Podcasts about sam phillips the man who invented rock

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Derrick Procell  | A Tall Class Of You  | Hello Mojo!  |  | Mean Mary & The Contrarys  | Penelope Rose  | Hell and Heroes (Vol 1) | Jeff Healey  | CNIBlues  | Holding On  |  | Too Slim and the Taildraggers  | Devil in a Doublewide Live  | Brace Yourself MP3s | Dave Thomas  | Rose Tinted Love  | ROAD TO THE BLUES | Sonny Landreth  | 22 Port of Calling  | 22 Special Blues Tracks | Julian Taylor Band  | Learn To Love  | Avalanche  |  | Brian Auger & Brian Auger's Oblivion Express  | Splatch  | Auger Incorporated  |  | Amos Milburn  | Bye Bye Boogie  | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD2 | Roy Mette  | Big Daddy C  | Vibralism  |   |  | Marie Knight  | When I Die  | Let Us Get Together: A Tribute To The Rev Gary Davis  | Dixie Frog | Jerry Lee Lewis  | Detroit City  | A Whole Lotta... Jerry Lee Lewis (CD1) | Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (Ike Turner)  | Rocket 88  | Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock n Roll | Steve Howell & The Mighty Men  | The In Crowd  | Been Here And Gone

In this, the second of two episodes, Billy and Michael talk with renowned music author Peter Guralnick about Charlie Rich's success and final record, Elvis Presley, Tom Waits, Chet Atkins, Colonel Tom Parker, and highlights from his highly-acclaimed new book, "Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing". More about Peter: Peter Guralnick has been called "a national resource" by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country's intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, “Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others.” He won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club as well as writing the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese's blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. His biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, was hailed as "monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes.” His 2015 biography of Sam Phillips, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n' Roll, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times and was a finalist for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. Reaction to his latest book, Looking to Get Lost, has ranged from Michael Eric Dyson's tribute to “one of the 3 or 4 greatest writers in the country today” to Rosanne Cash's description of him as “a dedicated explorer, a writer of great sensitivity and intuition, who lyrically untangles the network that exists between artist and art” to No Depression's description of a book that “is not a summation so much as a culmination of his remarkable work, which from the start has encompassed the full range of blues, gospel, country and rock and roll.”

Peter Guralnick has been called "a national resource" by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country's intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, “Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others.” He won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club as well as writing the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. His biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, was hailed as "monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes.” His 2015 biography of Sam Phillips, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times and was a finalist for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. Reaction to his latest book, Looking to Get Lost, has ranged from Michael Eric Dyson’s tribute to “one of the 3 or 4 greatest writers in the country today” to Rosanne Cash’s description of him as “a dedicated explorer, a writer of great sensitivity and intuition, who lyrically untangles the network that exists between artist and art” to No Depression’s description of a book that “is not a summation so much as a culmination of his remarkable work, which from the start has encompassed  the full range of blues, gospel, country and rock and roll.”

In 2015, Tom Reney spoke with Peter Guralnick about his biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll . And now in a two-part Jazz Beat, he’s interviewed Peter about six of the American music legends who are profiled in Guralnick’s new book, Looking to Get Lost: Adventures In Music & Writing : Robert Johnson, Skip James, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Dick Curless and Ray Charles.

In 2015, Tom Reney spoke with Peter Guralnick about his biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll . And now in a two-part Jazz Beat, he’s interviewed Peter about six of the American music legends who are profiled in Guralnick’s new book, Looking to Get Lost: Adventures In Music & Writing: Robert Johnson, Skip James, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Dick Curless and Ray Charles.

This week we are thrilled to be joined by our dear friend Billy Z from the Comic Book Bears podcast to chat about what we've been reading andtalk about the latest news flowing out of the #comics zeitgeist, namely the two new distributors that emerged in the last week (7:00).  Comics: DC’s Crimes of Passion/Wonder Woman Giant #4 (27:00); Witchblade #1(39:00); Werewolves of Mont Pellier (52:00); Pittsburgh (1:01:00).  Reading List sugestions: Mind MGMT vol1; Maus; Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll; Lady Death Limited Edition 1-3

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “That’s All Right Mama” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—-     Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis’ 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis’ five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as “Bear Cat” and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I’ve relied on three books here more than any others. The first is “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. which I’ve recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick — Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books — they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips’ ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I’m sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I’m coming from, but I’m aware that this will be some people’s first episode. There’s a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh’Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people’s music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show… The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music — and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn’t have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He’d hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of “My Kind of Carrying On” by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn’t sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say “Cause You’re Always On My Mind” by Wiley Barkdull, or “Twice the Loving” by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up — the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he’d started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he’d initially realised, he’d decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he’d have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as “Rocket 88”, the record he’d leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin’ Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he’d ever recorded. Howlin’ Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam’s studio before he’d started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he’d recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he’d been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties — if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We’ve already seen this with “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like “Caldonia”. And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to “Hound Dog”. There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin’ Tonight” — “Mr Hound Dog’s in Town” [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog’s In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase “hound dog”, you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips’ view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips’ telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and “wrote” “Bear Cat”. Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of “Hound Dog”, and there’s not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips’ experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips’ new record label, Sun. [excerpt of “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became — “Bear Cat” eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else’s song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he’d had a solid hit with “Bear Cat”, and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn’t buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that — if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people’s music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they’d start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys — Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been — he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro — and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips’ intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips’ assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who’d come in to the studio, she thought she’d found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that’s how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music’s history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who “discovered” Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker’s side. However, even there, it’s hard to see from Elvis’ original recording — versions of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that’s what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn’t have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn’t know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He’d hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they’d all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn’t really part of the group. He’d thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things — he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn’t cause any fires when he worked on people’s wiring. He didn’t have many friends — and no close friends at all — and many of those he did have didn’t even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source — the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He’d go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King — young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky’s on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn’t someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either — rather, he was someone who didn’t fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn’t own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He’d hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing — and specifically what is known euphemistically as “Southern Gospel”, but which really means “white Gospel”. And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That’s a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it — and it’s also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that’s the gospel music we’re talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there’s another gospel music as well — “Southern Gospel” or “quartet gospel”. That music is — or at least was at the time we’re talking about — almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren’t attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it’s performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, the Blackwood Brothers] That’s the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that’s a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson’s version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley’s favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them — but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He’d take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn’t have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself — Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he’d been working with. In their cases it was because they’d been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips’ case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else’s. He didn’t know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin’ Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips’ book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn’t try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty’s. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn’t impressed… or at least, he *thought* he wasn’t impressed. But at the same time… there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn’t quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on “That’s All Right Mama”, a song originally recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over — he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song “That’s All Right Mama” was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson’s classic “Black Snake Moan”: [excerpt: “Black Snake Moan”, Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in “If I Get Lucky”. He then came up with the melody for what became “That’s All Right”, but recorded it with different lyrics as “Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues”: [excerpt: “Mean Old Frisco Blues”, Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to “That’s All Right”, and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: “Dirt Road Blues”, Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded “That’s All Right Mama” itself: [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama”, Arthur Crudup] Crudup’s records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That’s All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn’t follow that template. Elvis’ version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music — it’s taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black’s slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup’s version. It still doesn’t, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for “a white man who could sing like a black one”, he hadn’t found it. Listening now, it’s definitely a “rock and roll” record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a “hillbilly” record. [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley’s singing which is different from most of the country music at the time — there’s a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it’s what’s needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre — Bill Monroe’s bluegrass song “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: [excerpt: Bill Monroe “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they’d reworked “That’s All Right Mama”. There’s nothing to these tracks but Elvis’ strummed acoustic, Black’s clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore’s rudimentary electric guitar fills — and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips’ echo. Phillips had a simple system he’d rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he’d done it. The room he was recording in didn’t have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn’t use just one tape recorder — though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember — he used two. He didn’t do multitracking like Les Paul — rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on “Blue Moon of Kentucky” it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music — a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn’t be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis’ mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn’t tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis’ race – most people had assumed, since Phillips’ show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands — at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I’ve seen claims, though I don’t know how true they are, that Crudup’s total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band’s first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley’s stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we’ve mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed — he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic — and even when he wasn’t, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn’t keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it’s hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we’ll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. 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. Both "Rocket 88" and the Howlin' Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 - Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips' studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though -- the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I'm not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner's autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of "Rocket 88" is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don't want to give the impression I'm condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual "first rock and roll record", and if there is, it's not "Rocket 88". But nonetheless, "Rocket 88" has been officially anointed "the first rock and roll record ever made" by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven't already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I'll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don't want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I'm not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official "beginning of rock" according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case -- Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about "Rocket 88" we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called "The Honeydripper", which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It's a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from "Shortenin' Bread". It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation -- sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live -- but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded "The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2" for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: "The Honeydripper" by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn't sound that much now -- pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that's with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts -- which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself -- but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn't stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn't keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing... "The Honeydripper"   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford's version of "The Honeydripper"].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing... "The Honeydripper". Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers' version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts ("Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It's likely that nobody will ever beat that record. "The Honeydripper" was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of "The Honeydripper". It sank without trace -- but you'll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. "The Honeydripper" made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll -- he didn't turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that -- but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn't just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as "The Honeydripper", but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band's driver -- at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother's success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we'll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we'd be talking about. They weren't the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man" or "Night Life Boogie" -- all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, "Cadillac Boogie" was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow...   [Excerpt "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why "Cadillac Boogie" was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It's safe to say that he's one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music -- and it's also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we'd still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s -- he's as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional -- when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn't when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we're dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people's feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right -- if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn't fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn't get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro's brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips' intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism -- and also to improve the world in other ways -- was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they'd mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they'd put on an acetate disc -- apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn't have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person's artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn't been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen -- but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name "Blues Boy", or just "B.B." for short. To my mind they're actually some of King's best material -- much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn't released at the time, but has made compilations later -- "Pray For You":   [excerpt: B.B. King "Pray For You"]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it's the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we'll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner's house. The two hadn't stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands -- there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one "B.B. King". Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn't know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner's old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he'd like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. "Straight away", Ike replied, and they set off -- five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident -- they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that's one story as to what happened to the guitar amp -- like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that's definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified -- their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we've seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is -- I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell's scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering "Cadillac Boogie", as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that's being talked about -- the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there's the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner -- that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here's the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here's Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There's another difference as well -- the guitar sound. There's distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won't even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed -- if you're listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you'd probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax -- the line it's playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a "first rock and roll record", they latched on to this one -- because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified -- because he'd assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats". And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston's solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner's band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn't let Brenston sing his hit on stage -- he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But "Rocket 88" had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after "Rocket 88" was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with -- Howlin' Wolf.   [excerpt "How Many More Years" -- version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That's a recording that was made at Phillips' studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin' Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you're sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, "Ike and Tina Turner".   And finally, "Rocket 88" was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen -- a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller -- was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan's records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn't crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record "Rocket 88", which had been a big R&B hit but hadn't broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it'll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story...

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. 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. Both “Rocket 88” and the Howlin’ Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 – Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips’ studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though — the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I’m not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner’s autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of “Rocket 88” is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don’t want to give the impression I’m condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual “first rock and roll record”, and if there is, it’s not “Rocket 88”. But nonetheless, “Rocket 88” has been officially anointed “the first rock and roll record ever made” by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven’t already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I’ll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don’t want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I’m not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official “beginning of rock” according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case — Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about “Rocket 88” we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called “The Honeydripper”, which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It’s a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from “Shortenin’ Bread”. It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation — sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live — but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded “The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2” for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: “The Honeydripper” by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn’t sound that much now — pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that’s with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts — which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself — but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn’t stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn’t keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing… “The Honeydripper”   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford’s version of “The Honeydripper”].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing… “The Honeydripper”. Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers’ version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts (“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It’s likely that nobody will ever beat that record. “The Honeydripper” was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of “The Honeydripper”. It sank without trace — but you’ll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. “The Honeydripper” made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll — he didn’t turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that — but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn’t just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as “The Honeydripper”, but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band’s driver — at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother’s success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we’ll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we’d be talking about. They weren’t the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like “Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man” or “Night Life Boogie” — all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, “Cadillac Boogie” was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow…   [Excerpt “Cadillac Boogie” by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why “Cadillac Boogie” was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It’s safe to say that he’s one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music — and it’s also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we’d still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s — he’s as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional — when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn’t when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we’re dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people’s feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right — if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn’t fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn’t get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro’s brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips’ intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism — and also to improve the world in other ways — was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they’d mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they’d put on an acetate disc — apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn’t have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person’s artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn’t been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen — but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name “Blues Boy”, or just “B.B.” for short. To my mind they’re actually some of King’s best material — much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn’t released at the time, but has made compilations later — “Pray For You”:   [excerpt: B.B. King “Pray For You”]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it’s the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we’ll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner’s house. The two hadn’t stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands — there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one “B.B. King”. Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn’t know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner’s old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he’d like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. “Straight away”, Ike replied, and they set off — five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident — they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that’s one story as to what happened to the guitar amp — like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that’s definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified — their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we’ve seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is — I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell’s scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering “Cadillac Boogie”, as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that’s being talked about — the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there’s the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner — that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here’s the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here’s Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There’s another difference as well — the guitar sound. There’s distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won’t even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed — if you’re listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you’d probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax — the line it’s playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a “first rock and roll record”, they latched on to this one — because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified — because he’d assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats”. And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston’s solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner’s band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn’t let Brenston sing his hit on stage — he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But “Rocket 88” had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after “Rocket 88” was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with — Howlin’ Wolf.   [excerpt “How Many More Years” — version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That’s a recording that was made at Phillips’ studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin’ Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you’re sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, “Ike and Tina Turner”.   And finally, “Rocket 88” was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen — a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller — was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan’s records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn’t crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record “Rocket 88”, which had been a big R&B hit but hadn’t broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it’ll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story…

Recording sound pioneer Sam Phillips — the father of Sun Records, the man who discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash…, the creator of WHER, The First All Girl Radio Station in the World — talks about his journey, his adventures and “the acoustics of life.” With stories from his son Knox Phillips, his wife Becky, his biographer Peter Guralnick, and one of his first artists, Ike Turner. Hear recordings from the archive of interviews we did with Sam beginning in 1998—personal stories told by the man himself and his family and friends. Interest in Sam Phillips is running high right now –not that it was ever running low. There’s a new TV series out and there’s Peter Guralnick’s epic biography “Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll.” And there’s a film in the works based on the book — one of the producers is Mick Jagger and Leonardo DiCaprio is playing Sam. Sam has had a monumental impact on the world of music and sound. And he’s had a monumental impact on The Kitchen Sisters.

Working Class Audio Session #097 with Matt Ross-Spang!!! Matt Ross-Spang , born in Memphis, began working at the Legendary Sun Studio when he was just 16, working his way up from intern to the Chief Engineer. He championed to bring the recording studio back to its origin, working hard to find, install and use the same period equipment that Sam Phillips engineered with in the 1950s. His 11 years of dedication to Sun and its signature sound garnered national attention when he was featured by Lester Holt for NBC’s Nightly News and the Today Show. NPR also featured Matt and his work on All Things Considered. "It's fantastic that [Ross-Spang] has pursued this with such scholarly devotion," says Peter Guralnick, author of the definitive, two-part Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis and the recently released biography, Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll.. "Sam was systematic in thinking about sound and gave great thought to it — no square angles; the tiles. In addition, he felt there was something unique about the room at 706 Union. He didn't know it when he rented it. To have reconstituted it is an exercise in creative archeology." In 2015 Matt left Sun to venture out on his own as an engineer and producer.  His first project post Sun was to engineer and mix Jason Isbell’s “Something More Than Free” for acclaimed Producer Dave Cobb which would award him his first Grammy. The record broke several records debuting at #1 on the Country, Rock, Folk and Indie Charts. It also broke Americana Radio chart records , staying #1 for over 25 weeks. The record won Grammys for Best Americana Album and Best Americana Song for (24 Frames). Since then Matt hasn’t slowed down ...engineering recent releases by The Drive By Truckers, Elle King, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Chris Isaak, The Rival Sons, Corb Lund, Lori Mckenna, Brett Dennen, Brent Cobb, Amanda Shires, Anderson East, The Sheepdogs and the concept album “Southern Family”. Matt also engineered, mixed and Co-Produced Margo Price’s debut album; entitled “Midwestern Farmer’s Daughter” the record was made in 3 days in 2014 at Sun Studio and released on Third Man Records. The record debuted in the top 10 Billboard country charts to critical acclaim and is already considered one of the best albums of 2016. Matt most recently was hired by Sony Records to mix 18 previously unreleased songs by Elvis Presley from historic 1976 sessions in the Jungle Room at Graceland which was released in August of 2016. Matt also recently produced albums on Sean Rowe, Patrick Sweany and UK artist Emily Barker. The City of Memphis named him one of its “30 under 30” Memphians in 2015 as well as honoring him with a key to the city in 2016. The City of Germantown also named a day after Ross-Spang in 2016. Matt and Matt join each other over Skype for a conversation about's Matt's journey.

We met at the Bryant Corner Café for cookies, coffee and a survey of what’s on everyone’s stack of books.  Nancy also had some news about the finalists for National Book Award Short List for Young Adult Novels Laura Rubey “Bone Gap”Neal Shusterman, ”Challenger Deep”Noelle Stevenson, “Nimona”  She also had news about the finalistsfor the Carnegie Award given by the America Library Association(Fiction) Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Sympathizer”Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”Jim Shephard, “The Book of Aron” (Non Fiction)Sally Mann, “Hold Still” A Memoir in Photographs”Helen Macdonald “H is for Hawk”Andrea Wulf. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New WorldOthers Readings from our stacks.John Irving, “Avenue of Mysteries” and maybe reread “The World According to Garp.’Peter Guralnick, “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n Roll Sophie Blackall and Emily Jenkins, “A Fine Dessert” Jon Meachum, “ “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey George Herbert Walker Bush.”Robert Jackson Bennett, “City of Stairs: The Divine Cities.” – Nancy just finished this science fiction book– she calls it entirely original world building.  First of a trilogy, “The Divine Cities.” The 2nd installment, “City of Blades is coming out January 26th, 2016. Ona Russell, “O’Brien’s Desk”  Louis de Bernieres, “Birds Without Wings”Orhan Parmuk, “My Name is Red” ,“A Strangeness In My Mind” Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Doctor Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine.”Jamie Holmes, “Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing.”Isabelle Allende, The Stories of Eva Luna” Stacy Schiff, “The Witches”Doris Kearns Goodwin, “The Bully Pulpit”Lincoln Steffens, “The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.”Kent Haruf, “Our Souls At Night.”