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15 episodes with tony austin
27 episodes with tony austin
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2 episodes with tony austin
2 episodes with tony austin
2 episodes with tony austin
ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT “BLACK RADIO” Los Angeles, July 3-6, 2011Black radio (yb vcl), Letter to Hermione (b vcl),Robert Glasper Experiment : Robert Glasper (p,el-p,synt) Derrick Hodge (b) Chris Dave (d) Casey Benjamin (vocoder,as,f,synt) Jahi Sundance (turntables) Stokely (vcl,perc) Shafiq Husayn, Erykah Badu, Lalah Hathaway, Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Ledisi, King, Amber Strother, Anita Bias, Musiq Soulchild, Chrisette Michele, Meshell Ndegeocello, Yaslin Bey, Hindi Zahra (vcl) HIROMI UEHARA (HIROMI) “ALIVE : THE TRIO PROJECT” New York, February 5-7, 2014Alive, Life goes onHiromi Uehara (p) Anthony Jackson (contrabass-g) Simon Phillips (d) KAMASI WASHINGTON “THE EPIC” Los Angeles, CA, fall 2016-2017Change of the guard, Final ThoughtIgmar Thomas (tp) Ryan Porter (tb) Kamasi Washington (ts,comp,arr) Cameron Graves (p,org,choir vcl) Neel Hammond, Tylana Renga Enomoto, Paul Cartwright, Jennifer Simone, Lucia Micarelli (vln) Molly Rodgers, Andrea Whitt (viola) Artyom Manukyan, Ginger Murphy (cello) Miles Mosley (b) Stephen Bruner (el-b) Tony Austin (d) Patrice Quinn (vcl,choir vcl) Dawn Norfleet, Thalma de Freitas, Malya Sykes, Gina Manziello, Natasha F Agrama, Dwight Trible, Steven Wayne, Taylor Graves, Charles Jones, Jason Morales, Dexter Story, Tracy Carter (vcl) MAKAYA MCCRAVEN “IN THESE TIMES” various locations, c. Continue reading Puro Jazz 23 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.
ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT “BLACK RADIO” Los Angeles, July 3-6, 2011Black radio (yb vcl), Letter to Hermione (b vcl),Robert Glasper Experiment : Robert Glasper (p,el-p,synt) Derrick Hodge (b) Chris Dave (d) Casey Benjamin (vocoder,as,f,synt) Jahi Sundance (turntables) Stokely (vcl,perc) Shafiq Husayn, Erykah Badu, Lalah Hathaway, Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Ledisi, King, Amber Strother, Anita Bias, Musiq Soulchild, Chrisette Michele, Meshell Ndegeocello, Yaslin Bey, Hindi Zahra (vcl) HIROMI UEHARA (HIROMI) “ALIVE : THE TRIO PROJECT” New York, February 5-7, 2014Alive, Life goes onHiromi Uehara (p) Anthony Jackson (contrabass-g) Simon Phillips (d) KAMASI WASHINGTON “THE EPIC” Los Angeles, CA, fall 2016-2017Change of the guard, Final ThoughtIgmar Thomas (tp) Ryan Porter (tb) Kamasi Washington (ts,comp,arr) Cameron Graves (p,org,choir vcl) Neel Hammond, Tylana Renga Enomoto, Paul Cartwright, Jennifer Simone, Lucia Micarelli (vln) Molly Rodgers, Andrea Whitt (viola) Artyom Manukyan, Ginger Murphy (cello) Miles Mosley (b) Stephen Bruner (el-b) Tony Austin (d) Patrice Quinn (vcl,choir vcl) Dawn Norfleet, Thalma de Freitas, Malya Sykes, Gina Manziello, Natasha F Agrama, Dwight Trible, Steven Wayne, Taylor Graves, Charles Jones, Jason Morales, Dexter Story, Tracy Carter (vcl) MAKAYA MCCRAVEN “IN THESE TIMES” various locations, c. Continue reading Puro Jazz 23 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.
Tony & Austin are live from Pella Windows & Doors in Montgomery talking Bengals and should the Reds bring back David Bell. Joe Danneman of Fox19, Mo Egger and of course Talkbacks.
1. Nicola Conte - Umoja (Joaquin's Sacred Rhythm Dub) - Umoja Joaquin Joe Claussell: Sacred Rhythm Music and Cosmic Art Remixes (Farout) 2. Greg Foat - Spider Plant Blues (Ameritz) 3. JJ Whitefield - Spectral Realm - The Infinity of Nothingness (Jazzman) 4. Azar Lawrence - Birds Are Singing - New Sky with John Beasley, Tony Austin, Sekou Bunch, Munyungo Jackson & Nduduzo Makhathini (Trazer) 5. Black Diamond - Carrying the Stick - Furniture of the Mind Rearranging (We Jazz) 6. The Core - The Root - Roots (Moserobie) 7. Jimi Tenor and Cold Diamond & Mink - Orbiting Telesto - Is Their Love In Outer Space? (Timmion) 8. The Rare Sounds - PYG - Introducing: Rare Sounds (Color Red) 9. Mike LeDonne Groover Quartet with choir - Let Us Go - Wonderful! (Cellar Music Group) 10. Stefon Harris - Life Signs - Sonic Creed II: Life Signs (Motema) 11. Parlor Green - West Memphis single (Colemine) 12. Amina Scott - Persistence - Where The Wild Seed Grows (self-released) 13. Lakecia Benjamin - Phoenix Reimagined (Live) FT John Scofield , Randy Brecker and Jeff Tain Watts - Phoenix Reimagined Live (Ropeadope) 14. Verb - Yne - Symbiose (Komos) 15. Monty Alexander - Aggression - D Day (PeeWee!) 16. Michael Eckroth Group - Human Geography - Human Geography (Truth Revolution) 17. Mike Westbrook - Gas, Dust, Stone - Mike Westbrook Band of Bands (self-released)
Tarren & Chad fill in on this Black Friday because Tony & Austin refuse to work.
The boys take you on the road in this good old fashion food tasting journey, trying a slice from the five biggest names in the pizza chain gang. From Blackjack, Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Domino's to Papa John's, the boys rank the five from best to worst. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Who is Hunter Moore from the new Netflix documentary, "The Most Hated Man on the Internet"?, Tony talks his new rivalry with small time celebrity Devon Sawa, and Austin has a clever but terrifying game to play. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
A new brain drain may be upon us, but that doesn't necessarily mean the brain gain is over.Tony Austin is a Kiwi who has held senior roles at eBay and Amazon, and he's coming home to take a position with tech start-up Partly.Austin was an early investor in the online auto parts firm and he's now been hired as Chief Strategy Officer.Tony Austin joined Andrew Dickens.LISTEN ABOVE
A new brain drain may be upon us, but that doesn't necessarily mean the brain gain is over.Tony Austin is a Kiwi who has held senior roles at eBay and Amazon, and he's coming home to take a position with tech start-up Partly.Austin was an early investor in the online auto parts firm and he's now been hired as Chief Strategy Officer.Tony Austin joined Andrew Dickens.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Tony Kurre talks with Blues Almighty's Austin Hank about Billy Gibbons, the return to concerts after COVID, how he makes music, the creative process, show ideas for Blues Almighty, and more!
Thursday Edition of Live Local & Loud
Monday Edition of Live Local & Loud: - Nick talks about Drew Brees signing in New Orleans as one of the biggest "What If" moments in Sports. - Reaction to NFL free agency. Jaguars quiet early. Tampa brining everyone back. - Tony Austin joins the show to talk about Justin Thomas' flawless weekend at the TPC. - Fox Sports' John Fanta stops by to talk March Madness - Nick and Scott Anez discuss whether people are leaving sports for good.
This week episode, Tony Austin shares the porch with Kimme. They talk about family traditions, life journeys and celebrating success while reminiscing about childhood funny events!
This week episode covers conversations at the Thanksgiving dinner table that can be challenging. Our guest this week Tony Austin and Paula Stepfany share their experiences in a funny light hearted way about family and friends who can make the holidays a challenge.
This week's episode starts off on a serious and somber note with an update on the COVID-19 situation in the UK (0:27), followed by a discussion on the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed (9:01). The boys also take a moment to ridicule the wheelchair lady, Tony Austin & Amy Cooper (31:57). Conversation then moves onto the Doja Cat Tiny Chat scandal (46:39), Lana Del Rey's foolishness (64:39) & Azealia Banks doing what she does best (74:08) & the boys share their opinions on the Gunna snitching scandal (84:55). Plus reviews of Verzuz, The Last Dance, The Last Ride, Insecure & Styles P's latest album (97:46). BLACK LIVES MATTER. REST IN PEACE TO ALL OF OUR BROTHERS & SISTERS THAT HAVEN BEEN TAKEN AWAY TOO EARLY ✊
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings at 9 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin live from Orange Tree for Veteran's Day.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturdays at 9 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturdays 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Train Kept A-Rollin'" by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 "Jump, Jive, an' Wail", by Louis Prima. ----more---- Resources For biographical information on the Burnettes, I've mostly used Billy Burnette's self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It's a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I've been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes' relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on "Train Kept A-Rollin'", and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn't seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we're going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff. There's a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we'll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades -- the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys... rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight. When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken -- over each other's heads. And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette's case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight. They'd grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black's brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group -- the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey's at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn't like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin' Wolf. Burlison's guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf's electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf's early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I've seen for Wolf say otherwise. The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio. While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On": [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I'm Moving On"] That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night's show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn't just get three random people he'd never met before on to the show. Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was "you", and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again. It wasn't long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, "You're Undecided", for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi; [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "You're Undecided", Von Records version] Around this time they also wrote a song called "Rockabilly Boogie", which they didn't get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, "Rockabilly Boogie"] That has been claimed as the first use of the word "rockabilly", and Billy Burnette, Dorsey's son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny's son Rocky. Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one -- that it's a portmanteau of the words "rock" and "hillbilly", to describe rocking hillbilly music -- but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it's just about possible. Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison's old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they'd come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area. Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time. Their first attempt at recording didn't go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces. They did record one track with the orchestra, "Shattered Dreams", although that song didn't get released until many years later: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "Shattered Dreams"] But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They'd simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn't need them. They didn't have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called "Tear It Up", which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of "You're Undecided": [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "Tear It Up"] While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that's what they were -- a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons. But that was all to come. For now, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio weren't happy at all about their recordings. They didn't want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn't know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley's studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they'd been getting live when they recorded there. In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he'd ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound. So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley's studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar. I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we've already looked at "Rocket 88", which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to. At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville "A-Team", the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison's. The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock 'n' Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry": [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"] But that was a good five years after the Rock 'n' Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years. The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. The A-side, "Honey Hush", was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Honey Hush"] It's not one of Turner's best, to be honest -- leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work -- but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock 'n' Roll Trio's cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Honey Hush"] This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called "Train Kept A-Rollin'". "Train Kept A-Rollin'", like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called "Cow Cow Boogie", which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance. Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, "Cow Cow Boogie"] That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title "Train Kept A-Rollin'": [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, "The Train Kept A-Rollin'"] And that in turn was the basis for the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison's guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] The single wasn't a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] The Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets: [Excerpt: Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] Aerosmith: [Excerpt: Aerosmith, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] Motorhead: [Excerpt: Motorhead: "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words "the train kept rolling all night long". Sadly, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio didn't last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by "Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio", and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette's backing musicians. Dorsey was the first to quit -- he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared. They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren't even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways. Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters. Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material -- Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents' TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like "Believe What You Say", "Waiting In School", "It's Late", and "Just A Little Too Much": [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Just a Little Too Much"] They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name "the Burnette Brothers": [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, "Warm Love"] But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, "There Was a Tall Oak Tree", which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a "most promising newcomer" award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack. Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey's, were in a very different style from the Rock 'n' Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, And You're Mine": [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "You're Sixteen"] That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny's solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we'll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident. Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract. He later joined "the Sun Rhythm Section", a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin', and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette -- Johnny and Dorsey's sons -- on vocals: [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.
Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—- Resources For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff. There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight. When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads. And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight. They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise. The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio. While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”: [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”] That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show. Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again. It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi; [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version] Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”] That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky. Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible. Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area. Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time. Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces. They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”] But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them. They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”: [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”] While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons. But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there. In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound. So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar. I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to. At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s. The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”] But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years. The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”] It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”] This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”. “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance. Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”] That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”: [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”] And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] The Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets: [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Aerosmith: [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Motorhead: [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”. Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians. Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared. They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways. Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters. Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”] They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”: [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”] But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack. Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”] That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident. Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract. He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals: [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.
Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—- Resources For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff. There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight. When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads. And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight. They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise. The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio. While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”: [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”] That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show. Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again. It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi; [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version] Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”] That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky. Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible. Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area. Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time. Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces. They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”] But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them. They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”: [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”] While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons. But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there. In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound. So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar. I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to. At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s. The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”] But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years. The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”] It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”] This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”. “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance. Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”] That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”: [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”] And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] The Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets: [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Aerosmith: [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] Motorhead: [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”. Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians. Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared. They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways. Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters. Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”] They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”: [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”] But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack. Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”] That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident. Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract. He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals: [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”] He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday mornings 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Fairways & Greens with Tony Austin. Saturday morning 9-10 AM on ESPN 580 AM & FM 96.5 HD 2.
Despite being barely in her 20s, newcomer YannaMaria? is armed with a lifetime of music business knowledge. Add that to her undeniable vocal ability, clear star power and the ability to capture her fresh outlook online through lyrics, and it’s no wonder that she quickly established herself as one to watch with the release of a handful of buzz building singles in 2016. Now, with the release of her latest single, the cleverly crafted “Candy Crush,” and a new album on the way, YannaMaria? is poised to become a voice for a new generation of bold, savvy young women everywhere. YannaMaria?’s love for music was obvious to her parents at a very early age. “I was always one of those kids singing in the mirror, pretending I was giving the concert of my life in front of an audience,” she recalls. Before long, with her family’s support, the Baltimore native took her talents from school talent shows, to national singing competitions to even the Carnegie Hall Stage. All before she graduated from high school. While honing her skills, YannaMaria? also nurtured her musical versatility, drawing inspiration from influences ranging from Beyonce to Beiber to Broadway. Recognizing the drive and dedication needed to take her talent to the next level, her father, former Def Jam exec Tony Austin set out to bring together the perfect team to bring YannaMaria?’s dream to fruition. Website: https://yannamaria.com,
Nick thinks Tiger Woods finally breaks through and wins a major this weekend at the US Open. Tony Austin, host of Fairways & Greens on ESPN 580 Orlando, joins the show to break down the US Open. Why is Antonio Brown so angry with the media? Nick thinks it is because he is a diva, Jerry thinks it could be a deeper reason.
On 1 July this year, new laws will come in to place which will govern the management of dogs and cats. These new laws will simplify the dog registration process, make it easier to reunite lost dogs and cats with their owners, help identify and put a stop to puppy farms, and reduce euthanasia rates. Andrew Lamb from the SA Dog and Cat Management Board, Richard Mussell from the Animal Welfare League of SA and Tony Austin from the Rural City of Murray Bridge discuss the biggest changes in South Australia in over a century.
Today's "best of" episode features bassist and composer Miles Mosley! About Miles Mosley: Throughout the years Mosley has written, composed, performed live, appeared in videos and recorded for various artists including Chris Cornell, Jonathan Davis, Everlast, Terrence Howard, Joni Mitchell, Lauryn Hill, Gnarls Barkley, Jeff Beck, Common, Christina Aguilera, Lesa Carlson, and Kamasi Washington. A founding member of the acclaimed collective, The West Coast Get Down, Mosley has released albums containing his own solo work, in addition to recording and touring with artists including Jonathan Davis (Korn), Miss Lauryn Hill (as her Musical Director and bassist), Harvey Mason, Kendrick Lamar, India Arie, Chris Cornell, Mos Def, Common and Andra Day. His newest project is with West Coast Get Down drummer, Tony Austin - a duo called BFI - their music is described as 'heavy soul', a mix of soul and rock. Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle! Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by: D'Addario Strings Check out their Zyex strings, which are synthetic core strings that produce an extremely warm, rich sound. Get the sound and feel of gut strings with more evenness, projection and stability than real gut. Robertson & Sons Violins For more than four decades, Robertson & Sons has specialized in providing the highest quality stringed instruments and bows to collectors, professional musicians, music educators, and students of all ages. Their modern facility is equipped with three instrument showrooms as well as a beautiful Recital Hall available to our clients to in their search for the perfect instrument and/or bow. Upton Bass String Instrument Company Upton's Karr Model Upton Double Bass represents an evolution of our popular first Karr model, refined and enhanced with further input from Gary Karr. Since its introduction, the Karr Model with its combination of comfort and tone has gained a loyal following with jazz and roots players. The slim, long “Karr neck” has even become a favorite of crossover electric players. The English Double Bass Book The English Double Bass Book examines the great English double bass makers of the 18th and 19th Century, illustrating in fine detail the incredible work they produced. It also explores the fascinating story of how the double bass came to England, its development guided by the great Venetian virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti, and the rise and fall of the English double bass makers. To pre-order your limited-edition copy, please visit www.theenglishdoublebass.com. Subscribe to the podcast to get these interviews delivered to you automatically!
Tony Austin was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is one of two drummers (the other being Ronald Bruner... The post 105 – Tony Austin: Playing with Kamasi Washington, The West Coast Get Down, Redefining West Coast Jazz appeared first on Working Drummer Podcast.
PODCAST NOTE: Listeners can tune in to iHeart Radio 740 The Game or listen in the Orlando area on FM 96.9 Wednesdays from 6-7 p.m. to hear The Golf Insiders live. Add The Golf Insiders podcast to your iPhone as an app. Click here and go to the bottom of the device's screen to create the "Quick Launch" icon for the Golf Insiders. Once you've done this it will add The Golf Insiders podcast as an App to your home screen. Holly G is in the studio with co host Kevin Sternett, assistant pro at Golden Bear Club at Keene's Point and Will Perry, creative director at EVVUS and Golf Insiders social media guru. The trio kicks off the show talking about the great week of golf including the U.S. Open, won by Dustin Johnson. One of the main distractions for this year's U.S. Open and DJ is that the USGA had a questionable ruling on DJ on the 5th hole of his final round where the ball moved before he grounded his club behind the ball. He called the rules official over and told him that he did not cause the ball to move. The official told him to play on with no penalty. However, the USGA confronted DJ on the 12th hole and told him that they had reviewed the video evidence and requested that he review the footage after the round. Then it would be decided if he would incur the one-stroke penalty. Bob Harig, ESPN.com, calls in from Congressional to talk about last week's U.S. Open and the USGA's ruling on DJ. Bob said that in the media center that it was chaos and absolute disbelief as the events unfolded. Kevin talks with Bob about the fact the ruling controversy not only was hard on Dustin, but it impacted the rest of the field not knowing how each player chasing the leader should attack the rest of the round. They did not know if Dustin was going to incur the penalty or if his current round's score was accurate. The team and Bob talk about the player's honor being called into question, which is paramount in the game of golf, not only for Dustin but Lee Westwood who was playing alongside DJ. In the end DJ was able to win by more than one stroke, which saved the USGA from an even greater PR nightmare. Bob said the key was that DJ had not addressed the ball. "Outside the USGA, I don't see anyone else who agrees with them." It happened to Shane Lowry the day before when he called the penalty on himself. USGA Rule 18b was revised in 2016, which was supposed to help shed some clarity on the subject. Tony Austin, Director of Programs for Core Golf Education in Orlando and also serves on the board for PGA of America as a member of the rules committee, call in for the second segment of the show to talk more about the ruling that affected this year's U.S. Open. Tony said that he felt for everyone involved including the committee. He said that he would have ruled that DJ had moved the ball because of his close proximity to the ball when it rolled, that DJ caused it to move. The problem was that the ruling wasn't made until after the round and not immediately when it happened. Tony pointed out that the rule is written that the committee can always take a look at something to get it right. It seemed like a non incident in real time. But the committee taking so long to bring it up and get it into the mainstream of the world was chaos. Tony said as he was watching the event on TV, he didn't think that DJ caused the ball to move. He said he thought differently after he reread the rule. There didn't appear to be any wind, and DJ stood very close to the ball, and the fact that he put his putter down to the side and it touched the ground to some degree, Tony would have given DJ the penalty ... based on the way the rule is written. The USGA and R&A definitely need to take a look at the rule and see what the intention of the rule is. Mike Kern, Philadelphia Daily News, calls in to the show to talk about the U.S. Open Championship. Mike talks to Holly about Dustin Johnson's play. When he is on he is as talented as anyone on the Tour. His putting usually holds him back. Holly asks Mike about Jim Furyk and the rest of the Top 10 on the leader board at the 2016 U.S. Open. Mike discusses the age of the Furyk and Mickelson and the fact that they don't usually win major championships in their 40s. Not that they can't but it's something that is usually not done. Jeff Shain, The Island Packet in Hilton Head, calls in to wrap up the show. Holly asks Jeff about the Olympics and the people like Rory McIlroy deciding not to participate in the Olympics due to the Zika virus. Jeff said that the golf schedule has a huge event over other week this season and a week off is a big deal to the players. None of the LPGA players have backed out of the Olympics. Jeff said that it seems that it would be a female golfer who has pulled out of the Olympics. Kevin, Will and Holly discuss the fact that it seems the women players seem more interested in the Olympics and not the men in the U.S.
PODCAST NOTE: Listeners can tune in to iHeart Radio 740 The Game (FM 96.9) Wednesdays from 6-7 p.m. to hear The Golf Insiders live. Add The Golf Insiders podcast to your iPhone as an app. Click here and go to the bottom of the device's screen to create the "Quick Launch" icon for the Golf Insiders. Once you've done this it will add The Golf Insiders podcast as an App to your home screen. Holly G is in the studio with special guest Brendan Sweeney, Director of Golf Media and Player Relations at French Lick Resort, Ind. Holly and Brendan recap the week in golf including Smylie Kaufman's win at the Shriners Hospital for Children Open in Las Vegas, his first PGA Tour victory. He finished ahead of a portion of the field but his 61 was good enough to hold off the eight players who finished tied for second place. With the win he earns a spot at the Masters in 2016. Jeff Shain, The Island Packet, Prime Sports Network, calls in from South Carolina to talk to Holly and Brendan. Holly asks Jeff about Smylie Kaufman's win. Jeff said Smylie started the day seven shots back before finishing with a 61. Kevin Na finished second again for seven runner up finishes, five have come in the last 20 months. He has also finished third several times in that time frame. Jeff said that Na has become one of the best scramblers and it was odd to see him chunk a shot that kept him out of the winner's circle. Smylie's best friend Patton Kizzire was one of the players who finished second and passed the time with Smylie while other players finished their final round. Jeff talks about Patton's residence at the Sea Island area with other veteran players. Holly asks Jeff about Rickie Fowler's T-25th place finish when he had been playing so well. Jeff is wondering if Rickie's game is built more for the tougher courses and not a birdie fest venue like the Shriners turned out to be. Jeff and Holly discuss the upcoming Tour events including the CIMB Class where players are competing for $1.26 million in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia. Jeff pointed out that players could actually make a fortnight of it if they also competed in the WGC-HSBC Champions event. If a player chose to do both they wouldn't have to fly all that way for one event. Holly talks to Jeff about the LPGA Tour where Lydia Ko notched her 10th victory over. She already has 10 wins and is only 18-years-old. She finished the tournament with a 9-shot lead over the field. The trio talk about how LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan has really helped move the LPGA in the right direction. The final event of the season for the LPGA is fast approaching, the CME Tour Group Championship is in Naples, Florida Nov. 19-22 and Ko is the defending champion. Terrie Purdum, Southern Golf Central Magazine, which is proudly celebrating 16 years, calls in to talk with Holly G and Brendan about the latest issue of the magazine and the upcoming charity events that the magazine is featuring including the Golf for Hope Tournament (Helping Other People Eat) in January. The fabulous Bella Collina in Montverde, Fla., is featured in the latest issue on line pages 38-39. Holly welcomes Tony Austin to the show to talk about the recent rules of golf changes. Austin is the Director of Programs for Core Golf Education of at Core Golf Academy and also has his own radio show,Core Golf Radio, Saturday mornings at 9 a.m. on ESPN radio. Tony and Holly talk about the the USGA and R&A's recent release of the 2016 edition of the Rules of Golf. Withdrawal of Rule on Ball Moving After Address Limited Exception to Disqualification Penalty for Submission of Incorrect Score Card Modification of Penalty for a Single Impermissible Use of Artificial Devices or Equipment Prohibition on Anchoring the Club While Making a Stroke Holly also asks Tony about some of the rules violation that he sees golfers commit. Provisional Ball -- The provisional ball is designed to help speed up the game. It doesn't apply if the ball went into the hazard. You have to find out if it did go in the water. If you do not and you play a provisional ball you will be penalized. Another rule is the use of the marker, to mark the ball so the player may lift and clean it. One thing he said that golfer's don't always realize is that after they have marked the ball, lifted it and cleaned it, once the ball is placed back on the green it is back in play even if the marker is still behind it.
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