Podcasts about savoy records

•The Gay Sisters of Chicago, Illinois became the top selling singing artists for Savoy Records In 1951, Geraldine, Evelyn and Mildred Gay went from local gospel sensations in Chicago's Church of God in Christ community to national stardom with the release of the hit single, “God Will Take Care of You”.   They travelled the world sharing their style of Gospel Music.  Because of their release “God Will Take Care of You” it became a top seller of 1 Million copies; which is the equivalent of a Platinum Album these days.  That was unheard of in the 1950's. •The Gay family, after moving to Chicago, IL were members and attended Elder Lucy Smith's All Nations Pentecostal Church on the West Side.  Elder Lucy Smith was a Pentecostal pastor and faith healer and the grandmother of Little Lucy Smith (Pianist for the Roberta Martin Singers.)  The All-Nations Pentecostal church had over 3, 000 members with a weekly radio broadcast affording the Gay Sisters access to reach people all over the Midwest. •The Gay Sisters appeared with Mahalia Jackson at Carnegie Hall, recorded several sides/singles for Savoy Records during the 1950's and, along with their brother Donald “Preacher” Gay, in the 1960's for Rush Records Checker Records, Faith Records, and other labels. •Most recently, (2014) Geraldine Gay and her brother Donald Gay teamed for projects released by The Sirens Records. Almost to the end, Geraldine could sit down and play gospel piano in a style that combined the kinetic energy of Arizona Dranes with the whispering jazz of Thomas Dorsey & Erroll Garner. She was a magician at the keys. •Please send Let's Talk: Gospel Music Gold an email sharing your thoughts about this show segment also if you have any suggestions of future guests you would like to hear on the show. Send the email to ⁠⁠letstalk2gmg@gmail.com⁠⁠ •You may Subscribe to be alerted when the newest episode is published. Subscribe on Spotify and we will know you are a regular listener. All 4 Seasons of guests are still live; check out some other Podcast Episodes •LET'S TALK: GOSPEL MUSIC GOLD RADIO SHOW AIRS SATURDAY MORNING 9:00 AM CST / 10:00 AM EST ON INTERNET RADIO STATION WMRM-DB Aired on iHeart Radio & Live365 •Both Podcast and Radio show are heard anywhere in the World! •BOOK RELEASE! •Legacy of James C. Chambers And his Contributions to Gospel Music History •Available for purchase on Amazon.com

Tonight's Jazz Feature is an indirect tribute to my late Mother, whose Birthday Anniversary is today: May 20. This album was one of her favorites. It is a classic by the great vibist and Modern Jazz pioneer, Milt Jackson. Jackson and his co-star here is flutist and tenor saxophonist Frank Wess. Wess of course is one of the great practitioners of Jazz flute. The rhythm section is superb and led by Hank Jones on piano and indeed he's one of the finest. Eddie Jones (no relation to Hank) is solid on bass and Kenny Clarke is his usual masterful self on drums. All of this was recorded for Savoy Records on October 28, 1955 and it's one of Milt Jackson's many gems and is tonight's Jazz feature. Enjoy!

Johnny Cash was a prolific hitmaker in the mid 50's to early 60's.  In the late 60's  he released a couple of live albums which had crossover appeal:  "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison," and "Johnny Cash at San Quentin."  By 1969, Johnny Cash had become an international musical success, selling more records than the Beatles at the time.Cash had left his original label, Sun Records, back in 1958.  However, he had left an extensive catalogue of songs with Sam Phillips at Sun.  Given his success and the upcoming Johnny Cash TV show, Sun Records decided it would be a good time to release a compilation of his earlier hits from 1954 through 1958.  This compilation was released on two albums, "Original Golden Hits, Volume I" and "Original Golden Hits, Volume II," which reached numbers 4 and 3 on the US Country charts respectively.  Cash would go on to fame in TV and film in the 70's, and would continue recording up until his death in 2003.While not strictly rock music, the Man in Black was an icon of American music and an inspiration for many in country, rock, and pop genres.  It is also a special memory for Wayne, as he listened to this  8-track as he traveled with his father out of California to Alabama.Wayne takes us through this greatest hits album for today's podcast. Home of the BluesThe inspiration for this song was the "Home of the Blues" record shop on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.  The store which was open from the late 40's until the mid 70's was a place he used to hang out, buy records, and meet other musicians. Hey PorterThis is Cash's first recorded song.  The setting is just after World War II, and the song focuses on a man returning home from overseas who feels elated to be returning to his native South, the last leg of which is by train.  Note that there is no percussion in this song, but Cash played his guitar with dampened strings to acquire a percussive effect.I Walk the LineJohnny Cash's first number 1 hit on the Billboard country charts eventually crossed over to the US pop charts, reaching number 17 and selling over 2 million copies in the United States.  The lyrics reflect temptations and the need to be accountable for your actions.  The frequent key changes make this song distinctive.Get RhythmThis was the B-side to "I Walk the Line."  It was re-released in 1969 as an A-side, and went to number 60 on the Billboard pop chart.   ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series “Fat Albert”The origin of Bill Cosby's animated series was an animated primetime television special that first aired on NBC on November 12, 1969.  STAFF PICKS:Birthday by Underground SunshineRob starts off the staff picks with a cover of the Beatles song by a group from Wisconsin.  The band had been around for a few years, but this cover helped them attain greater success.  Their cover made it to number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Down on the Corner by Credence Clearwater RevivalLynch's staff pick is one of the best known songs by CCR.  The song talks about a band called "Willy and the Poor Boys" playing in the street for spare change.  It went to number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 by the end of 1969.  I Can't Get Next to You by The Temptations Bruce gets us all moving with the number 1 single from David Ruffin, Melvin Franklin, Otis Williams, Eddie Kendricks, and Paul Williams - better known as The Temptations.  This was the second of four number 1 hits from the group, and was written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label. I'm Tired by Savoy BrownWayne's staff pick charted at number 74 on the top 100, and has a very heavy electric blues feel.  Three members of this group out of London would go on to form Foghat.  The group's name came from American Blues label Savoy Records - a name that had an elegant sound.  "Brown" was added as an extremely plain word that contrasted nicely with the elegance of "Savoy." INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Treat by SantanaSantana would produce a number of excellent instrumental hits during his decades in the rock scene, and this one is from his debut album. Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

Tonight's Jazz Feature focuses on the obscure but fine trumpeter and flugelhornist named Wilbur Harden. Little is known about Harden other than he was born in Birmingham, Alabama on Dec. 31,1924 and after working in some major R&B bands moved to Detroit in 1957 and began working with Yusef Lateef.. He became part of the talented Detroit Jazz scene then ventured to New York to record as he signed with Savoy Records. His 4 albums for Savoy were done in 1958 and he also recorded with John Coltrane as well in 1958 and later with trombonist Curtis Fuller. After 1960 nothing more was heard from Wilbur and ill health and a nervous breakdown forced him to stop playing. He died in obscurity in New York on June 10,1969 at age 44. This fine recording called "Mainstream 1958" is an excellent one and features Wilbur and his compositions. It is a solid date with Harden and John Coltrane, at an early peak, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Doug Watkins on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. If there is a masterpiece in Harden's short discography this album may qualify. Enjoy the sounds of Wilbur Harden, John Coltrane and company on tonight's Jazz Feature.

•The Southern California Community Choir Was organized under the direction of Reverend James Cleveland in the 1960's, during which the Southern California Community Choir was one of the world's foremost gospel groups. •Immediately following the choir's beginning they made several appearances on the Television show TV Gospel Time which highlighted Black Gospel musicians and singers.  The show was based in Chicago however aired in several other cities such as New York City; Washington, D.C.; Augusta, GA; Charleston, NC and many cities in less than a year TV Gospel Time had grown to over 20 cites across America. •In addition to Southern California Community Choir singing for the Lord, the choir advanced their inspiring harmonies as background on secular albums by performers such as Kansas (a rock and roll band), Elton John (pop icon), and Arlo Guthrie ( folk singer). •The Southern California Community Choir Released “Give Me A Clean Heart” on Savoy Records in 1970 – which is now under Malaco Record Label. In the 1970's and into the early 1980's there was sure to be an appearance on the Billboard Music charts.  The choir under the direction of Rev. James Cleveland also won a Grammy in 1975 for Best Soul Gospel Performance. •Although Southern California Community Choir was filmed in the 2-day Documentary Recording of Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace in the 1970's the film sat dormant for over 15 years not to be released until 2019 after Aretha's passing in August of the previous year. The choir also participated in the 1980's hit movie The Blues Brothers starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. •Please send me an email sharing your thoughts about this show segment also if you have any suggestions of future guests you would like to hear on the show. Send an email to letstalk2gmg@gmail.com •You may also “like” and share the podcast episode; or you may Subscribe to be alerted when the newest show is published. •NEW RADIO SHOW ON INTERNET RADIO STATION WMRM-DB SATURDAY MORNING 9:00 AM CST / 10:00 AM EST •The Podcast and Radio show may be heard anywhere in the World! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/letstalk2gmg-ansonia/message

Song: Somebody's Calling My Name Use: Hymn Song In Public Domain Song by: Dr. C.J. JohnsonIntro by: Gail NoblesToday's topic is Dr. CJ Johnson, a gospel music singing preacher and pastor. Claude Joseph Johnson is his name. He was born on May 16, 1913, in Douglasville, Georgia, the son of Will and Cora Reid Johnson. The family moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1916. His mother died when he was young, and he with his elder and younger sister were raised by his paternal grandmother, Sarah Farley Johnson. His father, Will, was a shape note teacher in Georgia in the 1920s and 1930s.He first acted as pastor at the age of 12 at the Antioch Baptist Church in Barnesville, Georgia. He was pastor in 14 churches, including his own foundation of the St Joseph's Missionary Baptist Church. Although Johnson had been active in Georgia since his early years, he only gained wider prominence from 1964, when he came to the attention of Fred Mendelsohn, then executive producer at Savoy Records. He recorded at least 20 albums, all of which were recorded in his church rather than in a recording studio.Although most of his recorded songs are traditional, 26 are listed as his own compositions. His 1970 recording of "I Wanna Go Where Jesus Is" was a gold-selling record.I love the way Johnson sings Hush! Hush! Somebody's Calling My Name. From the 1966 album Dr. C.J. Johnson The Old Time Song Service. They didn't have music.Just handclaps, the choir, and Johnson singing. Johnson was saying I'm so glad troubles don't last always and I'm so glad I got my religion in time. Every time I hear him sing and get to the end of each line of the song, I think to myself carry-on carry-on. When you get caught up in what he's singing, it makes you patient enough to listen no matter how long the song is. I listen and agree to the end of the song.You're listening to the Gospel Greats. I'm Gail Nobles. Today's topic: Dr. CJ Johnson.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. 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/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

Summertime, and the livin' is sweaty - at least for us in the Midwest right now.  Along with being the most perspiration-friendly season, Summer is also consecrated to travel, which can make it difficult to align two bastard's schedules.  Hence this solo podcast looking at jazz box sets.  Yes, the vinyl revival is all grown up enough to get its own self-indulgent shelf-benders and Pat is hear to talk about several of them.  Various Artists – THE BIRTH OF BEBOP; Bill Evans – TREASURES:  SOLO, TRIO, AND ORCHESTRA RECORDINGS FROM DENMARK; Eddie Lockjaw Davis – COOKIN' WITH JAWS AND THE QUEEN; John Coltrane – '58: THE PRESTIGE SESSIONS; Stan Getz – STAN GETZ (BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB).

For some artists, they get popular quickly. Maybe it's their location, the "it" factor, inside connections. For some other artists, it takes them years of hard work and dedication. Through the discipline, they are able to carve out a niche for themselves and might get popular through that. Some artists never make it. Some get close then something thwarts it. Jimmy Scott aka Little Jimmy Scott was a jazz vocalist like no other. From his phrasing to his ability to put so much emotion into his voice, Jimmy was recognized by anyone whose seen him that he was special. Held back from a bad deal at Savoy Records, Jimmy Scott's attempts to record and play live hit obstacle after obstacle for decades. After a performance at a funeral for his friend Doc Pomus, Jimmy Scott was able to get a new deal and gained popularity in his late 70's. This 'Lum podcast is about the ones that don't make it, barely make it, should have made it, and sometimes beyond all odds sometimes do...even if it takes forever. feel free to reach me at intricatedialect@gmail.com or IG intricate dialect made by intricate dialect and mixed by Timo 1-2 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thelumpodcast/support

•“Little Lucy Smith” Collier the Grand Daughter of Elder Lucy Smith, Founder and Pastor of All Nations Pentecostal Church located in Chicago IL 1918. Little Lucy became the church organist at the age of 12. Her Grandmother saw something in her and decided to send her to study piano and receive music lessons from Roberta Martin. •Little Lucy became so proficient in music she soon became the pianist for the famed Roberta Martin Singers; where she wrote several of the songs the group recorded. Little Lucy later started her own group the Lucy Smith Singers, where she continued to write music the group recorded. •Producer Heilbut was so moved by Little Lucy Smith To satisfy her fans, in 1962, Savoy Records released an instrumental album of gospel hymns titled "Little Lucy Smith at the Organ.“ •Please send me an email sharing your thoughts about this show segment also if you have any suggestions of future guests you would like to hear on the show. Send an email to letstalk2gmg@gmail.com •You may also “like” and share the episode. And you may Subscribe so you will be alerted when the newest show is published. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/letstalk2gmg-ansonia/message

This month The Jazz Show will be presenting a Charles Mingus Jazz Feature on the four Mondays in April. This is to honor the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Charles Mingus Jr who was born in Nogales, Arizona on April 22,1922. Tonight's recording is an early mature statement by The Charles Mingus Jazz Composer's Workshop which later became the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. Mingus' music here reflected a more formal stance with a lot music written out and scored coupled with improvisation. Mingus later abandoned this approach when he switched to delivering his ideas orally or from the piano (Mingus was an accomplished pianist) to the players in his bands. The people involved here are three fine and well trained saxophonists: John LaPorta on alto saxophone and clarinet, Teo Macero on tenor and section baritone saxophone and George Barrow on baritone saxophone. Mal Waldron is on piano and Rudy Nichols is on drums. Mingus is a tower of strength on bass and delivers some rather astounding solos throughout. the six compositions. Four Mingus compositions are featured plus two standards reconfigured and rearranged by Mingus. The date was recorded in New York for Savoy Records on Oct. 31,1954. An early masterpiece by Mr. Mingus. Our first Jazz feature honoring the great man.

Radio Nova revisite ses propres classiques : les raretés de tout bord qui rythment notre antenne, de la soul-funk au hip-hop en passant par les musiques afro-latines et la pop. Aujourd’hui : « Nothing Compares 2 U » de Jimmy Scott.Et c’est une voix d’ange que l’on convoque avec cette reprise de ce morceau de Prince par ce jazzman à la voix si singulière. Ami de Ray Charles, Billie Holiday ou encore Charlie Parker avec lesquels il a débuté dans le jazz, Jimmy Scott n’a pas connu la même reconnaissance.Le musicien a fait ses débuts – tout comme Quincy Jones – au sein de l’orchestre de Lionel Hampton qui le surnomme « Little Jimmy » du fait de sa petite taille et de sa voix d’enfant. Un timbre qu’il hérite d’une maladie génétique, le syndrome de Kallmann , qui a eu pour effet d’arrêter sa mue. Le musicien sort deux disques (dont un produit par Ray Charles) sur le label Savoy Records, label qui ne le soutient pas vraiment et lui mettra même des bâtons dans les roues quand il sortira plus tard son album The Source sur Atlantic Records. Des déconvenues qui rendront la voix de Jimmy Scott de plus en plus rare malgré le soutien de ses pairs…Little Jimmy disparaît de la circulation pendant près de deux décennies. On le croisera dans la loge noire de Twin Peaks, chantant « Sycamore Trees »…Au début des années 90, des disques ressortent et en 1998 sort Holding Back The Years, un disque dans lequel il reprend « Jealous Guy » de Donny Hathaway, et ce titre de Prince, « Nothing compares 2 U » ; composé par le natif de Minneapolis en 1984 mais que le love symbol a donné à son groupe The Family.Un titre d’abord repris par Sinead O’Connor mais qui retrouve ici le berceau jazz. Ce titre sera longtemps joué sur Radio Nova, on le retrouve dans le CUBE Jaune année 1998. Jimmy Scott est décédée en 2014. Un documentaire lui a été consacré : I Go Back Home. C’est un ange qui chante pour nous, Jimmy Scott sur Nova : « Nothing compares 2 U » .Visuel © Getty Images / Eric Robert / Contributeur See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Courtesy of Emtro Gospel Troy Sneed Grammy nominated gospel singer Troy Sneed passed away early on Monday morning (April 27) due to coronavirus complications. He was 52 years old. The Perry, Florida, native launched his music career at Florida A&M University, where he studied education with a minor in music. He soon joined the school's choir, and after he graduated, Savoy Records executive Rev. Milton Biggham offered him a position as the Georgia Mass Choir's Assistant Minister of Music. During his time there, he traveled with the choir, arranged music on their albums and appeared with them in the Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston 1996 film, The Preacher's Wife. Youth for Christ's 1999 album, Higher, earned Sneed a Grammy nomination in 2000. Sneed also had an impressive history on the Billboard charts. Seven of his albums hit the Top Gospel Albums chart, including A State of Worship, In His Presence, In Due Season, My Heart Says Yes, All Is Well, Awesome God and Taking It Back. 10 of his uplifting tunes hit the Hot Gospel Songs chart, half of which were in the top 10 including "Hallelujah," "Work It Out," "My Heart Says Yes," "Lay It Down" and "Kept by His Grace." He was also no stranger to the Gospel Airplay chart, with 13 placements from 2006 - 2018. "Work It Out" hit No. 2 on the chart dated September 13, 2008. "Words truly cannot express our sorrow regarding an innocent life taken WAY TOO SOON due to Covid19! Please pray for Emily (Sneed), the kids ‎and the extended family/loved ones of our tragically departed brother, Troy Sneed... " the statement continues. "He is missed, beyond words as our hearts are broken well beyond all understanding!"  

Biscuits & Grits are hanging out with some German folk!Music:Valse ModerneJohn Leach & George FentonFrom the Album Kpm 1000 Series: Music of the Nations (Volume 4) - France & ItalyBedtime after a coffee by Barradeen | https://soundcloud.com/barradeenMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unportedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US"I Know the Lord Will Make A Way" (1952)- The Caravans[Merlin] The Malaco Music Group (on behalf of Savoy Records)

Glenn Jones got his start in the music industry at a young age, signing to gospel label Savoy Records at just 17 years old. Later, his single “Here I Go Again” reached the top of the R&B charts in 1991. Now, Jones is based in Atlanta and releasing new music under his independent label, Talent Room Entertainment. On Second Thought invited Glenn Jones into the studio to share his additions to the Georgia Playlist.

In the 1960s, an unknown artist named Harvey supplied his bright, almost otherworldly perspective to about 200 gospel album covers (175 or so for the fabled Savoy Records) before disappearing into obscurity. Five-plus decades later, Robbie Rogers is devoting his master's thesis to Harvey's illustrations — and feverishly collecting Harvey albums in the process. Special thanks to Bob Marovich at the Journal of Gospel Music for his invaluable help in making this episode possible. Harvey Albums • Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (Baylor University) • Margo Lee Williams' essay on Harvey • Opening theme: "Keepers" by Still Flyin' • Closing theme: "Slow Draw/Feeling In My Heart" by Eric Frisch • Additional music by Chris Zabriskie • www.forkeepspodcast.com

  Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more----    Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (along with one, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", that got cut out of the eventual episode) I used three main resources for this podcast.  Big Mama Thornton: Her Life and Music by Michael Spörke  is the only biography of Thornton. It's very well researched, but suffers somewhat from English not being its author's first language. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, is an invaluable book on the most important songwriting team of their generation. And Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz is the definitive biography of Otis. This collection has most of Big Mama Thornton's fifties recordings on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   One of the things that is easy to miss when talking about early rock and roll is that much of the development of the genre is about the liminal spaces in race in America. (Before I start talking about this, a disclaimer I have to make -- I'm a white person, from a different country, born decades after the events I'm talking about. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can here, and as sensitive as I can, but I apologise if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of the people who were actually affected). "Black" and "white" are two categories imposed by culture, and like all culturally-imposed binaries, they're essentially arbitrary and don't really map very well onto really existing people. There have always been people who don't fit neatly into the boxes that a racist society insists everyone fits into -- and part of the reason that rock and roll happened when it did was that in the 1950s America was in the process of redefining those boxes, and moving some people who would have previously fit into one category into the other. The lines were being redrawn, and that led to some interesting art happening at the borders. (That sounds like I'm doing the "at least some good art came from this terrible event" thing. I'm really, really, not. Racism in all its forms is nothing but negative, and its distortions of culture are all negative too. But they do exist, and need noting when talking about culture subject to those distortions). There were a lot of groups who would now be regarded as white in the USA but which back in the 1940s and 1950s weren't, quite. Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places (unlike now, when they're merely *illegally* discriminated against). They weren't black, but they weren't quite white either. The same went for several other ethnic minorities, like Greek people. So it's perhaps not all that surprising that one of the most successful blues records of all time, which later inspired an even more successful rock and roll record, was the result of a collaboration between a black singer, a Greek-American producer who said "As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black", and two Jewish songwriters. Willie Mae Thornton was big in every sense -- she weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, or about twenty-five stone, and she had a voice to match it -- she would often claim that she didn't need a microphone, because she was louder than any microphone anyway. We've talked in this series about blues shouters, and how they were mostly men, but she was at least the equal of any man as a shouter. She became a blues singer when she was fourteen, thanks to her mentor, a singer called "Diamond Teeth Mary". [excerpt: "Keep Your Hands Off Of Him" · Diamond Teeth Mary] That's a recording of Diamond Teeth Mary from the 1990s -- when she was *in* her nineties. She performed constantly until her death aged ninety-seven, but she only made her first record when she was ninety-two. "Diamond Teeth Mary" was the half-sister of the great blues singer Bessie Smith -- Mary had four stepmothers, one of whom was Smith's mother -- and she was a powerful singer herself, singing with the Hot Harlem Revue around Alabama. She was called "Diamond Teeth Mary" because she had diamonds embedded in her front teeth, so she'd be more imposing on stage. Diamond Teeth Mary heard the young Willie Mae Thornton singing while she was working on a garbage truck, got her to get off the garbage truck, and got her a job with the revue. Mary probably felt a kinship with the fourteen-year-old Willie Mae, a girl who only wore boy's clothes -- Mary had, herself, become a performer when she was only thirteen, having run away from her abusive family, dressed in boy's clothes, and joined the circus. Willie Mae Thornton stayed with that revue for most of the next decade, playing with musicians like Richard Penniman, who would later become known as Little Richard, playing to audiences that were mostly black and also (according to Little Richard) exclusively gay. The Hot Harlem Revue was not exactly respectable -- Sammy Green, who managed it, made most of his money from owning several brothels -- but it was somewhere that a young singer could very quickly learn how to be an entertainer. You had to be impressive as a female blues singer in the 1940s, especially if, as with Willie Mae Thornton, you were also not conventionally attractive and not of a societally-approved sexuality or gender identity. I've seen suggestions from people who would know that Thornton was bisexual, but from others like Johnny Otis that she showed no interest in men or women (though she did have a child in her teens), and I've also seen suggestions that she may have been trans (though I'm going to refer to her using she and her pronouns here as that's what she used throughout her life). She was a remarkable figure in many ways. One of her favourite drinks was embalming fluid and grape juice (just in case anyone was considering doing this, please don't. It's really not a good idea, at all, even a little bit. Don't drink embalming fluid.) According to Jerry Leiber she had razor scars all over her face. She was a very, very, intimidating person. At the very least, she didn't fit into neat boxes. But you see, all that stuff I just said... *that* is putting her into a box -- the caricature angry, aggressive, black woman. And that was a box she never liked to be put in either, but which she was put in by other people. What I just said, you'll notice, is all about what other people thought of her, and that's not always what she thought of herself. She would get very upset that people would say she used to fight promoters, saying "I never did fight the promoters. All I ever did was ask them for my money. Pay me and there won’t be no hard feelings." And while she is uniformly described as "masculine-looking" (whatever *that* means), she put it rather differently, saying "I don’t go out on stage trying to look pretty. I was born pretty." Thornton is someone who didn't get to tell her own story much -- much of what we know about her is from other people's impressions of her, and usually the impressions of men. People who knew her well described her as intelligent, kind, charming, funny, and hugely talented, while people who only spent a brief time around her tend to have talked about the razor scars on her face or how aggressive she seemed. Depending on which narrative you choose, you can make a very good case for her being either a loud, swaggering, vulgar, aggressive stereotype of unfeminine black femininity, or a rather sweet, vulnerable, person who intimidated men simply by her physical size, her race, and her loud voice, and who may have played up to their expectations at times, but who never liked that, and who used alcohol and other substances to cope with what wasn't a very happy life, while remaining outwardly happy. But because we as a society value black women so little, most of this story is filtered through the white men who told it, so be aware that in what follows, you may find yourself picturing a caricature figure, seeing Big Mama as the angry sassy black woman you've seen in a million films. She was a real person, and I wish we had more of her own words to set against this. While the Hot Harlem Revue was a good place to learn to be an entertainer, it wasn't necessarily the best place to work if you actually wanted to earn a living, and Willie Mae had to supplement her income by shining shoes. She often had to sleep in all-night restaurants and bars, because she couldn't afford to pay rent, and go begging door to door for food. But she would pretend to everyone she knew that everything was all right, and smile for everyone. She became pregnant in her teens, and tried to be a good mother to the child, but she was deemed an unfit mother due to poverty and the child was taken away from her. After several years with the Harlem Revue, she quit them because she was being cheated out of money, and decided to stay in Houston, Texas, which is where she really started to build an audience. Around this time she recorded her first single, "All Right Baby", credited to "the Harlem Stars" -- it's a song she wrote herself, and it's a boogie track very much in the vein of Big Joe Turner: [excerpt "All Right Baby", the Harlem Stars] Shortly after moving to Houston, she began working for Don Robey, who ran Peacock Records and the Bronze Peacock Club. Robey had a mixed reputation -- most singers and musicians he worked with thought highly of him, but most songwriters he worked with were less enamoured of his penchant for stealing their money and credit. Robey had a reputation as a thug, too, but according to Little Richard he was too scared of Thornton to beat her up like he would his other acts. She recorded several singles for Peacock, starting with "I'm All Fed Up", but her talents weren't really suited to the slick Texas blues backing she was given: [excerpt "I'm All Fed Up", Willie Mae Thornton] The kind of music Peacock put out was in the smoother style that was becoming prominent in the southwestern US -- the kind of music that people like Lightnin' Hopkins made -- and that wasn't really suited to Thornton's louder, more emotional style. But after a run of unsuccessful singles, things started to change. Peacock Records was in the process of expanding. Don Robey acquired another label, Duke Records of Memphis, and merged them, and he got distributors working with him in different areas of the country. And he started working with Johnny Otis. Otis came to Texas, and he and Robey made a deal -- Otis would audition several of the acts that were on Duke and Peacock records, people like Thornton who had not had much success but clearly had talent, and he would incorporate them into his Johnny Otis Revue. Otis would take charge of producing their records, which would be cut in Los Angeles with Otis' band, and he would let Robey release the results. Some of the artists still couldn't find their commercial potential even with Otis producing. For example, Little Richard's recordings with Otis, while interesting, are an artistic dead-end for him: [excerpt: "Little Richard Boogie", Little Richard] Of course, Little Richard went on to do quite well for himself later... But in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, something clicked. The two became lifelong friends, and also began a remarkable collaboration, with Otis being the first person to encourage Thornton to play harmonica as well as sing. On her first show with the Johnny Otis Revue, Willie Mae Thornton sang "Have Mercy Baby", the then-current hit by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and the audience went so wild that they had to stop the show. After that point, they had to put Thornton at the top of the bill, after even Little Esther, so the audience would allow the other performers to come on. And with the top billing came a change of name. Johnny Otis had a knack for giving artists new names -- as well as Little Esther, he also gave Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto their stage names -- and in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, for the rest of her career she was known as "Big Mama" Thornton. At the time we're talking about, Otis was, as much as a musician, a fixer, a wheeler-dealer, a person who brought people together. And this was a role that those people on the margins of whiteness – like Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who chose to live among black culture – excelled in. The people who were on the borderline between the two different conceptions of race often ended up as backroom facilitators, bringing white money to black artists -- people like Milt Gabler or Ahmet Ertegun or Cosimo Matassa, people of ethnicities that didn't quite fit into the black/white binary, people who were white enough to use white privilege to get financing, but not so white they identified with the majority culture. And in 1952, the people Otis brought together were Big Mama Thornton and two young songwriters who would change the world of music. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were Jewish teenagers, both of whom had moved to California from elsewhere -- Stoller from New York and Leiber from Maryland. Mike Stoller was a musician, who was into modern jazz and modern art music -- he loved Bartok and Thelonius Monk -- but he also had a background in stride and boogie woogie. After he found normal piano lessons uncongenial, he'd been offered lessons by the great James P Johnson, who had taught him how to play boogie. James P Johnson was essentially the inventor of jazz piano -- he'd started out playing ragtime, and had invented the stride piano style that Johnson had taught to Fats Waller. He'd been one of the performers at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, and was also a major composer of serious music, but what he taught young Mike Stoller was how to play a boogie bassline, how to understand twelve-bar blues structure and other rudiments of the blues pianist's art. As Stoller later put it, "it was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson—except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fats Waller". After moving to LA, Stoller started studying with Arthur Lange, a composer of film soundtracks, and playing piano for jazz bands, jamming with people like Chet Baker. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber was a blues fanatic, who had had a minor epiphany after hearing Jimmy Witherspoon's "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do": [excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon "Ain't Nobody's Business"] Leiber had heard Witherspoon's song, and realised that he could do that, and he decided he was going to. He was going to become a songwriter, and he started working on song lyrics immediately, although he had no idea how to go about getting anyone to perform them. The first song he wrote was called "Real Ugly Woman". The lyrics went "She’s a real ugly woman, don’t see how she got that way/Every time she comes ’round, she runs all my friends away". He didn't have much knowledge of the music business, but luckily that knowledge walked right through the door. Leiber was working at a small record store, and one day Lester Sill, who was the national sales manager for Modern Records, walked into the shop. Modern Records was one of the dozens of tiny blues labels that were springing up across the country, usually run by Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs who could see the potential in black music even if the owners of the major labels couldn't, and Sill was a real enthusiast for the music he was selling. He started pitching records to Jerry Leiber, telling him he'd love them, acting as if Leiber was the most important person in the world, even though Leiber kept explaining he didn't make the buying decisions for the shop, he was only a shop assistant. Eventually, after playing a record called "Boogie Chillen", by a new artist called John Lee Hooker, which excited Leiber enormously, Sill asked Leiber what he was going to do when he grew up. Leiber replied that he was already grown up, but he planned to become a songwriter. Sill asked to hear one of the songs, and Leiber sang "Real Ugly Woman" to him. Sill liked it, and asked for copies of his songs. When Leiber explained that he didn't know how to write music, Sill told him to find a partner who did. Leiber found Stoller through a mutual friend, who told Leiber that Stoller knew about music. Leiber phoned Stoller, who was unimpressed by the idea of writing songs together, because to his mind "songs" were the kind of thing that was dominating the pop charts at the time, the kind of thing that Patti Page or someone would record, not something someone who was into hard bop music would like. But Leiber eventually persuaded him to at least take a look at the lyrics he'd been writing. Stoller looked at the lyrics to "Real Ugly Woman", and said "These are blues! You didn’t tell me you were writing blues. I love the blues.” They started collaborating together that day, in 1950, and worked together for the rest of their lives. Soon Jimmy Witherspoon himself was singing "Real Ugly Woman", just like Leiber had hoped when he'd started writing: [Excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon "Real Ugly Woman"] Soon after, Ralph Bass moved to LA from New York. He'd got to know Leiber and Stoller on their trips East and when he moved west he introduced them to Johnny Otis, who Bass had kept in touch with after leaving Savoy Records. Through the connection with Otis and Bass, they wrote many songs for Little Esther, and they also started a partnership with Little Esther's former backing vocalists The Robins, who put out the very first single with a Leiber and Stoller writing credit: "That's What the Good Book Says". [Excerpt: The Robins "That's What the Good Book Says"] The partnership between the Leiber and Stoller team and the Robins would end up defining all their careers. But right now, Leiber and Stoller were a couple of teenagers who were working with their heroes. And at least one of those heroes was not very impressed. Johnny Otis had introduced them to Big Mama Thornton and asked if they had a song for her. They said "we don't, but we will have in a few minutes", ran back to Stoller's house, and quickly knocked out "Hound Dog" in a style that they thought would suit Thornton. "Hound dog" was, at the time, black slang for a gigolo, and what Leiber and Stoller wanted to do was have a song that was as aggressive as possible, with their singer demeaning the man she was singing to, while also including sexual undertones. (Those undertones were strengthened in the follow-up Thornton recorded, "Tom Cat", where she told a "tom cat" "I ain't going to feed you fish no more"). Leiber and Stoller had very strong ideas about how their new song should be performed, and they made the mistake of telling her about them. Big Mama Thornton was not about to let two white teenagers teach her how to sing the blues. In truth, Big Mama Thornton was only a few years older than those kids -- they were in their late teens, and she was in her mid twenties -- but that kind of gap can seem like a big difference, and it might well also be that Thornton was offended by the fact that these white men were telling her, a black woman, how to do her job. So when Jerry Leiber insisted that rather than croon the song as she had been doing, she should "attack it", her response was to point to her crotch and say "attack this!" Johnny Otis didn't help by playing a rimshot right after Thornton said that. But he then suggested that Leiber sing it for Thornton, and she did listen, and agreed to try it that way. Once the communication problem had been sorted, Thornton turned in the definitive performance of the song. [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] "Hound Dog" is also notable as being one of the last times Johnny Otis played drums on a record. While he could still play the vibraphone, he could no longer hold his drumsticks properly, and so he'd largely given up drumming. But when they were working out the arrangement for the recording session, Otis played the drums in the rehearsals, playing with a style of his own -- turning the snare off on his snare drum so it sounded more like a tom-tom. When it came to the actual recording, though, Otis was in the control room, while a session drummer was playing in the studio. But Leiber and Stoller both agreed that he simply wasn't playing the part properly, and enticed Otis into the studio and got him to play the part as he'd been playing it in rehearsal. What happened next is a subject of much debate. What everyone is agreed on is that Otis was credited as a co-writer early on, but that he wasn't credited later. The story as Otis told it is that he did actually help Leiber and Stoller pull the song together, rewriting it with them, as well as doing the arrangement in the studio (which no-one disputes him doing). He claimed specifically that he'd come up with the lines "You made me feel so blue, you make me weep and moan/You ain't looking for a woman, you're just looking for a home", because Leiber and Stoller had had, quote, "some derogatory crap" in there, that he'd had to remove references to chicken and watermelon, and that he constantly had to edit their songs. He said that Leiber and Stoller acknowledged he was a co-writer right up until the point where Elvis Presley wanted to record the song a few years later. Leiber and Stoller, on the other hand, claimed that Otis had no involvement with the songwriting, and that he'd misrepresented himself to Don Robey. They claimed that Otis had falsely claimed he had power of attorney for them, as well as falsely claiming to have co-written the song, and deliberately defrauded them. On the other hand, it's only because of Otis that Leiber and Stoller got credit at all -- Don Robey, who as I've mentioned was a notorious thief of writing credits, originally put himself and Thornton down as the writers, and it was Otis who got the credits amended. Either way, Leiber and Stoller have, for more than sixty years, had the sole songwriting credits for the track, and Otis never bothered to dispute their claim in court. Indeed, they don't appear to have had any particular animosity -- they all repeatedly praised the others' abilities. Although as Otis put it "I could have sent my kids to college, like they sent theirs. But, oh well, if I dwell on that I get quite unhappy, so we try to move on." What's most ridiculous about the whole credit mess is that Elvis' version bore almost no resemblance to the song Leiber and Stoller wrote. Elvis' version was a cover of a version by the white Vegas lounge band Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, which was more or less a parody of the original. [excerpt: Freddie Bell and the Bellboys - “Hound Dog”] But still, Elvis came later, as did the money. In 1953, all Leiber and Stoller got for a record that sold over a million copies was a cheque for one thousand two hundred dollars. A cheque which bounced. As a result of their experience getting ripped off by Robey, Leiber and Stoller formed their own record label with Lester Sill, and we'll be hearing more about that later... Big Mama Thornton did actually get paid for her million-seller -- a whole five hundred dollars -- but she never had the success she deserved. She later wrote the song "Ball and Chain": [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball and Chain"] Janis Joplin later had a hit with that, and you can hear from Thornton's version just how much Joplin took from Thornton's vocal style. But due to a bad contract Thornton never made a penny in royalties from the song she wrote (which is a far more egregious injustice than the one people complain about, that Elvis had a hit with "Hound Dog" -- she didn't write that one, and Elvis did pay the writers). She continued performing until a few days before she died, in July 1984, despite getting so sick and losing so much weight (she was under a hundred pounds at the end) that she was almost unrecognisable. She died two weeks before Little Esther, and like Esther, she had asked Johnny Otis, now the Reverend Johnny Otis, to give her eulogy. Otis said, in part “Mama always told me that the blues were more important than having money. She told me: Artists are artists and businessmen are businessmen. But the trouble is the artist’s money stays in the businessmen’s hands. [...] Don’t waste your sorrow on Big Mama. She’s free. Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent."

  Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—-    Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (along with one, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, that got cut out of the eventual episode) I used three main resources for this podcast.  Big Mama Thornton: Her Life and Music by Michael Spörke  is the only biography of Thornton. It’s very well researched, but suffers somewhat from English not being its author’s first language. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, is an invaluable book on the most important songwriting team of their generation. And Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz is the definitive biography of Otis. This collection has most of Big Mama Thornton’s fifties recordings on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   One of the things that is easy to miss when talking about early rock and roll is that much of the development of the genre is about the liminal spaces in race in America. (Before I start talking about this, a disclaimer I have to make — I’m a white person, from a different country, born decades after the events I’m talking about. I’m trying to be as accurate as I can here, and as sensitive as I can, but I apologise if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of the people who were actually affected). “Black” and “white” are two categories imposed by culture, and like all culturally-imposed binaries, they’re essentially arbitrary and don’t really map very well onto really existing people. There have always been people who don’t fit neatly into the boxes that a racist society insists everyone fits into — and part of the reason that rock and roll happened when it did was that in the 1950s America was in the process of redefining those boxes, and moving some people who would have previously fit into one category into the other. The lines were being redrawn, and that led to some interesting art happening at the borders. (That sounds like I’m doing the “at least some good art came from this terrible event” thing. I’m really, really, not. Racism in all its forms is nothing but negative, and its distortions of culture are all negative too. But they do exist, and need noting when talking about culture subject to those distortions). There were a lot of groups who would now be regarded as white in the USA but which back in the 1940s and 1950s weren’t, quite. Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places (unlike now, when they’re merely *illegally* discriminated against). They weren’t black, but they weren’t quite white either. The same went for several other ethnic minorities, like Greek people. So it’s perhaps not all that surprising that one of the most successful blues records of all time, which later inspired an even more successful rock and roll record, was the result of a collaboration between a black singer, a Greek-American producer who said “As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black”, and two Jewish songwriters. Willie Mae Thornton was big in every sense — she weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, or about twenty-five stone, and she had a voice to match it — she would often claim that she didn’t need a microphone, because she was louder than any microphone anyway. We’ve talked in this series about blues shouters, and how they were mostly men, but she was at least the equal of any man as a shouter. She became a blues singer when she was fourteen, thanks to her mentor, a singer called “Diamond Teeth Mary”. [excerpt: “Keep Your Hands Off Of Him” · Diamond Teeth Mary] That’s a recording of Diamond Teeth Mary from the 1990s — when she was *in* her nineties. She performed constantly until her death aged ninety-seven, but she only made her first record when she was ninety-two. “Diamond Teeth Mary” was the half-sister of the great blues singer Bessie Smith — Mary had four stepmothers, one of whom was Smith’s mother — and she was a powerful singer herself, singing with the Hot Harlem Revue around Alabama. She was called “Diamond Teeth Mary” because she had diamonds embedded in her front teeth, so she’d be more imposing on stage. Diamond Teeth Mary heard the young Willie Mae Thornton singing while she was working on a garbage truck, got her to get off the garbage truck, and got her a job with the revue. Mary probably felt a kinship with the fourteen-year-old Willie Mae, a girl who only wore boy’s clothes — Mary had, herself, become a performer when she was only thirteen, having run away from her abusive family, dressed in boy’s clothes, and joined the circus. Willie Mae Thornton stayed with that revue for most of the next decade, playing with musicians like Richard Penniman, who would later become known as Little Richard, playing to audiences that were mostly black and also (according to Little Richard) exclusively gay. The Hot Harlem Revue was not exactly respectable — Sammy Green, who managed it, made most of his money from owning several brothels — but it was somewhere that a young singer could very quickly learn how to be an entertainer. You had to be impressive as a female blues singer in the 1940s, especially if, as with Willie Mae Thornton, you were also not conventionally attractive and not of a societally-approved sexuality or gender identity. I’ve seen suggestions from people who would know that Thornton was bisexual, but from others like Johnny Otis that she showed no interest in men or women (though she did have a child in her teens), and I’ve also seen suggestions that she may have been trans (though I’m going to refer to her using she and her pronouns here as that’s what she used throughout her life). She was a remarkable figure in many ways. One of her favourite drinks was embalming fluid and grape juice (just in case anyone was considering doing this, please don’t. It’s really not a good idea, at all, even a little bit. Don’t drink embalming fluid.) According to Jerry Leiber she had razor scars all over her face. She was a very, very, intimidating person. At the very least, she didn’t fit into neat boxes. But you see, all that stuff I just said… *that* is putting her into a box — the caricature angry, aggressive, black woman. And that was a box she never liked to be put in either, but which she was put in by other people. What I just said, you’ll notice, is all about what other people thought of her, and that’s not always what she thought of herself. She would get very upset that people would say she used to fight promoters, saying “I never did fight the promoters. All I ever did was ask them for my money. Pay me and there won’t be no hard feelings.” And while she is uniformly described as “masculine-looking” (whatever *that* means), she put it rather differently, saying “I don’t go out on stage trying to look pretty. I was born pretty.” Thornton is someone who didn’t get to tell her own story much — much of what we know about her is from other people’s impressions of her, and usually the impressions of men. People who knew her well described her as intelligent, kind, charming, funny, and hugely talented, while people who only spent a brief time around her tend to have talked about the razor scars on her face or how aggressive she seemed. Depending on which narrative you choose, you can make a very good case for her being either a loud, swaggering, vulgar, aggressive stereotype of unfeminine black femininity, or a rather sweet, vulnerable, person who intimidated men simply by her physical size, her race, and her loud voice, and who may have played up to their expectations at times, but who never liked that, and who used alcohol and other substances to cope with what wasn’t a very happy life, while remaining outwardly happy. But because we as a society value black women so little, most of this story is filtered through the white men who told it, so be aware that in what follows, you may find yourself picturing a caricature figure, seeing Big Mama as the angry sassy black woman you’ve seen in a million films. She was a real person, and I wish we had more of her own words to set against this. While the Hot Harlem Revue was a good place to learn to be an entertainer, it wasn’t necessarily the best place to work if you actually wanted to earn a living, and Willie Mae had to supplement her income by shining shoes. She often had to sleep in all-night restaurants and bars, because she couldn’t afford to pay rent, and go begging door to door for food. But she would pretend to everyone she knew that everything was all right, and smile for everyone. She became pregnant in her teens, and tried to be a good mother to the child, but she was deemed an unfit mother due to poverty and the child was taken away from her. After several years with the Harlem Revue, she quit them because she was being cheated out of money, and decided to stay in Houston, Texas, which is where she really started to build an audience. Around this time she recorded her first single, “All Right Baby”, credited to “the Harlem Stars” — it’s a song she wrote herself, and it’s a boogie track very much in the vein of Big Joe Turner: [excerpt “All Right Baby”, the Harlem Stars] Shortly after moving to Houston, she began working for Don Robey, who ran Peacock Records and the Bronze Peacock Club. Robey had a mixed reputation — most singers and musicians he worked with thought highly of him, but most songwriters he worked with were less enamoured of his penchant for stealing their money and credit. Robey had a reputation as a thug, too, but according to Little Richard he was too scared of Thornton to beat her up like he would his other acts. She recorded several singles for Peacock, starting with “I’m All Fed Up”, but her talents weren’t really suited to the slick Texas blues backing she was given: [excerpt “I’m All Fed Up”, Willie Mae Thornton] The kind of music Peacock put out was in the smoother style that was becoming prominent in the southwestern US — the kind of music that people like Lightnin’ Hopkins made — and that wasn’t really suited to Thornton’s louder, more emotional style. But after a run of unsuccessful singles, things started to change. Peacock Records was in the process of expanding. Don Robey acquired another label, Duke Records of Memphis, and merged them, and he got distributors working with him in different areas of the country. And he started working with Johnny Otis. Otis came to Texas, and he and Robey made a deal — Otis would audition several of the acts that were on Duke and Peacock records, people like Thornton who had not had much success but clearly had talent, and he would incorporate them into his Johnny Otis Revue. Otis would take charge of producing their records, which would be cut in Los Angeles with Otis’ band, and he would let Robey release the results. Some of the artists still couldn’t find their commercial potential even with Otis producing. For example, Little Richard’s recordings with Otis, while interesting, are an artistic dead-end for him: [excerpt: “Little Richard Boogie”, Little Richard] Of course, Little Richard went on to do quite well for himself later… But in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, something clicked. The two became lifelong friends, and also began a remarkable collaboration, with Otis being the first person to encourage Thornton to play harmonica as well as sing. On her first show with the Johnny Otis Revue, Willie Mae Thornton sang “Have Mercy Baby”, the then-current hit by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and the audience went so wild that they had to stop the show. After that point, they had to put Thornton at the top of the bill, after even Little Esther, so the audience would allow the other performers to come on. And with the top billing came a change of name. Johnny Otis had a knack for giving artists new names — as well as Little Esther, he also gave Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto their stage names — and in the case of Willie Mae Thornton, for the rest of her career she was known as “Big Mama” Thornton. At the time we’re talking about, Otis was, as much as a musician, a fixer, a wheeler-dealer, a person who brought people together. And this was a role that those people on the margins of whiteness – like Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who chose to live among black culture – excelled in. The people who were on the borderline between the two different conceptions of race often ended up as backroom facilitators, bringing white money to black artists — people like Milt Gabler or Ahmet Ertegun or Cosimo Matassa, people of ethnicities that didn’t quite fit into the black/white binary, people who were white enough to use white privilege to get financing, but not so white they identified with the majority culture. And in 1952, the people Otis brought together were Big Mama Thornton and two young songwriters who would change the world of music. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were Jewish teenagers, both of whom had moved to California from elsewhere — Stoller from New York and Leiber from Maryland. Mike Stoller was a musician, who was into modern jazz and modern art music — he loved Bartok and Thelonius Monk — but he also had a background in stride and boogie woogie. After he found normal piano lessons uncongenial, he’d been offered lessons by the great James P Johnson, who had taught him how to play boogie. James P Johnson was essentially the inventor of jazz piano — he’d started out playing ragtime, and had invented the stride piano style that Johnson had taught to Fats Waller. He’d been one of the performers at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, and was also a major composer of serious music, but what he taught young Mike Stoller was how to play a boogie bassline, how to understand twelve-bar blues structure and other rudiments of the blues pianist’s art. As Stoller later put it, “it was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson—except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fats Waller”. After moving to LA, Stoller started studying with Arthur Lange, a composer of film soundtracks, and playing piano for jazz bands, jamming with people like Chet Baker. Meanwhile, Jerry Leiber was a blues fanatic, who had had a minor epiphany after hearing Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do”: [excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”] Leiber had heard Witherspoon’s song, and realised that he could do that, and he decided he was going to. He was going to become a songwriter, and he started working on song lyrics immediately, although he had no idea how to go about getting anyone to perform them. The first song he wrote was called “Real Ugly Woman”. The lyrics went “She’s a real ugly woman, don’t see how she got that way/Every time she comes ’round, she runs all my friends away”. He didn’t have much knowledge of the music business, but luckily that knowledge walked right through the door. Leiber was working at a small record store, and one day Lester Sill, who was the national sales manager for Modern Records, walked into the shop. Modern Records was one of the dozens of tiny blues labels that were springing up across the country, usually run by Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs who could see the potential in black music even if the owners of the major labels couldn’t, and Sill was a real enthusiast for the music he was selling. He started pitching records to Jerry Leiber, telling him he’d love them, acting as if Leiber was the most important person in the world, even though Leiber kept explaining he didn’t make the buying decisions for the shop, he was only a shop assistant. Eventually, after playing a record called “Boogie Chillen”, by a new artist called John Lee Hooker, which excited Leiber enormously, Sill asked Leiber what he was going to do when he grew up. Leiber replied that he was already grown up, but he planned to become a songwriter. Sill asked to hear one of the songs, and Leiber sang “Real Ugly Woman” to him. Sill liked it, and asked for copies of his songs. When Leiber explained that he didn’t know how to write music, Sill told him to find a partner who did. Leiber found Stoller through a mutual friend, who told Leiber that Stoller knew about music. Leiber phoned Stoller, who was unimpressed by the idea of writing songs together, because to his mind “songs” were the kind of thing that was dominating the pop charts at the time, the kind of thing that Patti Page or someone would record, not something someone who was into hard bop music would like. But Leiber eventually persuaded him to at least take a look at the lyrics he’d been writing. Stoller looked at the lyrics to “Real Ugly Woman”, and said “These are blues! You didn’t tell me you were writing blues. I love the blues.” They started collaborating together that day, in 1950, and worked together for the rest of their lives. Soon Jimmy Witherspoon himself was singing “Real Ugly Woman”, just like Leiber had hoped when he’d started writing: [Excerpt: Jimmy Witherspoon “Real Ugly Woman”] Soon after, Ralph Bass moved to LA from New York. He’d got to know Leiber and Stoller on their trips East and when he moved west he introduced them to Johnny Otis, who Bass had kept in touch with after leaving Savoy Records. Through the connection with Otis and Bass, they wrote many songs for Little Esther, and they also started a partnership with Little Esther’s former backing vocalists The Robins, who put out the very first single with a Leiber and Stoller writing credit: “That’s What the Good Book Says”. [Excerpt: The Robins “That’s What the Good Book Says”] The partnership between the Leiber and Stoller team and the Robins would end up defining all their careers. But right now, Leiber and Stoller were a couple of teenagers who were working with their heroes. And at least one of those heroes was not very impressed. Johnny Otis had introduced them to Big Mama Thornton and asked if they had a song for her. They said “we don’t, but we will have in a few minutes”, ran back to Stoller’s house, and quickly knocked out “Hound Dog” in a style that they thought would suit Thornton. “Hound dog” was, at the time, black slang for a gigolo, and what Leiber and Stoller wanted to do was have a song that was as aggressive as possible, with their singer demeaning the man she was singing to, while also including sexual undertones. (Those undertones were strengthened in the follow-up Thornton recorded, “Tom Cat”, where she told a “tom cat” “I ain’t going to feed you fish no more”). Leiber and Stoller had very strong ideas about how their new song should be performed, and they made the mistake of telling her about them. Big Mama Thornton was not about to let two white teenagers teach her how to sing the blues. In truth, Big Mama Thornton was only a few years older than those kids — they were in their late teens, and she was in her mid twenties — but that kind of gap can seem like a big difference, and it might well also be that Thornton was offended by the fact that these white men were telling her, a black woman, how to do her job. So when Jerry Leiber insisted that rather than croon the song as she had been doing, she should “attack it”, her response was to point to her crotch and say “attack this!” Johnny Otis didn’t help by playing a rimshot right after Thornton said that. But he then suggested that Leiber sing it for Thornton, and she did listen, and agreed to try it that way. Once the communication problem had been sorted, Thornton turned in the definitive performance of the song. [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”] “Hound Dog” is also notable as being one of the last times Johnny Otis played drums on a record. While he could still play the vibraphone, he could no longer hold his drumsticks properly, and so he’d largely given up drumming. But when they were working out the arrangement for the recording session, Otis played the drums in the rehearsals, playing with a style of his own — turning the snare off on his snare drum so it sounded more like a tom-tom. When it came to the actual recording, though, Otis was in the control room, while a session drummer was playing in the studio. But Leiber and Stoller both agreed that he simply wasn’t playing the part properly, and enticed Otis into the studio and got him to play the part as he’d been playing it in rehearsal. What happened next is a subject of much debate. What everyone is agreed on is that Otis was credited as a co-writer early on, but that he wasn’t credited later. The story as Otis told it is that he did actually help Leiber and Stoller pull the song together, rewriting it with them, as well as doing the arrangement in the studio (which no-one disputes him doing). He claimed specifically that he’d come up with the lines “You made me feel so blue, you make me weep and moan/You ain’t looking for a woman, you’re just looking for a home”, because Leiber and Stoller had had, quote, “some derogatory crap” in there, that he’d had to remove references to chicken and watermelon, and that he constantly had to edit their songs. He said that Leiber and Stoller acknowledged he was a co-writer right up until the point where Elvis Presley wanted to record the song a few years later. Leiber and Stoller, on the other hand, claimed that Otis had no involvement with the songwriting, and that he’d misrepresented himself to Don Robey. They claimed that Otis had falsely claimed he had power of attorney for them, as well as falsely claiming to have co-written the song, and deliberately defrauded them. On the other hand, it’s only because of Otis that Leiber and Stoller got credit at all — Don Robey, who as I’ve mentioned was a notorious thief of writing credits, originally put himself and Thornton down as the writers, and it was Otis who got the credits amended. Either way, Leiber and Stoller have, for more than sixty years, had the sole songwriting credits for the track, and Otis never bothered to dispute their claim in court. Indeed, they don’t appear to have had any particular animosity — they all repeatedly praised the others’ abilities. Although as Otis put it “I could have sent my kids to college, like they sent theirs. But, oh well, if I dwell on that I get quite unhappy, so we try to move on.” What’s most ridiculous about the whole credit mess is that Elvis’ version bore almost no resemblance to the song Leiber and Stoller wrote. Elvis’ version was a cover of a version by the white Vegas lounge band Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, which was more or less a parody of the original. [excerpt: Freddie Bell and the Bellboys – “Hound Dog”] But still, Elvis came later, as did the money. In 1953, all Leiber and Stoller got for a record that sold over a million copies was a cheque for one thousand two hundred dollars. A cheque which bounced. As a result of their experience getting ripped off by Robey, Leiber and Stoller formed their own record label with Lester Sill, and we’ll be hearing more about that later… Big Mama Thornton did actually get paid for her million-seller — a whole five hundred dollars — but she never had the success she deserved. She later wrote the song “Ball and Chain”: [excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, “Ball and Chain”] Janis Joplin later had a hit with that, and you can hear from Thornton’s version just how much Joplin took from Thornton’s vocal style. But due to a bad contract Thornton never made a penny in royalties from the song she wrote (which is a far more egregious injustice than the one people complain about, that Elvis had a hit with “Hound Dog” — she didn’t write that one, and Elvis did pay the writers). She continued performing until a few days before she died, in July 1984, despite getting so sick and losing so much weight (she was under a hundred pounds at the end) that she was almost unrecognisable. She died two weeks before Little Esther, and like Esther, she had asked Johnny Otis, now the Reverend Johnny Otis, to give her eulogy. Otis said, in part “Mama always told me that the blues were more important than having money. She told me: Artists are artists and businessmen are businessmen. But the trouble is the artist’s money stays in the businessmen’s hands. […] Don’t waste your sorrow on Big Mama. She’s free. Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent.”

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…)

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.

Tonight and throughout the month of November The Jazz Show throws the spotlight on obscure, underrated and under recorded trumpeters. All are master musicians but for a variety of reasons, none got the recognition they so richly deserved. In the case of tonight's the wonderful Wilbur Harden , it was a case of his career being curtailed by ill heath both mental and physical. He had recorded with the great Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane and was held in very high esteem. He signed with Savoy Records in 1958 and recorded four wonderful dates, two of which make up tonight's Jazz Feature. Wilbur appears on flugelhorn, his preferred horn with the mighty John Coltrane, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianists Howard Williams and Tommy Flanagan (splitting the chores), bassist Alvin (aka Ali) Jackson and drum great Arthur Taylor. These two recordings were done in June of 1958 and first issued separately on two LPs. We hear them both tonight. Wilbur Harden wrote four of the seven tunes and Curtis Fuller wrote two and the ballad feature is the old standard "Once in a While". Wilbur made his final record in 1960 and sadly died in obscurity in 1969 at age 44. Hear him at his best tonight!

EARTH WIND AND FIRE Durante la década de 1970, nació una nueva marca de música pop, una que estaba impregnada de estilos africanos y afroamericanos, en particular el jazz y el R&B, pero que atraía a una sección más amplia del público que escuchaba. Como fundador y líder de la banda Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice White no solo se abrazó sino que también ayudó a lograr esta evolución del pop, que cerró la brecha que a menudo ha separado los gustos musicales de la América negra y blanca. Sin duda, fue un exito, ya que EWF combinó una maestría musical de alto calibre, un amplio eclecticismo de género musical y un espiritismo multicultural de los años 70. "Quería hacer algo que no se había hecho antes", explica Maurice. "Aunque éramos básicamente músicos de jazz, tocábamos música soul, funk, gospel, blues, jazz, rock y dance ... que de alguna manera acabó convirtiéndose en pop,el grupo comenzó lentamente a construir una reputación de grabaciones innovadoras y espectáculos en vivo emocionantes, completos con hazañas de magia ( pianos flotantes, juegos de tambores giratorios, artistas en proceso de desaparición) diseñados por Doug Henning y su entonces desconocido asistente David Copperfield. Su primer álbum de oro, Head To The Sky , alcanzó el pop número 27 en el verano de 1973, produciendo una suave y corpulenta versión de "Evil" y el single del título. El primer álbum de platino de EWF, Open Our Eyes, cuya canción principal fue una nueva versión del clásico originalmente grabado por el grupo de Savoy Records, Gospel Clefs, incluye "Mighty Mighty" (número cuatro de R&B) y "Kalimba Story" (número seis de R&B).

Show #759 Semi-Connected Again Spinner was semi-connected again to the outside world by means of a mobile WiFi device supplied to him by his internet provider. And so he was able to learn about the passing of a few prominent people, which ofcourse gave him the blues. 01. Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue (2:27) (45 RPM Single, Coral Records, 1957) 02. Otis Rush - I Can’t Quit You Baby (3:04) (45 RPM Single, Cobra Records, 1956) also released on a 10 inch 78 RPM 03. Led Zeppelin - I Can’t Quit You Baby (4:35) (Led Zeppelin, Atlantic, 1969) 04. Otis Rush - Looking Back (6:22) (Any Place I'm Going, House Of Blues, 1998) 05. Big Jay McNeely - The Deacan's Hop (2:50) (78 RPM Single, Savoy Records, 1949) 06. Dennis Herrera - With No Refrain (4:20) (You Stole My Heart, self-release, 2018) 07. Kirk Fletcher - Gotta Right (8:22) (Hold On, self-release, 2018) 08. JoAnne Shaw Taylor - Ready To Roll (4:05) (Wild, Silvertone Records, 2018) 09. Keith Stone with Red Gravy - Ain't That The Blues (3:54) (Keith Stone with Red Gravy, self-release, 2018) 10. Anthony Gomes - Come Down (4:34) (Peace, Love And Loud Guitars, Up 2 Zero Entertainment, 2018) 11. Scott Sharrard - Tell The Truth (4:34) (Saving Grace, We Save Music, 2018) 12. Cary Morin - Let Me Hear The Music (3:53) (When I Rise, Maple Street Music, 2018) 13. Detonics - Out Of Sight (4:13) (Raise Your Bet, Naked, 2018) 14. Damon Fowler - Fairweather Friend (3:34) (The Whiskey Bayou Sessions, Whiskey Bayou Records, 2018) 15. Lindsay Beaver - Dangerous (3:41) (Tough As Love, Alligator Records, 2018) 16. Gregg Allman - I Love The Life I Live (3:34) (Southern Blood, Rounder Records, 2017) 17. John Akapo - Little Lani (3:53) (Paradise Blues, Mensch House Records, 2018) 18. Midnite Johnny - Betcha By Now (5:06) (Long Road Home, Mosher Street Records, 2018) 19. Rob Ryan Roadshow - Night Bus (4:05) (Coming Home, Rhythm Bomb Records, 2018) 20. Jim Allchin - Devil Don't Sleep (3:12) (Prime Blues, Sandy Key Music, 2018) 21. Jan Mittendorp - Stella By Starlight (3:32) (Baritone Jazz 2 EP, KuvVer Records, 2018) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Wilbur Harden continues our Jazz Feature series this month on unknown or obscure musicians. Wilbur Harden fills the bill nicely. He was a wonderful player whose career was cur short by illness so he was only on the Jazz scene from 1957 until his final recording in 1960. Harden was born in Birmingham, Alabama on Dec. 31,1924 and was a self-taught trumpeter. He began playing in R&B bands and when he was touring with Ivory Joe hunter, he ended up in Detroit when he committed himself to playing Jazz and joined tenor saxophonist Yusef Lateef's band and switched from trumpet to the more mellow flugelhorn. He was one of the first to do this. He later went to New York and played with John Coltrane and began recording for Savoy Records. He made four wonderful dates for them in 1958, three with Coltrane as a sideman. Our Jazz feature tonight is his first called "Mainstream 1958". 6 Harden compositions are featured. Harden with Coltrane are backed by all ex-Detroiters: Tommy Flanagan on piano, Doug Watkins, bass and Louis Hayes on drums. Harden was not a flashy player but an original thoughtful player who would have made more of a contribution had not illness curtailed and ended his playing career. He died in obscurity in New York on June 10, 1969.

Valdo Williams continues this month's obscure and lesser known names as the Jazz Feature presentation. Valdo Williams is a pianist/composer who although he played with many artists including Charlie Parker and Lester Young among others made only one album of his own music under his own name. It was recorded in December 1966 for Savoy Records. Valdo lived a good long life as he was born in New York in 1928 and died there at 80 in 2010. I'm told he was pleased with this album as it represented his music and a culmination of his concepts honed over many years. It is both straight-forward and abstract too and completely original. Valdo was pleased with his sidemen who he described as "ideal". Bassist Reggie Johnson and drummer Stu Martin fill the bill. There are only four long compositions on the album all, of course by Mr. Williams. I know this artist will be a revelation to even the most dedicated and knowledgeable of Jazz fans. Here is Valdo Williams!

The ArtistBorn in the small town of Ozark, Alabama, she enjoyed singing for her family. She hails from a strong religious background; her father was a noted minister while her mother was a well-respected missionary. With deep gospel roots her yearning to sing thrived. Today, her love for Gospel has awarded her many opportunities to minister through music, and has led Voncile Belcher to peruse her fourth solo project.In 1968, Voncile moved her family to Rochester, New York. There she became affiliated with the City of Rochester Mass Choir, which was her first opportunity to perform on a professional level.In 1974, she and her family returned to Ozark, Alabama. There she was introduced to Gospel Music Workshop of America – Alabama Chapter. This association would prove to be the catalyst to her first recording venture. With the Harris Temple Church of God in Christ, under the direction of Keith Ellison, she recorded and sang lead vocals on “Do You Know Who Jesus Is” which became a blessing and inspiration to many. Later in1985, she again relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, and she transferred her GMWA membership to the Atlanta Chapter. She was welcomed with open arms. While in Atlanta she took charge of her career and began recording. Steady, in the studio Voncile met a man that would change the course of her life. Milton Bigham, the then President of Savoy Records gave her a little piece of paper with three lines. With those three lines she sang lead vocals on the track ‘Look Where He Brought Me From' that appeared on Georgia Mass Choir's 1985 ‘We've Got the Victory' album. The song became an instant hit on The Gospel Billboard Charts. Along with Georgia Mass Choir, Voncile also sang lead on ‘Hold To God's Unchanging Hand' written by Gospel Great James Bignon.As success arose it enabled Voncile to expand her ministry by booking various performances across the country, and ministering to audiences of all race and religions. As Voncile returned to her solo career, with a leap of faith it led her to the release her first album entitled ‘Be Strong'. Coming off the highs of ‘Be Strong', Voncile began to cultivate her gift of writing. She released her second project ‘What a Time' in which she did a vast array of writing, arranging, and co-producing. Once more again with success and opportunity in view she headed back to record her third project. Low Rush Music released ‘Kourageous' in the Summer 2010. Now, under her own newly formed Glory Bound (GB)Records, she is set to release her most anticipated solo project, with its leading single ‘Alright' produced by Tim Fryar & Rodney Edge under New Me Productions. It is a fresh, new, and innovative Voncile Belcher.Voncile's opportunities have enabled her to perform with small, medium, and large ensembles, which have included professional choirs. Voncile continues to lend her vocals to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and Battle of the Bands. It is her desire to continue to minister the Word through song so that all may be HEALED, DELIVERED, & SET FREE!!!

The ArtistBorn in the small town of Ozark, Alabama, she enjoyed singing for her family. She hails from a strong religious background; her father was a noted minister while her mother was a well-respected missionary. With deep gospel roots her yearning to sing thrived. Today, her love for Gospel has awarded her many opportunities to minister through music, and has led Voncile Belcher to peruse her fourth solo project.In 1968, Voncile moved her family to Rochester, New York. There she became affiliated with the City of Rochester Mass Choir, which was her first opportunity to perform on a professional level.In 1974, she and her family returned to Ozark, Alabama. There she was introduced to Gospel Music Workshop of America – Alabama Chapter. This association would prove to be the catalyst to her first recording venture. With the Harris Temple Church of God in Christ, under the direction of Keith Ellison, she recorded and sang lead vocals on “Do You Know Who Jesus Is” which became a blessing and inspiration to many. Later in1985, she again relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, and she transferred her GMWA membership to the Atlanta Chapter. She was welcomed with open arms. While in Atlanta she took charge of her career and began recording. Steady, in the studio Voncile met a man that would change the course of her life. Milton Bigham, the then President of Savoy Records gave her a little piece of paper with three lines. With those three lines she sang lead vocals on the track ‘Look Where He Brought Me From' that appeared on Georgia Mass Choir's 1985 ‘We've Got the Victory' album. The song became an instant hit on The Gospel Billboard Charts. Along with Georgia Mass Choir, Voncile also sang lead on ‘Hold To God's Unchanging Hand' written by Gospel Great James Bignon.As success arose it enabled Voncile to expand her ministry by booking various performances across the country, and ministering to audiences of all race and religions. As Voncile returned to her solo career, with a leap of faith it led her to the release her first album entitled ‘Be Strong'. Coming off the highs of ‘Be Strong', Voncile began to cultivate her gift of writing. She released her second project ‘What a Time' in which she did a vast array of writing, arranging, and co-producing. Once more again with success and opportunity in view she headed back to record her third project. Low Rush Music released ‘Kourageous' in the Summer 2010. Now, under her own newly formed Glory Bound (GB)Records, she is set to release her most anticipated solo project, with its leading single ‘Alright' produced by Tim Fryar & Rodney Edge under New Me Productions. It is a fresh, new, and innovative Voncile Belcher.Voncile's opportunities have enabled her to perform with small, medium, and large ensembles, which have included professional choirs. Voncile continues to lend her vocals to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and Battle of the Bands. It is her desire to continue to minister the Word through song so that all may be HEALED, DELIVERED, & SET FREE!!!

EPISODE 328 WIT' LADY VONCILE BELCHER AND JERRY ROYCE LIVE -WORLDWIDE! LISTEN TO HER NEW HIT SINGLE "I'LL STAND".LADY VONCILE BELCHER"The Voice that Rejuvenates Traditional Gospel Music"Born in the small town of Ozark, Alabama, she enjoyed singing for her family where she hails from a strong religious background; her father was a noted Minister while her mother was a well-respected Missionary. With deep gospel roots her yearning to sing thrived. Today, her love for Gospel Music has awarded her many opportunities to minister in song and has led Lady Voncile Belcher to pursue her fourth solo project.Voncile moved her family to Rochester, New York where she became affiliated with the City of Rochester Mass Choir, which was her first opportunity to perform on a professional singing level. In 1974, she and her family returned to Ozark, Alabama, where she was introduced to the Gospel Music Workshop of America – Alabama Chapter. This association would prove to be the catalyst to her first recording venture with the Harris Temple Church of God in Christ, under the direction of Keith Ellison, where she recorded and sang lead vocals on the song “Do You Know Who Jesus Is ” which became a blessing and inspiration to many. Later in 1985, she then relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, and transferred her GMWA membership to the Atlanta Chapter where she was welcomed with open arms. Residing in Atlanta, she took charge of her music career and began recording and while in the studio, she met a man that would change the course of her life in music. Rev. Milton Biggham, then the President of Savoy Records, who gave her a little piece of paper with three lines that said "Look Where He Brought Me From" . With those three lines, she sang lead vocals on the track that appeared on the Georgia Mass Choir’s 1985 album ‘We’ve Got the Victory’ . The song became an instant hit on The Gospel Billboard Charts and is still sung across the country in churches even today. Along with Georgia Mass Choir, Voncile also sang lead on ‘Hold To God’s Unchanging Hand’ also written by Gospel-Great James Bignon.Continuing her solo career with a leap of faith. it led her to the release her first solo album entitled ‘Be Strong’. Coming off the highs of ‘Be Strong’ she began to cultivate her gift of writing, releasing her second project ‘What a Time’ in which she did a vast array of writing, arranging, and co-producing. Once more again with success and opportunity in view, she then released her third project with Low Rush Music “Kourageous" in the Summer 2010. 2014 was an exciting year for Lady Voncile Belcher as she was awarded by the Rhythm of Gospel Awards as the "Traditional Artist of the Year" and is already nominated in 3 categories for the 2015 Awards Show. Under her own newly formed Glory Bound (GB) Records, and working with Producers Tim Fryar and Rodney Edge and New Me Productions, her single release of the song " Alright" is playing on the radio in the U.S. and International markets. The Christmas release of "A Time to Celebrate" proved as a seasonal hit with a perpetual impact. And now in 2015, the highly anticipated release of her fourth solo project entitled "Phenomenal" where you will be sure to hear a fresh, new, and innovative Lady Voncile Belcher.

EPISODE 328 WIT' LADY VONCILE BELCHER AND JERRY ROYCE LIVE -WORLDWIDE! LISTEN TO HER NEW HIT SINGLE "I'LL STAND".LADY VONCILE BELCHER"The Voice that Rejuvenates Traditional Gospel Music"Born in the small town of Ozark, Alabama, she enjoyed singing for her family where she hails from a strong religious background; her father was a noted Minister while her mother was a well-respected Missionary. With deep gospel roots her yearning to sing thrived. Today, her love for Gospel Music has awarded her many opportunities to minister in song and has led Lady Voncile Belcher to pursue her fourth solo project.Voncile moved her family to Rochester, New York where she became affiliated with the City of Rochester Mass Choir, which was her first opportunity to perform on a professional singing level. In 1974, she and her family returned to Ozark, Alabama, where she was introduced to the Gospel Music Workshop of America – Alabama Chapter. This association would prove to be the catalyst to her first recording venture with the Harris Temple Church of God in Christ, under the direction of Keith Ellison, where she recorded and sang lead vocals on the song “Do You Know Who Jesus Is ” which became a blessing and inspiration to many. Later in 1985, she then relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, and transferred her GMWA membership to the Atlanta Chapter where she was welcomed with open arms. Residing in Atlanta, she took charge of her music career and began recording and while in the studio, she met a man that would change the course of her life in music. Rev. Milton Biggham, then the President of Savoy Records, who gave her a little piece of paper with three lines that said "Look Where He Brought Me From" . With those three lines, she sang lead vocals on the track that appeared on the Georgia Mass Choir’s 1985 album ‘We’ve Got the Victory’ . The song became an instant hit on The Gospel Billboard Charts and is still sung across the country in churches even today. Along with Georgia Mass Choir, Voncile also sang lead on ‘Hold To God’s Unchanging Hand’ also written by Gospel-Great James Bignon.Continuing her solo career with a leap of faith. it led her to the release her first solo album entitled ‘Be Strong’. Coming off the highs of ‘Be Strong’ she began to cultivate her gift of writing, releasing her second project ‘What a Time’ in which she did a vast array of writing, arranging, and co-producing. Once more again with success and opportunity in view, she then released her third project with Low Rush Music “Kourageous" in the Summer 2010. 2014 was an exciting year for Lady Voncile Belcher as she was awarded by the Rhythm of Gospel Awards as the "Traditional Artist of the Year" and is already nominated in 3 categories for the 2015 Awards Show. Under her own newly formed Glory Bound (GB) Records, and working with Producers Tim Fryar and Rodney Edge and New Me Productions, her single release of the song " Alright" is playing on the radio in the U.S. and International markets. The Christmas release of "A Time to Celebrate" proved as a seasonal hit with a perpetual impact. And now in 2015, the highly anticipated release of her fourth solo project entitled "Phenomenal" where you will be sure to hear a fresh, new, and innovative Lady Voncile Belcher.

Stellar Award winner, and evangelist .La Shun Pace stops bye to Debut Her Latest New single " Something to live for" From her upcoming Album "Reborn"  Available in stores June 28th...Pace first emerged during the mid-1970s, performing alongside her siblings in the group The Anointed Pace Sisters. Her singing and ministering skills were further honed while she toured with the Rev. Gene Martin and the Action Revival Team, and in 1988 she recorded In the House of the Lord with Dr. Jonathan Greer and the Cathedral of Faith Church of God & Christ Choirs for Savoy Records. The label signed Pace as a solo artist soon after, and in 1990 she issued her debut He Lives, which reached the number two spot on the Billboard gospel charts and featured her signature song "I Know I've Been Changed"; the follow-up, Shekinah Glory, appeared in 1993. Three years later, Pace returned with Wealthy Place; in addition to successive releases including 1998's Just Because God Said It, she also enjoyed a career as an actress, most notably co-starring as the Angel of Mercy in the 1992 Steve Martin film Leap pf FaithLaShun was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

Reverend Don Coleman has been on the air as a Gospel Disc Jockey since the early 1970's. No matter where he is, Rev. Coleman makes a name for himself and let's it be known, "God is everything." His show, "The Old Time Gospel program", airs every Sunday night from 8pm to Midnight in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Kfor 1240 AM radio. Rev. Don Coleman has a vast background in Gospel radio including top rated programs from 1972 to 1980 at WPFB and WELX in Ohio. In May of 1978 Coleman was named the #1 Gospel DJ in the United States by Savoy Records.