long”. And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on “Tiger Man”, a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with “Mystery Train” in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, “Tiger Man”] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over “Bear Cat”, the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to “Hound Dog”, and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips’ artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn’t stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let’s talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we’re going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we’ll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel’s footsteps. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character — as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren’t so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people — except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny — working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he’d put a hot-plate under a chicken’s feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don’t know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot — it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn’t matter what the show was — what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would “get married” at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, “Ain’t She Sweet?”] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn’t actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who’d been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven”] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, “For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.” But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff’s career thus far. In particular, he’d tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He’d cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff’s manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn’t want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker — though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising — Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold’s second single, in 1945, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”, reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years”] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers’ songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes’ bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold’s manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel’s commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as “Colonel”, even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up — Parker was originally meant to be Arnold’s exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the “exclusive” manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Of course, Parker didn’t leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed — he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously — with Snow later saying “I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I’ve ever had dealings with.” The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners — right up until he discovered they weren’t. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula — a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay — songs like “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis’ own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future — whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else — even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips — the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn’t as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis’ last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn’t play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band — Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis’ fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”] That’s a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of “Mystery Train”, was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker’s single, as “Love My Baby” provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis’ version of “Mystery Train”. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters — as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn’t a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters — B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it’s likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn’t understand at all why those girls were screaming at him — he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis’ music — but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis’ family — and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis’ family. Elvis’ parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn’t work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he’d do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn’t mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We’ll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn’t seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label — a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’ contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn’t want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis’ success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That’s great! Except they will not pay you for several months — if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you’ve been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips’ money, and he didn’t have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn’t have any artists who could take Elvis’ place. He’d found the musician he’d been looking for — the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips’ dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis’ contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted — but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount for Elvis’ contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist’s contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips’ view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn’t — as seemed likely — he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus — of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker’s pocket. RCA quickly reissued “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train”, while they were waiting for Elvis’ first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I'm using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. I'm also relying heavily on another book by Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll -- for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. All the Sun Records excerpted here -- the ones by Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, and Johnny Cash, are 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 for an absurdly low price. And this three-CD box set contains literally every recording Elvis made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business, but of course Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we're not going to stop there. Today we're going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records -- and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history. We're going to tell a tale of two Parkers. The first Parker we're going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters with Johnny Ace, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and B.B. King. Junior Parker had been working with Howlin' Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames (which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we've talked about -- for some reason there is a profusion of Flames that we'll be dealing with well into the seventies). Ike Turner discovered them, and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though as with many Modern Records acts they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips' studio. Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames' first single, "You're My Angel": [Excerpt: Junior Parker and the Blue Flames, "You're My Angel"] But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun records. The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn't particularly interesting -- "Feelin' Good" was basically a John Lee Hooker knock-off: [Excerpt: Little Junior's Blue Flames: "Feelin' Good"] But it's their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it. The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames' second Sun single is one of the best blues records Sun ever put out, "Love my Baby": [Excerpt: Junior Parker, "Love My Baby"] That record was one that Sam Phillips -- a man who made a lot of great records -- considered among the greatest he'd ever made. Talking to his biographer Peter Guralnick about it decades later, he said “I mean you tell me a better record that you’ve ever heard,” and Guralnick couldn't. But it was the B-side that made an impression. The B-side was a song called "Mystery Train". That song actually dates back to the old folk song, "Worried Man Blues", which was recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family: [excerpt: "Worried Man Blues", the Carter Family] The Carter Family were, along with Jimmie Rodgers, the people who defined what country music is. Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rodgers, and we'll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later. But the important thing here is that A.P. Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written. "Worried Man Blues" was one of those, and those lyrics, "the train arrived, sixteen coaches long" became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker's song: [Excerpt: Junior Parker, "Mystery Train"] That song's composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips. Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit. The first was to give the song the title "Mystery Train", which has been a big part of the song's appeal ever since. The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen -- Parker had been singing "fifty coaches long". And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam. Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on "Tiger Man", a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the sixties, and would play as a medley with "Mystery Train" in the seventies: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Tiger Man"] But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come. Don Robey was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over "Bear Cat", the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to "Hound Dog", and Robey would take pleasure in poaching Phillips' artists for his own label. Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Robey was grooming Little Junior Parker for big things. Robey signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn't stop Robey from having Parker on his label. Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in R&B, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1971. Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them Elvis Presley. But before we talk more about Elvis, let's talk about that other Parker. Tom Parker was to become the most well-known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act, so today we're going to look at him in some detail, as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping, managers in the music business. When we deal with Allen Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we'll be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel's footsteps. It's difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success. What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival. We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town. And we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath. And that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder. We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating. Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character -- as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s. He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con-man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren't so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them. He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people -- except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course. Parker had started out as a carny -- working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show (in which he'd put a hot-plate under a chicken's feet so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing) to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whisky when he became too sickened by his job. (The geek, for those who don't know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience. Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.) All this had taught Parker a lot -- it had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality. As far as Parker was concerned, in showbusiness it didn't matter what the show was -- what mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show. In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts. One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding. He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would "get married" at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds. It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion. He first became involved in music when he got to know Gene Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s: [Excerpt: Gene Austin, "Ain't She Sweet?"] Austin had been a huge star, but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular. Parker helped him organise some shows (according to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree), but at this time Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it? Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years. That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are. Parker determined to get into music management. And given that he didn't actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who'd been coming to the carnivals. Country music. And so to start with he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Roy Acuff: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, "You're the Only Star in My Blue Heaven"] In later years Roy Acuff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, "For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God." But in 1941 he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar. And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff's career thus far. In particular, he'd tried a new trick that no-one else had ever done before. He'd cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut-price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper. This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box offices, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall. Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff's manager. Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Acuff thought an un-Christian attitude to money. Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross. Acuff didn't want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker -- though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising -- Parker got the rights to market Roy Acuff Flour in Florida. But Acuff did more than that. He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddy Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys. He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager. Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker. Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA records as a solo artist, and Arnold's second single, in 1945, "Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years", reached number five in the country charts: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years"] Eddy Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him. Parker would handle the management, Steve Sholes, the head of country and R&B at RCA, would handle the record production. Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range music publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them. And the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings. Both Sholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publishers' songs, Parker had Sholes in his pocket because he knew that Sholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Sholes' bosses at RCA, and Parker in turn took twenty-five percent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold, as Arnold's manager. This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry. Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary Colonel's commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, himself a former country musician, and from that point until the end of his life insisted on being addressed as "Colonel", even though in reality he was a draft-dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft. But Parker and Arnold eventually split up -- Parker was originally meant to be Arnold's exclusive manager, but in 1953 Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RCA acts, headed by Hank Snow. Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the "exclusive" manager of Hank Snow. [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Of course, Parker didn't leave his association with Eddy Arnold empty handed -- he insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of fifty thousand dollars, because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him. His association with Hank Snow would only last two years, and would break up very acrimoniously -- with Snow later saying "I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one. Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I've ever had dealings with." The reason Snow said this was because the Colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business. The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners -- right up until he discovered they weren't. Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on Sun that largely stuck to the same formula -- a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the country sides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters, and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay -- songs like "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone". [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone”] The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis' own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio. This would set the template for his work in the future -- whenever Elvis got to choose his own material, and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music. Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else -- even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips -- the music would suffer, though at this stage even the songs Elvis wasn't as keen on sounded great. By the time of Elvis' last Sun single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties. He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn't play on the single – session drummer Johnny Bernero played on it instead – he would be a part of the core band from now on. The trio of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band -- Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. The A-side of Elvis' fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget"] That's a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B-side, his version of "Mystery Train", was astonishing. It was actually a merger of elements from the A-side and the B-side of Junior Parker's single, as "Love My Baby" provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis' version of "Mystery Train". Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Mystery Train"] The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters -- as he was currently battling Don Robey in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could. But at the same time, it was a song Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s. This wasn't a song that was being forced on to Elvis. Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Parker live when he was playing with the Beale Streeters -- B.B. King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it's likely that he did see them at least a few times. So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped. But while he was recording for Sun, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder. And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis. He didn't understand at all why those girls were screaming at him -- he would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis' music -- but he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that. Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis' family -- and even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis' family. Elvis' parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the Colonel had helped him they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him. Elvis himself was young, and naive, and would go along with whatever his parents suggested. Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents. His daddy had a bad back and couldn't work, and his mama was so tired and sick all the time. If they said the Colonel would help him earn more money, well, he'd do what his parents said. Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mama could give up her job. They could maybe raise chickens in the yard. It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realised that the contracts didn't mention himself at all. His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company. Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with, and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues. A couple of months before “Mystery Train”, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act – “Hey Porter” by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter”] We'll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn't seem to be star material. Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels. Sun Records was a little nothing R&B label in Memphis; it barely registered on the national consciousness. If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label -- a big label like RCA Records. Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville. Not Memphis. Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis' contract, without bothering to check with Phillips. The problem was that Sam Phillips didn't want to give up on Elvis so easily. Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability. It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice. Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself. But there was a downside to Elvis' success, and it was one that every independent label dreads. Sun Records was having hits. And the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit. The problem is cashflow. Suppose the distributors want a hundred thousand copies of your latest single. That's great! Except they will not pay you for several months -- if they pay you at all. And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles *before* you get them to the distributors. If you've been selling in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company. Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit. And then on top of that there was the lawsuit with Don Robey over Junior Parker. That was eating Phillips' money, and he didn't have much of it. But at that point, Sam Phillips didn't have any artists who could take Elvis' place. He'd found the musician he'd been looking for -- the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips' dream of ending racism. So he came up with a plan. He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis' contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted -- but only for $35,000. Now, that doesn't sound like a huge amount for Elvis' contract *today*, but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist's contract. It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all. Phillips' view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs, and if he didn't -- as seemed likely -- he would still have Elvis. As Phillips later said, “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison any more. I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” He gave the Colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a five thousand dollar unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other thirty thousand. Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff. He got him the five thousand almost straight away out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Sholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding thirty thousand, and to pay Elvis a five thousand dollar signing bonus -- of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker's pocket. RCA quickly reissued "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" and "Mystery Train", while they were waiting for Elvis' first recording session for his new label. With Elvis was now on a major label, and Sam Phillips had to find a new rockabilly star to promote. Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him. Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

Our forty-first episode, which aired on April 14, 2019. Hillbilly Hellcats – Cats Like Us Louis Jordan – Don’t Worry ‘bout That Mule The Time Jumpers – Roly Poly Carl Perkins – Dixie Fried Darrel Higham – Pistol Boogie Little Charlie & The Nightcats – You Don’t Love Me That Way Narvel Felts – Pink and Black Days The Krewmen – Tortured Life Minnie Pearl & Pee Wee King & The Golden West Cowboys – Jealous Hearted Me The Dominos – It’s A Sin to Tell A Lie The Mystery Trio – Willie Joe Johnny Burnette & The Rock’n’Roll Trio – Lonesome Train on a Lonesome Track Tiny Tim & His Tornados – I’ve Gotta Find Someone Atomic Hi Tones – Pink Thunderbird The Hi-Flyers – Static Stomp Clarence Brown – Rock My Blues Away Tex Neighbors – Rockin’ Beat Bob Dunn & His Vagabonds – Washington & Lee Swing Lee Mitchell – Who’s That Big Man Carlos & The Bandidos – One More for the Road

Jazz musician Tony Miceli (vibraphone), together with Paul Jōst (vocals) and Kevin MacConnell (acoustic bass), combine to form The Jōst Project. Catch Tony’s conversation with Kathleen Greene of the Barnes about the upcoming performance for First Friday at the Barnes, featuring selections from the group’s ever-expanding repertoire including rock/pop classics such as Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz,” and the Beatles’ “Come Together.” Tune in to learn more!

Slocum is deeply involved in his very big and evil plan to take over the water rights to Tumbleweed Valley. With Ranger Doug still distracted and believing he is Don Ricardo Proboscis, Slocum has hatched a new plan to take over Miss Marm’s organic prune ranch. Charlie has been ordered to disguise himself as Ranger Doug, visit Miss Marm and drop a single drop of Ode de Prune Hawk into her irrigation tank… featuring Pee Wee King!

节目组: Music Bang Bang 音乐大爆炸 节目名称: Bob Dylan 开头曲 Knocking on heaven's door Good afternoon I am Brendan. Good afternoon I am Alice. I am lampson. I am jane. How are you doing? My dear friend Alice. Is this your first time come to music bang bang? I am all good thank you very much. And this is my very first time come to music bang bang I am very glad to be here. Thank you! And how was your qingming festival? Oh it is very good. Thank you for asking. Ok cut to the chase, let me introduce you today's shining star. He is a singer who got lots of nomination and finally won the Nobel prize in literature Wow that is not a common thing that ever happened. How could a musician won the Nobel prize. Who is he? He is bob dylan, he won the Nobel prize is for his amazing poem. Oh, then his song must be very charming,isn't it? Yes, let us listen to his melody. 插曲1 Knocking on heaven's door PART 1： Jane, since you are a big fan of movies , do you familiar with this name? Yes, I know a film share the same name. It is directed by Thomas Jahn. Yes, they share the same name. And this song is also the theme song from the movie Pat Garret & Billy The Kid. Maybe the next music bang bang I will write something about this movie. Bob dylan's song always have a lot of guitar strumming. And that make it very fresh. It is true, in this song I can hear the fresh guitar strumming. And I like it very much. I search on the Internet about the song's background, and I find out there is a lot of deep thoughts in this song. First of all, it is an anti-war song. Secondly, bob want to tell us that the killing shouldn't exist. At that time when the song was written in USA, there was a lot of military battle against other country, and plenty of people against this action of the US government, many artists and song -writers have works about the way how thay against it. Bob Dylan is one of them. Knocking on heaven's door is a famous one. 插曲 2 Like a rolling stone PART 2： This is a long song with over six minutes. And it struggled for Its first release just because of Its length. Wow, this song is very long. The lyrics is also a long story about how life changed. Bob is a poet, he once said "I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I will die like a poet. " He got a poetic soul and a mind full of story. Yes. The song like a rolling stone was written in 1965 after his travel back from England. At this travel, he suffered from some pain inside and he finally wrote this song. And that is where he got the hostility lyrics. There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes. So you can have a try and listen to this great poet. Yes let us listen. 插曲3 You belong to me PART 3： It is also an extremely old love songs. it was composed by 3 song writers Pee Wee King, Redd Stewart and Chilton Price in 1952. Bob Dylan coverd the song in the movie, Nature born killers. Although the movie is violet, the song is peaceful. Bob Dylan's voice is very special. When I first listened to the song, I was attracted by his deep, magnetic voice. oh I really agree with you. in my mind, the song is a very special one of his songs. We hardly ever can hear so peaceful song from him. Yeah, Whenever I hear the song, I feel so relaxed and I will keep a great mood.Can't wait to listen it. 插曲 4 Blowing in the wind PART 4 Blowin' In the Wind is one of the important works in the history of American folk songs. Yep, it reflected the social situation at that time. In 1957，Vietnam War broke out. The US spent lots of manpower and material resources to Vietnam. However, the War caused heavy casualties. An anti-war was booming in America. At the same time, the folk music was popular in compus. The song was catered to the trend in that society, and quickly spread worldwide. The lyrics impressed me deeply. People lost their life, became homeless because of war. So, I feel so lucky to stay in a peaceful country. So do I. with no doubt, This song is Bob's most excellent, most famous song. OK, let's enjoy it. 结束语 Hope you like Bob Dylan and his song. Today's program is over. Happy time is always short. Alice, I really enjoy talking with you. I am looking forward to working with you in next time. Oh, It is my honours. Happy to come to Music Bang Bang. I am also happy to talk music with you. 另外欢迎大家订阅我们的微信公众号“时代之声Radio”，网易云音乐“Music Bang Bang”以及荔枝Fm voe 外语广播电台。更多精彩节目等着你的发现。 Goodbye, my deer audience. See next time See you. 结束曲 Blowing in the wind 节目监制：刘仁邦编辑：尚博健 杨晨丹播音：刘仁邦 韩平治 尚博健 杨晨丹 制作：张雨航

Z čeho se zrodil onen žánr zvaný rockabilly, ze kterého nadále vyrostl samotný rock´n´roll? Bylo rockabilly vymláceno z mississippského bahna, jak praví jeden ze songů, který si pustíme? Směsice bílého hillbilly, western swingu, country boogie, country jazz, blues a rhythm & blues založila tento nesmrtelný žánr sice v polovině padesátých let, ale ten se formoval již hned po válce na americkém Jihu. Začneme hned rokem 1945 a zastavíme se těsně před polovinou padesátých let. Zaswinguje nám hvězdný kovboj Pee Wee King, zahillbilluje Osamocený Tulák Hank Williams a elektrifikované blues z Memphisu zakončí tuto hodinku o kořenech rockabilly.

Seus problemas acabaram e nossas férias também ! O Record Hop Podcast volta estraçaiando, acompanhado do grande Zoltar e de um veterano da Segunda Guerra Mundial, e contando tudo que vai acontecer em 2015. Fique por dentro das previsões gastronômicas, econômicas e esportivas. Saiba também quais os eventos que vão tocar fogo nos salões nacionais e internacionais. E para começar o ano estraçaiando bem estraçaiadinho, Pee Wee King, Glenn Barber, Andy Starr, Marc Valentine e o maioral Charlie Feathers botam para derreter nas pick ups dos estúdios da Kaos. Um ótimo 2015 a todos e bom divertimento !! SITE OFICIAL: http://www.overcast.com.br FEED: http://feeds.feedburner.com/recordhop E-MAIL: recordhoppodcast@gmail.com TWITTER: http://twitter.com/record_hop FANPAGE: http://www.facebook.com/recordhoppodcast RADIO CADILLACS: http://www.radiocadillacs.com.br/