A bygone Harlem music venue
POPULARITY
16 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
3 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
5 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
2 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
2 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
6 episodes with Savoy Ballroom
Celebrate Women's History Month with music from The Hampton Sisters, a legendary Indianapolis jazz quartet featuring Dawn, Virtue, Carmelita, and Aletra Hampton. They were born in Middletown, Ohio. Their birth dates spanned from 1915, when Aletra was born, to 1928, when Dawn, the youngest sister, was born. Their parents, Deacon and Laura Hampton, were both musicians. They had 12 children and together, they toured across the country as the Hampton Family Band. The experience they gained as children would serve them well later in life, as several members of the family pursued music as a professiom, including Slide Hampton, who became a world-renowned trombonist and arranger. In 1938, the Hampton Family settled in Indianapolis. During the 1940s and ‘50s the Hampton family band were stars on the Avenue. They appeared at local clubs including George's Bar, Walker Casino, Rum Boogie, Sky Club, Cotton Club, Paradise, Sunset Terrace, and the P&P Supper Club. The Hampton Family also performed at legendary venues outside of Indianapolis, including the Apollo, Carnegie Hall, and the Savoy Ballroom. The Hampton Sisters formed as an independent band during World War 2, when many male musicians were serving in the Armed Forces.
Last week, the music world lost two titans of jazz: drummer Roy Haynes and saxophonist Lou Donaldson, both NEA Jazz Masters who reshaped the genre with their artistry. This special episode of Art Works pays tribute to their immense contributions through archival interviews and timeless performances. From Roy Haynes' crisp, innovative drumming that defined the evolution of jazz over seven decades to Lou Donaldson's soulful alto saxophone that bridged bebop and groove, we celebrate their remarkable journeys.Roy Haynes reflects on his first big break with Luis Russell, playing at the legendary Savoy Ballroom, and his unforgettable collaborations with jazz icons like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Sarah Vaughan. Lou Donaldson, known as "Sweet Poppa Lou," shares insights on his trailblazing recordings for Blue Note, the rise of bebop, and his dynamic partnership with Jimmy Smith that popularized the organ-sax sound. Featuring selections from their iconic tracks—including “Green Chimneys,” “Blues Walk,” and “Alligator Bogaloo”—this episode highlights the lives and music of two artists whose impact will resonate for generations.
Last week, the music world lost two titans of jazz: drummer Roy Haynes and saxophonist Lou Donaldson, both NEA Jazz Masters who reshaped the genre with their artistry. This special episode of Art Works pays tribute to their immense contributions through archival interviews and timeless performances. From Roy Haynes' crisp, innovative drumming that defined the evolution of jazz over seven decades to Lou Donaldson's soulful alto saxophone that bridged bebop and groove, we celebrate their remarkable journeys.Roy Haynes reflects on his first big break with Luis Russell, playing at the legendary Savoy Ballroom, and his unforgettable collaborations with jazz icons like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Sarah Vaughan. Lou Donaldson, known as "Sweet Poppa Lou," shares insights on his trailblazing recordings for Blue Note, the rise of bebop, and his dynamic partnership with Jimmy Smith that popularized the organ-sax sound. Featuring selections from their iconic tracks—including “Green Chimneys,” “Blues Walk,” and “Alligator Bogaloo”—this episode highlights the lives and music of two artists whose impact will resonate for generations.
Playlist for The Everything Show 7/1/2024Massive Attack and Mos Def / I Against IBonnacons Of Doom / SignsSoul Brothers Six / Some Kind Of WonderfulPost Animal / Post AnimalJD McPherson / Sunshine GetawayBob Seger/Last Heard / Heavy Music Part 1Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds / Pretty BoyMdou Moctar / Imouhar (live)Erskine Hawkins (feat. Avery Parrish) / After HoursSkinshape / StornowayThe Damnations / Ain't Gonna Work TomorrowThe Wallflowers / One HeadlightVintage Culture / WeakKhruangbin (feat. Quantic) / Green OnionsDiana Krall / Cry Me A RiverWinnetka Bowling League (feat. Medium Build & Dawes) / This Is LifeElla Fitzgerald & Chick Webb / St. Louis Blues (at the Savoy Ballroom 1939)Lord Huron / Ends of the EarthMichael Jackson / Stranger in MoscowNeil Young / Harvest MoonFontaines D.C. / StarbursterFrank Sinatra / Just One Of Those ThingsSteely Dan / Black CowLos Tayos / Alma RuidaLeon Bridges / RiverJimmy Reed / The Sun Is Shining
Today’s Show Note Links Wonderful World: Explore the history of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, HERE Good Times: Check out the phenomenal Gregory Hines as he pays tribute to his mentor, Sammy Davis Jr., HERE. Sounds Good: Nile Rodgers and CHIC give a funky Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, HERE.
Harmonizing History: Judith Tick Unveils the Untold Story of Ella Fitzgerald, Jazz's Transformative Voice The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Art of Living Interview Welcome to The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast. I'm Paul Vogelzang, and today's show is part of our Smithsonian Associates Art of Living Interview series. Today we're diving into the melodious world of jazz with an enthralling discussion about one of its most iconic figures. Our guest is the distinguished music historian and Smithsonian Associate, Judith Tick. Smithsonian Associate Judith Tick will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up…Please check out our Show Notes today for more details. Judith Tick's meticulous research breathes new life into Ella's story, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, available Dec. 3, 2023. Drawing on a treasure trove of digital records from influential Black newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American and the Chicago Defender, Judith Tick shares resources previously untapped by biographers, providing us with a fresh and profound understanding of Fitzgerald's journey. We'll hear about her iconic performances at venues like the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom, her collaborations with giants like Chick Webb and Nelson Riddle, and her complex relationship with record labels, but let's listen as Judith Tick reads from her new book about Chick Webb's orbit. Judith Tick tells us today that the biography is more than a chronicle of dates and events. It's an exploration of how Fitzgerald, a groundbreaking Black American woman singer and bandleader, navigated and transformed the worlds of jazz and pop. Tick takes us through Ella's early days, her rise to stardom, and her unique ability to expand her audience across cultural divides. So, join us as we uncover the layers of Ella Fitzgerald's artistry and her profound impact on the American music scene. Whether you're a casual fan of jazz, a music historian, or an ardent admirer of Fitzgerald's talent, this conversation promises to be as masterful and wonderful as its subject. Stay tuned for a journey through the life and legacy of the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald. My thanks to Smithsonian Associate Judith Tick. Judith Tick will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates Interview Series coming up. Please check out our website and show notes today for more details. Judith Tick's new book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, available Dec. 3, 2023. And my thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks to you, my wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe, and Let's Talk About Better© The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next week. For more information, please click here on Smithsonian Associates: https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/becoming-ella-fitzgerald
New York dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies, in 1920s-40s. What did people hear at the Cotton Club? Connie's Inn? Small's Paradise? How about the Ubangi Club? What did the Savoy Ballroom sound like? Music by Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Bentley, and others.
The first regular band Chick Webb had at the Savoy Ballroom before Ella Fitzgerald joined. Taft Jordan, Bobby Stark, Sandy Williams, Pete Clark, Edgar Sampson, Elmer Williams, Joe Steele, Don Kirkpatrick, John Truehart, John Kirby and Webb himself created some classic big band sounds largely directed by the compositions and arrangements by Sampson. Records for Columbia, OKeh, Decca. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support
Good News: Conservationists are utilizing AI to help track wildlife in London, Link HERE. The Good Word: More great coffee-related wisdom! Good To Know: Staggering information about coffee consumption around the world… Good News: Dallas is creating miles and miles of bike trails to connect the city, Link HERE. Wonderful World: Explore the wonders of […]
Running through the month of April, Lincoln Center's "American Songbook: A Place You Belong" concert series celebrates four historic NYC music institutions of yesteryear: the Savoy Ballroom, Palladium Ballroom, Cafe Society, and Paradise Garage. Lincoln Center chief artistic officer Shanta Thake and George C. Wolfe, the writer and director who helped conceive the series, join us to preview.
February is Black History Month and for our celebration this month I am taking the four Saturdays and splitting them into two parts and presenting two bands and band leaders per show. Today, I am going to feature the bands of Chick Webb and Andy Kirk. Chick had a very exciting band and was a mainstay at the Savoy Ballroom. Andy Kirk comes out of Kansas City and had several hits and was popular in the late 1930's into the 1940's. I hope you enjoy part one of our celebration of Black History Month. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com
If ragtime piano can be seen as the starting point in the evolution of jazz piano, then the next step in that evolutionary process wasn't a step all; it was a "stride." Around 1920, the popularity of ragtime piano began to wane, as blues music became the new fad. In response to this — while also incorporating some of the influence of Tin Pan Alley — several pianists, primarily in Harlem, began to experiment with a blending of styles. The result was stride piano. Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, violinist, singer, and comedic entertainer. His innovations in the Harlem stride style laid much of the basis for modern jazz piano. SOURCE: Wikipedia. The Joint Is Jumpin' was released in 1937. Words by Andy Razaf and J. C. Johnson, music by Thomas "Fats" Waller/arr. Alan Billingsley. From the 1978 musical Ain't Misbehavin'. The musical is a tribute to the music of Fats Waller. It was a time when Manhattan nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom were the playgrounds of high society and Lenox Avenue dives were filled with piano players banging out the new beat known as swing.
Uno de los principales centros del mundo del entretenimiento de Harlem era la Séptima Avenida, en la calle 131. Había muchos salones de baile en Harlem en las décadas de los años 20 y los años 30, pero el Savoy, que abrió en 1926 en la Avenida Lenox entre las calles 140 y 141, los ocultó y ocupó su lugar preeminente hasta que cerró en 1958. Con José Manuel Corrales.
Neue (alte) Fotos aus dem Savoy Ballroom und Tipps für heiße Tage findest Du in dieser kurzen Episode. „Aber Vorsicht! It's cool man!“ Finde deine Lieblingsplattform, höre, abonniere, like, teile +++++++ borisnaumann.de/bei-mir-bist-du-schoen-podcast/ + Kontakt, Spenden, … +++++++ Abonniere und like unsere Seiten bei: Facebook: facebook.com/BeiMirBistDuSchoenPodcast Instagram: instagram.com/bei_mir_bist_du_schoen_podcast/ Twitter: twitter.com/MirBist ————— BMBDS-Podcast 073 - Manche mögen's heiß ShowNotes: Louis Armstrong https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong Neue Fotos für Dein Online Projekt: http://www.yehoodi.com/blog/2022/7/14/black-history-photos-from-getty-available-for-educational-use Dancers Uplift the Black Roots (and Future) of Lindy Hop KQED - Film mit Tyedric Hill & Shannon Varner http://www.yehoodi.com/blog/2022/6/15/dancers-uplift-the-black-roots-and-future-of-lindy-hop Step by Step auf dem kleinen Fest im großen Garten stepbystep-hannover.de https://www.kleinesfest-hannover.de/hannover/kleines-fest/ Herrenhäuser Gärten Hannover https://www.google.com/maps/place/Herrenh%C3%A4user+G%C3%A4rten/@52.3881143,9.6921667,971m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x47b0747fcbb481a7:0x8aba2eb652d94572!8m2!3d52.3881111!4d9.6966567 Eindruck des ersten Tages https://youtu.be/zo1fShomH10 Somme, Sonne, SwingOut - Mitmach-Challenge für diesen Sommer https://www.facebook.com/groups/746149796622096 Rhythmus Schablone https://www.borisnaumann.de/rhythmus-im-swing-handout/ Online Kurs - Rhythmus im Swing https://www.borisnaumann.de/online-swing-tanzschule/ —> Schreibe mir eine Mail, wenn Du exklusiven Zugriff auf den Kurs möchtest! Nur 29,90 statt 79 Euro!!! - Nur für kurze Zeit! Kontakt: BMBDSpodcast@gmail.com mail@borisnaumann.de Kostenfreier Styling Spickzettel: BorisNaumann.de/styling Kostenfreie Tanztipps: BorisNaumann.de/#kostenlos facebook.com/BorisBaumann5678 instagram.com/BorisNaumann_SwingtanzCoach Boris' E-Mail Adresse: mail@borisnaumann.de Kostenloses Strategiegespräch: BorisNaumann.de Intro: The Andrew Sisters - Bei mir bist Du schön youtu.be/Xe2UXccid40 Outro: Slim & Slam - The Flat Foot Floogie youtu.be/S4eAapgCaZU Foto: JaninaSchuster.de Wir, Boris & Phil aus Hannover, sprechen über die SwingTanz Szene in Deutschland, Europa und der Welt. Es gibt Episoden mit speziellen Themen, mit allgemeinen Themen und Interview-Specials. Alles dreht sich um die SwingTanz Welt. Ob LindyHop, Shag, Balboa, Blues, Charleston oder Solo Jazz. Schalte ein und genieße die spontane und lockere Art, in der wir unsere Sicht der Dinge wiedergeben. Viel Spaß!
Harlem Hospitality, hosted by William Bryant, a popular Jazz bandleader, vocalist, and disc jockey. This series aired on the American Armed Forces Radio Network. This episode aired in 1947 (month and day unknown). The program was recorded from the legendary and at the time - extremely popular, Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York City, with a combination of musical numbers and audience interviews. Starring: Willie Bryant a.k.a. "Mayor of Harlem" (host); (b. August 30, 1908 – d. February 9, 1964) Little Miss Cornshucks (Mildred Jorman) (singer -- b. May 26, 1923; d. November 11, 1999) Zella Carter; Amanda Randolph (actress & singer -- b. September 2, 1896; d. August 24, 1967); Etc. My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLES. You can subscribe to my channels to receive new post notifications, it's 100% free to join. If inclined, please leave a positive rating or review on your podcast service. Instagram @duane.otr Thank you for your support. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Listen to nurse Erachie Brown – born in Jamaica, Queens, New York – who is the descendant of a Foundational Black American share about her ancestry: her mother was from South Carolina and her family protected their land from the KKK; her father was from Jamaica, West Indies and he migrated to New York City where he met Erachie's mom at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. On being a Foundational Black American:“We are called Foundational Black Americans, because we are the descendants of the African slaves who were brought here, early in the 1600s, and Africans had been here even before then. So, we are the true indigenous people. We have a culture, because we're ripped from the homeland and brought to this country and many other places in the Caribbean and across the world, and stripped of our identity, our culture…” Erachie talks about being a Foundational Black American. Erachie and I, Sonja, met through the Zip Code Memory Project — https://zcmp.org — where we participated in community-based ways to memorialize the lives lost to Coronavirus. You can read about Erachie Brown here: https://zcmp.org/brown-erachie/ On working in a New York hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic:“I was put into a very hazardous condition. In fact, I was forced to, basically. But, with my own resourcefulness I got my own PPE… So I was put in this isolation unit for men. Air vents. They were all on vents, because of their breathing…had to pump oxygen into them as well as take away the virus and be filtered throughout this system. So it wouldn't go throughout the hospital air conditioning system. But, these men was in so much torment that they would rip their face masks off, and now they got those germs flying all over, and you know, I'm an LPN or PCA, Patient Care Tech, same thing. The RNs would refuse — white women refused to go in there, and there was… an Asian man in there and there was an Hispanic man and there was an old white man and I think there was someone else, and they were in torment, and not only where they in torment they were filled with feces and urine and nobody would change it for two shifts. I worked the night shift. What, what is humanity?” “…Well, uh, it started 2019, yeah 2020 – that's January – by time June came – by time we got into spring the trucks – the trailer – for refrigeration trailers were outside. Again working at night, and you know, I really didn't pay much attention 'cause you know it's a hard job, to tell you. It's not an easy job when you have somebody – like I said – It's very racist… Some bosses are not liking Black folks – I hate to say it, but it's true. So they give you all these dirty, rotten grunt work, and try to make you quit. So… I know… You know, I wasn't really paying attention. But then I start seeing the makeshift emergency, emergency center outside the building – like tents and stuff, I said okay something serious is going on…” Erachie recalls working in a hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Located in Harlem on Lenox Avenue, the Savoy Ballroom was known as “The World's Finest Ballroom” and the “Home of Happy Feet” from its 1926 opening to its 1958 close. Unlike other ballrooms of the era, the Savoy always had a no-discrimination policy and showcased the finest swing music in the city. To learn more about the Savoy, check out welcometothesavoy.com, a site that's restoring the Savoy with a VR experience, watch 1992's Stompin' At The Savoy directed by Debbie Allen on Amazon Prime Video or Roku, watch clips about the history of the Savoy on YouTube, or read Swinging At The Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer by Norma Miller.Sources:https://www.welcometothesavoy.comhttps://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/the-savoy-ballroom-harlem-new-york-1930/https://welcometoharlem.com/the-savoy-ballroom/https://youtu.be/H5DyQfcokFk (short YouTube doc on Savoy)https://youtu.be/Nr8MLXDThug (clip from PBS doc Jazz on Savoy)https://youtu.be/p9OHZtq8CTk (lindy hoppers at Savoy)If you like these Daily Drops, follow us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
Viele Vor- und Nachteile lernst Du heute kennen, die beim online tanzen lernen auftreten. + weitere spannende Themen. Unbedingt reinhören! Finde deine Lieblingsplattform, höre, abonniere, like, teile +++++++ borisnaumann.de/bei-mir-bist-du-schoen-podcast/ + Kontakt, Spenden, … +++++++ Abonniere und like unsere Seiten bei: Facebook: facebook.com/BeiMirBistDuSchoenPodcast Instagram: instagram.com/bei_mir_bist_du_schoen_podcast/ Twitter: twitter.com/MirBist ————— BMBDS-Podcast 065 - online tanzen lernen ShowNotes: BorisNaumann.de/Interesse-an-Online-Tanzschule Göbbels Swing Band - Charlie and his Orchestra swr.de/swr2/wissen/goebbels-swing-band-musik-als-propagandamittel-swr2-wissen-2021-07-14-100.html Helge Schneider erklärt Jazz (& Swing) youtube.com/watch?v=j68aqvexqbQ&list=PL2uMyncwMb2NXmitUdlxWCM2_koEUwc9J br.de/kultur/helge-schneider-jazz-swing-100.html Savoy Ballroom opening 12. März https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy_Ballroom Frankie Manning hatte eine Tochter, 2 Söhne, 7 Enkelkinder und 9 Groß-Enkelkinder. TheGuardian.com/stage/2009/jun/23/obituary-frankie-manning Blogpost zum Thema Online Swingtanzen lernen: BorisNaumann.de/online-tanzen-lernen Kostenlose Tanztipps: BorisNaumann.de/#kostenlos facebook.com/BorisBaumann5678 instagram.com/BorisNaumann_SwingtanzCoach Boris' E-Mail Adresse: mail@borisnaumann.de Kostenloses Strategiegespräch: BorisNaumann.de Intro: The Andrew Sisters - Bei mir bist Du schön youtu.be/Xe2UXccid40 Outro: Slim & Slam - The Flat Foot Floogie youtu.be/S4eAapgCaZU Foto: JaninaSchuster.de Wir, Boris & Phil aus Hannover, sprechen über die SwingTanz Szene in Deutschland, Europa und der Welt. Es gibt Episoden mit speziellen Themen, mit allgemeinen Themen und Interview-Specials. Alles dreht sich um die SwingTanz Welt. Ob LindyHop, Shag, Balboa, Blues, Charleston oder Solo Jazz. Schalte ein und genieße die spontane und lockere Art, in der wir unsere Sicht der Dinge wiedergeben. Viel Spaß!
WALTER THEODORE ROLLINS was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, bebop. In late 2020, the saxophonist released Rollins in Holland, a 2-CD/3-LP deluxe set via Resonance Records. The collection of unheard live and studio trio recordings from Rollins's 1967 Netherlands tour feature “take no prisoners” performances with bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink. Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thejazzpodcast)
Uno de los temas emblemáticos de la era del swing, "saltando en el Savoy" fue compuesto por Edgar Sampson (tenor de la orquesta de Chick Webb) aunque luego los créditos se ampliaron a Webb, B. Goodman y a Andy Razaf quien le puso letra. Amalgama de canción y de riff de orquesta, habla del Savoy Ballroom en Harlem donde se lucia Chick Webb y se hacían las grandes y legendarias tenidas de competición de orquestas, los "cutting contests". Épocas en que el jazz y la música popular eran sinónimos. Escuchemos a Webb, Benny Goodman, Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Ella y Louis, Clifford Brown y Max Roach y otros
Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. 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 "I'm a Fool" by Dino, Desi, and Billy. 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/ NB an early version of this was uploaded, in which I said "episode 136" rather than 137 and "flattened ninth" at one point rather than "ninth". I've fixed that in a new upload, which is otherwise unchanged. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I relied mostly on fur books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. Black and Proud: The Life of James Brown by Geoff Brown is a more traditional objective biography. And Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on Live at the Apollo is a fascinating, detailed, look at that album. This box set is the best collection of Brown's work there is, but is out of print. This two-CD set has all the essential hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Introduction, the opening of Live at the Apollo. "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? [Audience cheers, and gives out another cheer with each musical sting sting] Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you in this particular time, national and international known as the hardest working man in showbusiness, Man that sing "I'll Go Crazy"! [sting] "Try Me" [sting] "You've Got the Power" [sting] "Think" [sting], "If You Want Me" [sting] "I Don't Mind" [sting] "Bewildered" [sting] million-dollar seller "Lost Someone" [sting], the very latest release, "Night Train" [sting] Let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" [sting] Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames"] In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard -- just total silence. Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this -- why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself -- the high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, 4'33, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't -- the whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally excerpt the piece, but of course for 4'33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can excerpt another piece Cage wrote. Because on October the twenty-fourth 1962 he wrote a sequel to 4'33, a piece he titled 0'00, but which is sometimes credited as "4'33 no. 2". He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening. But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action performed with maximum amplification and no feedback: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with "Try Me", and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than sixty years later, but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of "Try Me" in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was -- at least according to Brown -- when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company had spent much of the 1940s working for Moe Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the Ink Spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups: [Excerpt: The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long"] In the fifties, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the Famous Flames were signed. A quick aside here -- Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King, but Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamla and Motown, or Phillips and Sun, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the "5" Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources, the Famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career. Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner, to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship. With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the chitlin circuit. But around this time there was another change that would have an even more profound effect. Up to this point, the Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the chitlin' circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill -- either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the Famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C. Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odum on bass. Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original lineup of what became the James Brown Band. Other musicians who played with them in the late fifties were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Buie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonder, although James Brown and Bobby Byrd would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point, as well, the lineup of the Famous Flames became more or less stable. As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original lineup of the Famous Flames had left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after "Try Me" had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like "Do You Remember", are quite good examples of their type: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember?"] Brown pulled together a new lineup of Famous Flames, featuring two of the originals. Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second lineup of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Byrd, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these lineup changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few R&B musicians with his own tight band. The story goes that Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown -- it seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern -- it apparently happened with "Please Please Please", Brown's first hit, *and* "Try Me", Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later in this episode -- that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Syd Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over twenty years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mullican to Wynonie Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed he was consistently making the most boneheaded, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released on Dade Records as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown's so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes"] That made the R&B top ten, and I've seen reports that Brown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Syd Nathan realised his mistake, and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name "James Brown presents HIS BAND", starting with a cover of Bill Doggett's "Hold It": [Excerpt: James Brown Presents HIS BAND, "Hold It"] After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back from another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top twenty R&B hit for the new lineup, "I'll Go Crazy", which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top forty hit, "Think!": [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think!"] The success of "Think!" is at least in part down to Bobby Byrd, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and (often uncredited) co-writer and co-producer until the mid-seventies. After leaving the Flames, and before rejoining them, Byrd had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less-than-ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Byrd to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Byrd also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos, and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists, to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the "5" Royales or Little Willie John or whoever, and Byrd had done this for "Think", which had originally been recorded by the "5" Royales, whose leader, Lowman Pauling, had written it: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Think"] Byrd had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable for example that the Royales sing "How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?/How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember which was my fault/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” But in Brown's version this becomes “How much of your happiness can I really claim?/How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember just what is wrong/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think"] In Brown's version, nothing is his fault, he's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand, but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he's right, while in the Royales' version they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't *only* do wrong and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words' difference, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. "Think" would become the Famous Flames' first top forty hit on the pop charts, reaching number thirty-three. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963 Brown and the Flames would have fifteen top-thirty R&B hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B charts, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. Many band-leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing. As Bobby Byrd put it, "Many band leaders do it but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us and we were all for it ‘cos we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, The Famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe. It was still a good idea because anybody joining The James Brown Revue had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had." But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage. If a band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined five dollars. Multiple flashes meant multiples of five dollars fined. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn, To quote Bobby Byrd again: "James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do and if he didn't do the complete spin you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from. Thirty-nine — Sixteen —Fourteen — Two — Five — Three — Ninety-eight, that kind of thing. Number thirty-nine was always the change into ‘Please, Please, Please'. Sixteen is into a scream and an immediate change, not bam-bam but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls thirty-six, that means we're going back to the top again. And the forty-two, OK, we're going to do this verse and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing." This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The Famous Flames shows soon became a full-on revue, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered (and given her stage name) by Johnny Otis, but DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on Chess records, with hits like "Soulful Dress": [Excerpt: Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress"] After DeSanto left, she was replaced by Bea Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like "You Got the Power": [Excerpt: James Brown and Bea Ford, "You Got the Power"] However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back. Tex's response was to record this: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "You Keep Her"] Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later rerecord himself with some success: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "I Found You"] Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Syd Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre, and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement, with shows running all day every day -- Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show. This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the sixties started -- the month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run where it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Wolk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the twenty-fourth, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Wolk describes what a full show by the James Brown Revue at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the "James Brown Orchestra" -- the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them: [Excerpt: James Brown Presents His Band, "Night Flying"] At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows, but the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released "Lookin' For a Love": [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love"] Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss' child, to sing her few numbers: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try"] Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single "I'm On My Way to Atlanta": [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta"] After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] After Burke came a change of pace -- the vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week, and Markham's album "The World's Greatest Clown" was a result of these shows and released on Chess Records: [Excerpt: Pigmeat Markham, "Go Ahead and Sing"] And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonder, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode -- and backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week (according to Wolk -- I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960), was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonder had at every show until Brown's death forty-four years later. The live album is an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you realise two things. The first is that this was *before* any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown -- before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Sex Machine", or "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" or "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" or "Funky Drummer" or "Get Up Offa That Thing". It's still an *unformed* James Brown, only six years into a fifty-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Wolk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself: [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] The album was released a few months later, and proved Syd Nathan's judgement utterly, utterly, wrong. It became the thirty-second biggest selling album of 1963 -- an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent sixty-six weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts -- the pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album -- breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years -- possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames, to join the Drifters, becoming part of the lineup that recorded "Under the Boardwalk" and "Saturday Night at the Movies". Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite!, which is generally considered a little lacklustre in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother, Maceo, along with him. Maceo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his Orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Out of Sight"] The Famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called "Maybe the Last Time", which was ripped off from the same Pops Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio -- from that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Byrd, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that "Out of Sight" was released on Smash Records, to which Brown -- but not the Flames -- had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records' incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording "Caldonia", a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Caldonia"] Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash -- but by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience -- the TAMI Show: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)"] We've mentioned the TAMI show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a filmed concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, the Supremes, and, as the two top acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather oddly, the point of the TAMI Show wasn't the music as such. Rather it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive. The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it's possible to get -- you'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen. There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did. Almost all surviving TV from the fifties and sixties -- and even some from the seventies -- was preserved by this method rather than by videotape. Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry, low-resolution, mess -- or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shoot in 525-line resolution, their cameras shot in 819-line resolution -- super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescoped the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process -- TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows, second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullaballoo. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures (the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often). Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians. So they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from "all over the world", as the theme song put it -- by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own bands -- or whose bands needed augmenting -- there was an orchestra, centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitzsche, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song. James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best-known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles, and whose biggest hit, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" only went to number fifty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] The Barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line "You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool" -- which was where the Rolling Stones came from. Or at least, it was where Americans seemed to think they came from given both that song, and the theme song of the TAMI show, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which sang about “the Rolling Stones from Liverpool”, and also referred to Brown as "the king of the blues": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World"] But other than the Barbarians, the TAMI show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late fifties and early sixties could be found in one place -- there was the Merseybeat of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the fifties rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Gerry and the Pacemakers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry and Gerry and the Pacemakers: "Maybellene"] And there was the Brill Building pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown acts, with Brown the other representative of soul on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him -- though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they *must* be the headliners. It was a difficult decision, because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience -- though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand. But according to Steve Binder -- though all the accounts of the show are contradictory -- Brown refused to do a rehearsal -- so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance -- Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson, one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online, and is well worth seeking out. But still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show)] The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that -- though when they did, the audience response was fine: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around"] Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with his payday from the TAMI Show, given that as well as his own performance the Stones did one of his songs, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did "Surfin' USA" for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the TAMI Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly sixty years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling -- yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records. As an instrumentalist. But Brown *was* signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material -- he had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by "James Brown" rather than the earlier billings of "James Brown and his Orchestra" or "James Brown and the Famous Flames", was for King, and was almost a remake of "Out of Sight", his hit for Smash Records. But even so, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolen had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the bluesman Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with "Tin Pan Alley": [Excerpt: Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley"] Wilson had brought Nolen to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety of bandleaders. His first recording came with Monte Easter on Aladdin Records: [Excerpt: Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening"] After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolen was just one of many West Coast blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker -- he was competing with Pete "Guitar" Lewis, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them. But he was still making some influential records. His version of "After Hours", for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolen's arrangement: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours"] Nolen had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-fifties, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolen, for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive"] But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player Pete "Guitar" Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolen to replace him. It's Nolen who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late fifties, like "Casting My Spell": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell"] And of course Otis' biggest hit "Willie and the Hand Jive": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Nolen left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording. It was during this time that Nolen developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolen's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townshend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolen went the other way -- while his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with *more* notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads -- the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale, so you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B: [Excerpt: E major chord] It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh, so an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B, and D: [Excerpt: E7 chord] But Nolen built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant. They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, *and* ninth of a scale, so an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp: [Excerpt: E9 chord] Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord *and* at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note, so an E major and B minor chord at the same time: [Demonstrates Emajor, B minor, E9] It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song "Ode to Billie Joe" around a D9 chord, barely ever moving off it: [Excerpt: Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"] That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for -- because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", actually has three chords in it -- it's basically a twelve-bar blues, like "Out of Sight" was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords -- but as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolen playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly-apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolen's replacement many years later, Brown asked "Can you play an E ninth chord?" "Yes, of course" came the reply. "But can you play an E ninth chord *all night*?" The reason Brown asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolen is *extremely* physically demanding. Because the other thing about Nolen's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers, and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken-scratching, based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent, semiquaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single, jagged-sounding, chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single-coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the midrange, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] And that is the sound that became funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolen's playing on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", that guitar sound -- chicken scratched ninth chords -- is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolen's guitar playing in its actual final form -- that wouldn't come until he started using wah wah pedals, which weren't mass produced until early 1967 -- but it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original studio recording of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" actually sounds odd if you listen to it now -- it's slower than the single, and lasts almost seven minutes: [Excerpt: James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)"] But for release as a single, it was sped up a semitone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Syd Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now didn't like the song. Indeed according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor. But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since "Try Me" seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively Black people with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated, audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector and the whole Motown stable were overlooked in favour of the big winners for that year Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr Singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees "In the Midnight Hour", "My Girl", "Shotgun" by Junior Walker, and "Shake" by Sam Cooke. From this point on, Syd Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown had now become the Godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.
Last night we got to meet another member of Vanessa Coffman's saxophonic family — a sexy silver soprano sax that Veezy's has named “Savoy.” And what an excellent moniker that is for this lovely instrument, which is a refurbished 1920s sax that was in its infancy when New York's great Savoy Ballroom for which it was named was just starting to showcase the century's greatest jazz musicians. Well, so in honor of this venerable guest, you know we had to come up with an evening of appropriate tunes which would let it rock but also roll, like this, an alternately rollicking, then prancing rendition of the 1930s classic, “Blue Moon.”
Onlosmakelijk verbonden hiermee: de Harlem Renaissance, de Jazz Age, speakeasies, segregatie en de teloorgang van prachtige concertzalen als de Savoy Ballroom of historische plekken, bv. 52nd Street.
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Amazon to acquire MGM Studios for $8.5 billion Butter Pat Industries Cast Iron Skillet A deep dive into Google I/O's smart home news Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub Roku wants to expand into smart home devices A thank-you note to the net Biden anitrust people say Amazon's prices are too low; DC's says they are too high Florida's New Pro-Disney, Anti-Facebook and Twitter Law Google Doodle celebrates the Savoy Ballroom with multiplayer swing dancing game A Cappella Group Sings Computer, App, and Game Sound Effects 'Charlie Bit My Finger' sold as an NFT, could vanish from YouTube forever Feeling blue: drug dealer's 'love of stilton' leads to his arrest 2,500 people showed up to a Huntington Beach party that devolved into violence and vandalism, police say This new Google Photos tool will help you prep for the end of free storage Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches Google adding convenient 'Save to Photos' shortcut for Gmail attachments Russia fines Google $81k (yes, k) for not deleting content; threatens to slow it down Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it'll take a 20 percent cut of sales Scoop: New York Times in talks to buy The Athletic Picks: Stacey - How Normal Am I? Jeff - America Talks: Want to connect with someone who disagrees with you? Ant - Test your lungs Ant - My Favorite Photo I Captured in Shanghai Is Discussed on "Behind The Shot" Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: udacity.com/TWiT offer code TWIT75
Hoy vamos a tener un programa relajado, con una música elegante y ensoñadora, una extraordinaria selección de estándares de jazz interpretados por el guitarrista y cantante estadounidense Jhon Pizzarelli. Pizzarelli, nacido el 6 de abril de 1960 en Nueva Jersey, posee una voz cálida y suave y junto a su presencia siempre elegante, se ha convertido en uno de los principales exponentes del jazz tradicional. Siguiendo los pasos de su padre, el también guitarrista Bucky Pizzarelli, empezó a cantar a los 20 años y siempre ha destacado entre sus influencias a la hora de tocar la guitarra las de músicos como Les Paul y Django Reinhardt. En esta ocasión vamos a disfrutar repasando su disco Let there be love, que, como hemos dicho, selecciona una preciosa colección de estándares de jazz. Empezamos por el primer corte, la canción que da título al disco: “Let there be love”, “Que haya amor”. Esta canción se publicó por primera vez en 1940, escrita por Lionel Rand y con letra de Ian Grant. La canción siempre ha sido muy popular y ha tenido infinidad de versiones. Escucharemos ahora la de Jhon Pizzarelli. En 1993 el John Pizzarelli Trio hizo de telonero en una de las últimas giras de Frank Sinatra, y participó en la celebración del 80 cumpleaños de este en el Carnegie Hall. En 1997 participó también en la producción de Broadway Dream, un homenaje al compositor Johnny Mercer. En 1998 grabó un disco, Meets The Beatles, donde reinterpreta canciones clásicas del grupo de Liverpool, tamizadas por su voz y por el jazz. Al año siguiente, en 1998, rindió homenaje a una de sus más grandes influencias en la canción, Nat King Cole, con P.S. Mr. Cole. Pizzarelli firmó en 1999 con el sello Telarc y grabó dos discos de estándares, Kisses in the Rain y Let There Be Love, en 2000, disco del que nos estamos ocupando. Escuchamos ahora “I’m putting all my eggs in one basket”, “Estoy poniendo todos los huevos en una cesta”, una canción escrita por Irving Berlin para la película de 1936 “Follow the fleet”, interpretada por Fred Astaire y Ginger Rogers. Desde entonces, ha grabado numerosos trabajos; un disco con el pianista George Shearing, otro para celebrar sus diez años de música con su trío, grabado en directo: Live at Birdland en 2003. Apartándose por un momento del swing, Pizzarelli grabó Bossa Nova en 2004, cantando composiciones de Antonio Carlos Jobim como "The Girl from Ipanema" y "Aguas de Marco". Ya en 2005 presentó nuevos estándares en Knowing You y, respaldado por la Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, le ha rendido homenaje a Sinatra en 2006 con Dear Mr. Sinatra. Seguimos con nuestro disco de hoy. Vamos a escuchar una cadenciosa versión de These foolish things, “Estas cosas tontas”, otro estándar con música de Jack Strachey y letra Eric Maschwitz, ambos ingleses y que se publicó en 1935. En este disco colaboran músicos de gran talento y muy reconocidos en el mundo del jazz. Al saxo tenor Harry Allen, un estadounidense que fue niño precoz y que destacó desde niño por poseer un talento excepcional para la música. Antes de trabajar con Jhon Pizzarelli ya lo hizo con su padre, Bucky Pizzarelli. Dominic Cortese, acordeonista, un músico versátil y quizá el más grabado de toda la historia de la música debido a sus innumerables participaciones, como músico de estudio, en sesiones de grabación de otros artistas, incluido, a modo de ejemplo, el trepidante “Viva las Vegas”, del Elvis. Ray Kennedy, pianista, compositor y arreglista, fue miembro del trío de John Pizzarelli durante más de una década aunque también grabó más de 10 álbumes bajo su propio nombre. Seguiremos con los músicos de la sesión pero, ahora, volvemos a la música: “Stompin’at the Savoy”, otro estándar de jazz de 1933, compuesto por Edgar Sampson y su título hace referencia al famoso local nocturno de Harlem, el Savoy Ballroom de Nueva York. Y aunque fue Benny Goodman el que llevó al éxito la composición y la acreditó como propia, el auténtico autor fue el citado Sampson. Dicho queda. Ken Peplowski, clarinetista y saxo tenor, otro de los músicos acompañantes de este disco, conocido principalmente como músico de swing. En algún momento ha sido comparado con Benny Goodman, con quien toco durante algún tiempo. Ambos fueron virtuosos en su instrumento. También toco en la orquesta Tommy Dorsey y ha colaborado como clarinete primero en orquestas sinfónicas. Y para que todo quedara en casa, nuestro artista invitado contó para este trabajo con la familia, su padre Bucky, a la guitarra y su hermano Martin al bajo, ambos músicos reconocidos en el mundillo del jazz. Más música: “I Don’t Know Why”, “No se por qué”, una canción publicada en 1931 y compuesta por Fred E. Ahlert. La canción ha sido grabada por muchos artistas (que van desde leyendas del country-blues como Moon Mullican y Jerry Lee Lewis hasta Dean Martin). Todos ellos la han convertido en lo que es hoy, un estándar. Y todavía nos queda un poco de tiempo para otra joya del álbum: “Just one more chance”, “Solo una oportunidad”, una canción de Arthur Johnston, compositor muy conocido en su época (1898/954) que trabajó con todos los grandes del momento: Irving Berlin, Sam Coslowy y Bing Crosby, entre otros. También fue nominado para el premio de la academia en 1936 a la mejor canción original por “Pennies from heaven”, otro de sus éxitos. Esta es la versión de Pizzarelli de “Just one more chace”. Os propongo una gratificante actividad para la que no tenéis que salir de casa. Volved a escuchar el podcast con los ojos cerrados. Estamos en un club de jazz, en Nueva York, en el Blue Note o en el Birdland, es igual, en buena compañía, con una copa en la mano y dejándonos llevar por la cadencia y la elegancia de la música… ¿Ya?... pues a vivir que son dos días. Bueno, para cuando os despertéis y ya me habré ido, así que, hasta la semana que viene… Y no, no se me olvida, …¡Buenas Vibraciones!.
Good News: A whole LIST of good news coming out because of, and often in spite of, Covid-19! The Good Word: A phenomenal quote from Nelson Mandela. Good To Know: Something fascinating about the Olympic flag… Good News: A remarkable ruling has been handed down in a landmark case regarding France’s actions to combat climate […]
Med sin hesa karaktäristiska stämma bjöd denne legendariske radioman i nära 40 år svenskarna på amerikansk storbandsjazz. Han ses idag som en sann folkbildare men själv kallade han sig underhållare. Leif "Smokerings" Anderson hade en närmast magisk förmåga att presentera musiken i sina radioprogram. När tonerna av amerikansk jazz vävdes samman med Leif Andersons mörka skånska stämma var det för många som att förflyttas till nattklubbarna i Harlem, New York på 1930-talet, The Cotton Club eller The Savoy Ballroom. I hans radioprogram förflyttades lyssnaren både i tid och rum. Under 39 år ledde Leif Anderson programmet Smokerings i Sveriges Radio, där han främst spelade amerikansk, mjuk och melodiös storbandsjazz från swing-epoken. Han presenterade band som Ellington, Dorsey, Lunceford, Bunny Bergian, Count Basie, Artie Shaw och många andra. Tre dagar före sin död slog han Svens Jerrings tidigare radiorekord med Barnens Brevlåda genom att sända det 1786:e Smokerings-programmet. Det är svårt att idag avgöra hur enormt mycket han har betytt för jazz-intresset i Sverige. Hans stämma blev som ett med den musik han presenterade. Det blev till mer än prat och musik. Det förvandlades istället till ett slags blåtonad poesi som berörde mig djupt, säger Dan Kristensson som gjort programmet. Leif dog den 17 november 1999. Han blev 74 år. Medverkande: Frans Sjöström, musikproducent på Sveriges Radio Sven-Erik Palmbring, god vän med Leif Jan Olsson, journalist Bo Nilsson, ljudtekniker och kollega Carl-Otto Strandh, trumslagare med specialitet jazz och swing Sara Ljunggren, sångerska i Smoke Rings Sisters Anna-Maria Sernhult, jazz-sångerska från Göteborg Programmet är gjort 2020 av Dan Kristensson Exekutiv producent: Sofia Kottorp
Music soothes the soul and can cross racial lines. When a supreme hostess introduces an international guest to one local style, a new media sensation is created.#HarlemRenaissance, #SavoyBallroom, #HallJohnsonchoir, #DumboWhenElephantsFly, #BessieSmith, #TheGreenPasturesfilm, #PorgyandBess, #MauriceRavel, #GershwinSupreme hostess Cobina Wright hosts a reception for famed French composer Maurice Ravel. The entertainment includes the best of the Harlem Renaissance including Hall Johnson and his choir.
Clearwater Jazz Holiday's Young Lions Jazz Master Virtual Sessions
Clearwater Jazz Holiday's History of Jazz Outreach Program engages professional musicians to share the story of Jazz through live, interactive musical experiences. By Spring 2020, the Program had reached nearly 30,000 students in approximately 60 Tampa Bay area schools and has evolved to also bring meaningful experiences to schools and organizations serving at risk students, people of all ages with special needs, neurodiversities, and autism, as well as older adults in senior living communities and memory care centers. Frank T. Williams III, a 40-year + educator, band director, clinician, author, adjudicator, and composer, is a long-time CJH education partner, important to the development of many CJH Outreach programs. In 2020, CJH launched its STOP-TIME SERIES with Frank Williams to complement the History of Jazz Outreach Program by creating a comprehensive visual and audio History of Jazz archive delivered in Frank's one-of-a-kind style. WATCH & LISTEN! Visit the CJH website Education & Outreach section to watch all STOP-TIME videos for FREE or enjoy listening here as part of the CJH Young Lions Jazz Master "Virtual" Sessions Podcast. To learn more about the annual CJH festival tradition and year-round Education & Outreach: www.clearwaterjazz.com
Today's show is a look at a very famous venue for he big bands, The Savoy Ballroom. We'll learn about the place they called, The Home of Happy Feet. I've picked four bands that were considered the head line bands that played at the Savoy to feature on our show. The bands are, Chick Webb, Erskine Hawkins, Cootie Williams, and Lucky Millander. There is some great music in this program and I hope it causes you to have happy feet. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com
Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. 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 “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson. This collection of Hank Ballard’s fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B. And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker’s pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a record that achieved a feat that’s unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record — ever — to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It’s a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States. We’re going to look at Chubby Checker, and at “the Twist”, and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”] One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on “The Wallflower”, which was based on their hit “Work With Me Annie”, and they’ve cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday’s news. They hadn’t had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label. But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit: [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, “Morning Train”] The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn’t sing it themselves — it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group — but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called “The Twist”, and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It’s difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn’t a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn’t a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances. Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James’ sequels to “The Wallflower”, she had sung: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”] There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They’d first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with “Peanuts”: [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Peanuts”] But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, “Let’s Do the Slop”, that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954: [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Let’s Do the Slop”] That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales’, which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters. Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters’ guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody. The melody they used was one they’d used previously — on a song called “Is Your Love For Real?”: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Is Your Love For Real?”] But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. “Is Your Love For Real?” had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”] That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song “Whatcha Gonna Do?” by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song: [Excerpt: The Radio Four, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”] Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it’s impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station. Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they’d changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they’d previously used on the song “Tore Up Over You”: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Tore Up Over You”] They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly — there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn’t sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales’ version. Either way, the finished song didn’t credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called “Teardrops on Your Letter”, but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “The Twist”] And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. “The Twist” was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”, which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”] The success of that saw “The Twist” start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart. The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV — at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn’t going to repeat Freed’s mistakes. But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they’d invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one. To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”. If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop. There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs. And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance “the Twist”, possibly because of Ballard’s record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it. Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn’t ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn’t make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening — by which it’s generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it’s not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard’s act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link — Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved. Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform “The Twist”, even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark’s show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do “favours” for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label — Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success — and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job. Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends — a single with “Jingle Bells” sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they’d asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he’d done on Clark’s private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, “Jingle Bell Imitations”] It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark’s wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him “Chubby Checker”, as a play on “Fats Domino”. Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in that style, renamed “The Class” made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Class”] Two more singles in that vein followed, “Whole Lotta Laughin'” and “Dancing Dinosaur”, but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing “The Twist”, it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”] Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show — a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size — and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it. Checker’s version of “The Twist” went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard’s version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker’s drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker’s saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo — and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard’s track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard’s version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker’s coattails. And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances — a version of “The Hucklebuck”, a quick cover of Don Covay’s “Pony Time”, released only a few months before, which became Checker’s second number one, and “Dance the Mess Around”. All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with “Let’s Twist Again” — singing “let’s twist again, like we did last summer”, a year on from “The Twist”: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Let’s Twist Again”] That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs — their first big hit had been Elvis’ “Teddy Bear”. But over the few months after “Let’s Twist Again”, Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters. Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they’d told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists — Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument — the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock. Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shimmy Baby”] Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue — which had a capacity of about two hundred people — was packed, largely with the band’s fans from New Jersey — the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey. As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again”, and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense. Until it wasn’t. Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen. But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself. The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. “The Twist” reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn’t have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them. Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn’t mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He’d played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he’d produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He’d produced Little Willie John’s version of “Fever”, and wrote “Drown in My Own Tears”, which had become a hit for Ray Charles. Glover had also produced Hank Ballard’s original version of “The Twist”, and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, “Peppermint Twist”, became their first single on Roulette: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Peppermint Twist”] “Peppermint Twist” went to number one, and Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker’s record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred. The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest “in” thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you’re young and rebellious, you don’t want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother’s favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing. But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of “Waltzin’ Matilda” remade as “Twistin’ Matilda”, the Chipmunks recorded “The Alvin Twist”. The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with “The Bristol Stomp”, recorded “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”, which managed to be a sequel not only to “The Twist”, but to their own “The Bristol Stomp” and to Hank Ballard’s earlier “Annie” recordings: [Excerpt: The Dovells, “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”] There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy… almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single. The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let’s Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after “Blue Moon”: [Excerpt: The Marcels, “Merry Twistmas”] Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley’s second film, Don’t Knock The Rock, so Checker’s second film became Don’t Knock the Twist. Checker also appeared in a British film, It’s Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker. Of course, the Twist craze couldn’t last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later. Checker’s last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording “Do the Freddie”, a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Do the Freddie”] In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He’s continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of “The Twist” with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we’ll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren’t issued on CD, so Checker didn’t get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one’s view of the artistic merits of his work, it’s sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked. But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we’ll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we’ll be hearing more from them later. The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years…
Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Twist" by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. 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 "Viens Danser le Twist" by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France's biggest rock star. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson. This collection of Hank Ballard's fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B. And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker's pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that achieved a feat that's unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record -- ever -- to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It's a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States. We're going to look at Chubby Checker, and at "the Twist", and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"] One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on "The Wallflower", which was based on their hit "Work With Me Annie", and they've cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday's news. They hadn't had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label. But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit: [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "Morning Train"] The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn't sing it themselves -- it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group -- but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called "The Twist", and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It's difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn't a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn't a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances. Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James' sequels to "The Wallflower", she had sung: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"] There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They'd first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with "Peanuts": [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Peanuts"] But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, "Let's Do the Slop", that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954: [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Let's Do the Slop"] That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales', which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters. Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters' guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody. The melody they used was one they'd used previously -- on a song called "Is Your Love For Real?": [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Is Your Love For Real?"] But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. "Is Your Love For Real?" had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?": [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"] That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song "Whatcha Gonna Do?" by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song: [Excerpt: The Radio Four, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"] Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it's impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station. Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they'd changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they'd previously used on the song "Tore Up Over You": [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Tore Up Over You"] They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly -- there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn't sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales' version. Either way, the finished song didn't credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called "Teardrops on Your Letter", but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "The Twist"] And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. "The Twist" was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, "Finger-Poppin' Time", which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark's TV show American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Finger-Poppin' Time"] The success of that saw "The Twist" start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart. The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV -- at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn't going to repeat Freed's mistakes. But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they'd invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one. To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie". If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop. There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs. And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance "the Twist", possibly because of Ballard's record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it. Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn't ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn't make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening -- by which it's generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it's not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard's act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link -- Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved. Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform "The Twist", even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark's show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do "favours" for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label -- Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success -- and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job. Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends -- a single with "Jingle Bells" sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they'd asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he'd done on Clark's private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, "Jingle Bell Imitations"] It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark's wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him "Chubby Checker", as a play on "Fats Domino". Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in that style, renamed "The Class" made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Class"] Two more singles in that vein followed, "Whole Lotta Laughin'" and "Dancing Dinosaur", but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing "The Twist", it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"] Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show -- a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size -- and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it. Checker's version of "The Twist" went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard's version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker's drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker's saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo -- and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard's track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard's version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker's coattails. And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances -- a version of "The Hucklebuck", a quick cover of Don Covay's "Pony Time", released only a few months before, which became Checker's second number one, and "Dance the Mess Around". All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with "Let's Twist Again" -- singing "let's twist again, like we did last summer", a year on from "The Twist": [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Let's Twist Again"] That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs -- their first big hit had been Elvis' "Teddy Bear". But over the few months after "Let's Twist Again", Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters. Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they'd told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists -- Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument -- the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock. Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shimmy Baby"] Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue -- which had a capacity of about two hundred people -- was packed, largely with the band's fans from New Jersey -- the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey. As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played "The Twist" and "Let's Twist Again", and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense. Until it wasn't. Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen. But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself. The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. "The Twist" reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn't have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them. Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn't mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He'd played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he'd produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He'd produced Little Willie John's version of "Fever", and wrote "Drown in My Own Tears", which had become a hit for Ray Charles. Glover had also produced Hank Ballard's original version of "The Twist", and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, "Peppermint Twist", became their first single on Roulette: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist"] "Peppermint Twist" went to number one, and Chubby Checker's version of "The Twist" went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker's record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred. The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest "in" thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you're young and rebellious, you don't want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother's favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing. But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of "Waltzin' Matilda" remade as "Twistin' Matilda", the Chipmunks recorded "The Alvin Twist". The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with "The Bristol Stomp", recorded "Bristol Twistin' Annie", which managed to be a sequel not only to "The Twist", but to their own "The Bristol Stomp" and to Hank Ballard's earlier "Annie" recordings: [Excerpt: The Dovells, "Bristol Twistin' Annie"] There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy... almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single. The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let's Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after "Blue Moon": [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Merry Twistmas”] Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley's second film, Don't Knock The Rock, so Checker's second film became Don't Knock the Twist. Checker also appeared in a British film, It's Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker. Of course, the Twist craze couldn't last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later. Checker's last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording "Do the Freddie", a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Do the Freddie"] In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He's continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of "The Twist" with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we'll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren't issued on CD, so Checker didn't get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one's view of the artistic merits of his work, it's sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked. But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we'll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we'll be hearing more from them later. The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years...
In 1919, into the heart of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, Norma Miller was born. As a child, she would watch the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald play to the hopping crowds of the Savoy Ballroom, the majestic heart of Harlem and the birthplace of swing. At just 12, she was plucked from the street outside its doors and so began a career that would take her around the globe as one of the world's foremost swing dancers - and all before she turned 18. So put on a record and lace up your dancing shoes, because we're swinging out from the sprung-wood floors of the Savoy to the slippery decks of British liners and the beaches of Rio as we follow the life of Norma Miller, Queen of Swing.McFadden, Robert D. “Norma Miller, Lindy-Hopping ‘Queen of Swing,’ Is Dead at 99”, New York Times, May 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/obituaries/norma-miller-dead.htmlMiller, Norma. Swingin'at the Savoy: the Memoir of a Jazz Dancer. Temple University Press, 1996.Spring, Howard. "Swing and the Lindy Hop: dance, venue, media, and tradition." American Music (1997): 183-207.If you want to support Deviant Women, follow us on: PatreonTwitter @DeviantWomenFacebook @deviantwomenpodcastInstagram @deviantwomenpodcastDeviant Women is recorded and produced on the lands of the Kaurna People and we pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Learn a little about Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and DANCE!
The Carnival of swing event can be found herehttps://www.facebook.com/events/1114912945535558Webinar about Chick Webb and the Savoy Ballroom is herehttps://www.facebook.com/events/182079159719021What'cha Know Johttps://www.facebook.com/whatcha.know.johoffberg
This month's episode is a little different than our usual extended interviews. In a case of perfectly serendipitous timing, this milestone 50th episode coincides with what would have been Frankie Manning's 106th birthday, now widely recognized as World Lindy Hop Day. So, to celebrate both the Ambassador of Lindy Hop and this milestone episode, we've curated a collection of stories about Frankie the dancer, and Frankie the man, as told by previous guests on The Track. It is hard to overstate the significance of Frankie Manning's contributions to our cultural history, and his part in cultivating a truly worldwide community of people united by their love of this African-American art form he helped define. As a teenager, Frankie danced at Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom, later bringing his talents to Whitey's Lindy Hoppers as a lead dancer and chief choreographer. In the 1930's and 1940's he performed the Lindy Hop with jazz greats, on stage and screen, and toured internationally. In the 1980's, Frankie answered the call of those with a renewed interest in the Lindy Hop and became its Ambassador - winning a Tony award for choreography, returning to performances on screen, and teaching dance workshops to a new generation of dancers around the world. The community Frankie helped create through his knowledge, generosity, and character has never been stronger than we are seeing now in the midst of the global pandemic. Dancers across the globe are finding new ways to connect, support artists, and spread the love of Lindy Hop despite seemingly insurmountable challenges and in doing so, continue to honor and spread the spirit of its Ambassador.
In this episode, Ben and Daniel discuss the 1982 broadcast of the Tony-winning musical Ain't Misbehavin', starring Nell Carter, André DeShields, Armelia McQueen, Ken Page, and Charlayne Woodard. Ain't Misbehavin' is a tribute to the black musicians of the 1920s and 30s, and uses the music of Fats Waller to celebrate the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance and the Golden Age of hotspots like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom. The musical was directed by Richard Maltby Jr., with choreography and musical staging by Arthur Faria.
Imagine the movers and shakers of culture and social justice lamenting on a Sunday afternoon. They exchange ideas and sentiments as Harlem is enduring the Great Depression and The Savoy Ballroom serves as an oasis from their troubles. The New Negro is demanding equality but old problems are in the way. A creative moment during an exciting but challenging time in Harlem. (This is an artistic creation and not an actual event) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/terri-lyons/support
Wie entstand Swing?-Musik, Geschichte und Tanz- Wofür steht #blackhistory ? Was sind Kritikpunkte und was haben wir bei unserer Recherche gelernt?Was sind „Chain Gangs“? Warum sind viele Songs ca. 3,5 min lang? Finde es heraus!Der #blackhistorymonth war Anlass dieser Episode - wir sprechen jedoch über vieles mehr... Finde deine Lieblingsplattform, höre, abonniere, like, teile Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/BMBDS-at-AppleSpotify: http://bit.ly/BMBDS-at-SpotifyDeezer: http://bit.ly/BMBDS-at-DeezerPodbean: https://beimirbistduschoen.podbean.com/Castbox: http://bit.ly/BMBDS-at-CastBoxOvercast.FM http://bit.ly/BMBDS-at-OvercastYouTube: http://bit.ly/BMBDS-on-YouTube Abonniere und like unsere Seiten bei:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeiMirBistDuSchoenPodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bei_mir_bist_du_schoen_podcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/MirBist BMBDS 010 - (Black) History Talk #10:00 Intro0:01 Social Ecke Rock that Swing https://www.rockthatswing.com/0:03 Warm up letzter Podcast https://beimirbistduschoen.podbean.com/e/009/0:07 Facebook Gruppe „teaching swing dance“ http://bit.ly/TeachSwingDance0:14 Hustle Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EJhVcU9vIA0:16 TraunsteinElephant Swing - Swing Tanzen in Traunstein https://www.elephantswing.com/0:18 YouTube Playlists Black History http://bit.ly/YT-BlackHistory Clips, die Du kennen solltest http://bit.ly/YT-DasSolltestDuGesehenHaben 0:19 Corona Virus https://youtu.be/KYfoMjpyOKU 0.20 Tipps zur Szenebildung und Workshop PlanungDie richtige Band zur entsprechenden VeranstaltungKommunikation / Absprache zwischen Band und OrganisatorenKommunikation zwischen Tänzern und BandEinige Bands spielen zwischendurch auch andere MusikrichtungenWarum Bands nicht immer 3,5 min Songs spielenDas richtige Tempo für deine SzeneT’aint what you do (Shim Sham) https://youtu.be/KhnNhr1spoM„Vertrag kommt von vertragen“Abstimmung von Band und DJDie richtige Besetzung der Band Brother Yussuf https://www.youtube.com/user/brotheryusef0:30 Hautthema - (Black) History Talk #1DisclaimerWarum gibt es einen Black History Month„Die Vergangenheit ist immer Teil der Gegenwart“Musikentwicklung Monk https://youtu.be/2fcqoLT6Bug Syncopated Dance Music (Ursprung Blues, Jazz & Swing) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiGi2vh90YNmROMJQcOaRAOR30SQu4n1G Work Songs 1. https://youtu.be/mskqvrmw-zM 2. https://youtu.be/4G5KtQynWvc Chain Gangs https://youtu.be/w3jgsULD9tA Call & Response https://youtu.be/QFWRcXYsYMo Triplets Sklaverei und die Entstehung der Tänze https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds4VXkCi1sI Ringtänze https://youtu.be/NQgrIcCtys0 Cake walk https://youtu.be/LqpINmqxlsc Turkey Trot https://youtu.be/D4KlCjCBLSY?t=90 Animal Dances https://youtu.be/sMyEnTZP0yI Musik aus Alltagsgegenständen https://youtu.be/WL-raBnVyJU Texas Tommy https://youtu.be/lTAQ5_KFpbQ Warum aufgenommene Musik ca. 3,5 min lang istFoxtrott im Savoy Ballroom https://youtu.be/PSs5g9wiD4wVermischung der Tanzstile Sugar Sullivan https://youtu.be/oLRwdJhFvps Felix Baumgartner https://youtu.be/vvbN-cWe0A0 Rassentrennung http://bit.ly/white-colored Aneignung der Kultur durch die Weißen Balboa Island https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/f8/dc/bef8dc339b5880e5fef855589c8f2ed6.jpgOriginal Dixieland Jazz Band https://youtu.be/5xhXpiT3eysEigene Einstellung zur Geschichte0:59 Kritik am Black History Month (BHM)Warum Fokus auf ein Thema pro Monat?Spezielle Fokus-TageWarum ist es gut über gewisse Themen zu sprechen?Talk black history eines Weißen vor Schwarzen https://youtu.be/x9WeQrC0DL8Vernichtung von DokumentenIntension des BHMFür wen ist der BHM? #blacklivesmatter https://youtu.be/tgFI0phqRIY Viele aus der schwarzen Community wissen nicht, dass Swing ein schwarzer Tanz istBewusste Distanzierung von der Kultur1:13 Surprise Question The Nitty Gritty https://youtu.be/P2v8IgJdsm4 getanzt von Stephen Sayer https://youtu.be/m01f4uAn1AA1:16 Recap iLindy https://www.ilindy.com/black-history-month/ amerikanische Black History vs. englische Black History1:20 Silly Lindy Hop Joke1:21 AusblickHistory Talk #2Bridge #2Interview mit Cat Foley und Cam Mitchell1:22 Outtakes Intro by:The Andrew Sisters - Bei mir bist Du schön https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe2UXccid40Outro by:Slim & Slam - The Flat Foot Floogie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4eAapgCaZUVerwendetes Foto von Janina Schuster www.janinaschuster.de Boris & Phil aus Hannover sprechen über die SwingTanz Szene in Deutschland, Europa und der Welt. Es gibt Episoden mit speziellen Themen, mit allgemeinen Themen und Interview-Specials. Alles dreht sich um die SwingTanz Welt. Ob LindyHop, Shag, Balboa, Blues, Charleston oder Solo Jazz. Schalte ein und genieße die spontane und lockere Art, in der wir unsere Sicht der Dinge wiedergeben. Viel Spaß!
Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. 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 “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. (more…)
Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Double Crossin’ Blues” by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis’ material — this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I’m almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther’s first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn’t contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we’re going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues. When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what’s called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll. Rock and roll when it started — the music of the mid fifties — is not really a guitar-based music. It’s dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We’ve already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as “rhythm and blues”, and that in turn fed into rock and roll. There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we’ll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It’s probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different. We’re going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there’ll be several more after that. Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with “Harlem Nocturne”, which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano: [excerpt of “Harlem Nocturne”] After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star. At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period — he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet’s version of “Flying Home”, and on “Jamming With Lester” by Lester Young. He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who’d all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others — while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows. One thing that’s very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We’ll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry — in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially. He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience — both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis’ show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love. He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops — though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn’t play drums easily. But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn’t sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk. He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who’d played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner. On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn’t win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band. That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities — we’ll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we’re talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips. At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther’s biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike. But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins. We haven’t talked much about doo-wop yet, but we’re at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we’ve discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people — this was a time when Italian-Americans weren’t considered fully “white” according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said “Charlie’s not white, he’s Italian!”) But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists — usually three or four of them — would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts. And in the tradition of the Ink Spots’ “top and bottom”, these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal — though the bass singer wouldn’t speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name “doo wop”, which was only applied later, comes from — from the singer singing things like this: [excerpt “Count Every Star”, by the Ravens] That’s the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We’re not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties — and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more. And The Robins were another of these “bird groups”. They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis — “My Baby Done Told Me”: [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds “My Baby Done Told Me”] However, they didn’t like the name, and soon settled on the Robins. The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, “Around About Midnight”, was a remake of Roy Brown’s earlier “Long About Midnight”, and it’s really rather good. Take a listen: [“Around About Midnight”] A quick note there — that’s noted as their first single on some discographies I’ve seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren’t released until a few months after they were recorded. It’s definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though. That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we’ve touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I’m sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins — and Esther Mae Washington — would all go on to another label, Savoy. Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he’s another one we’ll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he’d been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he’d taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs. He’d always had a love of music — he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager — and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered — Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren’t certain that they could use him, but they’d give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA. Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer — he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing “The Honeydripper”. But he still didn’t actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn’t have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn’t do wonderfully (for reasons we’ll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records. Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker and “Open the Door, Richard” by Jack McVea: [excerpt: “Open the Door, Richard”] That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton’s band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others — six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947. But the problem with “Open the Door, Richard” was that it was actually too successful — the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn’t, Bass had to find another label to work with. Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music. And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* — Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis’ band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact — the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he’d triple the royalty rate after Otis’ first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky’s promises, this proved to be false. When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn’t get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute — twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like “Open the Door Richard”, based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita — Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines. [excerpt “Double Crossin’ Blues”] Those lines “How come you ain’t in the forest?” “I’m a lady”, “they got lady bears out there!” take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that “lady bear” was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman. Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass “I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid’s expenses — lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted ‘Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?’ He wouldn’t give me the five bucks”. Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song’s name, which is where the title “Double Crossing Blues” comes from. Although as Bass said “Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it.” Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass’ time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther’s stage name was decided upon — Lubinsky said to Otis “you need a stage name for that girl,” to which Otis replied “which girl? Little Esther?” and Lubinsky said “that’s perfect!” And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon. The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth But the record’s success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people “who hummed behind Little Esther”. They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis’ future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused. The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we’ll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well — “Mistrustin’ Blues”, “Deceivin’ Blues”, “Dreamin’ Blues”, “Wedding Boogie”, “Rockin’ Blues”… Otis also had a 1951 hit with “All Nite Long”, which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads: [excerpt “All Nite Long”: Johnny Otis] We’ll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we’ll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including “Double Crossin’ Blues”) going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future. She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass — not that Bass didn’t have them (and not necessarily that he did, either — I don’t know) — but that he didn’t mix his business and personal lives. He didn’t hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him. So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass’ wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row. Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy. Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren’t as successful as the work they’d done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin. She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we’ll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips. Most impressive of these was “Home is Where the Hatred is”, a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972: [excerpt “Home is Where the Hatred is”: Esther Phillips] That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive — and to be fair, that’s one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it’s possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn’t deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right — she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance. She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.
Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Double Crossin' Blues" by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis' material -- this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I'm almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther's first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn't contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we're going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues. When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what's called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll. Rock and roll when it started -- the music of the mid fifties -- is not really a guitar-based music. It's dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We've already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as "rhythm and blues", and that in turn fed into rock and roll. There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we'll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It's probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different. We're going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there'll be several more after that. Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with "Harlem Nocturne", which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano: [excerpt of "Harlem Nocturne"] After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star. At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period -- he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet's version of "Flying Home", and on "Jamming With Lester" by Lester Young. He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who'd all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others -- while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows. One thing that's very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We'll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry -- in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially. He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience -- both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis' show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love. He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops -- though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn't play drums easily. But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn't sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk. He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who'd played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner. On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn't win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band. That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities -- we'll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we're talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips. At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther's biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike. But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins. We haven't talked much about doo-wop yet, but we're at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we've discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people -- this was a time when Italian-Americans weren't considered fully "white" according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said "Charlie's not white, he's Italian!") But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists -- usually three or four of them -- would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts. And in the tradition of the Ink Spots' "top and bottom", these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal -- though the bass singer wouldn't speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name "doo wop", which was only applied later, comes from -- from the singer singing things like this: [excerpt "Count Every Star", by the Ravens] That's the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We're not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties -- and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more. And The Robins were another of these "bird groups". They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis -- "My Baby Done Told Me": [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds "My Baby Done Told Me"] However, they didn't like the name, and soon settled on the Robins. The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, "Around About Midnight", was a remake of Roy Brown's earlier "Long About Midnight", and it's really rather good. Take a listen: ["Around About Midnight"] A quick note there -- that's noted as their first single on some discographies I've seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren't released until a few months after they were recorded. It's definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though. That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we've touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I'm sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins -- and Esther Mae Washington -- would all go on to another label, Savoy. Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he's another one we'll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he'd been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he'd taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs. He'd always had a love of music -- he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager -- and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered -- Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren't certain that they could use him, but they'd give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA. Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer -- he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing "The Honeydripper". But he still didn't actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn't have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn't do wonderfully (for reasons we'll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records. Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including "Stormy Monday" by T-Bone Walker and "Open the Door, Richard" by Jack McVea: [excerpt: "Open the Door, Richard"] That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton's band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others -- six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947. But the problem with "Open the Door, Richard" was that it was actually too successful -- the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn't, Bass had to find another label to work with. Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music. And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* -- Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis' band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact -- the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he'd triple the royalty rate after Otis' first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky's promises, this proved to be false. When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn't get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute -- twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like "Open the Door Richard", based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita -- Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines. [excerpt "Double Crossin' Blues"] Those lines "How come you ain't in the forest?" "I'm a lady", "they got lady bears out there!" take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that "lady bear" was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman. Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass "I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid's expenses -- lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted 'Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?' He wouldn't give me the five bucks". Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song's name, which is where the title "Double Crossing Blues" comes from. Although as Bass said "Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it." Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass' time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther's stage name was decided upon -- Lubinsky said to Otis "you need a stage name for that girl," to which Otis replied "which girl? Little Esther?" and Lubinsky said "that's perfect!" And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon. The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth But the record's success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people "who hummed behind Little Esther". They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis' future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused. The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we'll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well -- "Mistrustin' Blues", "Deceivin' Blues", "Dreamin' Blues", "Wedding Boogie", "Rockin' Blues"... Otis also had a 1951 hit with "All Nite Long", which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads: [excerpt "All Nite Long": Johnny Otis] We'll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we'll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including "Double Crossin' Blues") going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future. She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass -- not that Bass didn't have them (and not necessarily that he did, either -- I don't know) -- but that he didn't mix his business and personal lives. He didn't hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him. So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass' wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row. Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy. Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren't as successful as the work they'd done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin. She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we'll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips. Most impressive of these was "Home is Where the Hatred is", a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972: [excerpt "Home is Where the Hatred is": Esther Phillips] That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive -- and to be fair, that's one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it's possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn't deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right -- she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance. She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.
Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (more…)
Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at the Ink Spots and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one — Mixcloud doesn’t allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn’t set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don’t apply). I apologise for that, but it’s rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots’ music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg’s website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca is a wonderful resource for detail about the band’s career. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I’m covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that’s useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records. I’m using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson’s autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It’s credited there as by “Shirlita Bolton”, but that’s actually the name of Deke’s widow, who owns the rights to the book — it’s definitely Deke’s autobiography. It’s very short, only seventy-three pages, and it’s full of inaccuracies, but it’s still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it’s very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about “top and bottom”, I say “they first did it in the studio”. I don’t mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they’d already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended… Transcript OK, so we’ve covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now — we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we’ve stayed around there. Now, we’re still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we’re moving away from those shows, and we’re going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time. We’ve talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll — the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We’ve seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll. There’s one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we’ve not covered yet, and that’s the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started. And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups. Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using… well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you’d play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you’d play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn’t sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in — though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies “all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived”. Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough. The Ink Spots formed out of people who’d started their careers in these groups — Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo “Charlie and Jerry”, while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves “King, Jack, and Jester” or sometimes “King, Jack, and Jesters”. In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most. The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups — they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this: [Mills Brothers: “It Don’t Mean a Thing”] There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They’re imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they’d listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers. The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby’s radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall — they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia. Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with “Paper Moon” when they got back — their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties — and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day. But they’d lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they’d lost it to people who’d been imitating them — to the band we last heard of performing as “King, Jack, and Jesters”. By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes. In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name — there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent’s office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I’ll read the next bit from Watson’s book directly: “To me, it seemed like inspiration. ‘That’s it!’ I shouted. ‘How about calling us the Ink Spots?’ The boys really yelled this time. ‘There you go again Deek!’ Charlie exclaimed. ‘That’s right!’ agreed Hoppy, ‘always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he’ll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes’ They all talked at once. ‘Man, you know ain’t nobody wants to be no Ink Spot’.” Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing “Your Feet’s Too Big”, which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name “four-dice Rastus”, and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It’s entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race. That said, I’m not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I’m not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people “should” have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes. Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers. But there was a problem — Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band’s performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn’t continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music. In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots’ manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club’s manager, knew his boss’ band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots’ records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it’s Kenny’s voice you think of. Or at least, it’s Kenny and Hoppy Jones. Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots’ music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called “top and bottom”. (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I’m happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny). Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller — they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed: [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing “Your Feet’s Too Big”] When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while — still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of “Swing High, Swing Low”. [excerpt of “Swing High Swing Low”] Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it. He refined the idea of Hoppy’s spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit “If I Didn’t Care”, but the one we’re going to look at is their 1941 record “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure — this one: [excerpt of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”] We’d then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals: [excerpt of him singing] Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice [excerpt of that] And finally there’d be a final line with Kenny singing lead again. When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They’d found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here’s the intro to “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)” [intro to that song] Now here’s the intro to “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” [intro to that song] And here’s the intro to “To Each His Own” [intro to that song] And to “Whispering Grass” [intro to that song] I could go on… if you don’t believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on. This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it: [excerpt: “Juke Box Saturday Night”] But the thing is — all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked. And when I say “number one” or “top ten”, I don’t mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly — and when they did, they didn’t have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them. That may sound like I’m being dismissive of the Ink Spots’ music. I’m not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not? The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak — roughly from 1939, when they started making “top and bottom” records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder’s band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder’s band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder’s band, was easily available. But Gale was taking the majority of the money — Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you’ve got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn’t have to share it. The Ink Spots’ period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart. Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well — Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who’d put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them — he’d worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace. But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own “Ink Spots”. Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month — but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died. After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn’t let him. The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band — unlike Watson he hadn’t quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits. In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called “the Ink Spots” which didn’t have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone’s manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name — although I’ve seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn’t allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he’d founded. Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile, had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on “a completely new idea”. This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called “the Brown Dots”. The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential — “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”, written by two of their members. [excerpt of “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”] That’s been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat “King” Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson. Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as “the Ink Spots”. Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves “The Ink Spots” and Fuqua would tour as “Charlie Fuqua’s New Ink Spots”. Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as “the Ink Spots” — he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while. There’s one recording of that version of the band — Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson — live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again: [excerpt of “Wish You Were Here”] As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy’s bass vocal: [excerpt of “I Don’t Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You”] So there was one version of “the Ink Spots” touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who’d sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots. That wasn’t a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again — and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots. Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted. You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren’t a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. And they did. Every surviving member of the band — not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you — went out on tour as “the Ink Spots”. At one point there were up to forty different “Ink Spots” groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who’d been in a proper version of the Ink Spots — and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as “Ink Spots”, in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they’d just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point. The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I’ve been able to find details for took place in 2013. But the Ink Spots’ career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn’t the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we’ll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music. And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots’ final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, as one of the two tracks he would record. But we’ll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes’ time… Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at the Ink Spots and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, listeners in the US may not be able to access this one -- Mixcloud doesn't allow USians to listen to streams when they have more than four songs in a row by the same artists, due to copyright restrictions (and it isn't set up to realise that in this case, all the music is in the public domain so those restrictions don't apply). I apologise for that, but it's rather out of my hands. All the Ink Spots' music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one is dirt cheap, has decent sound quality, and has all the essential hits on it. More than Words Can Say by Marv Goldberg is the definitive Ink Spots biography, but sadly it came out through an academic publisher and is thus grossly overpriced. You can buy it here, should you choose. Goldberg's website is also an invaluable source of information, not just about the Ink Spots but about forties and fifties vocal groups, and R&B. Inkspots.ca is a wonderful resource for detail about the band's career. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, has a reasonable amount about the Ink Spots in it, as well as about almost all the other pre-1954 artists I'm covering here. A resource I should have mentioned earlier, but one that's useful for all the pre-1952 music, is archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records. I'm using this a lot. And finally, Deke Watson's autobiography is currently only available on the Kindle. It's credited there as by "Shirlita Bolton", but that's actually the name of Deke's widow, who owns the rights to the book -- it's definitely Deke's autobiography. It's very short, only seventy-three pages, and it's full of inaccuracies, but it's still the only autobiography any of the real Ink Spots wrote, and it's very cheap. Clarification At one point, talking about "top and bottom", I say "they first did it in the studio". I don't mean, there, that the first time they performed in this style was in the studio, but that this was the first time they tried something in the studio that they'd already done live. The way I say it makes it sound more ambiguous than I intended... Transcript OK, so we've covered the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938 and 39 and the performers around them quite exhaustively now -- we had a bit of a diversion into Western Swing, but mostly we've stayed around there. Now, we're still looking at New York in the late 1930s and early forties, but we're moving away from those shows, and we're going to look at the most popular vocal group of the era, and possibly the most important vocal group of all time. We've talked over the last few weeks about almost all the major elements of what we now think of as rock and roll -- the backbeat, the arrangements that focus on a rhythm section, the riffs, the electric guitar and the amplification generally. We've seen, quite clearly, how most of these elements were being pulled together, in different proportions and by different people, in the late 1930s, almost but not quite coalescing into what we now call rock and roll. There's one aspect which might be quite easy to overlook, though, which we've not covered yet, and that's the vocal group. Vocal harmonies have become much less prominent in rock music in the last forty years or so, and so today they might not be thought of as an essential element of the genre, but vocal groups played a massive role in the fifties and sixties, and were a huge element of the stew of genres that made up rock and roll when it started. And the vocal group that had the most influence on the groups that became rock and roll was a band whose basis was not as a vocal group, but in coffee pot groups. Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using... well, using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you'd play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you'd play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn't sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in -- though, as Deek Watson said about his coffee-pot group the Percolating Puppies "all of us had to keep our eyes on the cat who passed the collection for the evening, or else some of the money found its way from the pot to his pocket before dividing time arrived". Other instrumental parts, of course, would be replaced with simple mouth noises. You can make quite an impressive collection of instrumental sounds with just your voice, if you try hard enough. The Ink Spots formed out of people who'd started their careers in these groups -- Charlie Fuqua (pron. Foo-kway, and yes I have checked) was in one with Jerry Daniels before they became the imaginatively-named duo "Charlie and Jerry", while Deek Watson was in another. Those three, plus Hoppy Jones, performed in a variety of combinations under a variety of names before they settled on calling themselves "King, Jack, and Jester" or sometimes "King, Jack, and Jesters". In the early years of their career, they actually got themselves a radio show on a local station, where they were a fill-in for another band, the Four Mills Brothers. And the Four Mills Brothers were the people who influenced them the most. The Mills Brothers had actually started out not so differently from the coffee pot groups -- they entered a talent contest, and John Mills had lost the kazoo he was going to play. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and imitated a trumpet, and the brothers decided that they were going to start imitating brass instruments with their voices. And they got good at it. Listen to this: [Mills Brothers: "It Don't Mean a Thing"] There is no instrument on there other than a single acoustic guitar, believe it or not. They're imitating trumpets, a tuba, and a trombone with their voices, and they'd listen to instrumental musicians and copy their voicings. This is something that a lot of vocal groups have continued to do, but no-one has done it better than the Mills Brothers. The Mills Brothers became massively successful, and from 1930 through 1939 they were far and away the biggest black act in the US, making multiple appearances on Bing Crosby's radio show, appearing in films, and touring the world. It was the touring the world that caused their eventual downfall -- they went to play the UK in 1939, and discovered that with World War II imminent, the only ship away from the UK they could get at the end of their tour was one that went to Australia. Between that massive transport disruption, and then the further disruption caused by the war itself, it took them two years to get back into the US, by which time their popularity had faded somewhat (although they went on to have a massive hit with "Paper Moon" when they got back -- their career was far from over). They carried on having occasional hits into the late sixties, and carried on performing together into the late eighties -- and the last surviving Mills Brother carried on performing until his death in 1999, with one of his sons who carries on the family band to this day. But they'd lost their place as the top of the entertainment tree, and they'd lost it to people who'd been imitating them -- to the band we last heard of performing as "King, Jack, and Jesters". By the mid 1930s, those four men were in New York and performing as the Riff Brothers, but not getting very far. They were doing a mix of Mills Brothers inspired stuff and more jive music, and were earning decent money but not yet massive successes. In his autobiography, Deek Watson talks about how the Riff Brothers decided to change their name -- there were too many brother and cousin acts for the Riff Brothers to stand out, and the band eventually ended up in their booking agent's office, arguing for hours over what name they should choose and getting nowhere. Finally, as their agent toyed with a pen, a few drops of ink fell out. I'll read the next bit from Watson's book directly: "To me, it seemed like inspiration. 'That's it!' I shouted. 'How about calling us the Ink Spots?' The boys really yelled this time. 'There you go again Deek!' Charlie exclaimed. 'That's right!' agreed Hoppy, 'always wanting us to be something colored. Black Dots, Ink Spots, next thing you know he'll be wanting us to call ourselves the Old Black Joes' They all talked at once. 'Man, you know ain't nobody wants to be no Ink Spot'." Now, Watson in his book does seem to take credit for absolutely every good idea anyone involved in the band had (and for other things which had nothing to do with them, like writing "Your Feet's Too Big", which was written by Fred Fisher and Ada Benson). He also makes up some quite outrageous lies, like that this original lineup of the Ink Spots played at the coronation of King Edward VIII (anyone who knows anything about inter-war British history will know why that is impossible), but this does have the ring of truth about it. When he was in the Percolating Puppies, Watson used to work under the name "four-dice Rastus", and many early reviews of the Ink Spots criticised him for eye-rolling, hand-waving, and other minstrelly behaviours, which many black reviewers of the time considered brought black people into disrepute. It's entirely possible that his bandmates would be irritated by his emphasis on their race. That said, I'm not going to criticise Watson for this, or repeat some of the insulting names he was called by other black people. Everyone has a different response to the experience of oppression, and I'm not, as a white man, going to sit here and moralise or pontificate about how black people "should" have behaved in the 1930s. A lot of much better artists than Deke Watson did a lot more to play along with those stereotypes. Either way, and whatever they thought about it, Charlie Fuqua, Deke Watson, Jerry Daniels and Hoppy Jones became the Ink Spots, and that was the name under which their group would eventually become even more famous than the Mills Brothers. But there was a problem -- Jerry Daniels, their main jive singer, was getting seriously ill from the stress of the band's performing schedule, and eventually ended up hospitalised. He couldn't continue touring with them, and so for a little while the Four Ink Spots were down to three. They had to change, and in changing their lineup, they became the band that would change music. In 1936 Bill Kenny, a twenty-one year old high tenor singer, won an amateur night contest at the Savoy Ballroom. Moe Gale, the Ink Spots' manager, was the co-owner of the Savoy, and Charles Buchanan, the club's manager, knew his boss' band wanted a new singer and suggested Kenny. Kenny was, by any standards, an extraordinary singer, and his vocals would become the defining characteristic of the Ink Spots' records from that point on. When you think of the Ink Spots, it's Kenny's voice you think of. Or at least, it's Kenny and Hoppy Jones. Because as well as being an utterly astonishing singer, Bill Kenny was an inspired arranger, and he came up with an idea that changed the whole style and sound of the Ink Spots' music, and would later indirectly change all of popular music. The idea he came up with was called "top and bottom". (Note that Deke Watson also claimed credit for this idea in his autobiography, but the story as he tells it there is inconsistent with the known facts, so I'm happy to believe the consensus view that it was Kenny). Up until Bill Kenny joined the band, the Ink Spots had been a jive band, performing songs in the style of Cab Calloway or Fats Waller -- they were performing uptempo comedy numbers, and they were doing it very well indeed: [excerpt of the Ink Spots singing "Your Feet's Too Big"] When Bill Kenny joined the band, they continued doing the same kind of thing for a while -- still concentrating on uptempo numbers, as you can hear in their 1937 recording of "Swing High, Swing Low". [excerpt of "Swing High Swing Low"] Sometimes in those performances Hoppy Jones would speak-sing a line or two in his bass voice, but it was mostly fairly straightforward vocal group singing. They were still basically doing the Mills Brothers sound. And that was fine, because the Mills Brothers were, after all, the most popular black vocal group ever up to that point. But if they were going to be really big, they needed their own sound, and Bill Kenny came up with it. He refined the idea of Hoppy's spoken vocals and came up with a hit formula, which they would use over and over again. They first did it in the studio with their massive hit "If I Didn't Care", but the one we're going to look at is their 1941 record "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". They started doing ballads, usually introduced by an acoustic guitar playing what would become a familiar figure -- this one: [excerpt of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin"] We'd then get the whole song sung through by Bill Kenny, with the others singing backing vocals: [excerpt of him singing] Then Kenny would join in with the backing vocals, as Hoppy Jones repeated the whole song, speak-singing it in his deep bass voice [excerpt of that] And finally there'd be a final line with Kenny singing lead again. When I say this was a formula, I mean it really was a formula. They'd found a sound and they were going to absolutely stick with it. To give you an example of what I mean, here's the intro to "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)" [intro to that song] Now here's the intro to "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" [intro to that song] And here's the intro to "To Each His Own" [intro to that song] And to "Whispering Grass" [intro to that song] I could go on... if you don't believe that those are different songs, incidentally, check out the Mixcloud with the full versions of all these songs on. This was such a well-known formula for them that the Glenn Miller band did a dead-on parody of it: [excerpt: "Juke Box Saturday Night"] But the thing is -- all those songs I just played the intros of, they all went top ten, and two of them went to number one. This was a formula that absolutely, undoubtedly, worked. And when I say "number one" or "top ten", I don't mean on the R&B charts. I mean number one on the pop charts. They did sometimes deviate from the formula slightly -- and when they did, they didn't have hits that were quite so big. The public knew what it liked, and what it liked was a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, then Bill Kenny singing a song in a high voice, then Hoppy Jones saying the same words that Bill Kenny had just sung, in a much lower voice. And the Ink Spots were happy to give that to them. That may sound like I'm being dismissive of the Ink Spots' music. I'm not. I absolutely love it. One of the great things about popular music before about 1970 is it had a lot of space for people who could do one thing really really well, and who just did their one thing. Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, all just kept making basically the same record over and over, and it was a great record, so why not? The Ink Spots sold tens of millions of records over the decade or so when they were at their peak -- roughly from 1939, when they started making "top and bottom" records, until the late forties. Their manager Moe Gale was also the manager of most of the bands who played the Savoy, and so could put on package tours combining, say, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder's band, all of whom often played on the same bill together. This also meant that, for example, when Deke Watson took ill with pneumonia in 1943, Trevor Bacon from Millinder's band could fill in for him. Or when the Ink Spots needed a new pianist to back them in 1942, Bill Doggett, who had been in Millinder's band, was easily available. But Gale was taking the majority of the money -- Gale took sixty percent while the Ink Spots got the other forty between them, split four ways. But forty percent of multiple millions of 1940s dollars is still a lot of money, and with a lot of money comes the kind of problems you only get when you've got a big pile of money and think you could get a bigger pile of money if you didn't have to share it. The Ink Spots' period in the spotlight was eventually brought to an end by personality conflicts, lineup changes, legal squabbles, and deaths. Four years after their career took off, in 1942, Charlie Fuqua was drafted, and that began a whole series of lineup shifts, as replacements were brought in to cover his parts for the three years he was away. But then, two years later, in 1944, everything started falling apart. Deke Watson and Bill Kenny never got on very well -- Watson thought of himself as the leader, on the grounds that he was the one who'd put the band together, named it, and been the on-stage leader until Kenny came along. Meanwhile Kenny thought of himself as the leader, on account of being the lead singer and arranger. Hoppy Jones was the peacemaker between the two of them -- he'd worked with Watson for years before Kenny came along, but he also had an assured place in the band because of his spoken bits, so he took it on himself to keep the peace. But Hoppy Jones was growing ill, and started missing more and more dates because of what turned out to be a series of brain haemmorages. Meanwhile, Moe Gale allegedly gave Bill Kenny a pay rise, but not Watson or Jones. Deke Watson quit the band as a result of this and went off to form his own "Ink Spots". Kenny and Hoppy Jones carried on for a month -- but then, tragically, Hoppy Jones collapsed on stage and died. After this, Deke Watson tried to rejoin the band, but Kenny wouldn't let him. The result was a complicated four-way legal battle. Deke Watson wanted the right to rejoin the band, or failing that to form his own Ink Spots. Bill Kenny wanted to continue touring with his current Ink Spots lineup, Charlie Fuqua wanted to make sure that once the war was over he was allowed back into the band -- unlike Watson he hadn't quit, but he was worried that with Jones and Watson out, Kenny would see no reason to let him back in. And Moe Gale wanted to be able to continue taking sixty percent of what any of them was making. There was a whole flurry of lawsuits and counter-suits. In the end, Bill Kenny more or less won. The courts ruled that no club could book an act called "the Ink Spots" which didn't have Bill Kenny in it, but also that Deke Watson and Charlie Fuqua continued to have a financial interest in the band, that Moe Gale was still everyone's manager, and that Charlie Fuqua would be paid a regular salary as an Ink Spot while he was in the army. The only real loser was Deke Watson. He continued to get some money for his share of the Ink Spots name -- although I've seen some claims that Bill Kenny bought him out totally. But he wasn't allowed to tour as the Ink Spots, or to rejoin the band he'd founded. Fuqua came back, and for a few years a new lineup of Bill Kenny and his brother Herb, Fuqua, and Billy Bowen toured and recorded. Deke Watson, meanwhile, had been performing with his own Ink Spots before the lawsuits, but once they were settled, and not in his favour, he said he was going to form a new vocal group based on "a completely new idea". This completely new idea was to have a vocal group made up of four people, which would start their songs off with a guitar going dun-dun-dun-dun, have a bloke sing the song in a high tenor, then have someone recite the same song lyrics, then finish the song off with the high tenor again. And called "the Brown Dots". The Brown Dots actually made a record that would itself go on to be hugely influential -- "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", written by two of their members. [excerpt of "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons"] That's been covered by almost everyone who ever sang a ballad, from Nat "King" Cole to Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke to the Righteous Brothers to Rod Stewart. It looked like Deke Watson had found himself a second great band to be with. But then the other band members realised that it was hard to get on with Deke Watson, and left him to form their own band without him. The Four Tunes, their new name, would have several big hits in the 1950s, without Watson. Meanwhile, back in the Ink Spots, Charlie Fuqua returned for a while, but in 1952 he and Bill Kenny decided to part ways. The lawsuit from eight years earlier had said that both of them had an equal share in the band name, but had *also* said that only bands with Bill Kenny in could legally be presented as "the Ink Spots". Rather than reopen that can of worms, they eventually came to an agreement that Kenny and his band could carry on calling themselves "The Ink Spots" and Fuqua would tour as "Charlie Fuqua's New Ink Spots". Except that Fuqua soon ended up breaking this agreement, and just touring and recording as "the Ink Spots" -- he even got Deke Watson back into his band for a while. There's one recording of that version of the band -- Jimmy Holmes, Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Harold Jackson -- live at the Apollo before Watson was kicked out again: [excerpt of "Wish You Were Here"] As you can hear, it sort of sounds like the Ink Spots, but not really. Meanwhile Bill Kenny was still making records as the Ink Spots, which still sounded like the old Ink Spots minus Hoppy's bass vocal: [excerpt of "I Don't Stand The Ghost of a Chance With You"] So there was one version of "the Ink Spots" touring with two original members, and another with no original members, but with the bloke who'd sung lead on all their hits and had the memorable voice that everyone wanted to hear when they heard the Ink Spots. That wasn't a situation that was sustainable, so they went to court again -- and most people would have expected the court to make the same ruling it had before, that they owned the band name equally but that Bill Kenny was the only one who could tour as the Ink Spots. Instead, the ruling was one that no-one had expected, and that no-one wanted. You see, it turns out that the Ink Spots weren't a corporation, they were a partnership. And the judge ruled that, when Hoppy Jones had died, ten years earlier, that partnership had been dissolved. Since then, there had been no legitimate group called the Ink Spots, and no-one owned the name. Neither the surviving original members of the band, nor the man whose arrangement ideas and lead vocals had brought the band their success, had any claim over it. Anyone at all could go out and call themselves The Ink Spots and go on tour, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. And they did. Every surviving member of the band -- not just the three surviving members of the classic lineup, but anyone who had filled in in a later version of the band on guitar or what have you -- went out on tour as "the Ink Spots". At one point there were up to forty different "Ink Spots" groups touring, and many of them were recording too. Usually, at first, these bands would have some claim to authenticity, having at least one person who'd been in a proper version of the Ink Spots -- and indeed a few times in the fifties and sixties Fuqua and Watson would get together again and tour as "Ink Spots", in between bouts of suing each other. But more and more they'd just be any group of four black men, so long as you could get one old enough that he might plausibly have been in the band with Bill Kenny at some point. The last actual Ink Spots member, Huey Long, who had been one of the temporary replacements for Charlie Fuqua in 1945 for nine months, died aged 106 in 2009. The last Ink Spots gig I've been able to find details for took place in 2013. But the Ink Spots' career ending in legal infighting, arguments over credit, and disputes over the band name isn't the only way in which they were a precursor to rock music. Over the next few weeks we'll hear how, along with the jump band sound that was coming to dominate rhythm and blues, a new wave of Ink Spots-inspired vocal groups ended up shaping the new music. And how, in 1953, shortly after the Ink Spots' final split, a young man walked into a recording studio in Memphis that let you make your own single-copy records. He wanted to make a record of himself singing, as a gift for his mother, and he chose one of his favourite songs, "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", as one of the two tracks he would record. But we'll get to Elvis Presley in a few episodes' time... Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at the Ink Spots and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” (more…)
Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”. That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”] That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”. Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it. At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”. [excerpt of “Rock Me”] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance. [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”] And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one. [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”. [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt “This Train”] That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain” [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of “My Babe”] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” (more…)
Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe's music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe's life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it's really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe's performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it's dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but don't say I didn't warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we're going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We've talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I'd talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that's a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally -- they had problems, but weren't all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. "From Spirituals to Swing". It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative -- one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It's like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about "primitive" music -- a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes -- is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn't because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn't afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man -- Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we've mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name "Georgia Tom" he'd collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song "It's Tight Like That", from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form -- and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of "It's Tight Like That"] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made -- you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who's ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he'd been playing. It's rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns -- at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like "Peace in the Valley" and "Take My Hand, Precious Lord". That's a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] That's not "primitive" music. That's not music that is unsophisticated. That's not some form of folk art. That's one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn't need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it's probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that's where it's based, and that's where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it's the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it's a Pentacostal church, because that's something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I'm going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you're a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I'll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe -- if they're "born again" to use a term that's a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism -- to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be "baptised in the Holy Ghost". This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call "water baptism" -- though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), "All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them". Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they're going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you're going to Heaven. You're going to Heaven once you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that's an end of it. At least, it's an end of it so long as you continue with what's called "outward holiness", and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit's entered into you, you're going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don't do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it's a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn't just about fear and living right, it's also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It's no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches -- at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there's a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we'll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we'll see a lot in the history of rock -- the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn't generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of -- because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage -- to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her -- broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen -- at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated -- only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a "jungle musician". The name itself -- the Cotton Club -- was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it's not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she'd been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course -- in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist -- but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be "Holy Rollers", mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement -- and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money -- and her role was simply to be one of many acts who'd come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled "Hide Me in Thy Bosom" but given the newer title "Rock Me" by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey's original, with one important exception -- where he had written "singing", Tharpe sang "swinging". [excerpt of "Rock Me"] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to "Rock Me", and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and "That's All", backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe's performance. [excerpt of "That's All" from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn't great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe's performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together -- Mo Gale, Millinder's manager, was also Chick Webb's manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he'd seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder's Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder's band, said that it was Millinder's idea, not Gale's, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she'd been performing earlier -- her gospel repertoire -- but with a big band backing her. She'd also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary -- where before she'd had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of "Rock Me" with Millinder's band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 "Rock Me"] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That's just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn't how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder's band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York -- regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after -- allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn't allow that -- although as Malcolm X said, it wasn't as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder's band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course -- she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like "Tall Skinny Papa", which wasn't particularly gospel-like [excerpt "Tall Skinny Papa"] And it's not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn't sing on that one. [excerpt "Big Fat Mama"] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians' union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day", with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn't playing in a normal jazz key. He didn't like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe's mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe -- and it's yet another song often credited as "the first rock and roll record". [Excerpt "Strange Things Happening Every Day"] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days -- and it's entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church -- but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe's friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi -- although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe's funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together -- and Tharpe toured later on her own -- in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, because they were with a white man -- if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn't even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe's most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she'd first recorded in 1938, "This Train", again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt "This Train"] That's a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you'll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums -- and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* -- her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid's arrow. Even Tharpe's half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe's popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There's fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time -- along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with "Didn't It Rain" [Didn't It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she'd always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she'd had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn't even realise. "This Train" was not written by Tharpe, exactly -- it dates back to the 1920s -- but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of "My Babe"] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe's UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who'd had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of "My Babe". Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you'd think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you've ever liked rock guitar, you've got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Louis Jordan and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan's music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here's a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren't many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We've spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven't we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had "Roll 'Em Pete", recorded in 1938. And "Ida Red", recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll -- whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year. And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place. If you've seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races -- well, OK, if you've not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it's not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it's still a good Marx Brothers film, and it'll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven't watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait. OK, now you've definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you'll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm", and the amazing dancers in that scene. [Ivy Anderson "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm"] That's a dance called the Lindy Hop -- you might remember that as the dance the "booglie wooglie piggy" did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser -- and the people dancing it are Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman's first Carnegie Hall concert -- the one we talked about in episode one -- that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later. [Chick Webb "Stompin' At The Savoy"] That's "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey's Lindy Hoppers used to dance -- there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played. We've seen a few kings of swing so far -- Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who'd contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he'd taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He'd been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb's band enough that he bought the band's arrangements and used them himself -- all of the Goodman band's biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren't arrangements he'd bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb's arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote "Stompin' at the Savoy", which we just heard. There was a rivalry there -- Goodman's band was bigger in every sense, but Webb's band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb's Savoy Orchestra and Goodman's band. A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players -- the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a "his" -- this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him -- playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played -- and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They'd keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner. And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb's band set up on one stage, Goodman's on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening. And Chick Webb's band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman's drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said "I'll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!" And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb's band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren't really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there's no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington. Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important -- and it was -- the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman's band, as had Basie's tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band. Basie's band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though -- his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers. [Chick Webb – Ella] And everyone was in the audience. Goodman's band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb. And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb's lifetime. Because Webb won -- everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb's band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington. But everyone also agreed that Basie's band had got people dancing more. A lot more. What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey's Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said "I don't give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs 'em? As far as I'm concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too." After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb's band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren't exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band. Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you've got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you're going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo -- and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted. But despite all that, Webb's band still beat them in the audience vote. That's how good Webb's band were, and it's also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we've already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb's band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan. [Chick Webb I Can't Dance I Got Ants In My Pants] Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it. He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans -- he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb. In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb's disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians -- he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties. So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone's band (you'll remember him from episode two, he wrote "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"). And on December 20, 1938 -- ten days before "Roll 'Em Pete" -- Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record "Honey in the Bee Ball" and "Barnacle Bill the Sailor". [excerpt of "Honey in the Bee Ball"] Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we'll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he's someone who already had an influence on it, but here's where he becomes important. You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music -- and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label -- the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money. After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing. In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She'd been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn't interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond -- the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday's best-known performance, was "Strange Fruit", and it was about lynching. [insert section of Strange Fruit here]. Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it -- he'd been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday's colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday's label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore. That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the "song of the century". And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump's inauguration, she agreed on one condition -- that the song she performed could be "Strange Fruit". She was disinvited. As a result of "Strange Fruit"'s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties -- not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of "Flying Home" we looked at towards the end of episode one -- and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan -- remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan. Jordan's new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time -- Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying "He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper." And while we've talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement -- while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands. The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as "jump band" music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton's band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that's based on simple chord changes -- usually blues changes. And it's based on the concept of the riff. We haven't really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they're absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It's an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation -- when you "riff on" something, you're coming up with endless variations and permutations of it. Riffs were important in swing music -- generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You'd have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn't just about riffs -- with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do. In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that's it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing -- often a boogie rhythm -- and you make everything about the energy of the performance. Jordan's band did that, and they combined it with Jordan's own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don't keep a job like that very long if you're not good. Now, Jordan wasn't good in the same way as Ella was -- no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald -- but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven't talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway: [excerpt from "Reefer Man"] Jive singers weren't usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts -- when they weren't just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway. [Excerpt of "Flat Foot Floogie"] And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock's prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music. Most of Jordan's songs were written by Jordan himself, although he's not the credited writer on many of them -- rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she's credited on "Caldonia", which is a perfect example of Jordan's comedy jump band style. [Louis Jordan: Caldonia] "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," Jordan's biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 -- just after Gabler started producing his records -- Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it's blues or R&B -- in fact he's basically the archetype of a jump blues musician -- but remember how we've talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner. And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers -- Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as "My Little Buckaroo", "I've Just Gotta Be A Cowboy" and "Ding Dong Polka", while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote "Dixie Cannonball" and "Muleskinner Blues". So "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan's hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song: [insert section of Choo Choo Ch'Boogie here] You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week -- and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There's only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics -- "take me right back to the track, Jack" -- come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it's a country and western song. If there's any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say "this is where rock and roll really started". Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan's 1940s records. And indeed "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced -- an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan's. But we'll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time. For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it's a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you'll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it -- the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what's necessary. This is a punchy track, and it's a track that makes you want to dance. [sax solo excerpt] And this is music that, because it's so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this -- his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments. But also, notice the lyrics -- "the rhythm of the clickety clack". It's that backbeat again, the one we've been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains. That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll -- rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we'll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing "Nobody cares about the railroads any more" or about "the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains", but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people's minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch'boogie. And so next week we'll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938… Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Louis Jordan and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (more…)
Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Louis Jordan and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan’s music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here’s a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren’t many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We’ve spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven’t we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had “Roll ‘Em Pete”, recorded in 1938. And “Ida Red”, recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll — whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year. And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place. If you’ve seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races — well, OK, if you’ve not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it’s not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it’s still a good Marx Brothers film, and it’ll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven’t watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait. OK, now you’ve definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you’ll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”, and the amazing dancers in that scene. [Ivy Anderson “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”] That’s a dance called the Lindy Hop — you might remember that as the dance the “booglie wooglie piggy” did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser — and the people dancing it are Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman’s first Carnegie Hall concert — the one we talked about in episode one — that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later. [Chick Webb “Stompin’ At The Savoy”] That’s “Stompin’ at the Savoy” by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers used to dance — there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played. We’ve seen a few kings of swing so far — Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who’d contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he’d taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He’d been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb’s band enough that he bought the band’s arrangements and used them himself — all of the Goodman band’s biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren’t arrangements he’d bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb’s arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote “Stompin’ at the Savoy”, which we just heard. There was a rivalry there — Goodman’s band was bigger in every sense, but Webb’s band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb’s Savoy Orchestra and Goodman’s band. A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players — the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a “his” — this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him — playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played — and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They’d keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner. And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb’s band set up on one stage, Goodman’s on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening. And Chick Webb’s band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman’s drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said “I’ll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!” And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb’s band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren’t really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there’s no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington. Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important — and it was — the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman’s band, as had Basie’s tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band. Basie’s band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though — his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers. [Chick Webb – Ella] And everyone was in the audience. Goodman’s band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb. And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb’s lifetime. Because Webb won — everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb’s band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington. But everyone also agreed that Basie’s band had got people dancing more. A lot more. What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said “I don’t give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs ’em? As far as I’m concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too.” After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb’s band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren’t exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band. Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you’ve got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you’re going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo — and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted. But despite all that, Webb’s band still beat them in the audience vote. That’s how good Webb’s band were, and it’s also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we’ve already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb’s band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan. [Chick Webb I Can’t Dance I Got Ants In My Pants] Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it. He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans — he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb. In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb’s disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians — he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties. So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone’s band (you’ll remember him from episode two, he wrote “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). And on December 20, 1938 — ten days before “Roll ‘Em Pete” — Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record “Honey in the Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”. [excerpt of “Honey in the Bee Ball”] Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we’ll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he’s someone who already had an influence on it, but here’s where he becomes important. You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music — and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label — the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money. After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing. In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She’d been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn’t interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond — the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday’s best-known performance, was “Strange Fruit”, and it was about lynching. [insert section of Strange Fruit here]. Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it — he’d been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday’s colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday’s label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore. That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the “song of the century”. And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump’s inauguration, she agreed on one condition — that the song she performed could be “Strange Fruit”. She was disinvited. As a result of “Strange Fruit”‘s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties — not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of “Flying Home” we looked at towards the end of episode one — and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan — remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan. Jordan’s new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time — Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying “He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper.” And while we’ve talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement — while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands. The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as “jump band” music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton’s band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that’s based on simple chord changes — usually blues changes. And it’s based on the concept of the riff. We haven’t really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they’re absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It’s an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation — when you “riff on” something, you’re coming up with endless variations and permutations of it. Riffs were important in swing music — generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You’d have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn’t just about riffs — with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do. In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that’s it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing — often a boogie rhythm — and you make everything about the energy of the performance. Jordan’s band did that, and they combined it with Jordan’s own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don’t keep a job like that very long if you’re not good. Now, Jordan wasn’t good in the same way as Ella was — no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald — but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven’t talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway: [excerpt from “Reefer Man”] Jive singers weren’t usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts — when they weren’t just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway. [Excerpt of “Flat Foot Floogie”] And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock’s prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music. Most of Jordan’s songs were written by Jordan himself, although he’s not the credited writer on many of them — rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she’s credited on “Caldonia”, which is a perfect example of Jordan’s comedy jump band style. [Louis Jordan: Caldonia] “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” Jordan’s biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 — just after Gabler started producing his records — Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it’s blues or R&B — in fact he’s basically the archetype of a jump blues musician — but remember how we’ve talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner. And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers — Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as “My Little Buckaroo”, “I’ve Just Gotta Be A Cowboy” and “Ding Dong Polka”, while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote “Dixie Cannonball” and “Muleskinner Blues”. So “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan’s hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song: [insert section of Choo Choo Ch’Boogie here] You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week — and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There’s only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics — “take me right back to the track, Jack” — come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it’s a country and western song. If there’s any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say “this is where rock and roll really started”. Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan’s 1940s records. And indeed “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced — an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan’s. But we’ll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time. For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it’s a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you’ll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it — the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what’s necessary. This is a punchy track, and it’s a track that makes you want to dance. [sax solo excerpt] And this is music that, because it’s so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this — his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments. But also, notice the lyrics — “the rhythm of the clickety clack”. It’s that backbeat again, the one we’ve been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains. That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll — rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we’ll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing “Nobody cares about the railroads any more” or about “the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains”, but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie. And so next week we’ll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938… Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
CNN host Don Lemon shares some background on Harlem's famed hotspot, The Savoy Ballroom
CNN host Don Lemon shares some background on Harlem's famed hotspot, The Savoy Ballroom
This month, I am joined by the Queen of Swing herself, Norma Miller. Growing up behind the famous Savoy Ballroom, she joined Whitey's Lindy Hoppers as a young teenager and has spent over 80 years in show business as a dancer, choreographer, comedian, and writer. She competed in the inaugural Harvest Moon Ball in 1935, performed on Broadway, in films like Hellzapoppin' and A Day at the Races, and around the world as a dancer and leader of the Norma Miller Dancers and Norma Miller's Jazzmen. She has performed along side a who's who of music, dance, and comedy legends, including Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Robinson, and Redd Foxx. Norma joined me at Uptown Swingout in Minneapolis to talk about dancing at the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theater, and the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, traveling to Europe and Brazil as one of Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, and performing on stage and screen. We also discussed standup comedy, her thoughts on dance and music, and her experience in the swing revival spreading Lindy Hop around the world.
From the author of the acclaimed Can't Find My Way Home comes the gripping story of the rise of early drug culture in America. With an intricate storyline that unites engaging characters and themes and reads like a novel, Bop Apocalypse details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new and revolutionary segment of the American social fabric. Drawing upon his rich decades of writing experience, master storyteller Martin Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Reefer Madness, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the coming of heroin to Harlem. Aficionados of jazz, the Beats, counterculture, and drug history will all find much to enjoy here, with a cast of characters that includes vivid and memorable depictions of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and countless others. Bop Apocalypse is also a living history that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions surrounding drugs today, casting many contemporary issues in a new light by connecting them back to the events of this transformative era. At a time when marijuana legalization is rapidly becoming a reality, it takes us back to the advent of marijuana prohibition, when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes. As a new opioid epidemic sweeps through white working- and middle-class communities, it brings us back to when heroin first arrived on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s. And as we debate and grapple with the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration, it puts into sharp and provocative focus the racism at the very roots of our drug war. Having spent a lifetime at the nexus of drugs and music, Torgoff reveals material never before disclosed and offers new insights, crafting and contextualizing Bop Apocalypse into a truly novel contribution to our understanding of jazz, race, literature, drug culture, and American social and cultural history. Martin’s interview with Martin Torgoff was originally recorded March 7, 2017.
Like many of us, I am still reeling from the news that one of the guiding lights of swing passed away this weekend. Dawn Hampton left us too soon at 88 years young - and I had the distinct privilege to call her my mentor and my friend. She had the sharpest wit, the wisest soul, the warmest heart, and was also the biggest ham, of anyone I have ever known. If I am being completely honest, the potential of talking with Dawn was one of the very reasons I started this podcast. So instead of my normally scheduled episode this month, I am re-releasing my conversation with Dawn, when we sat down in April 2015 not far from her East Village apartment in New York City. As I said on the original episode, it is no exaggeration to recognize Dawn as a National Treasure. Her amazing life began traveling from town to town of the American South in a carnival, singing and playing saxophone with the Hampton Family Band, followed by stints at Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, and the Savoy Ballroom in New York City. Dawn became a legend of the Greenwich Village Cabaret in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, coaching the likes of Bette Midler and singing alongside Barry Manilow at the infamous Continental Baths. Only decades later did Dawn become a legend of another kind to swing dancers the world over, sharing her story and wisdom from Sweden to South Korea. I am struggling to find the words to describe the incredible woman who was my friend, but I think this excerpt from the New York Times review of her 1982 cabaret show perfectly captures what made Dawn, ‘The Lady’ - “In superficial terms, she is a singer. “But her voice, a strong but seemingly uncertain instrument full of quavers, growls, husky descents and high, shimmering airiness, is simply one element in a projection that is built even more on emotional intensity, high good humor, dramatics taken to almost corny extremes, zest and exuberance, all kept in such sensitive balance that one aspect adds flavor to another as she builds her songs into brilliant vignettes. “A key factor in the way Miss Hampton does things is a marvelously mobile, warmly expressive face that projects her lines even more than her voice does. Her huge, vital eyes and an unusually agile mouth can suddenly change, underline or add unexpected shading that cuts into the mood of a song to change the emphasis briefly, to lighten what threatens to be overly heavy dramatics. “Miss Hampton has a deep well of emotional energy and spends it recklessly and joyously.” That was the Dawn Hampton I know. She was a singer, a dancer, and a diva, but was also so much more and the world is a better place for having had her in it. A memorial fund is being organized to support Dawn's last wishes, and I'll update the show's website with that information as it comes out. I am grateful that I once again have the opportunity to share our conversation. As Dawn would say, The Light is On.
I have the honor and privilege to be joined this month by the one-and-only Dawn Hampton. It is no exaggeration to recognize Dawn as a national treasure - her amazing life began traveling from town to town in the American South with a carnival, singing and playing saxophone with the Hampton Family Band, followed by stints at Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, and the Savoy Ballroom in New York City. Dawn became a legend of the Greenwich Village cabaret in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, coaching the...
In this inaugural episode of The Track, I sit down with international instructor, performer, emcee and soul man Peter Strom. He s taught all over the world since winning the classic division at the American Lindy Hop Championships back in 2000 and has performed with Lindy Movement, Silver Shadows and Mad Dog at events such as Frankie 95 and the Savoy Ballroom 80th anniversary. Peter runs Uptown Swing in his hometown of Minneapolis, MN, which is hosting its first weekend workshop in August,...
Musiker, sångerska Gunhild Carling bjöd P1-lyssnarna på ett musikaliskt äventyr när hon spelade och jazzade i sitt Sommarprogram. Hon berättade också om en nervös konsert i inför 10.000 åskådare i New York: - Bandet verkade gripna av stundens magi. Det var helt klart. För dom gick på som om vi var Count Basie på Savoy Ballroom ’37, de öste så att hela scentaket höll på att sprängas. Trombonerna tjöt och saxofonerna vrålade och trummorna dundrade. Och nu började också publiken att bli totalt gripen av jazzmusikens vilda vansinne. Vi lassade på med swingriff, djungeltrummor och jag minns att jag bara stod och öste på en ton i trumpeten i vilda riff. Konserten blev en succé och ett minne för livet. Om Gunhild Carling Vann publikens hjärta i Let’s Dance på TV4 i våras. Showar och spelar munspel, trombon, harpa och säckpipa. Uppvuxen i en musikerfamilj och började turnera med familjen som sjuåring. Spelar i familjebanden Carling Big Band och Carling Family. Hade en swingklubb i Lund, turnerar över hela Europa med sin jazzmusik. Har hörts i Allsång på Skansen, Diggiloo och Dansbandskampen. Spelade i SVT:s julkalender från 1998, När karusellerna sover. Kan spela på tre trumpeter samtidigt. Och steppa. Producent: Sofie Ericsson
Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leading jazz scholars.” Now that’s academic courage! Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he’d be typecast. His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular. Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.” And there were others, including Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman. Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs. Tackley uses a musician’s and historian’s approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program. She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others. Members of Duke Ellington’s and Count Basie’s bands also participated in the jam session that night, too. Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night. After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald! Finally, the author tells the story of the concert’s own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently marketed by Columbia Records. Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing. Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless. Tackley’s story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz’s and America’s cultural legacy. On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents' classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman's songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world's leading jazz scholars.” Now that's academic courage! Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he'd be typecast. His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular. Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.” And there were others, including Paul Whiteman's orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman. Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs. Tackley uses a musician's and historian's approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program. She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others. Members of Duke Ellington's and Count Basie's bands also participated in the jam session that night, too. Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night. After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald! Finally, the author tells the story of the concert's own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently marketed by Columbia Records. Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing. Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless. Tackley's story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz's and America's cultural legacy. On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman.
Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leading jazz scholars.” Now that’s academic courage! Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he’d be typecast. His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular. Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.” And there were others, including Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman. Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs. Tackley uses a musician’s and historian’s approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program. She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others. Members of Duke Ellington’s and Count Basie’s bands also participated in the jam session that night, too. Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night. After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald! Finally, the author tells the story of the concert’s own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently marketed by Columbia Records. Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing. Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless. Tackley’s story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz’s and America’s cultural legacy. On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leading jazz scholars.” Now that’s academic courage! Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he’d be typecast. His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular. Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.” And there were others, including Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman. Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs. Tackley uses a musician’s and historian’s approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program. She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others. Members of Duke Ellington’s and Count Basie’s bands also participated in the jam session that night, too. Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night. After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald! Finally, the author tells the story of the concert’s own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently marketed by Columbia Records. Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing. Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless. Tackley’s story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz’s and America’s cultural legacy. On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
San Francisco jazz vocalist Kim Nalley stars in the world premiere of her new musical "Ella: The American Dream." Nalley penned this Ella Fitzgerald tribute, a quintessential rags to riches story that takes audiences back to 1930's Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom and birth of the swing era which paved the way for musical greats including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and a Savoy Ballroom dancer named Frankie Manning who popularized a new dance called the Lindy Hop. Based on new historical findings about Ella Fitzgerald's humble beginnings, this production will have audiences snappin' their fingers, feeling optimistic and yearning for more with its original music, jazz standards and Lindy Hop dancing. Directed by Elly Lichenstein. The show opens: Dec. 31, 2009 to Jan. 17, 2010. Times are: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 31 New Years Eve; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, Jan. 2, 8, 9, 15 & 16; 2 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 3, 10 & 17; and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 13.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
