Podcasts about Percy Sledge

Mike's new album is called The Sound of Muscle Shoals.   He's waited almost 20 years to round up the next generation of Swampers and record at the world-famous FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. Wow - was it worth the wait?  Mike Farris lives and sings The Sound of Muscle Shoals. The sound is a mix of blues, soul and country. The NY Times called it Indigenous American Music. The same sound that came from Etta, Aretha, Boz, Paul Simon, Wilson Pickett, Neil Young, Percy Sledge, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, The Staple Singers and many more. Long before heading for FAME studios, Mike had to clean up his life, and he talks about hitting rock bottom. That's when his wife said, "We're going to do something different this time.  We'll start by talking about the why's. Why, when you start getting successful,  you self-destruct?" Mike said, "That scared the hell out of me."   Mike is many years clean now, and he's riding the Slow Train to Muscle Shoals.  Enjoy The Sound of Mike Farris!!

Paul Jones is one of British music's true originals—a singer, songwriter, harmonica player, actor, broadcaster, and blues pioneer whose career has spanned over six decades. Best known as the original frontman of Manfred Mann, Paul helped define the sound of the '60s British Invasion. But there's so much more to his story than pop success.Born Paul Pond in Portsmouth in 1942, Paul had a bright academic future—earning a place at Oxford. But it was the blues, not the books, that really captured his heart. Drawn to the raw emotion of American R&B and blues, he immersed himself in music, gigging in London clubs and building ties with future legends like Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, and Brian Jones. In fact, Paul was briefly approached to front a little band called The Rolling Stones. He turned them down. Instead, he chose a different path. Rebranded as Paul Jones , he joined a jazz-influenced band led by South African keyboardist Manfred Mann. The group took on the name and quickly became one of the sharpest acts on the British scene. The band scored their first big hit with “5-4-3-2-1,” then came “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” It was an instant smash—hitting number one in both the UK and the US and cementing the band's place in pop history. Paul Jones became a household name, fronting a string of hits including “Sha La La,” “Come Tomorrow,” and “Pretty Flamingo.” But just as things were peaking, Paul shocked fans by stepping away from Manfred Mann in '66. He didn't want to be boxed into pop stardom. His first solo release, “I've Been a Bad, Bad Boy,” was a top 10 hit, and not long after, he starred in the film Privilege.From there, Paul split his time between stage and studio. He released a number of solo albums and never chased the pop charts, choosing instead to focus on artistry and authenticity.In the late '70s, Jones experienced a major musical rebirth. Alongside former bandmate Tom McGuinness, he co-founded The Blues Band—a group that would lead a new wave of British blues. Their first record, The Official Blues Band Bootleg Album, was self-released when no label wanted it. But it quickly found a fanbase and helped kick-start a blues revival in the UK. Over the years, The Blues Band became a cult favourite, recording over 20 albums and touring consistently for decades. Jones, with his fiery harmonica and soulful voice, became a beloved figure in the blues world.As if that weren't enough, Jones also became a prominent broadcaster. In 1986, he began hosting The Blues Show with Paul Jones on BBC Radio 2—a program that would run for 32 years. His warm, knowledgeable voice introduced listeners to everyone from blues giants like B.B. King and Muddy Waters to new acts keeping the genre alive. His influence on the blues scene through radio is as significant as his work on stage.In the 2000s, Jones released the critically acclaimed album Starting All Over Again, featuring collaborations with soul legends like Percy Sledge and Eric Bibb. It was a masterclass in classic songwriting, vocal nuance, and heartfelt delivery—proof that Paul Jones had lost none of his fire.Throughout his career, Jones worked with a who's who of music royalty: Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Mick Abrahams, and more. Whether singing, playing harmonica, or narrating the story of the blues, he brought depth, grace, and passion to every project.Later in life, Paul experienced a personal transformation. He became a born-again Christian and began to incorporate gospel into his musical world. His faith added a new layer to his performances, blending spirit and soul with honesty and humility.From Oxford scholar to '60s heartthrob, from blues crusader to BBC staple, Paul Jones has never stood still. He turned down the Rolling Stones, left a hit band at its height, helped revive the blues, and became a trusted voice for generations of listeners. Always evolving, always authentic—Paul Jones is one of the great unsung heroes of British music.

MONOLOGUE The CBC's Tyrannical Takedown: How Your Tax Dollars Fund the Silencing of Free Speech NEWSMAKER They're coming for the kids: Bureaucrats study euthanizing autistic youth https://www.rebelnews.com/they_re_coming_for_the_kids_bureaucrats_study_euthanizing_autistic_youth Sheila Gunn-Reid, Rebel News' Alberta Bureau Chief, Host of ‘The Gunn Show' Wednesdays 9pm ET OPEN LINES THE CULT OF CLIMATE CHANGE Get ready for several years of killer heat, top weather forecasters warn https://torontosun.com/news/world/get-ready-for-several-years-of-killer-heat-top-weather-forecasters-warn   Experts Warn Climate Change Is A ‘Health Emergency' https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiehailstone/2025/05/28/experts-warn-climate-change-is-a-health-emergency-in-open-letter/   Tony Heller – Geologist, Weather Historian, founder of https://realclimatescience.com NEWSMAKER The Slap Heard Around the World – What's Going On, Inside the Strange Marriage of France's President and First “Lady”? https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/emmanuel-macron-wife-brigitte-shove-face-plane-vietnam-b2758606.html   Brad Hunter National Crime Columnist at Toronto Sun – Author of Cold Blooded Murder: Shocking True Stories of Killers and Psychopaths and Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy: The Real-Life Killer Clown OPEN LINES THIS DAY IN ROCK HISTORY 1977 Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers played together for the first time when they performed as part of Mike Howlett's band, Strontium 90 in Paris France. 1973 Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon was on both the UK and US album charts. 1966 Percy Sledge started a two-week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'When A Man Loves A Woman' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nada nos fascina mais que a trivialidade.Quantos suspiros numa vitória ordinária! Um episódio quase inteiro dedicado a África do Sul, de Jordy Smith até Agatha Christie - ou vice-versa.E mesmo quando falamos dos vencedores, ninguém esquece uma onda bem surfada, não é verdade Caity e Leo ?A trilha foi escolhida com cuidado e atenção pelo Bruno Bocayuva, com Max Romeo e o hit rasta, Chase The Devil, João Valente com Percy Sledge e a versão original de Spooky, finalmente Júlio Adler com a dama da canção francesa, Barbara e sua linda e terrível, L'Aigle noir.

Send us a textOn this episode, Tom and Bert discuss the Fun Facts about Songs of the 1960's.Let the debates begin, are these all "True" Facts or do the guys have some Fact Checking of their own to do? Listen in and you'll get the usual challenges and banter that the guys toss around.  It's ALL in Good Fun! Chapter Highlights:(4:49) "Louie, Louie" by The Kingsmen(7:42) "The Girl from Ipanema" by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz(10:00) "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel(11:45) "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys(12:45) "Respect" by Otis Redding(23:25) "Can't take my eyes off of you" by The 4 Seasons(29:04) "My Generation" by The Who(31:47) "The Twist" by Chubby Checker(34:11) "When a Man loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge(43:58) "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals(49:14) "I got you Babe" by Sonny and Cher(53:07) "Palisades Park" by Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon(55:25) "Yesterday" by The Beatles Enjoy the show!You can email us at reeldealzmoviesandmusic@gmail.com or visit our Facebook page, Reel Dealz Podcast: Movies & Music Thru The Decades to leave comments and/or TEXT us at 843-855-1704 as well.

We always love a song with a complicated origin story, and here we get to pay tribute to an amazing songwriter and still indulge our favorite plot twists. Help Me Make It Through The Night, originally released by Percy Sledge, with versions by Kris Kristofferson, and by Gladys Knight and the Pips.  Outro music is Jump In The River by Sinead O'Connor — and if you don't know about the connection between Kris Kristofferson and Sinead O'Connor, you need to dig into that, because it's amazing. 

O músico, autor, compositor e antigo Ministro da cultura de Cabo Verde, Mário Lúcio deslocou-se esta semana aos estúdios da RFI antes de participar no festival musical "Au fil des voix", na sala de concerto 360 aqui em Paris, onde vai tocar e cantar neste sábado 1 de Fevereiro a partir das 20H00. Por ocasião deste certame que homenageia este ano alguns países de África Lusófona pelos 50 anos das suas respectivas independências, Mário Lúcio representa Cabo Verde, com o seu novo álbum lançado oficialmente neste 31 de Janeiro.Este novo trabalho que é o seu sétimo álbum em nome próprio, intitula-se "Independance", com "A" para evocar a palavra "dança". Nele, o músico recorda e retoma alguns dos êxitos do pós-independência. Com 10 anos de idade na altura em que o seu país conquistou a liberdade, Mário Lúcio lembra-se nomeadamente do fervilhar musical daquela época e diz que a sua vida mudou completamente com a independência.RFI: Quais são as sonoridades deste novo álbum?Mário Lúcio: Quando nós falamos de independência ou de qualquer acontecimento, nós temos a parte analítica e depois temos uma memória escondida. E é engraçado que isto só me aconteceu há pouco tempo. Qual é a minha memória da independência? Eu tinha dez anos. Para além de analisar, é bom lembrar-me das festas. Mas qual é a memória? É a música. Portanto, há pessoas que têm memória de lugares através dos cheiros e a música, porque em 1975 chegaram a Cabo Verde músicas desconhecidas para nós. Nós somos um arquipélago de uma música muito particular no contexto africano e mundial. Uma mistura de música, de reminiscências de música africana com música europeia. E de repente, chega-nos a música do continente africano. Até lá, eu ia sempre a uma mercearia muito pequenita, lá no Tarrafal. O senhor tinha um gira-discos. O que é que nós ouvíamos? Era Roberto Carlos, Luiz Gonzaga e também ouvíamos muita música norte-americana, James Brown, Otis Redding, Percy Sledge. Era o que nós ouvíamos. É como se nos negassem o acesso à música do continente. África estava efervescente havia algumas décadas. Vários países foram independentes nos anos 60 e digamos que esconder isso evitava o contágio. Mas, de repente, chega a música da Guiné-Bissau -que nós não conhecíamos- na mesma língua. A música da Guiné-Conacri, aquelas guitarras, a música de Angola e a música do Congo, mais a música do Senegal, Gana, Camarões e Nigéria, mas também a música das Antilhas, Martinica, Guadalupe, Haiti. Então, é como se nós tivéssemos também achado a nossa própria identidade. E por casualidade, nós começamos a tocar essas músicas, aprender no violão os primeiros acordes que eu aprendi de uma música de um cantor chamado Prince Nico Mbarga. E a música chamava-se "Aki". Eram dois acordes. E depois fui tocar no grupo Abel Djassi, na cidade da Praia, quando fui lá estudar. E já tocávamos nos bailes nocturnos. Os bailes duravam das 20h00 às 05h00. Tínhamos repertório com 100 músicas. Fazíamos quatro intervalos e basicamente eram essas músicas. Então, depois que eu tomei a minha profissão do músico, depois de exercer outras profissões, sempre com a música, tinha o sonho de um dia recuperar essas memórias. Eu não sabia como é que haviam de vir e eu lembrei-me que era o som ligado à dança. Essas músicas chegaram com as danças. Eu lembrava no Tarrafal, as casas, umas casas muito velhas, cheias de gente, rapazes e meninas, cada um no seu canto, a dançar essas músicas, a tentar descobrir uma forma de dançar. As nossas danças são sempre muito coladas, o homem e a mulher. E esses ritmos não exigiam muito malabarismo. Então, a palavra "independance" reflecte a minha memória da independência. São músicas ligadas à dança. E esse disco é um disco para dançar. Felizmente, toquei muitos anos em baile. É uma coisa que eu gosto de fazer, então é um testemunho, digamos assim, uma homenagem a essa época.RFI: Como é que foi todo esse trabalho de recolher as músicas do seu baú pessoal e reformulá-las?Mário Lúcio: As coisas têm os seus mistérios, não é? Normalmente, todos os meus discos, eu vou ao baú e lá selecciono às vezes 60, 80 músicas. Depois passa para 40, 20. Levo para o estúdio 20 músicas. E de repente gravo 12. Ou saem as 12, ou saem oito ou dez. Este processo não. Eu compus todas as músicas de uma assentada. Passei duas noites, compus todas as músicas, excepto a música "Independance", que eu compus no estúdio. Mas, como havia ali alguma coisa para dizer, há muito tempo que nós estávamos à espera que venha esse tipo de música, esse tipo de ritmo. Então, foi muito rápido. E eu sabia o que que as músicas estavam a dizer. E vieram já com o seu ritmo, seu balanço. As letras todas desceram rapidamente e a única música que eu gravei é um tema que eu fiz que se chama "Minha Bio", que é exactamente a minha biografia, que é uma música muito icónica na minha vida. Eu nunca tinha feito uma música sobre mim ou para mim. Esta sim conta a história do meu nascimento e também é uma música acústica. É mesmo uma pausa dentro do disco.RFI: é também uma espécie de balanço pessoal de uma longa carreira que começou quase praticamente depois da independência.Mário Lúcio: Obrigado por essa pergunta, porque eu não tinha sentido isso ainda. E é verdade. Acho que sim. A minha vida está muito ligada à independência, isto é, até os nove anos de idade não se sabia na minha aldeia, o que era um menino precoce. Então eu sofri muita protecção, sobretudo das mulheres mais velhas. A minha avó e a minha tia-avó. A minha mãe não ligava muito. Ela estava sempre a parir. Então a minha avó tomava conta. E aos dez anos, de repente, eu encontrei um poema no bolso das calças do meu irmão, um poema sobre Amílcar Cabral. Isto mudou a minha vida. E isso me levou à música, porque detectaram-me na rua a recitar poemas. Tinha uma memória fabulosa. E o Estado adoptou-me: "temos que lhe dar uma educação especial, porque isso ainda vai ser gente, não é?" Ainda há poucos dias encontrei o antigo Primeiro-Ministro Pedro Pires e ele ria muito. Ele foi lá à minha casa ao Tarrafal e dizia "realmente somos amigos há 51 anos, não é?" Ele está com 95, mais ou menos isso. E olhamos para trás, disse "Olha aquele encontro". Parece que ele se sente satisfeito e muito orgulhoso disso. Então, na verdade, estes 50 anos de dependência são 50 anos de um percurso da noite para o dia. Nada do que eu estava a fazer, do que estava previsto, depois eu vim a fazer, que era ser um pescador ou um pedreiro lá da zona, com muito poucas condições, como não tiveram o resto dos meus irmãos ou dos meus vizinhos. A independência trouxe isso. Estudei e tive acesso às artes. Tive acesso à universidade, tive acesso, depois, às condições que foram criadas depois da independência para as crianças, para os adolescentes. E também fui recebendo. Fui reciclando e dando também. Hoje, quando olho para trás, do alto dos meus 60 anos, tenho 50 anos de dádiva e de gratidão. Porque, na verdade, logo que eu comecei, com dez anos, eu já era músico na minha aldeia e também no grupo Abel Djassi, lá no Tarrafal, com instrumentos e dávamos concertos. E já aos 15, eu era profissional, a meio termo porque eu era estudante, mas tocava também nos bailes. De modo que isto também, essa pergunta é uma prenda para mim. Vou agora pensar nisso nos próximos dias. Como é que, na verdade, é um balanço junto com a história do meu país.RFI: E relativamente à História do seu país? Quando olha para esses 50 anos de percurso livre para Cabo Verde, como é que olha para todo este caminho já atravessado?Mário Lúcio: Tem dois lados, a independência, como a descolonização, esses reveses do domínio e também do aprisionamento e do cerceamento da liberdade. Esses reveses são sempre positivos, porque o homem nasceu para ser livre e feliz e dentro disso tem as matizes que é ser amado, amar, ser generoso, ter ética. Várias coisas. Mas, na verdade, tem o outro lado. Muitos países africanos pioraram as suas condições para as suas populações depois da independência. Isso é inaceitável. Um povo livre, um povo autónomo e países com muita riqueza, não é aceitável que passem a viver igual ou pior do que antes da independência. Cabo Verde é uma belíssima excepção. Eu não sei as razões. Evidentemente, podemos analisá-las. A formação desse povo é uma formação diferente, a escolaridade. Cabo Verde, em 1975, tinha uma taxa de analfabetismo de 75%. Hoje tem (uma taxa de alfabetização) acima de 98%. E então isso faz com que seja um país que progride todos os dias. Em Cabo Verde, é o progresso, o desenvolvimento humano. O desenvolvimento económico é apenas um índice. Mas o desenvolvimento humano passa por ter escolas. A escolaridade obrigatória e gratuita é boa, como existe em Cabo Verde, ter saúde, nós temos uma saúde básica boa. Em Cabo Verde, ter liberdade, liberdade de expressão e outras liberdades identitárias, respeita-se isso. Em Cabo Verde, os Direitos Humanos são respeitados e é um país onde todo o mundo trabalha. Não está infestado de corrupção e de ditaduras. Eu tenho uma sorte. Hoje a minha bandeira é as últimas eleições autárquicas em Cabo Verde. Portanto, as eleições foram no domingo e na segunda-feira todo mundo foi trabalhar. Nas minhas palestras falo da democracia de Cabo Verde, mas desta vez falo com mais felicidade porque houve uma região da ilha de Santiago, acho que era São Lourenço dos Órgãos, onde o vencedor saiu por um voto. Está a ver em África ou no mundo, ou nos Estados Unidos, algum candidato que vence o outro por um voto e não houve briga, não houve manifestações? Muito bem. Vamos recontar, contar, recontar. E se alguém tiver dúvidas, existem as instâncias próprias. Isso é saudável, de modo que quando se sente a maturidade para um povo ser livre e cuidar dos seus destinos, os resultados são como os resultados que existem em Cabo Verde e vários outros países. Vale a pena. E esse processo de Cabo Verde valeu a pena.RFI: Algum ponto talvez menos positivo, que também mereça a sua atenção? Alguma coisa que talvez possa melhorar em Cabo Verde, a seu ver?Mário Lúcio: O mundo todo! Eu acho que neste momento há uma desumanização da política, há uma desumanização da economia, há uma desumanização do próprio ser humano. E isso tem a ver com várias situações sociais. Quando o ser humano não tem acesso à cultura, é uma parte de si, principalmente a parte invisível, que é a alma da pessoa, que está a ser menosprezada, desvalorizada. Quando a pessoa não tem acesso à educação, está a ser-lhe negada uma das vias do progresso e do desenvolvimento humano. Em relação ao meu país, o que eu acho é que, também por fazermos parte do mundo, julgo que temos correcções a fazer. Essas correcções têm a ver exactamente com colocar a felicidade e a liberdade e o acesso ao progresso humano no centro das políticas e não ir, digamos assim, na moda e com o vento das várias possibilidades que estão a existir, de tornar o ser humano secundário, em que se dá demasiada importância às máquinas e à ganância. Então, acho que o Cabo Verde também está a sofrer disso nesse momento.RFI: Cabo Verde faz parte dos países que são homenageados pelos 50 anos das suas respectivas independências no festival "Au fil des voix" aqui em Paris. Como se sente por representar o seu país neste festival?Mário Lúcio: Eu nunca pensei ser um "representante oficial". Mesmo quando eu estava no governo. Mas na verdade, no outro dia, na minha aldeia, na minha vila, um historiador parou-me na rua para me cumprimentar e disse "que orgulho! Mas saiba uma coisa tu és património do Tarrafal." E eu disse "olha, eu que nasci com espírito livre e nunca quis pertencer a nenhuma agremiação e não ser nada para nada". Mas eu disse "para a minha pequena vila, eu aceito, então sou património". E quando me dizem que eu represento o meu país, tomo como uma leveza. Isto é o meu país. Representas ou sentes-te representado nas minhas acções. Por isso, também faço as minhas acções com a maior qualidade possível. E faço-as num contexto internacional, mundial, para que a sua representação não seja menos do que a sua realidade. Tenho trabalhado para isso.RFI: Está a lançar neste momento o seu novo disco. Como é que vai ser a sua actualidade nos próximos meses?Mário Lúcio: Bom, esse disco vai-me fazer tocar bastante. Como já não tocava em bailes, festivais, quero fazer bailes mesmo. Vai ser uma descoberta para as novas gerações, porque é um disco para se ouvir de pé. É um disco para libertar energias. Então, vamos fazer muitas turnês. Muitos concertos e já começamos. Agora vou a Cabo Verde descansar. Em Março, retomo e por aí adiante. Em Abril, Maio, Junho, Julho, Agosto. Setembro, Outubro, Novembro, já está tudo encaminhado. Hoje, vivo no Tarrafal, onde eu nasci, na minha cabana, e é onde quero estar mais tempo. Então começo a fazer as turnês de forma diferente. Não longas turnês, mas muito compactas, a vir à Europa, ir a outras partes do mundo, trabalhar e logo regressar para o meu mar, o meu sol, o meu povo, a minha terra.RFI: O que é que gosta de ouvir neste momento?Mário Lúcio: Eu sou muito eclético. Mas eu diria que se me dessem para escolher cinco músicas para ouvir permanentemente, escolheria, "Gracias à La Vida" de Violeta Parra, se possível interpretada por Mercedes Sosa. Ouviria também "Imagine" de John Lennon. Ouviria "What a Wonderful World" do Louis Armstrong e ouviria uma das "chaconnes" e "partidas" de Johann Sebastian Bach para violino e para violoncelo. E também ouviria "Sodade" na voz de Cesária Évora.Eis a programação do festival "Au fil des voix": https://www.aufildesvoix.com/

Dancefloor Memories with Patrick Hawkins, 60 Minutes of Classic 1960'S Soul Podcast. Classic tracks, from, The Bar Kays, The Capitols, Robert Parker, Shirley Ellis, Jackie Wilson, Arthur Conley, Sam and Dave, Booker T and the Mg's, Otis Redding, Fontella Bass, Motown tracks from Mary Wells, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Jr Walker and the All Stars, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, and Jimmy Ruffin, more classic tracks from Ben E King, Percy Sledge, and The Impressions. Just settle down with a long drink and chill or boogie around your kitchen to tracks others would never dream of playing! Spread the word, give me a like and follow my Podcasts. Much Love Pat

El amigo secreto y Rafael Panadero se atreven con los primeros acordes de una de las canciones de Percy Sledge más recordadas. Al ritmo de 'When A Man Loves A Woman' empezamos la mañana.

Las versiones musicales del amigo secreto de Javier del Pino y (un poco menos) de Rafa Panadero.

Uwe had a long weekend away and did some record digging in unfamiliar territory while James hit up a couple of the usual fruitful record spots in Louisville. They both added some great 45s to their collections from the likes of The Ikettes, Gino Washington, Percy Sledge, the Soul Brothers Six, OV Wright, Etta James, Marva Whitney, some raw early Motown from Sherri Taylor and "Singin" Sammy Ward, and more!For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/that-driving-beat/Tune into new broadcasts of That Driving Beat, Tuesdays from 8- 10 PM EST / 1 - 3 AM GMT//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Uwe had a long weekend away and did some record digging in unfamiliar territory while James hit up a couple of the usual fruitful record spots in Louisville. They both added some great 45s to their collections from the likes of The Ikettes, Gino Washington, Percy Sledge, the Soul Brothers Six, OV Wright, Etta James, Marva Whitney, some raw early Motown from Sherri Taylor and "Singin" Sammy Ward, and more! -Originally broadcast December 1, 2024- Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatLloyd Price / Every NightFrankie Valli / (You're Gonna) Hurt YourselfThe Ikettes / Troubles On My MindO.V. Wright / What Did you Tell This Girl Of MineThe Royalettes / It's A Big MistakeGino Washington / Come Monkey With MeSoul, Inc. / Midnight HourThe Wildweeds / Someday MorningThe Electric Flag / Over-Lovin' YouThe Quotations / ImaginationPercy Sledge / Baby, Help MeTommy & Cleve / Boo-Ga-Loo BabySoul Brothers Six / You Better Check YourselfSherri Taylor & "Singin" Sammy Ward / LoverOtis Redding / SatisfactionSandra Lynn / I Can't EscapeArthur Alexander / Pretty Girls EverywhereThe Five Knights / Times Are Getting HarderBrian Auger & The Trinity / Bumpin' On SunsetStone Foundation / Ordinary JoeDee Dee Warwick / Next Time (You Fall in Love)Etta James / Street Of TearsIrene Reid / One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)Nella Dodds / Maybe BabyRay Pollard / WanderlustSam Baker / I'm Number OneJohnny Preston / All Around The WorldSugar Pie DeSanto / Soulful DressTommy Tucker / Hi-Heel SneakersMarva Whitney / Ball Of FireBetty Everett / What Is It?Emorise Kelley / The Biggest FoolDee Dee Sharp / There Ain't Nothin' I Wouldn't Do for YouSusan King / You Got Me In A FixLittle Anthony & The Imperials / Better Use Your HeadSteve Alaimo / I Told You SoFreddy Scott and the Seven Steps / The Thing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

National play day with dad. Entertainment from 1994.Woody Woodpecker made his acting debut, Philadelphia held the 1st Thanksgiving parade, US imposed a nation wide 55MPH speed limit. Todays birthdays - Ricardo Montalban, Percy Sledge, John Larroquette, Amy Grant, Christina Applegate.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard     http://defleppard.com/The best day - George StraitI'll make love to you - Boys II MenIf I could make a livin - Clay WalkerBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent     http://50cent.com/When a man loves a woman - Percy SledgeNight Court TV themeBaby Baby - Amy GrantMarried with children TV theme - Frank SinatraExit - It's not love - Dokken     http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook, linkedin and cooolmedia.com

Seven years after our community was ravaged by three different wildfires, we're going to focus on the theme of rain in our show today. Call it a rain dance if you must but we're hoping that not only will the weather give us one more year of respite from the flaming torrent of climate change-induced wildfires but also make it two years in a row with reservoir replenishment. So why not a theme that promotes rainy weather? We'll go to every genre corner in the show today: gospel, jazz, country, rock ‘n roll, soul and rhythm & blues. Tune in for a themed collection this morning that includes the likes of Glenn Yarbrough, Percy Sledge, Leon Russell, Lonnie Johnson and Billy “The Kid” Emerson. There's a whole lot more so join in and find out. A sunny September morning leads us to our rain dance…or whatever you call it.

Sometimes you feel like a Nutt... Jimmy talked about Fame Studios, Jason Isbell, how to get $1000 for recording your music, miking up a bluegrass band, miking upright bass, the secret to great drums, large versus small mics, and setting up monitors. Get access to FREE mixing mini-course: https://MixMasterBundle.com My guest today is Jimmy Nutt a GRAMMY Award winning Engineer, Jimmy Nutt, grew up in Shreveport Louisiana surrounded by musicians steeped in blues and rock. He joined his first band at age 13. Early on, Jimmy was interested in recording and sound. He acquired a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder while still in his teens and started learning how to record a band. In 2000, Jimmy moved his family to Muscle Shoals, AL. to work as a staff-recording engineer at FAME Recording Studios. During his time at FAME, he recorded sessions for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Clarence Carter, Heartland, Russell Smith, The Drive-by-Truckers and many more. He worked at FAME for almost 3 years before becoming an independent recording engineer and producer. He was also a staff writer for FAME's publishing company during this time. Jimmy is now the owner of The NuttHouse Recording Studio, Inc. located in downtown Sheffield, Alabama. He transformed a bank built in 1955 into a recording studio and has hosted numerous recording sessions in the last 14 years including well-known artists; Percy Sledge, The Dead South, Blind Boys of Alabama, Dylan LeBlanc, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jason Isbell, John Paul White, Donna Jean Godchaux, and The SteelDrivers. In 2016, Jimmy won a GRAMMY award for engineering and mixing the “Bluegrass Album of the Year”, The SteelDrivers, “The Muscle Shoals Recordings”. And In 2020, Jimmy won the Canadian Juno award for producing and mixing the “Traditional Roots Album of the Year” for The Dead South album “Sugar & Joy”. Thank you so much to Jake Kiser, Mark Rubel, Craig Alvin, suggesting Jimmy come on the show and Kyle Lenhing for making our introduction! THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS! http://UltimateMixingMasterclass.com https://www.adam-audio.com https://www.native-instruments.com Use code ROCK10 to get 10% off! https://www.izotope.com Use code ROCK10 to get 10% off! https://gracedesign.com/ https://RecordingStudioRockstars.com/Academy  https://www.thetoyboxstudio.com/ Check out the MBSI on sale now for $80 off! https://www.makebelievestudio.com/mbsi  Listen to this guest's discography on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Wo9DKqojKpzf9ocdxbFG2?si=356832708b5046f2 If you love the podcast, then please leave a review: https://RSRockstars.com/Review CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE SHOW NOTES AT: https://RSRockstars.com/464

Send us a Text Message.Singles Going Around- Atlantic SoulWe start off Season 6 with a great one. All my life I have loved the sound of Soul from Atlantic Records and their other labels. This is my homage to that great sound.Ray Charles- "I Got A Woman"Solomon Burke- "Stupidity"Eddie Floyd- "Knock On Wood"The Mar-Keys- "Philly Dog"Otis Redding- "Shake"Wilson Pickett- "Land Of 1000 Dances"Arthur Conley- "Sweet Soul Music"Percy Sledge- "Baby, Help Me"Booker T & The MG's- "Green Onions"Sam & Dave- "Hold On I'm Coming"Chris Kenner- "I Like It Like That"Aretha Franklin- "Good Times"The Drifters- "Save The Last Dance For Me"Eddie Floyd- "Good Love, Bad Love"The Coasters- "Down In Mexico"Sam & Dave- "I Thank You"Archie Bell & The Drells- "Tighten Up"Ray Charles- "Don't You Know"King Floyd- "Groove Me"Clarence Carter- "Patches"Joe Tex- "The Love You Save"Solomon Burke- "If You Need Me"Otis Redding- "What A Wonderful World"Wilson Pickett- "Mustang Sally"Booker T & The MGs- "Hip Hug Her"Joe Tex- "The Letter Song"Aretha Franklin- "Save Me"Chris Kenner- "Land Of 1000 Dances"

Jurist, hoogleraar, politicus en diplomaat Dries van Agt was op z'n zachtst gezegd een bijzonder politicus. Toen hij minister president was (1977-1982), maar ook al daarvoor als Minister van Justitie werd hij de spil in politieke commotie rond de Drie van Breda, abortuskliniek Bloemenhove, de zaak Mentens en de Molukse trein- en schoolkapingen. Na zijn politieke carrière schoof hij op naar links, zei zijn lidmaatschap van het CDA op en werd pleitbezorger van de Palestijnse zaak. Hij overleed onlangs op hoge leeftijd, samen met zijn echtgenote Eugenie Krekelberg, als gevolg van duo-euthanasie. In Wat Blijft volgt Peter Blom zijn spoor terug en praat met journalist Jan Tromp (Volkskrant), voormalig politica Hedy d'Ancona en Van Agt's kleindochter en profwielrenster Eva van Agt.  ---- Redactie radio: Laura Iwuchukwu, Nina Ramkisoen, Geerte Verduijn, Jessica Zoghary. Eindredactie: Bram Vollaers  ---   Meer over Wat blijft: https://www.human.nl/wat-blijft Zie voor de playlist met alle muziek uit Wat blijft: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Gu8KXUHeVhLYE9M2jKkwu?si=cf8248e5824a48e5

Welcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:1 point: get the year correct within 10 years (e.g., you guess 1975 and it is between 1965-1985)4 points: get the year correct within 5 years (e.g., you guess 2004 and it is between 1999-2009)7 points: get the year correct within 2 years (e.g., you guess 1993 and it is between 1991-1995)10 points: get the year dead on!Guesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.comI will read your scores out on the following episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede (1974)Song 1: When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge (1966)Song 2: Musicology by Prince (2004)Song 3: Dancing Queen by ABBA (1976)Song 4: The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen (1995)Song 5: Cool the Engines by Boston (1986)Song 6: If Leaving Me is Easy by Phil Collins (1981)Song 7: Lovefool by The Cardigans (1996)Song 8: Eyes Closed by Ed Sheeran (2023)Song 9: Irreplaceable by Beyonce (2006)Song 10: No Man's Woman by Sinead O'Connor (2000)

Craig and Rex riff on New Mexico State beating Auburn, Texas A&M is really proud of beating Abilene Christian and Sam Houston, the 2024 Hall of Fame ballot, who might be the baseball equivalent to Journey, MLB owners approve Oakland's move to Las Vegas and the Rolling Stones are going on tour.Episodes Mentioned:143 - The Rays Are Getting Their New Stadium w/ Dr. Elizabeth Strom163 - A Journey Through Mallparks w/ Prof. Michael T. Friedman -->Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/tT8d3pVUsN-->You can support Hooks & Runs by purchasing books, including the books featured in this episode, through our store at Bookshop.org. Here's the link. https://bookshop.org/shop/hooksandrunsHooks & Runs - www.hooksandruns.comHooks & Runs on TikTok -  https://www.tiktok.com/@hooksandrunsHooks & Runs on Twitter - https://twitter.com/thehooksandrunsAndrew Eckhoff on Tik TokLink: https://www.tiktok.com/@hofffestRex von Pohl (Krazy Karl's Music Emporium) on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/people/Krazy-Karlz-Music-Emporium/100063801500293/ Music: "Warrior of Light" by ikolics (Premium Beat)      

National play day with dad. Entertainment from 1961.Woody Woodpecker made his acting debut, Philadelphia held the 1st Thanksgiving parade, US imposed a nation wide 55MPH speed limit. Todays birthdays - Ricardo Montalban, Percy Sledge, John Larroquette, Amy Grant, Christina Applegate. Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/The best day - George StraitBig Bad John - Jimmy DeanBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Fantasy Island TV themeWhen a man loves a woman - Percy SledgeNight Court TV themeBaby Baby - Amy GrantMarried with children TV theme - Frank SinatraExit - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/https://coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/

You may recall that a few weeks ago, I played a couple of interviews with the great Vinny Ciesielski. He's a wonderful person and has been a mainstay for years in the Nashville music scene. Vinnie really acquitted himself well in the podcast, so much so that I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I were to give him the reins for an interview on this podcast!What you'll hear in this episode:-Mike shares his founding origins on trumpet in the Nashville area...04:30-Successes and pitfalls breaking into the Nashville scene in the late 1970's...09:45-Mike and Vinnie discuss equipment for varying situations...19:05-The worst things often lead to the best things...22:30-How "overuse syndrome" nearly derailed a boatload of "natural talent"...29:15-Serve the music, and remember just because you have it doesn't mean you need it...37:00-The spirituality of the practice of music within and without...41:30-What Mike would teach his teenage self...52:00-Plus whatever your discerning ears deem worthy of your time and interest...Resources mentioned:Trumpet Dynamics podcast episodes with Vinnie CiesielskiThe Way of the Peaceful WarriorAbout the Guest:Attending Towson University in Maryland, Vinnie Ciesielski majored in music performance on trumpet, which he has played professionally for over 50 years.Since coming to Nashville in 1992, Vinnie has played on thousands of recordings with artists such as Lyle Lovett, Travis Tritt, Tracy Byrd, Smokey Norful, Tanya Tucker, Glenn Frey, T.D. Jakes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bad Company, Gregg Allman, Kirk Franklin, Queen Latifah, Yolanda Adams, Donnie McClurkin, Israel Houghton, Demi Lovato, Grace Potter, Delbert McClinton, Alison Krauss, Taylor Swift, The Clark Sisters, Thomas Rhett, Nuno Betencort, Marcus Scott (Tower of Power) Steven Tyler, Vince Gill, Michael McDonald, Keb Mo, Johnny Taylor, Bobby Blue Bland, Via Con Dios, Martina McBride, Don Was, Zac Brown Band, and many more.He has performed live with artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Gladys Knight, Kid Rock, Keith Richards, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, Sting, Tony Bennett, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Kenny Rogers, Shelby Lynne, The Temptations, The Four Tops, The O'Jays, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Shawn Colvin, Eddie Floyd, Booker T. and the MGs, Vince Gill, Amy Grant, Bob Hope, Frankie Valli, Sheryl Crow, Adrian Belew, Bruce Hornsby, Michael McDonald, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Nettles and The Beach Boys.He has also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,, Late Night with David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, CBS New Years Eve Bash, The Road, SoundStage, Disney and Universal TV specials, Nashville Now, Music City Tonight, Austin City Limits, Grand Old Opry, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen's Really Big Show, Crossroads, The Dove Awards and The Stellar Awards. Vinnie has performed on numerous Radio, Internet, TV and Movie soundtracks and Trailers. He has also performed with the Nashville Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony, Orchestra Kentucky, Nashville and Knoxville Jazz Orchestras.Well known in the performance and recording community, Vinnie's resume includes work on over 6,000 recording sessions, 50 Grammy-nominated and 25 Grammy-winning recordingsand dozens of Stellar and Dove Award nominated and winning recordings. Vinnie has also been the horn arranger on multiple Grammy, Dove and Stellar nominated and winning recordings.Thank you for joining us on "Trumpet Dynamics" – telling the story of the trumpet, in the words of those who play it....

directly available here: TOOOOOOOOOOPERSFeatures fine music by Mike Hankinson, Percy Sledge,  Spanky & Our Gang, The Eden Electric Ensemble, Phil Niblock, LL Cool J, Gerry Mulligan, Reunion, Leonard Nimoy, Butthole Surfers, Devo, composer Raymond "Def" Leppard, and more.

On this edition of TMWS, I am speaking with Howell Sledge, the son of Percy Sledge, and the lead singer of Howell Sledge and the Revue! Howell will be talking about his dad, his family, his own life, and the upcoming Sledgefest taking place in Leighton, Alabama, this Saturday from 1p-9p CST.

Welcome to Part 2 of my interview with Vinnie Ciesielski!Before I say anything else, let me point out that the link I share to access the show notes during the episode is incorrect. The show notes for this episode are https://trumpetdynamics.com/trumpetvinnie2. I believe I left out the number 2 during the interview because I initially planned to have this be one giant episode, but wisely chose to break it into two parts.And what a part this is. Vinnie and I dove deep into the "why" of playing trumpet. The "How" tends to be rather superficial, which is why I don't have much interest in podcasts like that. But the "why" is what gets me excited, and Vinnie surely did not disappoint with his insightful comments in this one.Enjoy!What you'll hear in this episode:-More in-depth dialogue on the "good day and great day" concept...05:05-The need for healthy lifestyle for success on trumpet and overall quality of life...08:30-Self-loathing equates to loathing your environment...13:30-Why and how Vinnie has played with a rare condition that causes loss of feeling on the left side of his body...17:20-If you can feel your face, you're ahead of the game!...25:00-Shame is a wasted emotion...32:00-Keeping things real regarding the importance of trumpet...36:00-Adapting to radically changed physicality, and thoughtfully losing weight so it stays off...43:30-Music a salve for tremendous joy and intense loss...53:45-Are we "called" to trumpet?...58:45-A father's offhand comment while watching TV proves prophetic...01:03:30-Plus whatever your discerning ears deem worthy of your time and interest...Resources mentioned:Vinnie's websiteMy Fitness Pal appTrumpet Dynamics podcast with Beth PeroutkaAbout the Guest:Attending Towson University in Maryland, Vinnie Ciesielski majored in music performance on trumpet, which he has played professionally for over 50 years.Since coming to Nashville in 1992, Vinnie has played on thousands of recordings with artists such as Lyle Lovett, Travis Tritt, Tracy Byrd, Smokey Norful, Tanya Tucker, Glenn Frey, T.D. Jakes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bad Company, Gregg Allman, Kirk Franklin, Queen Latifah, Yolanda Adams, Donnie McClurkin, Israel Houghton, Demi Lovato, Grace Potter, Delbert McClinton, Alison Krauss, Taylor Swift, The Clark Sisters, Thomas Rhett, Nuno Betencort, Marcus Scott (Tower of Power) Steven Tyler, Vince Gill, Michael McDonald, Keb Mo, Johnny Taylor, Bobby Blue Bland, Via Con Dios, Martina McBride, Don Was, Zac Brown Band, and many more.He has performed live with artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Gladys Knight, Kid Rock, Keith Richards, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, Sting, Tony Bennett, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Kenny Rogers, Shelby Lynne, The Temptations, The Four Tops, The O'Jays, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Shawn Colvin, Eddie Floyd, Booker T. and the MGs, Vince Gill, Amy Grant, Bob Hope, Frankie Valli, Sheryl Crow, Adrian Belew, Bruce Hornsby, Michael McDonald, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Nettles and The Beach Boys.He has also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,, Late Night with David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, CBS New Years Eve Bash, The Road, SoundStage, Disney and Universal TV specials, Nashville Now, Music City Tonight, Austin City Limits, Grand Old Opry, Rosie...

On this edition of TMWS, I am speaking with Howell Sledge, the son of Percy Sledge, and the lead singer of Howell Sledge and the Revue! Howell will be talking about his dad, his family, his own life, and the upcoming Sledgefest taking place in Leighton, Alabama, this Saturday from 1p-9p CST.

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m

The first of the six covers that appear on Please Please Me is a mid-tempo ballad called “Anna (Go to Him),” which was written and first recorded by Arthur Alexander. Chances are that most people who hear the version sung by John Lennon have no idea who Arthur Alexander is—but the Beatles certainly knew, and so did the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan: Alexander is reportedly the only songwriter whose tunes have appeared on studio albums by those three hallowed acts. Elvis Presley recorded one of his songs as well—albeit one that Alexander co-wrote—and so did Otis Redding and Tina Turner and Jerry Lee Lewis and Percy Sledge.Don Covay  recorded for several labels, including Blaze, Sue, Big Top, Fire, Arnold, Fleetwood, Columbia, Epic and Scepter, releasing 'Popeye Waddle' b/w 'One Little Boy Had Money' in 1962 for Cameo Parkway, which became a hit.Don was, by now, recording solo material, and material under the name of Don Covay and the Goodtimers.He penned the U.S. number 1 single 'Pony Time' for Chubby Checker, wrote a hit song called 'I'm Hanging Up My Heart for You', for the Soul singer Solomon Burke, and wrote for Gladys Knight & The Pips, penning 'Letter Full of Tears', which made the top 20.Don formed partnerships with several associates including Horace Ott and Ronnie Miller.In 1964, when he signed to the Rosemart label.His debut single there with the Goodtimers, 'Mercy Mercy' featured Jimi Hendrix on guitar.The following year, Jimi Hendrix played again on the follow up single 'Take This Hurt Off Me' b/w 'Please Don't Let Me Know'.Clarence Carter didn't have it easy while growing up in Alabama; and being Black and blind was an extra burden, but he has overcome many other obstacles in so many ways. “I feel incredibly good about what I've been able to accomplish, but it was not easy. Our world presents challenges and barriers to success for people with disabilities, but I always wanted more in life and believe that the ADA helped me get to where I am today.”I would like to say that Carter now has three “B's” behind his name, Black, Blind and Blessed. Carter is known for serious Blues music, which includes a string of R&B hits. The songs “Back Door Santa,” “Slip Away,” “Patches,” “Too Weak to Fight” and the dance hall hit “Strokin” are part of his Blues legacy.

In this week's episode, Sid Evans, Editor-in-Chief of Southern Living Magazine, chats with Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay, a singer who's lent her voice to some of the most well known music of the last 60 years. She got her start as a session singer when just a teenager in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and her voice helped songs from Percy Sledge and Elvis Presley become #1 hits. Eventually, she headed to California and made the transition from the studio to live performance after befriending Jerry Garcia and joining the Grateful Dead. She's also got a love of both Southern and Californian cuisines and, of course, her grandmother's delicious biscuits. For more info visit: southernliving.com/biscuitsandjam Biscuits & Jam is produced by: Sid Evans - Editor-in-Chief, Southern Living Krissy Tiglias - GM, Southern Living Lottie Leymarie - Executive Producer Michael Onufrak - Audio Engineer/Producer Jeremiah McVay - Script Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barry Joseph Goldberg is an American blues and rock keyboardist, songwriter, and record producer. Goldberg has co-produced albums by Percy Sledge, Charlie Musselwhite, James Cotton, and the Textones, plus Bob Dylan's version of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready". barrygoldbergmusic.com http://markhummel.com

Singles Going Around- Mimosa Tree BluesThe Byrds- "It's No Use"Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs- "Little Red Riding Hood"Tony Joe White- "Whompt Out On You"The Monkees- "Daily Nightly"Joe South- "Hush"Elvis- "The Power of My Love"Simon & Garfunkel- "Fakin' It"Percy Sledge- "Take The Time To Know Her"Tommy McClain- "Before I Grow Too Old"The Animals- "Talking About You"Sonny & Cher- "I Look For You"Booker T & The MG's- "Sunny"The Beatles- "We Can Work It Out"Elmore James- "It Hurts Me Too"Bobby Charles- "Goodnight Irene"Lazy Lester- "Strange Things Happen"Neil Diamond- "Brother Love's Traveling Salvtion Show"Vanilla Fudge- "You Keep Me Hangin' On" (QT Edit)*All songs taken from the original Lp's and 45 rpm records.

| Worth It  | Dria Thornton | So Soon  | Aretha Franklin  | Mine (Remix)  | Wanmor | You And Me  | Ten - 63 | Please Don't Go (Vocal)  | Ches Haynes & The Outfit | Show Me  | Tahjená  | Honey Butter  | Dene | Live With That  | Shannon Lauren Callihan | The Man  | Laolu | I Can't Believe It's True (Where Did Our Love Go)  | The Creators | Sitting In The Park  | Ernando Recendez | You Don't Know  | Kim Tavar | Sunset Love  | Maeva Borzakian | On My Own  | Marie Dahlstrom | Lover's Interlude (The Realm Edit)  | October London | Tell Me (Gedi Clean Edit)  | October London | Don't Be Cruel  | Plus | Addicted (Clean Version)  | Rose Gold | Hold My Hand  | Saint Smith | Karma (Clean Version)  | Taylor McCants  | Learn To Love  | Isadora | She Knows  | Spring The Artist | Say We'll Stay  | Ten - 63 | The World Feels A Little Brighter  | Marie Dahlstrom | Through The Night  | Maeta feat. Free Nationals | On My Mind  | Iris Aeria | I Don't Wanna  | Iris Aeria | Good Enough  | Oria | Baby Baby Baby  | Percy Sledge | It Was You  | Aretha Franklin  | Beautiful  | Kim Tavar

(Open) PLANTATION INN - The Mar-keys BUT IT'S ALRIGHT - J.J. Jackson BE YOUNG, BE FOOLISH, BE HAPPY - The Tams IT TEARS ME UP - Percy Sledge THE ENTERTAINER - Tony Clark TIGHTEN UP - Archie Bell and the Drells ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE - Jerry Butler JUST DON'T WANT TO BE LONELY - The Main Ingredient SITTING IN THE PARK - Billy Stewart TREAT HER LIKE A LADY - Cornelius Brothers LOVE ON A TWO WAY STREET - The Moments 39-21-46 - The Showmen I'M GONNA MISS YOU - The Artistics ANY DAY NOW - James Brown COWBOYS TO GIRLS - The Intruders LOVE OR LET ME BE LONELY - Friends of Distinction SIDESHOW - Blue Magic RIVER DEEP, MOUNTAIN HIGH - Ike and Tina Turner HOLD BACK THE NIGHT - The Tramps YOU DON'T KNOW - Dana Valery TOO LATE - Larry Williams & Johnny Watson SOUL TIME - Shirley Ellis TIME WILL PASS YOU BY - Tobi Legend MOONLIGHT, MUSIC AND YOU - Laura Green HELP ME (GET MYSELF BACK TOGETHER) - The Spellbinders  

Sometimes you don't realize the hidden gems that are in plain sight. SLIM HARPO was such an influential artist that stemmed from Baton Rouge and gained international recognition from artists all over the world. With major hits like "I'm a King Bee", "Rainin' in My Heart" and "Baby Scratch My Back", which reached number one on Billboard's R&B chart and number 16 on its broader Hot 100 singles chart. Johnny Palazzotto and his amazing team has given next level dedication over with over two decades worth of work to present the Slim Harpo Documentary. With a long list of accomplishments of his own, I found that I had more questions that needed answers!  Make plans to join us Saturday, April 15, 2023 at the Main Library on Goodwood for the showing of this amazing documentary. The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited... Please RSVP. Watch full interview HERE Read more on the man behind the scene running the scene.  Johnny Palazzotto, a veteran of the entertainment industry, has become synonymous with discovering new talent and putting Louisiana artists on the international map, thus earning him a music business Lifetime Achievement Award from Offbeat Magazine (2011) as well as an induction into the Southern University Jazz Hall of Fame (2002). His work also landed him a spot on the Board of Governors' Memphis Chapter of the Recording Academy. The Baton Rouge native has helped to shape the careers of dozens of artists including Loggins & Messina. He has managed artists, auditioned and signed new writers, filed copyrights, negotiated contracts for recording artists, produced and distributed albums, and produced concerts from Los Angeles to Louisiana. Palazzotto is co-founder of Baton Rouge Blues Foundation,Inc. He currently produces the Slim Harpo Music Awards and presents Music in the Schools throughout Louisiana. This program introduces elementary, middle school and high school students to a music curriculum beyond the origins of all-American blues to gospel, rock and hip-hop. Palazzotto presented Baton Rouge Blues Week in conjunction with the Blues Festival including artists such as: Luther Kent, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Luther Allison, Johnny Adams, Percy Sledge, Ruthie Foster, Sonny Landreth, Bonnie Bramlett, Earl King, Philip Guy, Coco Montoya, Derrick Trucks, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Delbert McClinton, Jimmie Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton and Tony Joe White among local Blues Legends, Tabby Thomas, Henry Gray, Raful Neal, Larry Garner, ChrisThomas King, Kenny Neal. ************************************************************************************************* NEW MUSIC ALERT NEVER KNEW - LaTangela Fay NEW BOOK ALERT P.O.O.F. (Power Over Obstacles Forever) - LaTangela Fay Sherman ************************************************************************************ THE LATANGELA SHOW RADIO -  WEMX- Baton Rouge, La. Mon-Fri 10a.m.-3p.m.CST TV - WLFT - Baton Rouge, La. KGLA  - New Orleans, La. The Louisiana Film Channel YouTube - #LaTangelaFay Podcast - ALL digital platforms www.LaTangela.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Edwin Starr and Percy Sledge are often viewed as "one-hit-wonders," in large part because their careers were each defined by a massive hit.  The truth, however, is that these were accomplished artists with more substantial recording careers than they are credited with.  It is time to change the narrative!Reviewing the careers of Starr and Sledge also gives us a chance to compare and contrast Motown and Atlantic Records (Muscle Shoals).  So, let's get into it!

Since release day for this episode falls on Christmas, we think it's fitting that we wish you a metal Christmas. In this episode we share some holiday share and break down that metal Christmas holiday class album "We wish You A Metal Xmas". We also have a special Crank It Up New Music Spotlight with Dallas Dwight from the LA Maybe. We share their latest song and find out what they've been up too. Enjoy and Happy Holidays to you and yours from the Growin' Up Rock Crew. WE NEED YOUR HELP!! It's quick, easy, and free - Please consider doing one or all of the following to help grow our audience: Leave Us A Five Star Review in one of the following places: Apple Podcast Podchaser Connect with us  Email us growinuprock@gmail.com Contact Form  Like and Follow Us on FaceBook Follow Us on Twitter Leave Us A Review On Podchaser Join The Growin' Up Rock Loud Minority Facebook Group Do You Spotify? Then Follow us and Give Our Playlist a listen. We update it regularly with kick ass rock n roll Spotify Playlist Buy and Support Music From The Artist We Discuss On This Episode Growin' Up Rock Amazon Store The LA Maybe Music in this Episode Provided by the Following: Halestorm, The LA Maybe, Jeff Scott Soto, Bruce Kulick, Bob Kulick, Chris Wyse, Ray Luzier, Lemmy, Billy F. Gibbons, Dave Grohl, Alice Cooper, John 5, Billy Sheehan, Vinny Appice, Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Rudy Sarzo, Simon Wright, Geoff Tate, Carlos Cavazo, James Lomenzo, Doug Pinnick, George Lynch, Simon Phillips, Tim "Ripper" Owens, Steve Morse, Juan Garcia, Marco Mendoza, Chuck Billy, Scott Ian, Jon Donais, John Tempesta, Oni Logan, Craig Goldy, Tony Franklin, Stephen Pearcy, Tracii Guns, Greg Bissonette, Joe Lynn Turner, Tommy Shaw, Steve Lukather, Kenny Aronoff, Chuck Berry, Jackson 5, Garth Brooks, Bing Crosby, Carol Richards, Elvis Presley, The Temptations, Percy Sledge, Nat King Cole, Elmo & Patsy, Brenda Lee, John Lennon, Sin City Sinners Crank It Up New Music Spotlight Our Conversation with Dallas Dwight from The LA Maybe -  Song is “Down To Fight” If you dig what you are hearing, go pick up the album or some merch., and support these artists. A Special THANK YOU to Restrayned for the Killer Show Intro and transition music!! Restrayned Website

Episode 3 of The Winchesters was wild, and Catherine and Chrisha were definitely feeling like that gif of the guy with the red string by the end of recording this episode.From new character revelations to the dueling music narratives to the way that radio waves seemed to play an important role in the episode, they dig deep into the meta of the episode and notice some interesting connections between The Winchesters and the wider world of Supernatural. Also: Robbie Thompson, Catherine and Chrisha really want to know what you're up too. The Winchesters audio clip credits: The CWSupernatural audio clip credits: The WB; The CWMusic clip credits: "Restless Feeling" by Elderberry Jak; "Something Got Into Your Life" by Spooky Tooth; "Spooky" by Percy Sledge; "You're Lost Little Girl" by The DoorsFollow us on Twitter @TheFangirlBizJoin our new Kofi Discord community at $1/month, and check out the other perks we have at higher tiers:https://ko-fi.com/thefangirlbiz/tiersSupport our podcast by buying our new merch: https://www.redbubble.com/people/thefangirlbiz/shopThanks for listening!

A mixed bag of the soulful sounds with an undercurrent of gospel mixed in this morning. Songs whose construction bears some resemblance or, in most cases, far distant ancestry to the sacred sounds of the church gatherings. The music this morning isn't really gospel in its obvious form. It's more the sound of performances that owe gospel music a debt of gratitude for the sound, the rhythm, and the form. Tune in for a bright, shining blend of popular sounds from Paul Simon, Laura Nyro, Curtis Mayfield, Percy Sledge, Mitty Collier, and a couple dozen others as we take a closer walk with rhythm, soul, rock, and pop on a Friday morning in Sonoma County on KOWS, your low power community station with a big heart. Tune in on 92.5 FM or stream us on kowsfm.com/listen.

From the Tennessee River mud that flows through The Shoals, to the studios, to the records, and the world, helped to forge that Muscle Shoals Sound, created by The Swampers. They were rural Alabama's answer to The Wrecking Crew and became bigger than most big city studio players, achieving so much, without leaving home. Well, there were a few trips to record in places like New York, and opening for The Beatles, when the situation required it. Those will be discussed, as well as the growth of a recording empire that was truly unique. From Rick Hall and Fame Studios forming, to the Swampers getting their nickname, their own place, and making amazing records, Markus & Ray wade through it all, and deliver a Shotgun 5 Faves of this amazing music!We have fantastic sponsors of our podcast, please visit their web sites, and support those who make the show go:Boldfoot Socks   https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery   https://crookedeyebrewery.com/Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/     

Funkboy aka Ivan Bodley is bass player and music director to the stars. He has performed with 50 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, has appeared in 13 Broadway shows, and has been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He can currently be seen on tour with Humble Pie. Funkboy's debut single “Crab Walk” is available on Color Red Music and features performances by Crispin Cioe (Uptown Horns), Moses Mo (Mother's Finest), Kenny Soule (Dag), James Dower (Sam Moore), and Doug Hinrichs (In the Heights). His new memoir Am I Famous Yet? Memoir of a Working-Class Rock Star is also out now. Ivan has been music director for Sam Moore (Sam & Dave), Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Tokens and has performed with Sting, Elvis Costello, The Temptations, Solomon Burke, Ben E. King, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Bo Diddley, Buster Poindexter, Uptown Horns, Paul Rodgers, Wynonna Judd, and David Foster. Notable appearances include Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Broadway shows: Rock of Ages, Spider- Man, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, SpongeBob, Kinky Boots, Ain't Too Proud, Once on This Island, Fun Home, and The Prom. Performed at the Obama Inaugural Ball featured in the Barry Levinson documentary Poliwood, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Today, Emeril Live, Imus in the Morning, Charlie Rose, Live with Regis & Kelly, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Istanbul and Israel State Symphony Orchestras. A magna cum laude graduate of Berklee College of Music, he has traveled to 29 countries and played to audiences of up to 82,000 in settings from duos to 150-member symphony orchestras. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, Ivan has resided in: New Orleans, Los Angeles, London, Boston, and is now based in New York City. He has a BA in Psychology from Tulane University, where he was Musical Director of college radio station WTUL, New Orleans. He was also a publicist with Epic Records/Sony Music. More information is available at www.funkboy.net. Ivan “Funkboy” Bodley uses Fender, Moxy, Warrior, and Gretsch basses, Hartke amplification, DR strings, PRA Audio wireless, and Tech 21, Digitech and Line 6 signal processors. Ivan eats only Little Debbie snack cakes. ***Head on over to Creatrix Compass and explore our many offerings from free inspiration to get your creative juices flowing to creativity classes to creativity coaching and life coaching for creatives.  It can all be found at: https://www.creatrixcompass.com Your donation helps us continue to spread creativity throughout the land.  Thank you! https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=2PM3V82XDS7GA  Music: Good Friends Inc by Jonathan Boyle 

In the first part of our chat with S. E. Feinberg about his book “Southern Man: Music and Mayhem in the American South,” which he co-authored with Alan Walden, we focused on the legendary work Walden did with R&B artists such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Percy Sledge.. It wasn't always peaches and cream: the music business is tough. But after following his passion for R&B and building the careers of many of the legends in the genre, Alan Walden needed a break. In Act Two, author S.E. Feinberg tells us how Alan was renewed by the music of The Allman Brothers Band. Listening to hundreds of bands, he discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Outlaws, amongst others and helped define the sound of what would become known as “Southern Rock.”

In the first part of our chat with S. E. Feinberg about his book “Southern Man: Music and Mayhem in the American South,” which he co-authored with Alan Walden, we focused on the legendary work Walden did with R&B artists such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Percy Sledge.. It wasn't always peaches and cream: the music business is tough. But after following his passion for R&B and building the careers of many of the legends in the genre, Alan Walden needed a break. In Act Two, author S.E. Feinberg tells us how Alan was renewed by the music of The Allman Brothers Band. Listening to hundreds of bands, he discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Outlaws, amongst others and helped define the sound of what would become known as “Southern Rock.”

Creativity Under Duress with Funkboy Ivan BodleyProfessional bass player Ivan Bodley was hooked on the bass for life after hearing Rick James play on song on TV - he heard that funky, deep bassline and he knew that his instrument had found him. Join us as Ivan talks about his early influences, plays some basslines, and tells us about subbing in on Broadway shows and his creative process. He works best under duress and creates deadlines for himself! Ivan's also an author of the book Am I Famous Yet? Memoir of a Working Class Rockstar. We wrap up the episode listening to the bassline for The Meters' CC Strut.  Ivan “Funkboy” Bodley's Bio:Ivan “Funkboy” Bodley performed with 50 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and in 12 Broadway shows. Music director for Sam Moore, Martha & the Vandellas, Shirelles. Blues Hall of Fame inductee.Performances: Sting, Elvis Costello, Temptations, Solomon Burke, Ben E. King, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Bo Diddley, Buster Poindexter, Paul Rodgers, Wynonna Judd, David Foster.Appearances: Carnegie Hall (featured soloist), Broadway shows including Spider-Man, Rock of Ages, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, SpongeBob, Kinky Boots, Ain't Too Proud, Kennedy Center, Obama Inaugural Ball, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, Today Show, Emeril, Imus, Charlie Rose, Regis & Kelly. Magna Cum Laude, Berklee graduate.Connect with Ivan Bodley:Website: www.funkboy.netLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/funkboy/All Links: linktr.ee/funkboyAm I Famous Yet? Memoir of a Working Class RockstarHost Hilary Adams is an award-winning theatre director, coach, equine-partnered facilitator, and founder of Story and Horse. She is all about supporting creative expression and sharing stories with the world.Connect with Story and Horsewww.storyandhorse.comFacebook: @storyandhorseInstagram: @storyandhorse Support the show

It's Mike vs Bill in this Tuesday edition of the PopMaster Podcast, hosted by Ken Bruce.

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. 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/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. And the I Never Loved a Man album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

#40-36Intro/Outro: Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals40. When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge *39. Green Onions by Booker T. & the MG's38. River Deep Mountain High by Ike & Tina Turner *37. Georgia On My Mind by Ray Charles *36. Louie Louie by The Kingsmen Vote on your favorite song from today's episodeVote on your favorite song from Week 2* - Previously played on the podcast

Bill Murray returns to the show for the third time (and the first time back with Lorne) and it may just be one most out of control, sexually repressed and angry episodes we've covered yet. Plus, we regale you with tales of Tammy Faye Bakker and fighting with pops!

The Life And Times Of A Working Class Rock Star With Bassist Ivan Bodley#music #bass #rockmusic #author #bluecollar #rockandrollhalloffame #blueshalloffame #bassplayerFunkboy aka Ivan Bodley is bass player and music director to the stars. He has performed with 50 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, has appeared in 12 Broadway shows, and has been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He can currently be seen on tour with Humble Pie.Funkboy's debut single “Crab Walk” is available on Color Red Music and features performances by Crispin Cioe (Uptown Horns), Moses Mo (Mother's Finest), Kenny Soule (Dag), James Dower (Sam Moore), and Doug Hinrichs (In the Heights).His new memoir Am I Famous Yet? Memoir of a Working-Class Rock Star is also out now.Ivan has been music director for Sam Moore (Sam & Dave), Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Tokens and has performed with Sting, Elvis Costello, The Temptations, Solomon Burke, Ben E. King, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Bo Diddley, Buster Poindexter, Uptown Horns, Paul Rodgers, Wynonna Judd, and David Foster.Notable appearances include Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Broadway shows: Rock of Ages, Spider-Man, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, SpongeBob, Kinky Boots, Ain't Too Proud, Once on This Island, Fun Home, and The Prom. Performed at the Obama Inaugural Ball featured in the Barry Levinson documentary Poliwood, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Today, Emeril Live, Imus in the Morning, Charlie Rose, Live with Regis & Kelly, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Istanbul and Israel State Symphony Orchestras.A magna cum laude graduate of Berklee College of Music, he has traveled to 29 countries and played to audiences of up to 82,000 in settings from duos to 150-member symphony orchestras.Originally from Chattanooga, TN, Ivan has resided in: New Orleans, Los Angeles, London, Boston, and is now based in New York City. He has a BA in Psychology from Tulane University, where he was Musical Director of college radio station WTUL, New Orleans. He was also a publicist with Epic Records/Sony Music.Website: https://funkboynyc.wixsite.com/funkboyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ivanfunkboy/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FunkboyMusic/Twitter: https://twitter.com/funkboynycYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/user/funkboynycThe Vibes Broadcast Network  Thanks for tuning in, please be sure to click that subscribe button and give this a thumbs up!!Email: thevibesbroadcast@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/listen_to_the_vibes_/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevibesbroadcastnetworkLinktree: https://linktr.ee/the_vibes_broadcastTikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeuTVRv2/And Now!!! The Bandmates' club, Supporters of the channel: Matthew Arrowood Host of The ONLY Brocast podcast:https://youtube.com/channel/UCsfv1wWu3oUg42I2nOtnMTADon Hahn of In the Margins: https://www.youtube.com/c/InTheMarginsBukas Siguro: https://www.youtube.com/c/BukasS%C4%ABgur%C3%B8Will Scoville of Ranch Rehab DIY: https://www.youtube.com/c/RanchRehab

We would see the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy; the Tet Offensive would begin in Vietnam; and comedian Will Smith would be born. It's 1968, and both Percy Sledge and Cliff Nobles would show up on the American Billboard Hot 100. We might've been protesting the Vietnam War, but we aren't protesting this week's episode of American 100 with Micha McKee and trusty robot sidekick, Rando!

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

I'm so pleased to release this episode! I have such a great guest in Donna Jean Godchaux, but I'm also joined by my good friend and former podcast co-host, Tommy Caprio. Donna Jean has been a part of some legendary recordings, like Percy Sledge's When A Man Loves A Woman and Elvis' 1968 Comeback special. But that was all before moving to California. She moved just to have an adventure, music wasn't the reason. Then she saw the Grateful Dead. She and her husband Keith joined the band and toured the world with the Dead from 1972-1979. She's been doing her own music ever since, including a new remix of the song Shelter by Donna Jean & The Tricksters. I want to thank Donna Jean for joining me and Tommy for lending his Grateful Dead knowledge to the show. Check out the remix wherever you get music. Check out Tommy's podcasts, The Unsolicited & I'm Walking Here. Follow us @PerformanceAnx. Coffee is accepted at ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety. Merch is at performanceanx.threadless.com. Review the show. It helps more people find it. Now join me and Tommy Caprio as we chat with Donna Jean Godchaux on Performance Anxiety on the Pantheon Podcast Network.