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Elvis Is Back! is the tenth studio album by Elvis Presley, released on April 8, 1960. It marked his triumphant return to the recording studio after serving two years in the U.S. Army. The album showcased a more mature and versatile Elvis, blending rock and roll, rhythm and blues, pop, and even jazz influences into a polished and sophisticated sound.The album features standout tracks like "Fever," where Elvis delivers a sultry, stripped-down performance, and "Such a Night," a lively, swaggering tune. His vocal power shines on "The Girl of My Best Friend" and the soulful "Reconsider Baby." The album also embraces a broader stylistic range, with crooner ballads such as "Soldier Boy" and "It Feels So Right," demonstrating his evolving artistry.Critically acclaimed, Elvis Is Back! is often regarded as one of Presley's finest albums, proving that he had lost none of his charm or energy during his military service. The record was a commercial success and cemented his place as a dominant force in music as the 1960s began.Listen to the album on SpotifyListen to the album on Apple MusicWhat did you think of this album? Send us a text! Support the showPatreonWebsitePolyphonic Press Discord ServerFollow us on InstagramContact: polyphonicpressmusic@gmail.comDISCLAIMER: Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to play pieces of the songs we cover in these episodes. Playing clips of songs are unfortunately prohibitively expensive to obtain the proper licensing. We strongly encourage you to listen to the album along with us on your preferred format to enhance the listening experience.

Julius Adame, who appeared on the show last summer to talk about For LP Fans Only, returns to discuss the 1985 blues compilation "Reconsider Baby". Gurdip bemoans the fact Elvis never did a proper blues album during his lifetime, while Justin dig into the originals that inspired Elvis, and overall the crew has an excellent conversation celebrating this remarkable release from the year of Elvis's 50th birthday. We also take a bit of time at the top of the show to remember Tina Turner, Cynthia Weil and Bill Baize. Gurdip skips Song of the Week this week but hangs around to comment on Julius' pick, the perfectly-themed "A Mess of Blues" from 1960, and Justin selects the quite obscure "Blue River," which was recorded in 1963 but RCA dug up a couple years later for a single release. You can follow Julius' Rock My Soul Records at instagram.com/rockmysoulrecords If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. If you are unable to support us via Patreon, but want to support us another way, please make sure to leave a positive review or mention our show to another like-minded music/movie history enthusiast.

Noted Elvis expert Christopher Marcum joins Jagbags to talk the life and career of a true American original: Elvis Presley. They talk his life, his music, books devoted to his life, his cultural impact.....and yes, his movies. We try to make sense of his 31 movies, his countless songs, the '68 comeback special, his output for Sun Records, as well as the upcoming Baz Luhrmann biopic. It's gonna be a HOT ONE! Tune in!

65 years ago this year, Elvis made two appearances on Milton Berle's popular variety program, once on board the U.S.S. Hancock and another back in Los Angeles. As voted by the TCBCast patrons, Justin & Gurdip are looking at both, and offering perspectives on the fallout from the latter performance, which gave way to the first major wave of controversy and backlash against Elvis. The two Songs of the Week that won the monthly patron poll made it an extremely tough choice between the two for Gurdip, but ultimately he settled on "Love Me," the Leiber/Stoller country spoof that Elvis played completely straight, while Justin digs into Lowell Fulson's blues classic "Reconsider Baby," with both songs having been featured throughout Elvis's entire career. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. If you are unable to support us via Patreon, but want to support us another way, please make sure to leave a positive review or mention our show to another like-minded music history and movie enthusiast.

El viernes os gustaron Serius Business de Zarauz. Hoy el programa va de versiones, así que empezamos con su versión de "Reconsider Baby". Alguien ha pensado que "Faithful", séptimo disco de Todd Rundgren puede ser el primer elepe monográfico de versiones de rock. No es asi porque solo hubo versiones en la cara a. Escuchamos tres de ellas, de Yardbirds, Beach Boys y Beatles. Sin embargo, diez años antes, en 1967, el cuarteto neoyorquino Vanilla Fudge publicaron un elepé homónimo con siete versiones. Escuchamos solo una, "Ticket to Ride" porque ahora vienen cinco versiones de Trash Metal a cargo de Ellefson, quien fuera bajista de Megadeth. De su disco "No cover" elijo versiones de Judas Priest,Twisted Sister, Motorhead, Dead Kennedys y Billy Idol. Tras esta descarga de Trash os pongo dos temas de Megadeth de cuando Ellefson estaba con ellos. Suenan cándidos y hasta naif, a pesar de tratarse de "No More Mister Nice Guy" de Alice Cooper y "Paranoid" de Black Sabbath. Mañana mas. Escuchar audio

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

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

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

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Susie Q" by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Shake a Hand" by Faye Adams.  ----more---- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song "Do it Again a Little Bit Slower" doesn't have the word "just" in the title. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud's terms of service, it's broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him -- Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins' early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already -- all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as "rockabilly", they don't tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don't sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as "swamp rock". [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that's the description that most people now use of him. We'll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It's not that he didn't like country music, of course -- as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers -- but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn't have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] While Hawkins Sr.'s name isn't in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn't, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it's unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn't reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn't the only family member to be a musician, either -- Dale's younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing Daddy Swing"] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we're going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams' widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins' first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn't as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them -- when the car park filled up, they'd just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn't tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan's Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they'd heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan's Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label -- if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer -- the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby", which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] Lewis took an interest in his young employee's music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis' instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like "Ring of Fire"), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins' most famous song, "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q", demo version] Listening to that, it's clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place -- the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn't fully worked out his guitar part, although it's close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist -- a song by Bobby Charles called "Later, Alligator", which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title "See You Later, Alligator": [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, "Later Alligator"] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles'. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed -- "See You Soon, Baboon": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins' demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "See You Soon, Baboon"] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins' first name -- Leonard Chess misheard "Del Hawkins" over the phone, and the record came out as by "Dale Hawkins", which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins' songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins' follow-up single, a new version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn't receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song -- notably James Burton -- didn't get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song -- I've seen various other putative co-authors listed -- but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians -- it's the kind of song that musicians come up with when they're jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound -- both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff -- is "Baby Please Don't Go" by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters' song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody -- "I've Got My Eyes on You": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "I've Got My Eyes On You"] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin' Wolf -- I've seen some people claim that the song was "ripped off" from Wolf. I don't believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like "Smokestack Lightnin'": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] And "Spoonful": [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Spoonful"] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration -- that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about "Suzy". There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis' daughter Suzie -- and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song's lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, "Doin' the Suzie Q"] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one's feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it's likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so -- Jimmy McCracklin, in his song "The Walk", released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing "I know you've heard of the Susie Q": [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, "The Walk"] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, "Susie Q" was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan's opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn't notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins' vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] This new version of "Susie Q" was stripped right down -- it was just guitar, bass, and drums -- none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version -- that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis' fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he's closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo -- Tuminello couldn't make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we've put the song in context, there's an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to "Susie Q" as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to "Susie Q". And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week -- the electric bass. The demo version of "Susie Q" had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music -- though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn't play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass' tailpiece. But that points to something that "Susie Q" was doing that we've not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I've not looked very much at the music that we now think of as "the blues", though at the time it was only a small part of the blues -- the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that's because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false -- as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics -- primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B -- and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. There's never a first anything, and that's especially the case here where we're talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for "Susie Q" as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins' footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones' own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What's surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren't going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, "All Night Long"] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins' cover version of Little Walter's "My Babe": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "My Babe"] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Lo-Do-Dada"] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins' follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people's styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on "Susie Q". By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Do the Twist"] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break "Susie Q" on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I've seen claims, for example, that he produced "Hey Baby" by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, "Hey Baby"] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on "Judy In Disguise With Glasses" by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he's often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit "Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower" by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, "Do it Again A Little Bit Slower"] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of "Susie Q": [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Susie Q"] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, "LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: "LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas"] When that wasn't a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department -- a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit -- as well as finally getting his master's degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Wildcat Tamer"] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure -- he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people's records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record -- a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

  Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams.  —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer,  and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "I Got A Woman" by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles' autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles' work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Let's talk about melisma. One of the major things that you'll notice about the singers we've covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who's been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There's a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties -- not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing -- melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning -- it's when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing -- for example, at the start of "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Oh say...", there are two notes on the syllable "oh". That's melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn't, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to "Pocketful of Miracles" -- "Practicality doesn't interest me" -- but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he'd written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Pocketful of Miracles", with Sinatra singing "pee-racticality dee-oesn't interest me"] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century -- Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett -- they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers -- Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound -- but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren't stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you'd mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn't talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel -- and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we're talking about -- the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you'd sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I'm not going to unpick here -- we've got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all -- but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it's their command of melisma they're trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today's standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it's worth talking about the musical boundaries we're going to be using in this series, because while it's called "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs", I am not planning on using a narrow definition of "rock music", because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there's footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke "the greatest rock and roll singer in the world", and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called "rock and roll", but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call "soul" was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it's completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we're going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don't be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don't be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we're going to talk about a record that's been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we're going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We're going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing -- though perhaps one that's not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called "Mama", and by his father's wife, who he called "Mother". Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles' -- he didn't want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though -- and perhaps because -- he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn't going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn't want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I'm not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles' own attitude to his disability. I'm disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I'm just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase". [Excerpt; Art Tatum, "I Wish I Were Twins"] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum's musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style -- his first record, "Wondering and Wondering", was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Wondering and Wondering"] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder's band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn't how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We've heard Nat "King" Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it's still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like "Unforgettable", Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole's version of "Route Sixty-Six": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole Trio, "Route Sixty Six"] You'll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular -- Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat "King" Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the "Son" came from the Robinson in his own name, the "Mc" from the guitarist's name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio "Don't Put All Your Dreams In One Basket"] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn't perform on many of Fulson's sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson's biggest record, "Reconsider Baby", which came out shortly after Charles' time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but "The Things That I Used To Do", his most famous record, is as much Charles' record as it is Guitar Slim's -- Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim's other work, though it still has Slim's recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with "Mess Around", which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. "Mess Around" is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting -- rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing "Cow Cow Blues", a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, "Cow Cow Blues"] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled "Mess Around": [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, "Mess Around"] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers -- the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn't sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "It Should Have Been Me"] "Mess Around" and "It Should Have Been Me" were Charles' two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, "the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place." Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton's, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "One O'Clock Jump"] Charles' own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone's. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles' trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he'd been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They'd be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, "It Must Be Jesus"] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled "rock and roll", this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, "I Got a Woman", Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn't just that they were performing secular music -- it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. "I Got a Woman" went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, "I Got a Woman"] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, "I Got A Woman" became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees... Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn't stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song "This Little Light of Mine": [Excerpt: Etta James, "This Little Light of Mine"] And reworked it into "This Little Girl of Mine": [Excerpt: Ray Charles: "This Little Girl of Mine"] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn't a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 -- classic songs like "Hallelujah, I Love Her So", "Drown in My Own Tears", and "Lonely Avenue" -- he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as "My Bonnie" and "Swanee River Rock". But you can't keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we'll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.

Playlist: Brian MacDonald, Midnight In Nowhere, Chris Stovall Brown, DRive Myself Crazy, The Weeklings, Baby You’re A Rich Man, Mike Crandall Band, Jump Blues, Black Cat Road, Faith And Ammunition, Benny And The Flybyniters, Hammerhead, Big Apple Blues, You Gotta Start Somewhere, The Little Red Rooster Blues Band, Lock Up The Liquor, Vanessa Collier, You Get What You Get, The Bennett Brothers, Rocking Chair, Nick Piunti, Temporary High, The Bruce Katz Band, Hesitation Blues, Markey Blue Ric Latina Project, Mississippi Soul, Tammi Savoy & The Chris Casello Combo, Sweet Baby Of Mine, Travis Bowlin, Go To Girl, J.P. Soars, Southbound I-95, Crystal Shawanda, I’d Rather Go Blind, Trevor McShane, Eloise, Stone Stanley, Cobble Hill, Spencer Mackenzie, Voices Echoing, Paul Filipowicz, Reconsider Baby, Keeshea Pratt Band, Out Of My Mind, The Proven Ones, Why Baby Why, Buddy Guy, Old Fashioned, Matty T. Wall, Slideride, Lurrie Bell And The Bell Dynasty feat Billy Branch, Eddie Taylor Jr & Sumito Ariyoshi, So Hard To Leave You Alone, Bob Corritore & Friends, Went Home This Morning, Tas Cru, Give A Little Up, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: WEDNESDAY 7/18 ROBERT CRAY BAND - NARROWS CENTER, FALL RIVER MA. PROF HARP (Tunes on the Dunes) -TOWN BEACH (6 to 8 PM), WESTERLY RI MARK NAFTALIN with MARK ZARETSKY & CHANCE BROWN - THE 323 CLUB, WESTPORT. LITTLE FEAT - RIDGEFIELD PLAYHOUSE, RIDGEFIELD. TOM "THE SUIT" FORST and DAN BROTHERS - DARYL'S HOUSE, PAWLING NY. CRACKER - IRON HORSE, NORTHAMPTON MA. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS and the MELLOW MEN - OLD LYME INN, OLD LYME On the Patio at 6 PM. BRUCE JOHN - RIVER ROAD COMPLEX (6:30 TO 8:30 PM), WILLIMANTIC. MURRAY THE WHEEL - TOOTZY PASTA PIZZA, WILTON. SUGAR - BEACH PARK (6 PM), WATERFORD. FREE FUNK WEDNESDAY - ARCH STREET TAVERN, HARTFORD. BATTLE OF THE BANDS - ATRIUM LOUNGE (8 PM), FOXWOOD CASINO. ROLLIN ON THE RIVER JAM - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. DONAHUE'S OPEN MIC - DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR, MADISON. CARMINE'S OPEN MIC - CARMINE'S RESTAURANT, EAST HARTFORD. COMMUNITY BLUES JAM - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. FRIENDS DAY OPEN MIC - THEODORE'S BLUES CLUB (10 PM), SPRINGFIELD MA THURSDAY 7/19 LIVIU INVITATIONAL - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. Liviu with Mike Crandall, Mike Williams, & Ed Parnigoni BRUCE KATZ - DARYL'S HOUSE, PAWLING NY ANTHONY GOMES - BRIDGE STREET LIVE, COLLINSVILLE. TAB BENOIT - NARROWS CENTER, FALL RIVER MA. ROCKY LAWRENCE - THE CRAVE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM), ANSONIA. ERIC DUCOFF - STOMPING GROUND, PUTNAM. LEE ANN LOVELACE AND FRIENDS - TIPPING CHAIR TAVERN, MILLDALE. JEFF PITCHELL & TEXAS FLOOD - FAMILY FUN NIGHT, EAST HAMPTON. ERAN TROY DANNER (Acoustic Solo) - D'AMELIA'S ITALIAN EATERY, WATERBURY. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - TAPPED APPLE, WESTERLY RI. BALKUN BROTHERS - SUMMER SESSIONS, MONTGOMERY CENTER, VT. THIRD THURSDAY STREET FESTIVAL - MAIN STREET, WILLIMANTIC FREE 5 Stages (including Vitamin B-3), Dining and Shopping. FRONT STREET BAND - CADILLAC RANCH (6 TO 9 PM), SOUTHINGTON. Bike Night, Rockin Good Time. THE CARTELLS - COMMUNITY CENTER (7 PM), EAST LYME. HUNT HILL FARMS OPEN MIC - HUNT HILL, NEW MILFORD. SHELBY LYME - IRON HORSE (7 PM), NORTHAMPTON MA. JAKE KULAK and LOW DOWN - BLUE MOUNTAIN RESORT, POCONOS PA. KEN SAFETY OPEN MIC - CJ SPARROWS, CHESHIRE. DAVE COSTA'S OPEN MIC - CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB, GRANBY. JIMI PHOTON'S JAM - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. ALL STAR JAM - SHAMROCK PUB, WATERBURY. KYLE TACY - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. PINE LOFT OPEN MIC - PINE LOFT PIZZARRIA, BERLIN. OPEN NIGHT AT THE BISTRO - INFINITY HALL, NORFOLK. GREG SHERROD OPEN MIC - BLACK SHEEP, NIANTIC. WENDY MAY OPEN MIC - BLACK DUCK, WESPORT TAMARACK OPEN MIC - TAMARACK LODGE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM), VOLUNTOWN. FRIDAY 7/20 TAS CRU - BLACK EYED SALLY'S (8:30 PM), HARTFORD ANTHONY GOMES - CHAN'S, WOONSOCKET RI. SUGAR RAY AND THE BLUETONES - KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER , WESTERLY RI. JAMES ARMSTRONG - THEODORE'S, SPRINGFIELD MA. VITAMIN B-3 - MAPLE TREE CAFE, SIMSBURY Collaboration with CTBS and Ellen Knowlton / Maple Tree. WENDY MAY - THE HIDEAWAY, RIDGEFIELD. GRAYSON HUGH with POLLY MESSER - SMOKIN WITH CHRIS, SOUTHINGTON. MIXED SIGNALS BAND - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. SHINEY LAPEL TRIO - HARBOUR HOUSE, MIDDLETOWN. THE CARLEANS - STEAK LOFT (7 PM), MYSTIC. CRACKER - INFINITY MUSIC HALL, NORFOLK .MISTY MEADOWS BLUES ALL STARS - ANDOVER PIZZA (8 TO 11 PM), ANDOVER. KATHY THOMPSON BAND - BEACHCOMBER, MILFORD. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS & CHRIS D'AMATO - PRIAM VINEYARD (6 TO 9 PM), COLCHESTER. THE AMPLIFIRES - feat DAVE ROBBINS - THE 350 CLUB, SPRINGFIELD MA. MURRAY THE WHEEL (Acoustic Solo) - WITCH DOCTOR BREWERY (6 to 8 pm), SOUTHINGTON. MURRAY THE WHEEL - OUZO BLUE, WATERTOWN. THE ZOO / SOUL PILOT - SHAMROCK PUB, WATERBURY. 4 BARREL RILLY - HARVEY BEACH (7 PM), OLD SAYBROOK. UNFINISHED BUSINESS BLUES BAND - LA LUNA, BRANFORD. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - PRIAM VINEYARDS (6 PM), COLCHESTER. ERAN TROY DANNER (Acoustic Solo) - PARADISE HILLS VINEYARD (5 TO 8 PM, WALLINGFORD. JEFF PITCHELL (Acoustic solo) TRATARRIA TOSCANA, MANCHESTER. BEYOND PURPLE with JIMI BELL (7 PM) AND SPIRIT SHAKER (5 PM) - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. SATURDAY 7/21 COLLINVILLE'S HOT ! - LIVE MUSIC FESTIVAL, COLLINSVILLE Jr Krauss & the Shakes, Someone you Can XRay, Hannah's Field and more. ZZ WARD - WOLF'S DEN, MOHEGAN SUN CASINO. VINCE THOMPSON - BILL'S SEAFOOD (7:30 PM), WESTBROOK. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - PERKS AND CORKS, WESTERLY RI. DANNY KLEIN'S FULL HOUSE - CHAN'S, WOONSOCKET RI. THE OCTANES - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. SARA ASHLEIGH BAND with CARL RICCI - OX HEAD TAVERN, STURBRIDGE MA. CRACKER - DARYL'S HOUSE, PAWLING NY. SHAKEDOWN - THEODORE'S, SPRINGFIELD MA. HIP JOINT BAND - MAPLE TREE CAFE, SIMSBURY. HOWIE AND THE SOUL POTATOES - ALFA'S ROOM, MILFORD. CREAMERY STATION - JERRY JAM (5 PM), BATH NH. WHISKEY WINE & COKE (5 PM) / FUNK THAT (9 PM) - TIPPING CHAIR TAVERN. MILLDALE. SUE MENHART (Acoustic) - VILLAGE GAZEBO (2 TO 4 PM), OLD MISTICK VILLAGE. ASHLEY YOUNG BAND - BROWN DERBY, UNCASVILLE. ERAN TROY DANNER (Acoustic Solo) - SLIDERS BAR & GRILL (8 PM), MIDDLETOWN. REDLINERS - DADDY JACKS, NEW LONDON. JEFF PITCHELL & TEXAS FLOOD - BRUNSWICK, OLD ORCHARD BEACH ME JAKE KULAK AND LOW DOWN - BULLFROG BREWERY, WILLIAMSPORT PA. STEVEN McGRATH - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. SUNDAY 7/22 TAB BENOIT - INFINITY MUSIC HALL, NORFOLK. JR KRAUSS AND THE SHAKES - BRASS HORSE (3 TO 7 PM), BARKHAMSTED. ALEXIS P SUTER BAND with MICHAEL LOUIS - ARKVILLE BOWL & BBQ, ARKVILLE NY Gospel Brunch at My Side of the Mountain Music Festival. CRACKER - FAIRFIELD THEATER COMPANY, FAIRFIELD. CHRIS ROBINSON BROTHERHOOD - FAIRFIELD THEATER COMPANY WAREHOUSE, FAIRFIELD. RICKY "KING" RUSSELL - CADY'S TAVERN, CHEPACHET RI. ERAN TROY DANNER - THE HOP COMPANY (3 TO 6 PM), DERBY TIM TAYLOR BLUES BAND - NARRAGANSETT CAFE (4 TO 7 PM), JAMESTOWN RI. PURE AMERICANA - MAIN PUB, MANCHESTER. KEITH COOPER - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. THE CARTELLS - MAUGLE SIERRA (3 PM), LEDYARD. G LOVE & SPECIAL SAUCE - JONATHAN EDWARDS, NORTH STONINGTON. PULSE - THE PAVILION, SOUND VIEW BEACH, OLD LYME. GREG SHERROD BEACH JAM - THE ANDRIA, MISQUAMICUT. RI STONEHOUSE BLUES JAM feat MIKE CRANDALL - STONEHOUSE BAR (3 TO 6 PM), BALTIC. STOMPING GROUND OPEN MIC - STOMPING GROUND, PUTNAM. BLUES AND BEYAND OPEN MIC - THE STILL BAR, AGAWAM MA. Hosted by Steve, Jason & Paulski. FRONT ROW BAND (Musicians Hot Spot) - BLUE PLATE TAVERN. PLAINVILLE. WHAMMER JAMMER OPEN MIC - VFW, PRESTON. MONDAY 7/23 THE LOVE DOGS - MYSTIC RIVER PARK (6 PM), MYSTIC. Blue Monday Concert Series. GREG PICCOLO - STEAK LOFT (7 PM), MYSTIC. TUXEDO JUNCTION (Swing Band) - BILL'S SEAFOOD (7 PM), WESTBROOK. BRANDT TAYLOR OPEN MIC - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. RICH BADOWSKI and MIKE ST GEORGE - MARK'S CRUISE NIGHT (Auto Parts),EAST GRANBY. BILL'S GARAGE ALL STAR JAM - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICK. PERKS AND CORKS OPEN MIC - PERKS AND CORKS, WESTERLY RI. TUESDAY 7/24 TOMMY WHALEN & RAGGED EDGE - WATERFRONT, HOLYOKE. ZZ WARD - FAIRFIELD THEATER COMPANY, FAIRFIELD. LORNE ENTRESS - MAIN PUB, MANCHESTER UNPLUGGED OPEN MIC - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICH. DAN STEVENS - MUSIC NOW SHOWCASE (4 PM), iCRV INTERNET RADIO DAN STEVENS - CAMP HORIZONS (7 PM), WINDHAM. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

In this episode, we speak with Lech Wierzynski of The California Honeydrops, which is an Oakland based band who are the amalgamation of soul, blues, funk...all of the good stuff. The band is currently on tour with the legendary Bonnie Raitt. They'll be performing here in D.C. on March 26 at the Kennedy Center. Below are the rest of their tour dates. They also have a new album out called, "A River's Invitation." March 26 /// The Kennedy Center /// Washington, DC* March 29 /// Orpheum Theatre /// Boston, MA* April 1–2 /// Beacon Theatre /// New York, NY* April 17 /// Keller Auditorium /// Portland, OR* April 20 /// Paramount Theatre /// Seattle, WA* April 22 /// Grand Sierra Resort & Casino: Grand Theatre /// Reno, NV* April 23 /// Fox Theater /// Oakland, CA* April 26 /// Winspear Opera House /// Dallas, TX* April 27 /// ACL Live at The Moody Theater /// Austin, TX* April 29 /// Bayou Theater (Revention Music Center) /// Houston, TX* May 3–4 /// Ryman Auditorium /// Nashville, TN* "Lead Me Home" by The California Honeydrops "Reconsider Baby" by Lowell Fulson "So Very Hard to Go" by Tower of Power "Seventh Son" by Sly and The Family Stone "I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt

Intro Song Zac Harmon, “Long Live The Blues”, Right Man Right Now, Blind Pig Records First Set Mike Shermer, “Blues In Good Hands”, Blues In Good Hands, VizzTone Label Group Kevin Selfe, “Bluesman Without The Blues”, Buy My Soul Back, VizzTone Label Group Igor Prado Band & Delta Groove All Stars, “Shake and Fingerpop”, Way Down South, Delta Groove Music Second Set Benny Turner, “Reconsider Baby, When She's Gone, Nola Blue Chris Yakopcic, “The Next Place I Leave”, The Next Place I Leave, Yako Records Anthony Geraci and the Boston Blues All-Stars, “The Blues Never Sleeps”, Fifty Shades of Blue, Delta Groove Music Third Set Zora Young & Little Mike and the Tornadoes, “I've Been A Fool Too Long”, Friday Night, Elrob Records The Henry Gray/Bob Corritore Sessions, “Let's Get High”, Blues Won't Let Me Take My Rest, Delta Groove Music Deuce 'n a Quarter, “Tired Of Your Excuses”, Take the Journey, Bolt Record Fourth SetCharlie Musselwhite, “River Hip Mama”, Juke Joint Chapel, Henrietta Records Buddy Guy, “Thick Like Mississippi Mud”, Born To Play Guitar, RCA Silvertone Records Brandon Santini, “Help Me With The Blues”, Live & Extended, Vizztone RecordsThe Knickerbocker All-Stars, “Go Back Home To The Blues”, Go Back Home To The Blues, JP Cadillac Records

Playlist: Big Mean Sound Machine, Angriest Man In The World, Tommy Z, Going To A Party, Chris Bergson Band, Down In The Bottom, Eddie Cotton, Hard Race To Win, Keith Stone New Orleans Moonlight, Johnny Rawls, Tiger In A Cage, Joyann Parker & Sweet Tea, Hit Me Like A Train, Jason Vivone and The Billy Bats, The Vivone Song, Anthony Geraci & The Boston Blues All-Stars, If You Want To Get To Heaven, Andy Santana & The West Coast Playboys, Love Sickness, Benny Turner, Reconsider Baby, Clarence” The Blues Man” Turner, Sabrena, Pinetop Perkins and Jimmy Rogers with Little Mike and The Tornadoes, Pinetops Boogie Woogie, Randy McAllister, The Push, Jeffrey Halford and The Healers, Thunderbird Motel, Tim Williams,The Grizzly Bear, Mike Zito & The Wheel, Get Out Of Denver, Karen Lovely, Cross The Water, The Tearaways, Naughty Dog, David M’ore, Funky It Up, The Alchemystics, Let Them Know, Balkun Brothers, Been Drivin’, Brian Charette, Late Night Tv, Mojomatics, Soy Baby

The Favorite Elvis Tunes Countdown continues as we hit the Top 10!  We'll hear songs #10-#6 this week as well as The BellFuries, Wanda Jackson, Crazy Cavan & The Rhythm Rockers and so much more! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey   Katmen- "We Nee Elvis Back" Little Richard- "Slippin' & Slidin'" 13 Kats- "Drag On" Billy Burnette- "Oh Well"   Favorite Elvis Tunes Countdown 10.  "Reconsider Baby" 9.  "My Baby Left Me" 8.  "Such A Night" 7.  "Guitar Man" 6.  "Suspicious Minds" Brought to you by Dr. Rubin's Pomade!   Billy Lee Riley- "Searchin'" The BellFuries- "Love Found Me" Bo Diddley- "Hey Bo Diddley" Charlie Gracie- "Just Lookin'" Jimmie Vaughan- "I Ain't Never" Wanda Jackson- "Riot In Cell Block #9" Crazy Cavan & The Rhythm Rockers- "Bop Little Baby" Imelda May- "Tribal"  

"My Baby Left Me" "I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago" "Never Say Yes" "Wearin' That Loved On Look" "Double Trouble" "Easy Question" "That's What You Get For Loving Me" "City By Night" "Please Don't Stop Loving Me" "A Big Hunk O' Love" "Baby, If You'll Give Me All Your Love" "It Hurts Me" "Am I Ready" "I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine" "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" "It Won't Be Long" "Suspicion" "Snowbird" "Beach Shack" "So Glad You're Mine" "Put Your Hand In The Hand" "Paralyzed" "By And By" "She's A Machine" "Reconsider Baby" "I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water" -Elvis