Podcasts about so lonesome i could cry

这期节目的标题，是去年初建工程文档时的代号。时隔一年重新捡起这组没编完的歌单，对音乐中留存的初冬回忆丝毫未变：10月的东北、11月的北京，降温的时刻，风很凛冽，人在趔趄，只有树的颜色总是特别美。 曲目单： (00:00) Y La Bamba - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (03:00) Laura Misch - Listen To The Sky (05:47) Jim O'Rourke - Little Island Walking (10:16) Michael Kiwanuka - Small Changes (14:01) Alpine Decline - Idlehour (19:17) Jack J - Foolish Man (23:19) The O'my's feat. Pink Siifu - Skipping Stars (28:43) Jan Wagner, aint about me - Oblige (31:34) Gordi feat. Soak - Lunch At Dune (37:17) Makaya McCraven - Seventh String (40:16) 梯云纵 - 不是鹿｜Si Bu Xiang (43:02) Bruno Migotto, Felipe Silveira, Sérgio Machado - Alquimia (47:57) Devendra Banhart - Sirens (52:21) IIOII - Ilumina el aire (54:23) 君島大空 - 16_28 → 选曲/撰稿/配音/制作/包装：方舟 → 主题音乐：Yu Su → 题图版式：六花 → 私信/合作联络： 微博/网易云/小宇宙/汽水儿 @线性方舟 → 《周末变奏》WX听友群敲门群主：aharddaysnight

Welcome back to the Rick's Rambles Podcast, where we fill your week with positivity, wholesome stories, and good news that'll brighten your day! In this episode, we're diving into a nostalgic look at one of the most cherished children's shows of the past—Captain Kangaroo. For many of us, Captain Kangaroo was a heartwarming part of our childhood, filled with simple joys and lasting lessons. And here's a fun fact: Dolly Parton herself made a special appearance on the show! We'll explore more interesting tidbits like this that will take you on a walk down memory lane. But that's not all! We're also focusing on the importance of being proactive about our mental health. In a world that can sometimes feel overwhelming, it's essential to take positive steps toward self-care. We'll discuss several simple yet impactful ways you can boost your mental well-being, helping you create a happier, more peaceful mindset. It's all about empowering you to take control of your mental health journey with kindness and compassion. Next, we bring back our popular "Story Behind the Song" segment, and this week we're going classic with one of the most emotional country songs ever recorded: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams. We'll delve into the story behind this iconic song, the raw emotion it captures, and why it continues to resonate with listeners today. And finally, we'll wrap things up with a look at this week's special days—moments we can all celebrate and appreciate as reminders of the good things in life. Whether it's a quirky national day or a meaningful cause, these highlights will leave you with a smile on your face. This episode is filled with uplifting content, positivity, and a bit of nostalgia to warm your heart. So grab a cup of coffee, relax, and enjoy some good news to start your week off right. And remember, if you enjoy what you hear, please share the podcast with your friends and family on social media—let's spread the joy together!

One For All – Say When – 6:24 Jazzanova – L.O.V.E. And You And I – 7:48 Jazz Liberatorz – Music In My Mind Part 2 – 3:05 Chris Beckers – Wallsend (Paul’s Blues) – 5:13 Pat Metheny – Are You Going With Me? – 8:35 John Scofield – I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry […]

07-08-2024 Liquidity is running dry, "It's So Lonesome it Could Cry."---------------------Hear that lonesome Repo well. It sounds too low to fly.Last week, the implied likelihood of a September Fed rate cut rose to 73%. Over a week ago, it was 62%.Bonds cry for a “higher for longer” Fed. But the fall of the dollar and the steadfastness for gold suggest that turmoil is ahead.Recently, clogged bank balance sheets caused a spike in repo rates while reserve balances declined. Will the Fed accelerate the QT taper that it began in late 2023?Liquidity is running dry, It's So Lonesome it Could Cry.--------------------------Song: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (1949)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WXYjm74WFI

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! El mes pasado rendíamos homenaje a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds por partida doble, por un lado porque se cumplen 40 años desde la publicación de su primer álbum, aquél From Her to Eternity que vio la luz en marzo de 1984, pero también, por la próxima publicación del que será su décimo octavo trabajo de estudio, Wild God. Para celebrarlo realizamos un especial Conexiones MZK en el que hicimos un largo viaje por cada uno de sus diecisiete discos de estudio del bueno al aún más bueno y centrándonos en sus canciones menos populares. Dijimos entonces que si tenía acogida, habría una segunda parte más centrada en las rarezas y eso es lo que te hemos preparado. Aquí tienes una estupenda selección llena de extrañas canciones de todas las etapas de Nick Cave, con y sin los Bad Seeds en la que encontrarás duetos memorables, versiones, alguna que otra cara B o bandas sonoras. Dirige Manuel Pinazo. Suenan: "Shivers" (de The Boy Next Door") "Ho-Ho" (de The Birthday Party, aquí con la voz de Nick Cave en lugar de con la de Rowland S. Howard) "There Is a Light" (BSO Batman Forever) "Free To Walk" (con Deborah Harry de We Are Only Riders: The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project) "The Garden Duet" (rareza) "Bedazzled" (con Anita Lane) "Faraway, So Close!" (BSO Faraway, So Close!) "Sweetest Embrace" (con Barry Adamson) "(I'll Love You) Until The End Of The World" (BSO Until The End Of The World) "Done Dun" (con Lydia Luch) "Vortex" (descarte de Grinderman) "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (con Johnny Cash) "The Big Hunt" (con Gallon Drunk) "All the Pretty Little Horses" (con Current 93) "Animal X" (inédito de las sesiones de 'Push The Sky Away') "Sail Away" (cara B de "Do You Love Me?") "Vixo" (con Anni Hogan y Budgie) "I Got Another Woman Now, Dear" (inédito de las sesiones de 'The Boatman's Call') "I Just Dropped In (to see what condition my condition was in)" (con Die Haut) "Time Jesum Transeuntum et Non Riverentum" (con Dirty Three)Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de Conexiones MZK. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/286835

Luz Elena Mendoza of Y La Bamba is finally on Bakotunes! This interview has been in the works for over a year well worth the wait. If you're familiar with her rich body of work, you already know how brilliant it is. If you don't, be prepared to become a true believer. The group's latest album, "Lucha", is out now.  Episode contains music clips and songs from Y La Bamba: "Bruja de Brujas", "Cruisin' To The Parque (Durand Jones & The Indications feat. Y La Bamba)", "Ojos Del Sol", "Mujeres", "Collapse", "Hues" feat. Devendra Banhart, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Boca Llena". Y La Bamba Official. Realer Than Most PodcastHere at Realer Than Most Podcast, we believe that hip-hop/rap is more than just...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySponsored by Chain Cohn Clark - Kern County's leading accident, injury, and workers' compensation law firm. Subscribe to Bakotunes at all podcast outlets and follow our socials!Instagram / More LinksContact: mattomunoz@gmail.com

Shawn's Picks: B. J. Thomas.Hey Streetwalkers. THANK YOU SO MUCH for inspiring me to get to 400 episodes! As you may have guessed; lm taking March "off" from releasing new episodes. HOWEVER; all month long, l will be releasing some of my wife's very favorite episodes, in a "Best Of" style.So expect a re-release of an older favorite every weekday; with an all new intro from my wife, explaining why she chose each specific episode.Keep in mind that these are in no particular order, and l'll be back in April with all new episodes. Like, follow, subscribe and tell a friend!-Steve Owens Fascination Street Podcast B J ThomasTake a walk with me down Fascination Street as I get to know B J Thomas.B J is a singer / songwriter who has sold well over 70 million albums worldwide. He has had 8 number one hits, and has had 46 songs on the Billboard top 100. You definitely know his songs!I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hooked On A Feeling, I Just Can't Help Believing, Rock And Roll Lullaby, Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song, and the Academy Award winning song Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (1970 Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid). B J also sand the theme song to smash hit tv show Growing Pains: As Long As We Got Each Other. This is the FIFTY year anniversary of Raindrops!B J also has the honor of being a member of The Grand Ole Opry, winning 5 Grammy's, as well as having the very first Contemporary Christian album in history to go platinum.In this episode we chat about how he came to be in the music business out of a tiny town outside of Houston, Tx. Then he tells us some stories about some of these hit songs, including preforming at the Academy Awards in 1970. We also talk about when he was invited to play FOR Elvis. BJ is kind enough to let me play a song or two. Enjoy!Follow BJ on social media:Twit: @TheBJThomasInsta: @TheBJThomasFB: The B J Thomas

Izaline Calister: Kanta Hélele; Izaline Calister, Angelo Verploegen, Ed Verhoeff: Miss Celie's Blues; Astrid Seriese: Have A Little Faith In Me; Cassandra Wilson: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry; Yes! Trio: 2K Blues; Dubbelaar: Scott Hamilton, Rein de Graaff, Marius Beets, Eric Ineke: Old Folks; Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb: […]

Appalachian Road Show/Don't Want to Die in the Storm/TribulationBen Gage/Messenger Bird/Two Singing SongsSylvia Tyson/Generous Heart/At The End Of The DaySylvia Tyson/No Crowd, No Show/At The End Of The DayRachael Kilgour/Heart On Fire/My Father Loved MeQuiles & Cloud/Black Sky Lightning/Beyond the RainHaymakers/     I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry/ 100 Years Of HankThe Soggy Bottom Boys/I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow/O Brother, Where Art Thou?The Stanley Brothers/Angel Band/O Brother, Where Art Thou?Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch/Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby/O Brother, Where Art Thou?John Prine & Kelsey Waldon/Love At The Five And Dime/More Than A Whisper: Celebrating The Music Of Nance GriffithMary Gauthier /More Than A Whisper/More Than A Whisper: Celebrating The Music Of Nance GriffithRobby Hecht/  A Reckoning of Us/Last of the Long DaysLeon Rosselson/Stand Up For Judas/Chronicling the TimesSupport the show

#925 - Beth Petty of the Hank Williams Museum The Beth Petty of the Hank Williams Museum Interview is featured on The Paul Leslie Hour. Are you here?  Thank you for being here, tuned in to The Paul Leslie Hour. We are pleased to present the Beth Petty interview as we say "Hats off to Hank!" You see Beth Petty is something of a Hank Williams expert, as you'll soon find out.  The year 2023 is the Centennial year of Hank Williams, 100 years since his birth and well…let me tell you a bit more. On this episode we're taking you to Montgomery, Alabama for an interview focusing on the great Hank Williams considered the Father of Contemporary Country Music. Born on September 17, 1923 in Mount Olive, Alabama, Hank Williams began playing music after his mother gave him a guitar at 8 years old. Hank Williams learned his singing style in part from a blues street singer named Rufus "Teetot" Payne.  Williams went on to perform across the United States. He had many hit songs and was a favorite on radio and television. Hank Williams was and perhaps is the greatest country star of all times. Hank Williams passed away on January 1, 1953 at 29 years old. Yet Hank Williams music continues to get new fans. His songs are known by everyone. You cannot get much more "American" in music than Hank Williams. His songs were covered by countless musicians from Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson. Patsy Cline to Jimmy Buffett. George Strait. George Jones. They all recorded his songs. Even when people do not know the name Hank Williams, people from around the globe know the songs…"Your Cheatin' Heart," "There's a Tear in My Beer," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Jambalaya," "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," and of course "Hey Good Lookin'."  Hank Williams' legacy lives on at the Hank Williams Museum in beautiful Montgomery, Alabama where this interview was recorded. On this episode we are joined by Beth Petty. She's the manager of the Hank Williams Museum.  It is a museum filled with photographs, press clippings, and numerous personal artifacts belonging to the late Hank Williams including his personal Nudie suits, instruments and many fascinating exhibits. We want you to be sure to go to http://www.thehankwilliamsmuseum.net There will be some upcoming event for Hank 100. You'll find out about it there. Please also consider supporting The Paul Leslie Hour - yes, keep us going and proudly independent. Go right here, and give yourself and others the gift of stories. I think everyone's ready to hear the interview with Beth Petty, all about one of the most important figures of music - for all times. Let's listen. Together.

“浪费时间努力猜 答案还是要 自己找 自己找” 曲目单： (00:00) Ms. Jaylin Brown - Intro (Asé) (feat. Khalil Houston) (02:25) 林宥嘉 - 新預感 (08:14) Margaret Glaspy - Act Natural (12:26) The Aces - Girls Make Me Wanna Die (15:03) Bully - Days Move Slow (17:40) Mandy, Indiana - Pinking Shears (20:08) 실리카겔 (Silica Gel) - Realize (24:24) 莫文蔚 - 散光 (27:55) Y La Bamba - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (30:56) Tom Waits - What's He Building? (34:03) Solange - Cranes in the Sky (38:12) two blinks, i love you - carnegie hall (42:57) 动物园钉子户 - 形状 Pt.Ⅰ & II (51:53) Wednesday - Bull Believer → 选曲/撰稿/配音/制作/包装：方舟 → 题图版式：六花 → 私信/合作联络： 微博/网易云/小宇宙/汽水儿 @线性方舟 → 《周末变奏》WX听友群敲门群主：aharddaysnight

Rockshow Episode 178 Hank Williams RockerMike and Rob discuss Hank Williams, born Hiram King Williams on September 17, 1923, in Mount Olive, Alabama, was one of America's most influential singer-songwriters and a pioneer in the country music genre. With a career spanning the late 1940s to early 1950s, Williams left an indelible mark on American music with his emotive songs, powerful lyrics, and distinctive voice. Despite challenges in his personal life and a tragically short career – he passed away at the age of 29 – his incredible body of work, including timeless hits like "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Hey, Good Lookin'," continue to resonate with fans and influence future generations of musicians. #HankWilliams #CountryMusic #Legend #SingerSongwriter #ClassicCountry #YourCheatinHeart #ImSoLonesomeICouldCry #HeyGoodLookin #MusicHistory https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/hank-williams https://open.spotify.com/artist/1FClsNYBUoNFtGgzeG74dW https://www.biography.com/musicians/hank-williams https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/what-makes-this-musician-great-hank-williams/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/hank-williams-tragic-life-modern-music/ https://www.countrythangdaily.com/hank-williams-facts/ Park Dental Care 12419 101st Ave South Richmond Hill Queens (718) 847-3800 https://www.718DENTISTS.com Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup

The Black Crowes "Midnight From The Inside Out"Big Maybelle "Baby Won't You Please Come Home"Jimmy Reed "Honest I Do"Lucero "I Can't Stand to Leave You"Red Foley "Pin Ball Boogie"The Deslondes "Ways & Means"Billie & DeDe Pierce "I Ain't Good Looking"Loretta Lynn "Portland Oregon"Tampa Red "Mercy Mama"Valerie June "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home"Otha Turner and The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band "Shimmy She Wobble"Albert King "The Sky Is Crying"Eilen Jewell "I'm a Little Mixed Up"Amos Milburn "Milk and Water"Hank Williams "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"Sidney Bechet "In a Café On the Road to Calais"Precious Bryant "Don't Jump My Pony"Dr. John "Croker Courtbullion"The Black Keys "Sinister Kid"Flora Molton "Never Drive a Stranger from Your Door"Aretha Franklin "Groovin'"Otis Rush "Groaning the Blues"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Bring It on Down to My House"The Big Three Trio "Cigareets, Whuskey. And Wild Women"Merle Haggard "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"Superchunk "Makeout Bench"R.L. Burnside "Miss Maybelle"Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers "Bustin' Loose"Willie Nelson "Don't Get Around Much Anymore"Howlin' Wolf "Dog Me Around"Emmylou Harris "Sweet Old World"Skeets McDonald "Heartbreaking Mama"Louis Armstrong "Star Dust"Ian Noe "Irene (Ravin' Bomb)"Billie Holiday "More Than You Know"Gillian Welch "Barroom Girls"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Mama Says I'm Crazy"Ten Years After "Good Morning Little School Girl"Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses) "Pocket Full of Rain"Tom Waits "Jersey Girl"Ruth Brown & Her Rhythmakers "The Tears Keep Tumbling Down"Lucero "Raining for Weeks"Alex Moore "Lillie Mae Boogie"The Yardbirds "Lost Woman"Joan Shelley "The Fading"Soltero "The Factory"The Spinners "Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You"

Helen and Gavin chat about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the Oscar-nominated Animated and Live-Action Shorts, and it's Week 68 from the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Best Songs Ever, numbers 165 to 161; I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams, Mr Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan, Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, Pink Moon by Nick Drake, and Into the Groove by Madonna.

Voici le cent soixante-neuvième opus d'"En Cadence", une émission mensuelle consacrée aux grands thèmes éternels de la musique populaire : l'amour, les voyages, les filles, les canons ou les scooters.Si vous ne vous sentez pas très bien depuis le réveillon, c'est normal : vous souffrez de ce satané cafard du mois de janvier. C'est l'heure d'affronter votre gueule des bois, de reprendre le travail et de vivre toutes ces journées froides et sans soleil. Nous vous proposons donc cet accompagnement musical pour profiter au maximum du "January Blues".Liste des morceaux :01. Farhad Mehrad - Alone Again, Naturally02. Vashti Bunyan - Winter Is Blues03. Bill Fay - The Room04. Porter Wagoner - The Rubber Room05. Carl Brice - Footnote to a Tragedy06. Jake Holmes - Lonely07. The Specters - Depression08. The Factotums - In My Lonely Room09. Two Gospel Keys - I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore10. Hank Williams - Long Gone Lonesome Blues11. Homesick James - Long Lonesome Day12. Muddy Waters - I Feel Like Going Home13. Michael Hurley - Intersoular Blues14. Abner Jay - I'm So Depressed15. Wild Man Fischer - In My room16. Elizabeth Cotten - When I Get Home17. Charlie Rich - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry18. The Flying Burrito Brothers - Do You Know How It Feels (To Be Lonesome)19. Cal Smith - When You Are Gone20. Nina Simone - Mood Indigo21. Billie Holiday - Solitude22. Peggy King - In My Own Little Corner Écouter

Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:00:00] Lefty Frizzell - "Blue Yodel No. 6" [0:04:01] Red Sovine and Webb Pierce - "Why Baby Why" [0:07:34] Hank Williams - "Lovesick Blues" [0:09:35] Hank Snow - "Ninety Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street)" [0:12:08] Vernon Claud - "Jungle Of Cement And Stone" [0:14:40] Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:17:13] Ray Smith - "Makes Me Feel Good" [0:21:47] John Logan - "Working For The Man" [0:23:53] Connie Hall - "After Date Rendezvous" [0:26:08] Jean Dee - "Your Fool" [0:28:28] Kay Adams - "Husband Stealer" [0:30:54] Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:33:55] Dolly Parton - "Dumb Blonde" [0:36:59] Frankia Treat - "My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You" [0:39:28] Jean Chapel - "Tell It Like It Is" [0:42:09] The Pointer Sisters - "Fairytale" [0:44:45] Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:50:10] Conway Twitty - "Go On And Cry" [0:52:32] John Henry - "Lonesome (I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry)" [0:54:33] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/123402

Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:00:00] Lefty Frizzell - "Blue Yodel No. 6" [0:04:01] Red Sovine and Webb Pierce - "Why Baby Why" [0:07:34] Hank Williams - "Lovesick Blues" [0:09:35] Hank Snow - "Ninety Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street)" [0:12:08] Vernon Claud - "Jungle Of Cement And Stone" [0:14:40] Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:17:13] Ray Smith - "Makes Me Feel Good" [0:21:47] John Logan - "Working For The Man" [0:23:53] Connie Hall - "After Date Rendezvous" [0:26:08] Jean Dee - "Your Fool" [0:28:28] Kay Adams - "Husband Stealer" [0:30:54] Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:33:55] Dolly Parton - "Dumb Blonde" [0:36:59] Frankia Treat - "My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You" [0:39:28] Jean Chapel - "Tell It Like It Is" [0:42:09] The Pointer Sisters - "Fairytale" [0:44:45] Music behind DJ: Ray Stanley - "Pushin'" [0:50:10] Conway Twitty - "Go On And Cry" [0:52:32] John Henry - "Lonesome (I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry)" [0:54:33] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/123402

Michael and I talk about the genius of Mick Taylor and Taylor's short stint with the Rolling StonesNorth Carolina barbecue vs. Texas barbecuethe image Michael saw one day while swimming that inspired his novel ‘I Am the Light of This World'why the early 1970s was such an interesting time culturally and why Michael chose it as the backdrop for a big part of the storythe significance of the title of the novelthe North Carolina Piedmont Blues scene of the 1930s, the Folk Music revival of the 1960s, and Rev. Gary Davis and the artists he influencedMichael's relationship with music, on a personal level and as a writerhow the songs Michael references in certain scenes complement those scenes perfectly, like “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, “The Crystal Ship” by The Doors, “The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell, “Walk Away” by The James Gang, ‘The Zombies' Greatest Hits', “No Quarter” by Led ZeppelinMichael's use of song lyrics in the novelthe significance of Lead Belly—the mythological figure and music of—to the protagonist, Earl, and to the author, Michaelthe role Hank Williams' music plays in the storythe “happy accidents of making art”Jeff and I talk about Lead Belly's historyprison recordmusic catalogueartists he influencedLead Belly's death and his legacy MUSIC AND MEDIA IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:“Time Waits for No One” by the Rolling Stones“Can't Hardly Wait” by The Replacements“I Am the Light of This World” by Rev. Gary Davis“She Loves You” by The Beatles“Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones“The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell“Walk Away” by The James Gang“Good Mornin' Blues” by Lead Belly“Love in Vain” by Robert Johnson“I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams“The Gallows Pole” by Lead Belly“Goodnight Irene” by Lead Belly“Black Girl (In the Pines)” by Lead Belly“Midnight Special” by Lead Belly LINKS: Michael Parker's website, https://www.michaelfparker.com/Michael Parker, Instagram, @texheel22 Jeff Place/Smithsonian Folkways website, https://folkways.si.edu/ Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/Christy Alexander Hallberg Twitter, @ChristyHallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg Instagram, @christyhallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqag

Michael and I talk about  the genius of Mick Taylor and Taylor's short stint with the Rolling Stones North Carolina barbecue vs. Texas barbecue the image Michael saw one day while swimming that inspired his novel ‘I Am the Light of This World' why the early 1970s was such an interesting time culturally and why Michael chose it as the backdrop for a big part of the story the significance of the title of the novel the North Carolina Piedmont Blues scene of the 1930s, the Folk Music revival of the 1960s, and Rev. Gary Davis and the artists he influenced Michael's relationship with music, on a personal level and as a writer how the songs Michael references in certain scenes complement those scenes perfectly, like “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, “The Crystal Ship” by The Doors, “The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell, “Walk Away” by The James Gang, ‘The Zombies' Greatest Hits', “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin Michael's use of song lyrics in the novel the significance of Lead Belly—the mythological figure and music of—to the protagonist, Earl, and to the author, Michael the role Hank Williams' music plays in the story the “happy accidents of making art” Jeff and I talk about Lead Belly's  history prison record music catalogue artists he influenced Lead Belly's death and his legacy   MUSIC AND MEDIA IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: “Time Waits for No One” by the Rolling Stones “Can't Hardly Wait” by The Replacements “I Am the Light of This World” by Rev. Gary Davis “She Loves You” by The Beatles “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones “The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell “Walk Away” by The James Gang “Good Mornin' Blues” by Lead Belly “Love in Vain” by Robert Johnson “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams “The Gallows Pole” by Lead Belly “Goodnight Irene” by Lead Belly “Black Girl (In the Pines)” by Lead Belly “Midnight Special” by Lead Belly   LINKS:  Michael Parker's website, https://www.michaelfparker.com/ Michael Parker, Instagram, @texheel22   Jeff Place/Smithsonian Folkways website, https://folkways.si.edu/   Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/ Christy Alexander Hallberg Twitter, @ChristyHallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg Instagram, @christyhallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqag Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

El programa "T'agrada el blues?" d'aquesta setmana presenta i fa sonar el darrer disc gravat a estudi del sensacional bluesman Dr. John (Nova Orleans, Louisiana). Disc farcit d'humanitat, i de genialitats interpretatives i vocals d'aquest inoblidable bluesman.

Dr. John”Things Happen That Way Track”: “Funny How Time Slips Away” “Ramblin’ Man” “Gimme That Old Time Religion” feat. Willie Nelson “I Walk On Guilded Splinters” feat. Lukas Nelson & Promise of The Real “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” “End Of The Line” feat. Aaron Neville “Holy Water” “Sleeping Dogs Best Left Alone” “Give Myself A Good Talkin’ To” “Guess Things Happen That Way” Early James “Strange Time To Be Alive”: ”Racing To A Red Light” ”Straightjacket For Two” ”Real Low Down Lonesome” Duet W. Sierra Ferrell Escuchar audio

Two years before he blasted out his Greatest Hits in 1975, Al Green released Call Me - a sumptuous chunk of Memphis soul. Including renditions of heartrending country ballads So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams and Funny How Time Slips Away by Willie Nelson, it also includes world-beating originals such as You Ought To Be With Me, which was later sampled by Ghostface Killah on his debut album Ironman. Here I Am (Come And Take Me) and Call Me (Come Back Home) were top ten hits on the Billboard Chart, and it was the third soul record to reach number one on the album charts. Call Me is also the 427th Greatest Album of All Time according to Rolling Stone magazine, so Christopher and Liam have done a deep dive on it and now they're going to lay it down serious-style. Featuring cool jokes and hot takes on everything from the Japanese post-rock band Mono's recent performance in Lisbon, to why in God's name Al Green has three separate records on the list, as well as the poor reviewing style of Bruce Springsteen collaborator Jon Landau. All that plus Unhinged YouTube Comment of the Week, plus new segments Is This Emo? and Heartwarming Reddit Post of the Week. Enjoy An Album. Enjoy!

This is a rebroadcast of an episode from 2019. After winning his second consecutive Super Bowl, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw released an album of country and western covers. This is the story of Terry Bradshaw's I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, from 1976. Support the show: patreon.com/bizarrealbums Follow the show on Twitter & Instagram: @bizarrealbums Follow Tony on Twitter & Instagram: @tonythaxton

Psychology Today says this about loneliness... Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one's desires for social connection and actual experiences of it. First off, I'm not a psychologist. I'm a lifelong student in human behavior and psychology, but that hardly makes me an expert. But I notice things. I notice people. I notice my own behavior. I'm in good touch with my feelings, even though I don't always love how I'm feeling - or know how to go about altering them as quickly as I'd like. Like now. Did you know that according to one BYU researcher, extreme social isolation can have the same negative impact on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day? If that's extreme isolation, then I wonder what moderate isolation - or moderate loneliness - produces. The equivalent of smoking how many cigarettes a day? Do you suppose we could equate our degree of loneliness - feeling isolated - with a specific number of cigarettes smoked in a day? Curious minds would like to know. The research makes a distinction between isolation and loneliness. Isolation is objective. Loneliness is subjective. You can measure isolation. It's hard to gauge the subjective feeling of being lonely. No matter, most of us just know whether or not we're lonely. ZingInstruments.com has a list of the top 20 songs about loneliness. See if you agree with their list. I've not researched it enough to argue with it. ‘Only The Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)' By Roy Orbison ‘You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go' by Bob Dylan ‘So Lonely' by The Police ‘Space Oddity' by David Bowie ‘Lonely Boy' by The Black Keys ‘Lonely' by Tom Waits ‘Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles ‘Pictures of You' by The Cure ‘I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' by Hank Williams ‘Tired Of Being Alone' by Al Green ‘Lonely Avenue' by Ray Charles ‘The Loner' by Neil Young ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?' by Elvis Presley ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams' by Green Day ‘How to Fight Loneliness' by Wilco ‘Cactus' by The Pixies ‘I Wish You Lonely' by Morrissey ‘Lonely Girl' by Weezer ‘Lonely People' by America ‘Solitary Man' by Neil Diamond   There are lots of songs, poems,  and stories about loneliness. Because it's such a universal sensation. More chronic for some than others. I've examined my own loneliness for as long as I can remember. Even though I'm an introvert I'm not anti-social. I've never been extremely isolated. I've never really been isolated. Even during the shut-down days of the pandemic, I was with my wife. I jokingly say of my introversion and need to get away at times, "I'm just looking for a big rock to crawl under." That's much less about loneliness and more about my personal need to be left alone. Sidebar, your honor. I wish some people had a greater capacity for observation and soft skills. See if you can relate to this. Think of people in your life who have little to no awareness of how others are wired. They go about their business treating everybody identically the same, as much as possible. That person who is extroverted or wants to be the most popular person around, works the crowd like a politician and then often - in my life - declares how we need more social interaction. But their constant intrusion in my life, which I politely (okay, sometimes not so much) grin and bear, saps my strength unlike anything else. Trust me, I know how to give off a vibe that even a blind person could sense. But these poor folks don't seem to pick up on it. I've watched it closely all my life and my conclusion hasn't changed. They're not watching for it. In me, or anybody else. Watch them closely. Those folks who work a room. Appearing to befriend all comers. Notice something if you will. It's not about the people they greet. Or interact with. It's about them. They don't notice the effect they have on you because they're not thinking about you. They're in it for themselves. Let's talk about noticing. Or not.

You can now support us on Patreon!At long last, the boys cover Hank Williams Sr., the "Hillbilly Shakespeare" himself. This week Danny and Tyler are joined by Greg Hess (@heygreghess, MEGA Podcast, Live from Here, Improvised Shakespeare) to discuss Hank Williams' final recorded song before his untimely passing. Is "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" dark comedy country? A knowing farewell? Straight up cursed? Or perhaps one of the most Buddhist country songs ever recorded? All of the above? We dig in to find out, plus we talk about a lot of other fun stuff, including (but not limited to) our theories on the evolution of pop country, ideal child names, and Hoobastank. This is a real fun one!You've probably heard "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Move It On Over" just from being alive and in the world, but we have a few other Hank Sr. recommendations for you!Hey Good Lookin'Mansion On A HillYour Cheating HeartI Could Never Be Ashamed of YouJumbalaya (On The Bayou)Honky Tonkin'My Bucket's Gotta Hole In ItHowlin' At The MoonRockin' Chair MoneyI Saw The LightFollow the link to keep up with which songs are being added to our Ultimate Country Playlist on Spotify, now including the "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive": https://tinyurl.com/takethispodplaylist And now on TIDAL!https://t.co/MHEvOz2DOAFor everything else:https://linktr.ee/takethispodandshoveit

One For All – Say When – 6:24 Jazzanova – L.O.V.E. And You And I – 7:48 Jazz Liberatorz – Music In My Mind Part 2 – 3:05 Chris Beckers – Wallsend (Paul’s Blues) – 5:13 Pat Metheny – Are You Going With Me? – 8:35 John Scofield – I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry […]

Hank Williams - "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" [0:00:00] Hank Williams - "I'd Still Want You" [0:06:28] Hank Williams - "Six More Miles (To The Graveyard)" [0:08:59] Hank Williams - "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You)" [0:11:45] Hank WIlliams - "Cold, Cold Heart" [0:14:09] Music behind DJ: The Mile-Tones - "Trial Of Love" [0:16:50] Johnnie White - "Happy Birthday Cake Boogie" [0:20:24] Faron Young - "Forget The Past" [0:22:21] Buck Owens - "Above And Beyond" [0:24:36] John Prine - "Please Don't Bury Me" - Sweet Revenge [0:27:05] Warren Bros. (Shorty & Smokey) - "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight" [0:29:48] Music behind DJ: Cal Collins - "Forty Miles Of Bad Road" [0:32:22] Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton - "The Right Combination" [0:34:39] Dolly Parton - "Ping Pong" [0:37:35] Mac Wiseman - "Ring Of Fire" [0:39:50] Bill Haley - "Within This Broken Heart Of Mine" [0:41:47] The Pell Brothers (The Georgia Boys) - "Jesus Is The Man" [0:44:58] Music behind DJ: The Mile-Tones - "Trial Of Love" [0:49:32] Gene Wyatt - "Twelve Men" [0:51:58] Willie Nelson - "Man With The Blues" [0:54:28] Rudy Wesley - "Mutual Feelings" [0:56:39] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/107678

The 2002 4th Installment In The American Recordings Series, One Of The Best In My Opinion. RATE: 9/10 Favorites: Hurt, I Hung My Head, Personal Jesus, In My Life, Sam Hall, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, We'll Meet Again, The Man Comes Around Least Favorite: Bridge Over Troubled Water Keep On Craving My Lil Junkies

#440-436Intro/Outro: Miracle by Foo Fighters440. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams439. Casey Jones by The Grateful Dead438. Reach Out, I'll Be There by The Four Tops437. Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On by Jerry Lee Lewis436. Your Hurricane by Death Cab for Cutie

Sometimes, some of the greatest things are at home. No better example than these talented artists right out of the Chattahoochee Valley! Love and light, y'all! Playlist: Plus tôt by Alexandra Stréliski Thomas Wiggins "Sewing Song: Imitation of a Sewing Machine" by John Davis Trust No Man by Ma Rainey Plastic Jesus by Tia Blake The Rising of the Moon by Tia Blake Son of a Ramblin' Man by Joey Allcorn Tears by Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Jimmie Spheeris The River St. Johns by Jake Xerxes Fussell Rest Easy (Live) by The Shelby Brothers New Day Comin' (Live) by The Shelby Brothers A Change Is Gonna Come (feat. Gary Clark Jr.) by Los Coast One Bright Hour by Bebo Norman Teenage Dream by Kidd G Indigo by Colin Manskar Shiloh by Dallas Austin, Cory Enemy & Dalico The Quiet Voice by Alexandra Stréliski

Listen as we sit down with country music artist and songwriter Sara Evans. Talking about her new memoir, 'Born to Fly', parenting, being a Step-Mom, new album Copy That and more. Copy That, Sara’s first solo record in nearly three years, was released May 15, 2020 and opened at #1 on the iTunes Country chart. Its thirteen songs span six decades and chronicle her influences and pivotal songs that shaped her life and career. Tracks include “If I Can’t Have You,” “Hard To Say I’m Sorry,” “Come On Eileen,” “My Sharona,” and “It’s Too Late.” Co-produced with Jarrad K (Ruston Kelly, Goo Goo Dolls), Copy That includes collaborations with Little Big Town’s Phillip Sweet on “Whenever I Call You Friend” and Old Crow Medicine Show on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Evans’ daughter Olivia Barker provides BGV on “Whenever I Call You Friend.” On September 8, 2020 Sara released her memoir, Born To Fly, through Howard Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Named after her landmark double-platinum album, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, Born To Fly finds Evans opening up and sharing stories not only about her career and what it is like living in the spotlight, but about what inspires her and how her faith keeps her strong. To purchase Sara's latest book or check out her latest album 'Copy That' visit Sara Evans official website at: www.saraevans.com Thank you so much for listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/cheriandbrocshow/message

Schrijver Christophe Vekeman kiest voor een strofe uit de song I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry van Hank Williams.

One troubled & lonely Alabama country singer, storyteller, and legendary songwriter used his writing of emotional convictions, by giving the world a series of musical hits like "Cold, Cold, Heart" , "Your Cheatin Heart", and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" , garnering himself many nicknames like Mr. Lovesick Blues and The Hillbilly Shakespeare, country music legend. Hank Williams Sr. He recorded 35 singles that would reach the Top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, including 11 that ranked number one, with a few of these songs releasing after his death. But one of these number one songs, that just so happened to be released a few days after his death, has an interesting tale of how it was written & conceived, within a small cabin, in the small lake town of Kowaliga, Alabama, just a few months before Hank would pass away in the back of his Cadillac in 1953, involving an ol wooden Indian whose heart was made of knotty pine.[FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA & MORE]TWITTER: www.twitter.com/SouthernOddPodINSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/SouthernOddPodJARED'S TWITTER: www.twitter.com/jared_ordisJARED'S INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/jared.ordisORDIS STUDIOS NETWORK & WEBSITE: www.ordisstudios.com[ADDITONAL INFORMATION]Questions or Business Inquiry, Email Us @ ordisstudios@gmail.comEven the Podcast is Afraid: https://solo.to/podcastafraidResearched was used for this episode of Southern Oddities, and we couldn't have made it possible without the journalism and dedication from these awesome sources of information: Wikipedia "Kaw-Liga" Country Thang Daily "Hank Williams Kaw-Liga" Kowaliga Restaurant "About" WKDG "Hank Williams Kawliga was Based on a Real Wooden Indian" Lake Magazine "Elmore County Living, Hank Williams Partied Hard in Elmore County" Alex City Oulook "Kowaliga Restaurant Statue Get its Tomahawk Back" APC Shorelines "Hanks Place""Southern Oddities" is created & produced by Jared Ordis, an Ordis Studios production. This show is part of the Ordis Studios Podcast Network & the Crawlspace Media Network.Copyright © 2020 by Ordis Studioswww.ordisstudios.com

B J ThomasTake a walk with me down Fascination Street as I get to know B J Thomas. B J is a singer / songwriter who has sold well over 70 million albums worldwide. He has had 8 number one hits, and has had 46 songs on the Billboard top 100. You definitely know his songs!I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hooked On A Feeling, I Just Can't Help Believing, Rock And Roll Lullaby, Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song, and the Academy Award winning song Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (1970 Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid). B J also sand the theme song to smash hit tv show Growing Pains: As Long As We Got Each Other. This is the FIFTY year anniversary of Raindrops!B J also has the honor of being a member of The Grand Ole Opry, winning 5 Grammy's, as well as having the very first Contemporary Christian album in history to go platinum. In this episode we chat about how he came to be in the music business out of a tiny town outside of Houston, Tx. Then he tells us some stories about some of these hit songs, including preforming at the Academy Awards in 1970. We also talk about when he was invited to play FOR Elvis. BJ is kind enough to let me play a song or two. Enjoy!Follow BJ on social media:Twit: @TheBJThomasInsta: @TheBJThomasFB: The B J Thomas

Featured in this Episode: Traditional - “The Ballad of John Henry” (:25) The Mississippi Sheiks - “Sittin On Top of the World” (11:09) Pete Seeger - “If I Had a Hammer” (22:05) Hank Williams - “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” (44:32) Tyler Childers - “Rocks, Salt and Nails” (1:05:35) Teaser: Was the greatest African American folklore hero based on a true story? The most popular old time and blues string band in the 30's that all started with one insanely talented family. One of the hardest working advocates and activists who spent many years carrying old songs forward and getting audiences to sing together, banned from performing by the US government. The King of Country music, who lived perhaps one of the most paradoxically tragic and successful lives ever documented in American music. A Kentucky native born in the home of bluegrass revives and redefines country music today and reclaims its soul. Follow: Instagram | Facebook Support Independent Programming: Join the Patreon community, or send a one-time donation through Venmo or PayPal "Shine A Light": History of Country Music Source Credits: #1: ABAA | National Park Service | LOC | Ibiblio #2: Document Record Store | Old Time Party | Delta Blues Gospel #3: Michael Hayes | Histclo | Folkways | LOC | ThoughtCo #4: Hank Williams Story | Tennessean | Hankmuseum | Grunge #5: (Written by Glen C Herbert) + Rolling Stone | Chicago Tribune | Official Website --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

One For All – Say When – 6:24 Jazzanova – L.O.V.E. And You And I – 7:48 Jazz Liberatorz – Music In My Mind Part 2 – 3:05 Chris Beckers – Wallsend (Paul’s Blues) – 5:13 Pat Metheny – Are You Going With Me? – 8:35 John Scofield – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry […]

Episode 133, “Songs with Stories,” explores interesting stories behind a dozen popular songs including “Take the A Train,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Sing Sing Sing,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Stardust,” and “The Green Door.”... Read More The post Episode 133, “Songs with Stories,” appeared first on Sam Waldron.

Sintonía: "Mississippi" (Instrumental) - Little Richard "Green Power" - "I´m So Lonesome I Could Cry" - Settin´The Woods On Fire" - "Second Line" - "It Ain´t What You Do, It´s The Way How You Do It" - "Nuki Suki" - Prophet of Peace" - "Sanctified, Satisfied Toe-Tapper" - "In The Name" (Versión 2) - "Why Don´t You Love Me" - "Open Up The Read Sea" (Instrumental); todas las músicas cantadas e interpretadas al piano/teclado por Little Richard Escuchar audio

We travel and move; we grow and change, and for Bo, this all because of radio. Some music, played by some DJ far away to a distant place. Everything changes. Cherish the memories; these memories of radio helped create this show. Radio brings us together, and we hope this show lasts in your memories. Playlist: Plus tôt by Alexandra Stréliski I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams Fade into You by Mazzy Star A Bo Story: In a Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane La Vie En Rose by Melody Gardot Meu Fado Meu by Mariza Claude Debussy’s “Snow is Dancing” by John Novacek Summer In Siam by The Pogues Surprise Ice by Kings of Convenience I Am the Mercury by Jimmie Spheeris Be Here Now by Ray LaMontagne Half the Perfect World by Madeleine Peyroux Fair Play by Van Morrison Pup Shalom by hymn for her

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "So Long I'm Gone" by Warren Smith.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn't have time to cover his career up to that point -- even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He's someone who just dominates other people's stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we've got to the point where he's about to have his first hit, but we haven't really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we're going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On"] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams -- and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye": [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye"] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he'd been gone so long, and he said he'd picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin' Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant -- other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics -- he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He'd started playing music when he was four years old. He'd been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He'd almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of "Silent Night", and his parents -- who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother -- realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn't have electricity in the house -- until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema -- a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family -- and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his "double first cousin" -- Swaggart's father was Lewis' father's nephew, while Swaggart's mother was Lewis' mother's sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his "Waiting For a Train": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting For a Train"] His favourite song to play, though, was "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee", the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] But he had two bigger influences -- two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything -- Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music -- into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, "Piano Breakdown"] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis' hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it's spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: "You Are My Sunshine"] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner -- who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn "My God is Real" with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis' life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He'd been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they'd won the machine in a contest. He'd already got married twice, and hadn't actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he'd also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He'd been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There's only one recording available of Lewis' mentor Mr. Paul -- his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, "Right Now", by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, "Right Now"] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He'd already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on -- they'd told him he needed to play a guitar. He'd blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened -- he'd been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, "Down Yonder"] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as "The Great I AM". Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they'd ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee's father's henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn't afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course -- but they couldn't afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar -- except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed -- they needed to get this man in. Lewis' first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of "Crazy Arms" a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there's more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams' hits, including "Cold Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can't even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I'm going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney's frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn't a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, "Crazy Arms"] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn't sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don't have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I'll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price's version of "Crazy Arms" was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it's unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he'd also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn't a massive hit -- that didn't bother him, he knew he'd have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be -- but because his father didn't seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he'd given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he'd been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn't, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn't hugely impressed by Jerry Lee's first record was just that -- that seeing his son achieve an ambition he'd given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee's next record, though, didn't disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn't recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he'd cut a few more songs as himself. He'd play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush", which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] Two people both claimed to have written the song -- a black singer called Dave "Curlee" Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song's writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym "Sunny David"). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it "We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an' they even keepin' time on a ding-dong." That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams -- something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him -- as soon as the song became a hit, Hall's ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song's royalties. Neither Big Maybelle's version of the song, nor Roy Hall's, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of "Whole Lotta Shakin'" that was very different from either version that had already come out -- they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he'd tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that's when you've got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, "You're a bit late, aren't you?" "No," Jerry Lee had replied, "I'm right on time". That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie", a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn't feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn't feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit... and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis -- there wasn't room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he'd had, and how he'd like to come back as a turd in his ex's toilet bowl, so she'd look down and see him in there winking up at her. He'd taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into "It'll Be Me": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "It'll Be Me", single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they'd let Jerry Lee cut this "Shakin'" thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" -- Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they'd recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic -- they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts -- the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he'd not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips' new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they'd not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America -- at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys", and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips' brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee -- in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show -- the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen's manager and the head of talent for NBC -- they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring -- no photos, no records, nothing -- and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn't capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud "I'll give you five hundred dollars if you don't show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him." So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month's time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I'll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn't capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed "shake", he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who'd made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who'd mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent's lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you're someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we'll find out about Jerry Lee's fall in a few weeks' time.

We're gliding back in time today to ride the nostalgia coaster. Though not all of us were born in the time these songs came out, they still have that old-timey feel. So sit back and enjoy the "Old-Timey Show." The purpose of art is to wake us up, the purpose of ArtHaus Radio is to wake us up gently. Intro: Kentucky Waltz by David Johnson First Four Songs: Wayfaring Stranger by Burl Ives Little Black Train by Woody Guthrie Irene by Lead Belly It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine by Blind Willie Johnson A Bo Story: Opus 20 by Dustin O’Holloran Last Ten Songs: The Rainstorm by Thomas Wiggins I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams Faded Love by Patsy Cline Green, Green Grass of Home by Porter Wagoner As Time Goes By (Rehearsal) by Frank Sinatra La-La Means I Love You by The Delfonics Moonshiner by Bob Dylan Star Girl by Jake Xerxes Fussel Bird Song by Heather Masse Au Fond de Temple Saint by David Byrne

In this episode, Bo dives into Space and explores the very idea around space. Relax and enjoy the sounds of this episode. The purpose of art is to wake us up, the purpose of ArtHaus Radio is to wake us up gently. Intro: Plus tôt by Alexandra Stréliski First Four Songs: Written in Lightning by Mutual Benefit Sugar Mountain by Neil Young I’ve Been Let Down by Mazzy Star If You Were Mine by Billie Holiday A Bo Story: Last Eight Songs: Space Oddity by David Bowie Star Girl by Jake Xerxes Fussell Fifty-Five Falls by Marissa Nadler The Golden Age by Beck The Dress Looks Nice on You Good for Me by Aimee Mann I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Al Green Interlude by Alexandra Streliski

In this episode, Bo reminisces of his childhood in the Chattahoochee Valley and the defining river of Columbus, GA. Relax and enjoy Rivertown Radio. Intro: Plus tôt by Alexandra Stréliski First Four Songs: The River by Bruce Springsteen Blood Red River by Beth Orton I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams River by Leon Bridges A Bo Story Next Five Songs: See See the Rider Blues by Ma Rainey The Rainstorm by Thomas Wiggins Down to Zero by Joan Armatrading Let It Flow by Jimmie Spheeris Moon River by The Innocence Mission A Bo Story Last Three Songs: River by Natalie Merchant Love Me Like a River Does by Melody Gardot Blue In Green by Miles Davis

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- First, a brief apology — this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott’s is generally considered the best. Williams’ recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I’m talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche — which we’ve already established as being very wrong — is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that’s very far from being the actual truth, we’ve also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we’ve only looked at one country and western star — Bob Wills, back in episode three.  Now, this is probably the correct balance — early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records — but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven’t heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It’s music that combined country music instruments — guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily — with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we’ve already seen in the Western Swing genre — that’s still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: “Shotgun Boogie” by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we’re going to talk about a song that was — as far as we can tell — a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You’ve probably heard of Hank Williams, but you’ve probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn’t sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican “What’s the Matter with the Mill?”] That’s a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it’s absolutely country and western in Mullican’s performance. We’re again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career — we’ll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do — the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration’s song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That’s the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it’s what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he’s not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There’s a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I’m not the best person to talk about — I’m likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don’t know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are — or certainly were at this point — looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture — they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It’s Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That’s not the only factor, of course, but it’s a big one. We’ve talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you’re interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I’d recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I’ll link that in the show notes, and it’s definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I’m going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name “zydeco” itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word’s origins, but the one I prefer is that it’s a mispronunciation of the phrase “les haricots” — French for “the beans” — as used in the Cajun French phrase “Les haricots ne sont pas salés” — “the beans aren’t salty”, a phrase which idiomatically meant “things are difficult” or “I’m tired”. “Zydeco ne sont pas salés” was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt “Zydeco ne sont pas sales”: Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre — fais dos dos music. This is music that’s mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in “Bosco Stomp” by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt “Bosco Stomp”, Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit “New Jole Blon” which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt “New Jole Blon” by Moon Mullican] That’s a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You’ve got that high “ahh” sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you’ve also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you’ve got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It’s a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he’ll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican’s records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let’s talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I’m talking about — for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there’s someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I’m going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I’ll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I’ve dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics — “I Saw the Light”, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Lovesick Blues”, “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, “Cold Cold Heart”, “Hey Good Lookin'” and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 — though he’d been a live performer for quite a few years already by then — and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn’t do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman — not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician — was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I’ve talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: “Blue Yodel Number 9”] That’s Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That’s the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, “Move it on Over” in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we’ll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: “Move it on Over” by Hank Williams] But that wasn’t the only style that Williams could do — he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered — a lot — to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams’ appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther — and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther’s mother asked Esther who she’d been speaking to, and she said “Just some cowboy”, but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther’s mother screamed “you turn this bus round right now!” — she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don’t let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience — and even they were listening to WIlliams’ songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett “Cold Cold Heart”] At the time we’re talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records — and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” I say “probably”, because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn’t given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican’s version had slightly different lyrics. Let’s take a listen to Mullican’s version — the less successful of the two — first. [excerpt “Jambalaya” by Moon Mullican] Now let’s hear an extract from Hank Williams’ version: [excerpt: “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators’ sound on them. Mullican’s has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them — this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated — their food, their music, and their dancing. “Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo”, “pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we’re gonna be gay-o”. And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There’s a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams’ record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll — though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was “a guitarist, period” — but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of “Jambalaya” is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you’d think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we’ll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But “Jambalaya” is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya” would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music — it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that’s largely because he died before the rock and roll craze — had he lived, it’s entirely possible we’d now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: “Jambalaya” by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis — short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording “Jambalaya” he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he’d developed even more of a dependency on pills, he’d developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows — he was a mess. And on New Year’s Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year’s Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he’d been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”. He was twenty-nine years old.  

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- First, a brief apology -- this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode.   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott's is generally considered the best. Williams' recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I'm talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche -- which we've already established as being very wrong -- is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that's very far from being the actual truth, we've also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we've only looked at one country and western star -- Bob Wills, back in episode three.  Now, this is probably the correct balance -- early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records -- but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven't heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It's music that combined country music instruments -- guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily -- with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we've already seen in the Western Swing genre -- that's still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we're going to talk about a song that was -- as far as we can tell -- a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You've probably heard of Hank Williams, but you've probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn't sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican "What's the Matter with the Mill?"] That's a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it's absolutely country and western in Mullican's performance. We're again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career -- we'll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do -- the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration's song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That's the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it's what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he's not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There's a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I'm not the best person to talk about -- I'm likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don't know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are -- or certainly were at this point -- looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture -- they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It's Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That's not the only factor, of course, but it's a big one. We've talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you're interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I'd recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I'll link that in the show notes, and it's definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I'm going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name "zydeco" itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word's origins, but the one I prefer is that it's a mispronunciation of the phrase "les haricots" -- French for "the beans" -- as used in the Cajun French phrase "Les haricots ne sont pas salés" -- "the beans aren't salty", a phrase which idiomatically meant "things are difficult" or "I'm tired". “Zydeco ne sont pas salés" was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt "Zydeco ne sont pas sales": Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre -- fais dos dos music. This is music that's mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in "Bosco Stomp" by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt "Bosco Stomp", Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit "New Jole Blon" which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt "New Jole Blon" by Moon Mullican] That's a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You've got that high "ahh" sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you've also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you've got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It's a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he'll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican's records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let's talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I'm talking about -- for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there's someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I'm going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I'll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I've dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics -- "I Saw the Light", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Lovesick Blues", "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Cold Cold Heart", "Hey Good Lookin'" and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 -- though he'd been a live performer for quite a few years already by then -- and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn't do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman -- not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician -- was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I've talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: "Blue Yodel Number 9"] That's Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That's the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, "Move it on Over" in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we'll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: "Move it on Over" by Hank Williams] But that wasn't the only style that Williams could do -- he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered -- a lot -- to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams' appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther -- and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther's mother asked Esther who she'd been speaking to, and she said "Just some cowboy", but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther's mother screamed "you turn this bus round right now!" -- she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don't let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience -- and even they were listening to WIlliams' songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett "Cold Cold Heart"] At the time we're talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records -- and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" I say "probably", because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn't given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican's version had slightly different lyrics. Let's take a listen to Mullican's version -- the less successful of the two -- first. [excerpt "Jambalaya" by Moon Mullican] Now let's hear an extract from Hank Williams' version: [excerpt: "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators' sound on them. Mullican's has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them -- this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated -- their food, their music, and their dancing. "Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo", "pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we're gonna be gay-o". And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There's a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams' record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll -- though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was "a guitarist, period" -- but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of "Jambalaya" is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you'd think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we'll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But "Jambalaya" is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya" would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music -- it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that's largely because he died before the rock and roll craze -- had he lived, it's entirely possible we'd now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: "Jambalaya" by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis -- short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording "Jambalaya" he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he'd developed even more of a dependency on pills, he'd developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows -- he was a mess. And on New Year's Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year's Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he'd been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive". He was twenty-nine years old.  

In Nashville, the greatest guitar town in the world, Guthrie Trapp is at the top of the mountain. He can range across every style, improvise with endless invention and subtlety. He can shred or twang or drift elegantly. And most of the time, he's a sideman and studio player. A player in demand for being able to serve and enhance a song and do no more than what's called for. But he's also a mind-bending solo artist. And his second LP as a leader and composer came out this spring. It's called Life After Dark. Trapp has worked with Patty Loveless, Dolly Parton, Jerry Douglas, Garth Brooks, Rosanne Cash and many other greats. Currently he tours with John Oates in his solo configuration. But Guthrie's  work as a leader ranks up there with the best guitar music being made today. For years he's led his own small group at a variety of Nashville venues, where he can really stretch out, refine his originals, indulge in some favorite old songs. He put out his first solo album in 2012, called Pick Peace, and it's an entirely instrumental project. This new one mingles instrumentals with guest aritists taking star turns on vocals - Jimmy Hall sings the blues. Charlie Worsham and Vince Gill sing country classics. Bekka Bramblett offers a stunning take on “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” It shows how much reverence he has among his peers in music city. I like what acoustic Americana star tim O'Brien says about Guthrie. “He'll blow you away but he'll never wear you out.”

Joe Camilleri is celebrating 50 years in the Australian music industry, has just released his 45th album (while working on 46 & 47), and has The Black Sorrows back on the road. But his career was very nearly derailed when he developed a fear of flying and now says his son saved his life.Joe Camilleri visits the ABC Newcastle studios (ABC Local:Carol Duncan)I've had the privilege of interviewing many of Joe Camilleri's Australian music peers and I've often remarked on how many of them were 'ten pound Poms'.Joe Camilleri says he was a five-pounder, but not a Pom, "We came on the five-pound scheme from Malta. There was only four of us when we came out - my Dad came out in 1949 and me and my two sisters and brother came out in 1950. I think for Mum it would have been an incredible struggle on that boat.""Four kids under six. Phyllis was six years old, Frank was five, I was three, and Maryanne was one.""I've never really had the opportunity to discuss it with them, but Malta was war-torn, it got a heavy beating, Malta. For Dad, he was going to go to Canada and I think someone who had just got back from Australia said, 'That's the place you need to go.'""So he chose Australia. They're both buried here. I think they gave up so much for their children, and their own life, because the thing you have most of all is you want to be around your friends, but you come to a foreign land and all you have is your family. Most of the time, it's not until years later that you connect, sometimes your friends come to Australia, and if they come to Australia, where do they go? It's a big place! Malta is 16 miles square so it's pretty easy to get around but if you're living in Sydney and your buddy's living in Perth - it's a long walk.""I think for us, the hardest thing for my Dad was he would work two shifts. He wanted to get ahead,""He was a baker at night and a metal shop worker by day, so that was his two gigs for a number of years. He was a good handy guy, Dad. He was a spray painter for a number of years, worked on the wharves for a few years, he was just able to do that.""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too.""When I was working as a first-class machinist there was always some amount of pride in whatever it was I was finishing, they were one-off things whether it was for a big crane or a motorcycle, that was a nice feeling. Do I like putting nail in a wall? Yes I do!""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too. It's an empty page and then it's a full page and sometimes it's really good, but there's nothing quite like a tradesman who can come in and whip up a kitchen. I'm still amazed by that. Or they can fix a bathroom. We get an IKEA thing and look at it like it owes you money.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well."Joe Camilleri first came to my attention through television music show like Countdown. I was still in high school and lived for Sunday night when Countdown was on the telly. It seemed to be a really interesting time in Australian music when the industry became really healthy."I think because we didn't have that information - the frontrunners like The Twilights and Johnny O'Keefe and all those people - you never got to hear about their successes or the hardship. If you won Battle of the Sounds, you didn't win anything because you had to work on that boat for four weeks before you got to England, and then you had to work your passage back. So they were the real frontrunners. Countdown just became something else,""Of course it was looking for stars because it was a popularity thing, if the kids liked something it would automatically go on the charts if you were on Countdown. It was exciting. But they were looking for bands that didn't necessarily have a record. And there were other shows that were like a fraternity of shows. The ABC had a 10 minute show just before Bellbird and they had lots of different acts, Billy Thorpe, The Pelaco Brothers - we didn't have a record but we were playing in Sydney and they asked us to come to the studio.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well. I remember going on that with a single called 'Run Rudolph Run' but I hadn't played as 'The Falcons' before that and they just put it on. One minute I'm playing and just having a lot of people come to see you play but no record, no anything, and the next thing you've got a record and no-one knows anything about it. They put you on Countdown and it's in the charts. It's amazing.""What was really great about Sounds was it went for a few hours on a Saturday morning. You could pretty much just ring them and say 'We're in town, can we pop in?' and they'd have you in. They'd have you in and you'd just sit there in your drunken state, as shabby as you can be from the night before, and if you had a video, they'd play it. If you didn't, you'd just have a chat.""You couldn't do that today, today you've got to go through the wringer. It's really tight. There was a beautiful time, not only because of Countdown but because there was something that was going on, I've always put it down to late night closing, the 10 o'clock close, it changed everything because instead of bands playing in halls, they were now playing in bars. So all of a sudden if you were half-decent, like The Falcons were, you'd have 700 people coming to a gig and getting on board a whole bunch of songs that nobody knows.""The word would get out, kind of like Facebook does today but with drums and smoke," laughs Joe."The live thing is healthy again, I think. I've played pretty much everywhere around the world and Australian bands can rock. I think it's because of the pub scene. The pub scene was a really hard scene because if they didn't like it they'd let you know pretty quickly. It was tough. You were kind of invisible, but not invisible. You would know what a good track was. You would play your repertoire, you would play your album, you would play it in, you would know pretty much how the audience reacted to it,""I remember 'Shape I'm In' at Croxton Park - I can remember it like it was yesterday. I said, 'I've got this song, it's called The Shape I'm In, and the audience started grooving to this half-finished song. The roadie came up to me and said, 'I think that's your single.'""Many a song got left on the road because you develop. If you did 10 shows to get to Sydney, by the time you got to Sydney you'd have a pretty good idea of what you were playing and what you thought was pretty strong, because the last thing you wanted to do was be downtrodden by the audience. It was tough, but it was good training. That's why I think when the (Black) Sorrows played in Europe for the first time, it didn't matter if we were two miles apart from each other on a stage, we could play together and it made a really big difference to us.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'.""I was never a popstar. I don't know how people perceive me really, but I imagine have followed what I do on a different level, not just from the hit songs but because my audiences have liked what I've done as a collection of music on an album. Not necessarily the Shape I'm Ins or Hit and Runs or the Harley and Rose ... those things are valuable to you as a performer but maybe I realised kind of early that my whole thing would have to be (that) we're all in the same boat - the audience and the performer - so I'm more than happy to leave Harley and Rose out if it didn't work on the night. But there's nothing scheduled, there's nothing planned. I haven't had a song list unless doing something really small, or filming or something. With the APIA tour I had to actually do those songs because it wasn't my bad so I had to behave a bit. But when you're doing your own show it's more about the event of what you've got to offer.""Even though it's my 50th year (in the music industry) I didn't start recording really until 1975, or 1972 ... around that time ... so my whole thing is that if we can do it where there's no trigger points, each song belongs as part of the collection of the night rather than 'here's the songs, you can buy this'. My thing is to be as free as I can both musically and from a performance point of view. I think what I've been able to achieve is that people realise if they come and see me in a couple of weeks time it's not going to be the same. Some of the songs might be the same but there'll be different things.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'. It's kinda good. I like being an independent artist on that level."Joe Camilleri is already up to album number 45 and working on another."I've got this new double album called 'Endless Sleep'. I've already got a title for it. When I was recording Certified Blue I was also recording other songs for what I just thought was entertainment value. I tried to get inspired by something so I'd play on the piano something like Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', and then I'd find another way of getting into that song and maybe we'd record it and just leave it. But then I realised it's the inspiration of these people, whether it's Gil Scott Heron or Lou Reed, so when I finished Certified Blue I had about nine of these songs and I realised that they (the artists) were all departed.""And I thought there's some kind of message here - I was just doing it because I liked the songs, I wasn't paying any attention to this, and so when I realised that most of them had departed I thought, 'Oh wow, this is what I need to do', even though I'm writing new songs, I need to make this record. The song from the 1950s by Jody Reynolds called 'Endless Sleep' came up in my head and I thought 'there it is, it's the title of the album and the reason I'm doing this record'.What's the first song Joe Camilleri remembers hearing?"There was this woman in Carlton. Some of the houses in Carlton had their windows right on the street, there was no front yard. There was this woman called Aunty Darcy, we used to call her that, I don't know why, but she was a music fan and she would open the window and just give us stuff,""She would say 'come and have a listen to this' and I remember her saying 'this is the new thing' and I guess I probably thought it was going to be Doris Day or something, but it was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and The Comets. I remember hearing that.""I think those days everybody had a piano or some sort of musical instrument because that's what you would do at night, you'd sit around the piano and sing songs. My brother played the piano accordion and we would do that.""I used to love the radio and I loved to sing the songs of the day, but wasn't until about 1961, 1962 - it was when I heard The Searchers, I probably heard The Searchers before The Beatles because they all came out around the same time. There was this noise about this new thing, this British beat, and there was The (Rolling) Stones, The Animals, and The Kinks - all this music was coming out at the same time and that's when I got pretty much hooked on the whole idea.""I loved all the Elvis Presley things but I didn't have the money for that sort of stuff. The Shadows was the first record I bought, maybe it was the only album I could find at the time, but it wasn't until the sixties really that I went nuts and went back and found all those records that the Rolling Stones did great versions of, Otis Redding or Howlin' Wolf, that was a kind of secret, this thing that kind of came upon you and WOW! It was insane staff. It was dark and it was mysterious and it had something else. But it was kind of like the British beat going back 10 years and buying that stuff. There was an album called, I think, 'Fresh Berries' it had just Chuck Berry songs. It had 'Carol' on it and it had all these other songs that the Rolling Stones were playing, they did pretty good versions and they souped them up a bit, but you realise the depth of Chuck Berry playing those songs because he really was the Shakespeare of rock & roll.""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record."The early part of Joe Camilleri's career, the Countdown era, was one thing, but then in the 1980s Joe returned with The Black Sorrows which went huge."By accident of course! I was pouring coffees. I'd just had a hit with Taxi Mary and Walk On By - the great Walk On By which I think I ruined although it was an interesting verison of that song. I just gave up. I said 'I'm just gonna take some time out' and I got a job as a vegie roadie working at the Footscray market. It was just taking vegetables from trucks and putting them on other trucks, so that was my gig,""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record. It could have been so much better and it was my fault that it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but anyway, it yielded these two songs and we got to play and I got to do something that I wanted to do which was play with the cha band and six horns and high-heeled boots and gay cavalier and all that nonsense, but it just left me wanting. It was nice, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna get a job', it wasn't much of a job, it was three hours a day but you had to get up at 5am, done by 9am, and you had $20 a day and all the vegetables you can eat, so I got this other job by meeting a guy who loved Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. He'd just opened a restaurant and he said, 'Why don't you come and work for me, I'll give you a job, you can pour some coffees', so that was my gig at this place called the Cafe Neon."So I did that and Chris said, 'Why don't you do something on a Sunday afternoon?' and that's how it all started.""I was in love with this music called zydeco music and no-one really knew much about it here, maybe some taste-makers might have known about it, it was an unusual connection. We had the piano accordion/violin sound, and then there was the clarinet and saxophone - we made up the horn section and the four of us made up this sound, it was kind of a nice sound,""I recorded an album of covers really, except for one song called Blow Joe Blow, and we did a couple of shows and people went nuts for it because it was different. It might not have been great but it was heartfelt. And of course it yielded a hit out of the weirdest thing,""Elvis Costello was in town, we toured with Elvis. Across the road from where he was staying was this place called 'Discurio' - somewhere like that. I would go to the record stores and actually sell them to the record stores. In fact next door to the Cafe Neon was a butcher shop and I sold him 10 copies, that was a new cut of meat!""But that's what you did. We made the record in a day, a guy I knew designed the cover, another guy could make a screenprint, so we screenprinted them and put them on the line, we did some t-shirts at the same time and got them out there,""But he (Costello) found this record and I swear to you that he spent more time talking about this particular record than talking about what he's doing on tour.""Most of this record was from an album called 'Another Saturday Night' and that's where I got to hear someone like Bobby Charles, and zydeco music was sort of like New Orleans music but they used it in a different way, they used those R&B songs where they went back to the fifties and sometimes sang in French. I did a song called 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and that particular song turned it around for this band,""We'd only done maybe two or three shows for this record. It was recorded in an afternoon and that was under circumstances - we weren't allowed to keep the tapes, we only had a day to record, it was a demonstration for the studio because they got a new desk in and wanted someone to try it out. That's how it happened. We recorded a couple of extra songs but I never got to keep the tape. Everything was just by chance,""I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore.""But that led me to that point where we were a really big band and we were recording things like 'Chained To The Wheel' and we had the Bull sisters and we're playing all over the world and we're getting gold records in different parts of the world and platinum records in Australia and multi-platinum records. It took us on a wonderful journey,""But once again the bigger you get, the harder it is to stay there. I always ask, 'Why is it that Paul McCartney wrote so many songs but he can't have a hit record anymore?'. I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore. I didn't fly for about four years so if I was touring I'd have to catch a train. If I was coming to Sydney I'd have to go overnight and it was kind of annoying for people.""It was just really tough. We had a hit in Germany and I just couldn't go. But I couldn't tell anyone I couldn't fly anymore. And flying really killed my overseas commitment to taking the band there, so if you can't go there ... today you can do different things. I remember I made a decision to go and live in England because if we were going to do it we had to base ourselves somewhere in Europe where we could jump off. I was with Sony at the time and they were trying to get me to go to Germany. They said, 'This is going to be a top single, top 10, it's already 18, get your keester down there and do it pronto!' They're not used to people saying, 'No'."" I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off.""They think I want a business class ticket. I don't care what sort of ticket it was, I couldn't get on a plane, and I thought at the time that I was the only person in the universe who couldn't do this, I thought it was a real sign of weakness and that created a really bad thing in me. I was at a point where if the sky was grey I felt claustrophobic. I couldn't get outside the house unless it was a blue day. So I'm putting all these things in front of myself not knowing how to get any assistance,""It was Harlan (Joe's son) strangely enough who saved my life, because I decided I was going to fight it. I was ready to get off this plane. I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off - all these different things. And then Harlan got sick on a plane and somehow everything changed. It wasn't about me anymore, it was about the things I really loved,""It was a small trigger and it took me another three years, but I was then able to slowly do things and strip away these things. It was all about fear of failure, I think.""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""All those little things that I didn't have with The Falcons. When I was playing with The Falcons, even though I was the leader of the band I only ever felt like I was just one of the musicians because we're all in it together. It's a nice thing to know that nobody got anymore than anybody else. Sometimes these are the things that you struggle with. Even in a world where money becomes evil, some people will start making money and if you don't look after everybody else some of them don't make anything apart from their gig fee. All those things were able to be rectified but in those days we were all in it because it was all beer and skittles! Wagon Wheels and malted milks! There was NO money so it wasn't an issue!""We'd do 300 shows a year with The Falcons, or The Sorrows, we'd get $300 a week, or $250 a week, we'd have four weeks off, or six weeks off - two weeks making a record, and you'd get paid those six weeks. The roadies were being paid while we weren't working for those six week as well. So of course when the band finally broke up, we didn't have any money because everyone else had it. Everyone else that wasn't involved in the band made the bulk of our hard work. But no-one felt bad about it. We all felt, 'Gee whiz if you can hang out til you're 30 and you're in a band, are you crazy? There goes your rock & roll shoes!'""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""Making those first four records independently with The Sorrows, it wasn't that hard, apart from the Dear Children album, which is my favourite record. Not because it has great songs on it, but because it was what I call my 'wedding album' - I must have played a hundred weddings to make that album. To get a gold record from Sony for that - it's the only record that I have anywhere in that house. I don't have any paraphenalia, nothing. Just that gold record. And I've had multi-platinum records and gold singles and all that kind of nonsense, ARIAs, but nothing belongs in my house. Nothing beats that 'wedding album'.""It was the struggle of that record. It was, 'I've got to make this properly, I've got to record it on two-inch (tape), I can't be muching around with that A-DAT stuff, I've got to make this on two-inch, I've got 24 tracks, I've got a limited amount of time, I'm going to run out of time, I've got $400 and it's like putting money in a machine. They gave me some liberties and I got it done and it was just beautiful to hear it on the radio.""Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity."So is Joe Camilleri a happy man?"Yeah. I am happy. I do believe that it's always half-full. As you get a bit older, you get a few barnacles and you struggle. With pain. I don't call it real pain because I imagine people with real pain, but I still have an upbeat concept and I still love doing the things that I like to do and that makes me good.""The really nice thing is playing music, I think that's the only time I can say I really get lost. I have responsibilities like we all have. I've got five children. I've got a whole bunch of things I have to deal with on a financial basis, I have a record label, I have to look after certain things, and I'm only good if people allow me to be that, if they want to hire me. If I don't have a job, I don't have a job.""On some levels I've been really fortunate, and I think some of that is because of the way I've navigated through things. Whether it's been a dumb way or not, I don't know. I don't worry about it. You're gonna get ripped off; I've been ripped off. I don't care for thinking about it. It doesn't put my stomach in a knot. There's been plenty of guys who haven't paid me. There's been lots of stuff where record companies have ... I mean, how do you know what your royalty rates are? Who cares? I'm interested in the day. I'm interested in what's going to be tomorrow. It doesn't take much for me to smile. I look forward to playing and it's kinda nice when people say nice things about you but also if they say nice things about your art, or your work, or whatever you want to call music.""I love having an idea and finishing it. That's my tradesman bit! I actually do love that and I'm working on four or five songs at any one time. Like we all are! Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity. Maybe it's a bunch of different things. I look forward to getting better at what I do, so that's good. I kick myself up the keester for being lazy - if I've got an idea and I can't finish it."I mention to Joe that having this conversation with him is a bit like watching an artist with six unfinished paintings on easels and is figuring out at which point they each become finished."Imagine Picasso doing that! Putting his brush in a bit of paint and walking past and just going 'splot' - that's done! As a producer I fight the struggle with songs because I know every note on there. So I can't listen to the record. I can listen to playing it live because it's happening, but I can't listen to the record.""Unlike The Falcons where you work through the song, with The Sorrows you don't have that opportunity to work through the songs, you have that time in the studio to work through the songs because it is a band, but it's not a band. It's a band of people that get together.""I'm just honoured to be part of the Australian musical landscape, really. Forget about the hits and stuff, although the hits made a big difference, but there's just something about people enjoying what you do,""The best drug you can have is when an audience is singing back something that you've written. It's an incredible feeling. I do it on a small scale but imagine what it's like for the Stones. People just going nuts and saying, 'I really dig this song and I don't even know what it's about.'"

BJ Thomas is a 5-time Grammy winner who’s sold over 70 million records worldwide.  His hits endure to this day – songs like “Hooked on a Feeling,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Another Done Somebody Wrong Song,” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”  He remains active, still recording and playing shows to this day.  Thomas tells us the stories behind some of his biggest songs, and about touring with James Brown early in his career

Джазовый подкаст №733 (4-2017). В США в 59-й раз вручены премии Национальной академии звукозаписи «Грэмми». Среди лауреатов много джазовых музыкантов, и двое из них получили аж по два бронзовых граммофончика. Главный редактор «Джаз.Ру» Кирилл Мошков комментирует треки «I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry» с альбома гитариста Джона Скофилда «Country For Old Men» (Impulse!, 2016) (премии […]

El miércoles 16 de noviembre, en la única actuación en España dentro de su gira europea, el guitarrista John Scofield presentará en el Festival de Jazz de Madrid su nueva grabación en el sello Impulse! titulada Country For Old Men. En esta gira está acompañado por el trío de músicos (Larry Goldings al piano y Hammond; Steve Swallow al bajo; Bill Stewart a la batería) con el que grabó este repaso, sumamente recomendable, a unos cuantos temas que provienen de la música country, obra de autores como Merle Haggard, Hank Williams o Dolly Parton. En HDO 196 escuchamos cuatro temas de esta grabación: “Jolene” (de Parton), el eterno “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” de Hank Williams, “Mama Tried” y “Faded Love”. © Pachi Tapiz, 2016 HDO es un podcast editado, producido y presentado por Pachi Tapiz. Toda la información de HDO 196 en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=27605

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Plusieurs nouveautés cette semaine avec Bound & Tethered, Corinna Rose, Daniel Romano et Bumper Jacksons. Bound & Tethered - Bound and Tethered Corinna Rose - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry Le Winston Band - Coloniser Mars All Day Breakfast Stringband - Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong Daniel Romano - If I've Only One Time Asking' Bumper Jacksons - Come All You Virginia Gals Ernest Lovers - No Song Came By Today Dubl Handi - Don't Get Trouble In Your Mind The Lonesome Trio - Whiskey Drink Slocan Ramblers - Call Me Long Gone Gold Star - Learning the blues Olivier Brousseau - Je voulais jouer au hockey Woody Pines - Make It To The Wood Pharis & Jason Romero - Lonesome and I'm going back home The Honey Drewdrops - Numb